On the intellectual prerequisites for “war readiness”: Why our relationship to the things of this world must become fundamentally different, or lasting peace will never be possible.
by Ortwin Rosner
[This article posted on 9/18/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.streifzuege.org/2025/rueckkehr-zur-ehrfurcht-vor-dem-leben/.]
“Whenever a person dies, a consciousness dies. You have to keep that in mind.” This remark came from a history teacher who had just told us (an Austrian school class in the early 1980s) about the First World War and used these words to paint a picture of the horror of war in general, the cruel fate of the young soldiers who had fallen. I don’t know where he got the idea, whether he picked it up somewhere or whether he spontaneously lifted it from his own soul in the course of his speech. Is it even a particularly original thought, one might ask, isn’t this statement basically trivial? Why should one “keep this in mind”?
But as is often the case with seemingly trivial statements, it depends on how you look at them, whether they seem banal or whether they express a deep, almost unfathomable wisdom. The sentence “All men are mortal,” for example, seems on the one hand to express a self-evident truth and to say nothing special, nothing that everyone does not already know. On the other hand, however, becoming aware of what it means, in all its implications, is a real challenge. This is where philosophy begins. And this is also where morality begins.1 And this is also where resistance to war and organized killing begins. For one thing is reflected first and foremost in our understanding of war and peace: our relationship to life and death.
For murder begins much earlier. It begins even before the war itself has started. It is a mental crime that underlies war; the physical acts are only a consequence. War is inherent in our civilization. The killing in war expresses an instrumental reason that has become boundless, a means-end rationality that dominates the entire earth down to its furthest corners, a utilitarianism that increasingly reduces all things to their mere commodity character, but no longer considers that an existence could have value merely for itself. It is a kind of morality which at the same time represents complete immorality, because it says that this or that particular end—whatever it may be in concrete terms—justifies the most appalling means and methods, and indeed, and this is where the real crime lies, justifies them to such an extent that, in the final analysis, they even outweigh what should be most sacred to us: life; so that we are prepared to damage and destroy it in order to achieve our goal.
The intellectual foundations of war
This obscure ethic, which I claim dominates our modern world and which culminates in war, does not reflect reverence for life, but the exact opposite: a deep contempt for life. As the ethics of war, it mocks those it sends to their deaths, most of all when it appears to honor them by celebrating them as “heroes.” This is merely a sophisticated way of saying that it reduces their existence to a mere means to an end, that is, it negates them as independent beings and degrades them to objects. Today, we shake our heads at the culture of the Aztecs, who believed it was necessary to occasionally cut out the heart of a captured warrior, slave, woman, or defenseless child so that the sun would not fall out of its orbit. We take this as proof of the primitiveness, cruelty, and intellectual backwardness of this people. But is it any less cruel and mythical-archaic to systematically prevent peace negotiations for years, thereby causing an estimated half a million Ukrainian soldiers to die on the battlefield because, as they say, otherwise the West would perish and therefore only victory over Russia could be considered—even though, as one should know very well, this is not even possible?
War, however, is the escalation of something that has always been there. Long before war begins, it has already been there, preparing itself in our culture in the form of excessive subjugation and exploitation of all living things, as has become a matter of course in our society. This takes shape in a purely instrumental, efficiency- and profit-oriented approach to things, to which we no longer grant any independent, autonomous, or transcendent meaning, in the way we are gradually eliminating the last remnants of untouched wilderness on the planet and viewing the entire world—including the fauna and flora that exist on it—as mere material and energy resources for the production of objects in our artificial product landscapes. The fanatical subjugation of all existence to the axioms of financial gain, consumption, social success, and technological progress finds its logical completion in war, in which this machinery is reduced to its very essence: the subjugation of life to death.2
For what man does to nature, man also does to man. In reciprocity, but also each individual to himself. Something of this connection was known in the 1980s, when the German left still had the “dialectic of enlightenment” as its guiding star and when the Greens were in the process of linking the peace and ecology movements.3
Our everyday life is already murderous, otherwise war could not arise from it, otherwise murder would be alien to us. After all, much must be presupposed and already given in a culture for its members to go to war or send others there, for them to believe in its blessings, for them to be prepared to take this or that goal so seriously that they say: This is worth all the dead, wounded, all the corpses and all the suffering; it is worth reducing entire cities and vast areas of our planet to rubble. Above all, one must have mastered a certain skill: a certain unwavering type of technocratic thinking, a certain type of calculation in particular. American politician Madeleine Albright, who later became US Secretary of State, let this truth slip in 1996 when she was asked during a television appearance about the effects of the draconian economic sanctions against Iraq. She was asked whether she thought it was worth the price that half a million Iraqi children had died as a result of the US sanctions. And the answer slipped out: “It’s worth the price!”4 An answer she later considered a “mistake” (the answer, mind you, not the action), but an unexpectedly honest answer, because it succinctly summed up the barter of war (and every war is ultimately such a barter!): The goal achieved counts for more than human lives, counts for more than the lives of 500,000 children.
These are nothing more than incidental factors in a cold cost-benefit calculation. We, on the other hand, as human beings who do not merely function like computers and machines, but want to be independently thinking rational beings, should ask ourselves whether “it” (whatever that means) could have been worth the life of even a single child, and whether the media representative who asked Albright this question, if she meant it seriously, has not already violated everything that has been considered a fundamental principle in Western moral philosophy since Immanuel Kant by even considering the possibility of such a trade-off. According to Kant, one must never regard another person as a mere means to an end.5
Consciousness industry
War is where humanity’s worst failures play out. This insight, which has been pushed into the back rooms of our consciousness at the beginning of the 21st century, is reflected in the great pacifist texts of the past, from Erasmus of Rotterdam’s “Lament for Peace”6 and Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” as well as in the statements and actions of many who, in the course of the 20th century, followed in the footsteps of Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi, campaigned for the right to conscientious objection, and preached nonviolent civil disobedience. Incidentally, the statement made by our history teacher in the 1980s, which I quoted at the beginning, cannot have been that banal after all, since it expresses a specific humanistic spirit that has since been lost in such a way that today it can no longer be assumed that its meaning would be universally understood, whereas at that time its intuitive comprehensibility could be taken for granted. In any case, the appeal contained therein runs counter to the narrow inventory of set phrases and clichés that largely determine public discourse today, and the chance that a teacher would say something like this in the present day seems rather slim. Today, in 2025, the focus of our consciousness is decidedly elsewhere than it was in the 1960s, 1970s, and even the 1980s.
It would be interesting to examine the extent to which the media influences our thinking, because ultimately it is the media that largely determines what we are aware of, and what we see on television and hear on the radio, as well as what we read in the newspapers, is fundamentally different today from the intellectual material we were fed back then, not to mention the fact that we now also have the internet to contend with. Added to this are massive upheavals in the education system, or to put it more bluntly: a drastic loss of education and, in particular, of the now no longer particularly desirable ability to reflect independently, a circumstance that leads to the constant repetition of predetermined patterns of speech, thought, and emotion, coupled with a simultaneous abundance of information that can be accessed electronically at any time. What was once called “humanism” is disappearing, and what we used to call ‘education’ has been replaced by something I would like to call the “consciousness industry.”
In any case, the development toward a bellicose consciousness was gradual; it did not suddenly appear overnight in February 2022, but rather took place gradually. Public consciousness has slowly but persistently turned 180 degrees over the past decades. It is a long way from the general pacifist mood of the 1970s and 1980s, through the approval of the NATO attack on the rest of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 and the US-led global War on Terror triggered by 9/11, to the point where we are now, with peace demonstrators being readily labeled “ragtag pacifists” by leading opinion makers and a once widely revered figure like Gandhi suddenly being called a “nutcase.”7
However, it should be noted that one should not make the mistake of believing that this gradual change in the public consciousness landscape created by the media has happened by itself, so to speak. The increasing influence of political power structures on journalistic content via news and PR agencies and even on Hollywood productions, the networking of the military-industrial complex (MIC) with the cultural industry and media elites is well documented and of such significance that some now prefer to speak of the “military-industrial-communicative complex” (MIC-C).8 What we read in the newspaper today may have been circulated yesterday by the AP (the New York-based Associated Press is one of the three agencies dominating the global news market, alongside Britain’s Reuters and France’s AFP – Agence France Press), which most likely had to follow the narratives prescribed by US government agencies. 9 The first thing that comes to mind is the individual small, nameless Ukrainian or Russian soldiers and therefore an end to the war, but instead, all that is discussed is what legitimizes it.
The millions of Aztec sacrifices
“Whenever a person dies, a consciousness dies. You have to keep that in mind.”
Let’s return to this sentence from my history teacher. The impossibility of keeping this in mind when it is not a single person but, as in war, hundreds of thousands or millions of dead, and of commemorating them in an appropriate manner, formed the essential pivot of the anti-war reflections of the philosopher Günther Anders: “And let someone try to conjure up the image of millions. Of millions of dead.“10
Albright answers in the affirmative when asked whether ‘it’ (whatever ”it” may be) was worth the sacrifice of half a million children’s lives. Half a million, a number that is simply thrown out there by the interviewer, just a number, abstract, as numbers are abstract – which does not prevent technocrats from believing that they can be used to represent reality objectively, when in fact they tend to obscure rather than reveal the cruel reality.
Anders was not satisfied with numbers.11 At the end of the 1950s, he visited the atomic bomb victims’ hospital in Hiroshima, saw the mutilated and dying patients with his own eyes, and listened with dismay to their stories and reports in order to gain at least some idea of the horror, and he wrote about it to keep the memory alive. This was something that the person ultimately responsible for dropping the atomic bomb, US President Harry Truman, had no interest in. Instead, he announced from a distance that he felt no “pangs of conscience” – he was not plagued by a guilty conscience. 12 A kindred spirit of Albright’s, who likewise would never have thought of traveling to Iraq to personally visit the victims of their policies and their bereaved families, and perhaps even feel something like remorse. “It” (whatever that may be) was also worth a few hundred thousand human lives to him, which in this case were destroyed in one fell swoop.
On his return journey from Japan, Anders reports,13 a man sitting next to him on the plane emphatically explains why all this is necessary: the atomic horror, the threat. The man justifies all this with an argument that may still sound familiar to us today: it is about defending the “free world.” It must be protected against the threat of totalitarianism—and death is not the worst thing that could happen.14 So this would be the ominous “it” that was worth all these sacrifices, all the dead and maimed. This would be the purpose above all else to which we would have to make the Aztec sacrifice and which would justify all means, more valuable than life itself.
Anders replies to his counterpart, “that it is absurd to want to save freedom by mobilizing one form of totalitarianism against another.”15 But wouldn’t something similar be objectionable to Albright? Isn’t it totalitarian to believe that it is okay to sacrifice half a million children to achieve one’s political goals? And is it not totalitarian to send a country like Ukraine to its doom in defense of Western values and to brand anyone who objects to this as a “Putin sympathizer” – in other words, to defend freedom by taking away people’s freedom (and, moreover, their lives)?
The machine heart
Both the theologian and physician Albert Schweitzer—who coined the term “reverence for life” that gives my essay its title and regarded it as the only suitable basis for true ethics16—and Günther Anders saw the machine, that is, our relationship to technology, as a crucial key to understanding the moral problems of modern warfare. 17 It is the remote effect of modern weapons that prevents our conscience from being troubled when we kill, maim, and injure, because we are not directly confronted with the suffering and death of other human beings. 18 This thesis was recently vividly confirmed by the account of Britain’s Prince Harry, who reported without any sign of remorse that he had killed 25 people from his combat helicopter while serving as a soldier in Afghanistan. The reason he was able to do this so easily, without any inner conflict, was that they were mere “chess pieces” to him. “You can’t hurt anyone if you see them as human beings,” he explains. And anyway, he only saw them as bad guys who he had to eliminate before they murdered the good guys.19
He goes on to explain that this view was taught to him during his military training. Harry’s statements are probably the most vivid illustration of how war propaganda and military education work: namely, by dehumanizing the enemy and reducing them to mere objects, items, or things. It is shocking, however, that even in retrospect, with a time distance of at least ten years, the prince does not seem to be able to reflect on this in any depth and question the intellectual principles he followed during the war. Perhaps he is incapable of doing so, because then he would suddenly have to admit to himself that he is a mass murderer.
Harry’s counterpart is Claude Eatherly20 – a tragic figure who, unlike the tabloid prince, has since been erased from our collective memory, and not without reason: he does not fit in with our pretty stories of the glorious West. Eatherly was a young US pilot when he received the order to take part in the first military use of an atomic bomb, which took place over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. We know the result: with a single push of a button, approximately 200,000 lives were destroyed in one fell swoop. Eatherly did not drop the bomb himself, but he commanded the lead aircraft and gave the decisive signal for the drop. Unlike the member of the British royal family, however, his conscience began to trouble him afterwards: He realized that he was now a mass murderer.
And it almost broke him. And he got into trouble with society: US politics needed its heroes. But it had no use for a soldier who, instead of feeling like a hero, bitterly regretted his actions in public.21 When Eatherly wanted to draw public attention to the fact that a crime had been committed, he was put in a psychiatric institution for many years. Some aspects of his fate are reminiscent of the case of Julian Assange. That’s what happens when someone really has a conscience.
But what about the others, the majority of soldiers, those who seem to have none? What about those political leaders who seem to have none?
In his writings, Albert Schweitzer recounts the story of an encounter between a student of Confucius and a gardener who, instead of making his arduous work easier by using the principle of a draw well, prefers to climb down to the water himself each time and carry it up himself. “When someone uses machines, they conduct all their business mechanically; those who conduct their business mechanically develop a mechanical heart; but those who have a mechanical heart lose their pure simplicity,”22 the gardener explains to Confucius’ student, thus justifying his refusal.
Albright, Truman, Prince Harry, the soldiers, today’s politicians … they are such beings with machine hearts. They sit at and in machines and operate them. Other people, whom they command and deal with, are also merely tools to them, nothing more. That is, they use them as they need them for their purposes. And in the end, that has turned them into machines themselves.
War as work and death as a commodity
For one thing, there is another objection to the argument put forward by Albright or Günther Anders’ seatmate on the plane, an objection that we have not yet mentioned: Namely, that when they talk about a “price” that is worth paying, or when they talk about “sacrifices” that we all have to make, they—and this also applies to all today’s politicians and opinion makers who advocate armament and war—overlook the fact that it is not they themselves who pay this price, but that it is always others who pay it for them. they are ignoring the fact that it is not they themselves who are paying this price, but that it is always others who are paying it for them.23
Half a million Iraqi children have lost their lives, while Albright herself has not only not suffered, she has never been in danger. More than half a million Ukrainians have died, while the politicians and alpha journalists who directed the war from their desks and declared it “necessary” are far removed from any threat. The same applies, of course, to the deaths of children in the Gaza Strip. It is not the decision-makers, but they who are the sacrifice that must be made, the “price” that must be paid – for “it” (whatever that may be). So that the sun does not fall out of its orbit. The Aztec sacrifice.
The sacrifice, as we have already mentioned, is made according to a logic of exchange, a barter; it is the “price” of something you want to have, or a goal “worth” achieving. But what does that mean? It means that modern warfare is not only complicit with the capitalist system in terms of its external purposes (for example, because it is waged for economic resources), but that its innermost logic, its mental structure and way of thinking, indeed its very possibility, is deeply rooted in the intellectual principles of the market economy: it is conducted like the exchange of two commodities. The ruler says: I give the lives of these or those people, and in return I receive this and that.
This also shows how deeply war is rooted in our civilization; it is not something that happens by chance, but is closely interwoven with its intellectual foundations. Of course, those in power will avoid making themselves the victims. They set the price that others must pay. They present this sacrifice as inevitable. They ignore the individual fates of specific people and reduce the lives that are being destroyed to “pawns” and the like, dehumanizing them.
This is one side of the coin. However, as Günther Anders, together with futurologist Robert Jungk, emphasizes, and as Albert Schweitzer’s statements imply, those in power, or those who press the button from a safe distance, the soldiers who carry out the orders, the helicopter pilots who, like Prince Harry, fire their missiles at defenseless people far below them, do not emerge unscathed from this process of transformation. War affects not only the victims, but also the perpetrators. It changes them too. The Aztec heart that is sacrificed is ultimately their own. They pay by turning their own hearts into machine hearts, by turning themselves into machines. It is now only a matter of them having to function in the system like a worker in a factory; in other words, they carry out the murders they commit as a work step that they have to perform at their assigned workplace, as a mere “job” among many.24
Because in the capitalist system, everything you do in the world is a “job” – even killing. In other words, even death is just a commodity that is produced, one among many commodities that are manufactured. Or, as Günther Anders puts it, war today consists of a “mechanical production of corpses.”25 He points out that even the soldier Claude Eatherly, whose conscience was so troubled after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, nevertheless internalized that expression – “job” – to such an extent that he still uses it in retrospect, not only when he talks about his actions, which he now despises, but even when he talks about his pacifist commitment. Anders explains that this is a trivializing term, the use of which actually “makes the mobilization of one’s own conscience and the assumption of responsibility superfluous.” 26. By doing so, one reduces oneself to a mere “cog in the machine”27, one performs an act of “self-objectification”28, erases one’s own personality, dehumanizes oneself.29
Robert Jungk (in his introduction to the correspondence between Günther Anders and Claude Eatherly) prophetically explains how such a war machine, due to its “spiritual repercussions,”30is changing not only the country of the victims, but also the society of the perpetrators—he is referring primarily to the United States here: “collapse the foundations of our moral and political existence. […]” because modern methods of warfare (from his time, R. J. is thinking mainly of the nuclear threat, so today’s readers will have to make some adjustments here; one could think, for example, of the now commonplace drone killings) “hollow out democracy […], they cause a general brutalization of those who bear arms, who must always be capable and determined to go to the extreme. They destroy the inner belief of nuclear-armed countries in their own humanity and morality.”31
Is it not this moral decay that we see today when we look at the Western world?
The modern Aztec priests
Jungk argues that this “spiritual repercussion” has “literally driven mad” the owners of modern war machines—today we speak of the ‘elites’ or the members of the “establishment”— “in the most literal sense of the word,” and he believes that this is “a madness that is all the more dangerous because its representatives seem to speak reasonably.”32
A barbarism that has always been hidden in our civilization, a complete irrationality that comes cloaked in rationality: This is the flip side of the absolute instrumentalization of the objects of the world by humans, which we are dealing with today and which we already encounter in the work “Dialectic of Enlightenment”33, written by the two social philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno towards the end of World War II: Modern man reduces things to mere means for his purposes, but in doing so he instrumentalizes himself, makes himself a mere instrument, a means, does violence to himself, kills something in himself, and in an act of inner self-sacrifice perhaps extinguishes what makes life worth living in the first place, what is actually alive, so that in the end instrumental reason reproduces mythical violence (= the logic of ancient sacrificial rituals) in the new guise of rational exchange – this is one of the central theses of the book. It is not only the person lying on the sacrificial altar, into whose chest the Aztec priest cuts with a knife, who suffers, but also the priest himself, who at that moment does something to himself, sacrifices something within himself, turns himself into a thing instead of being an independent, free personality with his own conscience. he submits to a machinery and engages in a supposedly divine barter, but in fact destroys the most sacred thing, life. In order to preserve “it” (whatever it may be). We are the modern Aztec priests: “[…] we today consist of countless virtual Claudes, to whom the same thing could happen that happened to Claude: namely, to become a piece of machinery for becoming an accomplice,” warns Günther Anders34.
But didn’t we believe that we were further ahead than the representatives of an ancient culture, which presumably did not yet know our concept of the individual and thus that of our own free decision of conscience? Yes, perhaps we were, in some respects, but our humanistic progress ultimately failed to keep pace with our technical progress. This is a discrepancy that Günther Anders and Albert Schweitzer repeatedly emphasize: we have the technical potential to destroy the planet countless times over—but we cannot imagine what that actually means.35 We consider ourselves so superior to the lost cultures of ancient peoples because we have technology and science at our disposal—but we have allowed our souls and spirits to atrophy. And in my opinion, this applies particularly to the development of social discourse in recent decades, roughly since the 1980s, even more so than to the period in which Anders, Jungk, and Schweitzer lived. The discourse on war that we are currently dealing with is only the result of this negative development, which has been observable for some time. Once again, we are led to the point: what we are dealing with is a spiritual problem, a problem that is deeply rooted in our culture, much deeper than we believe, and therefore ingrained in our so-called everyday life. The war in Ukraine, the destruction of life in the Gaza Strip, and many other wars raging around the globe that may attract less attention but are nonetheless happening, are perhaps only the most drastic expression of this one problem.
The false ethics of utilitarianism
When I say that this is a “spiritual” problem, this does not contradict the fact that it is also a material problem, provided that we do not mean merely matter as understood by a physicist, but rather the social conditions of our coexistence, as they represent distortions of our natural needs, i.e., a problem of our economy, or to put it more broadly: our relationship with things and with ourselves in general.
“An economic system like ours cannot want peace,”36 says theologian and psychoanalyst Eugen Drewermann, referring to the fact that war has always prevailed in the economic sphere, long before what we usually call war takes place – a “world of permanent competition.”
“The very definition of democracy contradicts specialization and the division of labor,”37 states Günther Anders, referring to the aforementioned fact that in a society based on the division of labor, the individual is merely a “cog in the machine” who simply carries out the task assigned to him without feeling responsible for the consequences of his actions. In extreme cases, this leads to people seeing their “job,” i.e., their business, as killing other people, and doing so obediently, simply because they have been ordered to do so, without feeling any pangs of conscience. It is therefore a question of the erosion of political and moral consciousness inherent in our economic and labor system.
Furthermore, it is clear that a type of person has prevailed for whom one unquestioned premise stands above all else: namely, that the world belongs to him and that the only thing that matters is to grab as many pieces of it as possible in a competition with others, including military competition if necessary.
The phrase often heard in the context of environmental protection since the 1980s, that we have “only borrowed the earth from our children,”38does not make it any better. Simply shifting humanity’s absolute claim to ownership of the world to the next generation does not make it any less problematic.
The unquestioned assumption that the objects and living beings of the world are merely objects of one interest or another has led to a situation where even circles opposed to war often talk about the need to take into account the “interests of the other side” (meaning Russia). This may be justified to a certain extent in the current context. Nevertheless, true pacifism begins where it is not merely a question of “purposes” and “interests,” in other words, power, but of a fundamentally different ethic.39 The situation is similar with the position repeatedly advocated by German politician Sahra Wagenknecht, for example, Germany should focus more on its “own” – national – interests instead of representing the interests of the US. But would that mean that if Germany went to war to defend its interests, Wagenknecht would suddenly find war acceptable?41
This is why the formula of “balancing interests” has its limits. An ethic that is concerned only with “interests” – no matter what they are, and even if they are seemingly noble goals, and even if they are not one’s own but those of another – inevitably boils down to the end justifying the means. Then, although one does not go to war for oneself, but ostensibly for solidarity with the Ukrainians or for the interests of some other people, one nevertheless continues to carry out one’s destructive work. Then, in the end, exactly what we described above happens again: the “it” (whatever it may be) becomes more valuable than anything else, more than the lives of half a million children. Sooner or later, one inevitably ends up in the logic of modern Aztec sacrifice. And this leads to the kind of perversions we are dealing with today: for example, abolishing freedom and democracy in the name of the struggle for “freedom” and “democracy.”
The utilitarian commodity form as the current state of mind
A deep sense of this pervades the work of Kant, who knew very well that the realm of morality and the sphere of ends are two very different things and that one must not subordinate the former to the latter. He therefore introduced the distinction between the moral politician and the political moralist. Both refer to morality, but in completely different ways. The two are pretty much the opposite of each other, in that the political moralist is actually immoral, that is, he instrumentalizes morality only to achieve his ends. He thus subordinates moral principles to the end or, as Kant puts it, “puts the cart before the horse.”42
It is obvious which type has the absolute upper hand today. Kant was, of course, far from foreseeing the Orwellian practices of propaganda that we are now dealing with. But even Günther Anders only dealt with the phenomenon of propaganda in passing, and I even have the impression that he paid too little attention to it.43
But what is propaganda anyway? Here, too, as with war, it is a mistake to consider it a peripheral phenomenon that has been added to our culture by chance, as something external to it. In fact, it is an intellectual principle that is deeply rooted in our society. Propaganda is the current state of the mind.
At its core, propaganda is nothing more than an attempt to close the gap between morality and interests that we have just discussed by presenting actions based on one’s own interests as moral to others.44 But it means even more: namely, that the utilitarian commodity form, reification, also extends to our intellectual activity.
We are rightly outraged by propaganda. But isn’t it the consequence of our viewing things only as commodities? Language, thought, reflection, information, knowledge, and everything that is referred to as “opinion formation,” as well as the emotions and feelings associated with it, have thus become commodities, and even morality is now merely a commodity.45 The whole world has become advertising, we could say, loosely following Adorno,46 but that also means, and this does not occur to him, as far as I know, that even ethics is now just a department of the advertising industry. However, all this is a result of the fact that the media, PR and news agencies, and advertising companies now manufacture the entire public discourse in a factory-like manner.
All the madness we are dealing with today has its roots in this. We are surprised by absurd slogans such as the claim that weapons bring peace and vaccinations bring freedom, or that those who are currently behaving in a fascist manner themselves refer to others as “Nazis.” Yes, every day we find ourselves in the midst of a jumble of statements that, on closer inspection, are meaningless or nonsensical and even contradictory. But isn’t that the logical result of using Santa Claus to advertise Coca-Cola — a circumstance that is no less absurd, but one that we are already accustomed to accepting?
This is the result of the fact that we use not only material objects, but also intellectual concepts, merely as set pieces, as machine parts — as “desire machines,” as described by the two postmodern philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari47 – which we connect and tear apart as we please, without caring about their meaning anymore. For us, what matters is no longer what words mean, and certainly not their deeper meaning, but only that they function, their mere effect, their effectiveness. The result is that we are dealing with a profound erosion of conceptual thinking in public discourse.
Conclusion: Ending the war with the things of the world
Perhaps ever since intelligence awakened in humans, they have been in a permanent war with things. Subjugating them and making them useful is their ultimate goal. The ideas of modern technology do not differ fundamentally from the ancient rituals of magic, even if they may be incomparably more efficient. Originally intended for the mere purpose of self-preservation, later useful for achieving one or another convenience in life, they gradually transformed into instruments of ever more total domination and power over everything on the planet, over everything that crawls and flies on it—and also of humans over humans.48
People are now even thinking about conquering and subjugating space: they want to colonize the empty, barren, dead Mars – while at the same time, and this is what is truly absurd, destroying the fertile, living Earth. Here, too, the commodity form prevails, for now the entire Earth is treated like a used-up commodity that could be replaced by a new one, and here, too, life is exchanged for death in the belief that something is to be gained. The “it” (whatever that may be).
And it is not only the things of the outer universe that the technocratic human being never leaves alone, but also himself. always dissatisfied with themselves, they can never let themselves be as they are, they cannot stop, they wage a constant war against themselves. Their dream is to literally transform themselves into a robot or computer. In the goals of “transhumanism,” the self-objectification of humans undoubtedly reaches its peak. As the name suggests, humans are working towards their own self-extinction. Their innermost being is now up for exchange, the essence of humanity itself. It is no longer just a matter of exchanging the old human being for the new human being, the superhuman; no, it is now being regenerated with the help of replacement parts.49 The living human being as such is being exchanged, segment by segment, for the supposedly better functioning, thoroughly planned machine, and thus becoming a commodity. The transhumanist sacrifices himself. Humanity itself is thus facing its own abolition. But while on the one hand, humans are promised something akin to eternal life or the “abolition of death,” on the other hand, also based on state-of-the-art technologies, the perfect killing and war machines are being tinkered with—in other words, their murder is being prepared in parallel.
Why all this, one might ask. And never receive a proper answer.
For the realm of all-dominant purposes is the realm of absolute meaninglessness. It renders itself absurd; it is a machine that merely runs continuously in circles so that it can keep running, without having to concern itself with the contradictions that constantly arise in the process and without it even being possible to ask questions about meaning. 52 The only meaning of expanding the exercise of power lies solely in the expansion of the exercise of power itself, and the only meaning of success is success itself. What should really only be a means to an end has now set itself as an end, as an end in itself, as an empty machine that must always run and grow. One must never rest, never leave things alone, and never leave oneself alone.
War between us humans prevails because our relationship to things is a warlike one in the first place. If we want to end wars, we must first fundamentally change our relationship to things and thus to ourselves.
1Perhaps no philosophy has expressed this fundamental connection between the vulnerability and mortality of others and the idea of morality as clearly as that of Emmanuel Lévinas.
2Compare, for example, the following passage from Günther Anders’ 1964 text “Die Toten. Rede über die drei Weltkriege” (The Dead: A Speech on the Three World Wars), in which he argues that the goal of the capitalist mode of production must ultimately always be destruction: “Capitalist production—as every child knows—depends on selling its products. It must ensure that these are sold and consumed, in short, liquidated. Liquidation, i.e., the ruin of its products, is the goal of all production. If this goal is not achieved, if a large quantity of unsold products accumulates, then further production, and with it profit, is jeopardized.
At the latest since the emergence of figures such as the German politicians Annalena Baerbock and Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, the form of feminism that labels war as “masculine” and thus argues in a sexist manner should actually have become obsolete.) Also worth reading in the same issue is the essay “Media as the Fourth Estate” by Sabine Schiffer (pp. 44-46) and, by the same author: The Narrative of the Good and the Bad. — In: Hannes Hofbauer and Stefan Kraft (eds.): Consequences of War. How the struggle for Ukraine is changing the world. – (Vienna 2023.) pp. 223-236. However, I can particularly recommend the following books as an introduction to the topic: Mira Beham: Kriegstrommeln. Medien, Krieg und Politik (Drums of War: Media, War, and Politics). – (Munich 1996) (= dtv 30531); Jörg Becker and Mira Beham: Operation Balkan: Werbung für Krieg und Tod (Operation Balkan: Advertising War and Death). 2nd edition. – (Baden-Baden 2008); Jens Wernicke: Do the Media Lie? Propaganda, Pack Journalism, and the Battle for Public Opinion. – (Frankfurt a.M. 2017. ) Anyone looking for a quick, easy-to-read overview of Western war propaganda in recent decades will find this EMMA article useful: https://www.emma.de/artikel/so-verlor-ich-den-glauben-die-etablierten-medien-340467
9See Do the Media Lie, p. 163
10Hiroshima p. 365
11G.A. repeatedly expresses his abhorrence of purely statistical considerations. He speaks of the “transformation of events into tabular data” and adds: “The neat and reliable face of statistical tabulation makes the smoking ruins hygienic and disinfects the radio-contaminated carcasses.” (Hiroshima p. 135) Elsewhere, he expresses outrage at the practice apparently used at the time in military strategist circles of simply renaming 100 million deaths in their destruction forecasts as “100 megacorpses” by means of a linguistic convention, just as one speaks of tons of herring. (See Hiroshima p. 368)
12Cf. Hiroshima, pp. 22 and 211
13Cf. Hiroshima, pp. 152-173
14One may recall the old slogan from the McCarthy era: Better dead than red. In G.A.’s diary entry about his conversation with the anti-communist, it reappears in the form of a “trick question” (as G.A. calls it): “Rather red than dead?” (See Hiroshima, p. 165). As we know, the fear of communism has been replaced today by the fear of the “danger from the right.” The pattern remains the same.
15Hiroshima p. 166
16Audio tip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNkDP93E5JI
17However, Kant already alludes to this problem; he warns against machine humanity. In this regard, he sees the institution of the “standing army” as a threat that should be abolished: “[…] to which end, being hired to kill or be killed seems to involve the use of human beings as mere machines and tools in the hands of another (the state), which cannot be reconciled with the rights of humanity in our own person. “ I. K.: Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. Edited by Rudolf Malter. – (Stuttgart 2024) (= RUB 14382) p. 8.
18See also the following statement by Eugen Drewermann: ”If we saw what we were being ordered to do, we would not do it.” He recounts the report of a Royal Air Force bomber pilot during World War II: “It lay beneath us like a black ribbon of velvet, embroidered with pearls. But we knew that what we were doing down there was worse than Dante’s Inferno. But we only saw fires, we didn’t see people. Otherwise, we couldn’t have done it.” (E. D.: Living without NATO – Ideas for peace. — In: Consequences of War, pp. 161/162.)
19See https://taz.de/Prinz-Harry-ueber-Tod-von-Taliban/!5904740/
20See: G.A.: Off limits for the conscience. The correspondence between Hiroshima pilot Claude Eatherly and Günther Anders (1959-1961). With a foreword by Bertrand Russell and an introduction by Robert Jungk. — In: Hiroshima pp. 191-360. G.A. himself contrasts Eatherly with the SS officer Adolf Eichmann, who was incapable of remorse and who, until the very end, maintained that he was not personally guilty of his actions because he had only obeyed orders. (Cf. Hiroshima pp. 345-347)
21A statement by Claude Eathlery himself on this subject: “The truth is that society simply cannot accept the fact of my guilt without at the same time acknowledging its own much deeper guilt.” (Hiroshima, p. 244)
22Awe, pp. 49/50.
23The reason why G.A. does not raise this objection is obvious: his thinking revolves around the danger of the entire human race being wiped out by a nuclear war. That is why his objection at this point is a different one: namely, that there are no conceivable purposes for which such a war could be waged at all. (To the anti-communist on the plane mentioned above, he expresses this thought in the form of an objection to the assertion “that there could be any goals of the same magnitude as the ‘total means’ . […] because the use of the means would completely destroy the possibility of further objectives” Hiroshima p. 167) In this scenario, Albright would also pay the “price,” because in the end, no one would escape. Although the danger of such a nuclear war is closer than ever before, it is also taken less seriously than ever before in current public discourse, and as a result, far fewer people are taking to the streets today than demonstrated for disarmament in the 1980s. A strange phenomenon. In those circles of high-ranking military strategists, on the other hand, who are well aware of the danger of an impending nuclear conflict, people do not want to believe in its total consequences and are considering how they could remain in power even after it: https://www.telepolis.de/features/Im-Fall-eines-Atomkrieges-USA-wollen-auch-danach-Weltmacht-bleiben -10175072.html. However, if, like G.A., we assume that a nuclear war would be tantamount to the annihilation of the entire human race, then we can translate his train of thought into our own train of thought, which we will explain in the next section, on the act of exchange that has become universal in our world, as follows: Once the world as a whole has been turned into a commodity, an object of exchange, and thus exposed to destruction like any other sacrificial offering, what else could it be exchanged for? There is nothing else left. Obviously, it is nonsensical and absurd to even think about such an exchange.
24″Once again, the Eatherly case is not outdated; rather, it is the epitome and embodiment of conscience in a world where millions are lulled into believing that the consequences of their actions are not their concern—that they did not act, but only ‘worked,’ and their work, regardless of its purpose, its goals, and its direct or indirect results, does not stink, ‘non olet’. Eatherly resisted this temptation […]” (Hiroshima, p. 359)
25Hiroshima p. 365
26Hiroshima p. 296 footnote 4.
27Hiroshima p. 346. There are similar lines of thought in A.S., who, however, speaks of a conflict between “supra-personal” and “personal” responsibility. For him, there is no question as to which of the two sides represents true ethics; and he warns against “sacrificing some of one’s humanity to one’s supra-personal responsibility” (Awe, p. 41). “Too often we act, from the smallest person in the smallest business to the political ruler who holds war and peace in his hands, as people who, without effort, manage to be no longer human beings but merely executors of general interests.” (Awe, pp. 44/45)
28G.A. does not use this particular expression, unless I have overlooked it, directly in the Hiroshima writings (although I find the statement in the introduction written in 1982 that “large-scale technology reifies us humans” Hiroshima p. XXXII), but it is a centrally discussed concept in the chapter “On Promethean Shame” in the first volume of his “Antiquity”: G.A.: The Antiquity of Man. Volume 1. On the Soul in the Age of the Second Industrial Revolution. – (Munich 1992.) (= B&R 319) pp. 21-95. For Anders, the real point here is not the well-known (though nowadays forgotten) finding of the “reification” of humans, but rather that, on a higher level, humans “affirm their own reification, or reject their non-reification as a shortcoming,” in other words, they feel a shame that is “the shame of not being a thing” (Antiquity, p. 30).
29“We are all more or less in danger of becoming human things instead of personalities,” as A.S. puts it (Awe, p. 50).
30Hiroshima. p. 199.
31Hiroshima p. 196
32Hiroshima p. 199
33M. H. and Th. W. A.: Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments. – (Frankfurt a. M. May 1991) (= Fischer Wissenschaft 7404)
34Hiroshima p. XVIII
35A.S. puts it this way, for example: “All advances in knowledge and skill ultimately have disastrous consequences if we do not maintain control over them through corresponding advances in spirituality. Through the power we gain over the forces of nature, we also gain power over other people in an uncanny way. Possession of a hundred machines gives a person or a cooperative dominion over all who operate these machines. A new invention makes it possible for one person to kill not a hundred, but ten thousand people with a single movement.” (Awe, p. 54)
36Consequences of war, p. 166
37Hiroshima, p. 360
38https://www.hdg.de/lemo/bestand/objekt/plakat-wir-haben-die-erde-von-unseren-kindern-nur-geborgt.html
39Such a fundamentally different ethic is perhaps hinted at in Michael Ende’s play “Das Gauklermärchen” (The Juggler’s Fairy Tale), for example when the clown Jojo says the following to the spider Angramain: “Love, you say, does not exist, / Nor freedom, nor creative play? / Who is surprised that Angramain speaks thus, / Who recognizes only herself as her purpose and goal! / For these three things are given only to those / Who are able to act without intention.” M.E.: Das Gauklermärchen. A play in seven scenes with a prologue and epilogue. – (Munich 1995; 6th ed.) (= dtv 10903) pp. 98/99. The crucial point in these lines is the rejection of means-end rationality. Of course, this does not mean that the free aesthetic play that the neo-Romantic has in mind here is in itself a sufficient foundation for an ethics. However, it provides a model that comes close to Schweitzer’s idea of a fundamental “reverence for life.” Adorno’s statement that “society in its present form” is based “on the pursuit of one’s own interests against the interests of all others” (Th. W. Adorno: Education after Auschwitz — In: Theodor W. Adorno: Education for Maturity. Lectures and Conversations with Hellmut Becker 1959-1969. Edited by Gerd Kadelbach. – (Frankfurt 2017, 26th edition) (= st 11) pp. 88-104, p. 101). And he adds: “Every person today, without exception, feels unloved because everyone is incapable of loving enough. […] Silence under terror was merely a consequence of this.” Of course, Adorno does not offer a ready-made ethic as an antidote, but merely a moment of resistance; This is not Schweitzer’s “reverence for life,” nor Ende’s belief in the liberating “creative play,” but rather an anti-collectivist impulse: “The only true force against the principle of Auschwitz would be autonomy, if I may use Kant’s expression; the power of reflection, of self-determination, of non-participation.” (p. 93)
40See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42_GuXIjlWs
41For the same reason, it is problematic when the only objection that can be raised against the sanctions against Russia is that they harm “our economy” and “our industry”: https://x.com/SWagenknecht/status/1572505280130478080. None of these arguments reflect any real ethics, but rather the same old logic of instrumental reason, which can be used to justify anything and everything if it seems useful to oneself, and that is why their opposition to war is coincidental and not principled. Of course, it must be taken into account that these may be strategic statements by Wagenknecht, intended to win people over to peace by appealing to their egoism. Here, one is also less in danger of being branded a friend of the enemy.
42On Perpetual Peace, p. 57. Similar thoughts, perhaps inspired by his reading of Kant, can be found in A.S., who warns against the belief that “the ethical can be overridden by the expedient” (Ehrfurcht, p. 42).
43Although he speaks, for example, of “opinion factories” (Hiroshima, p. 372). Jörg Becker even says: “In its economic analyses of capitalism, the critical left has always ignored the supporting role played by advertising and the media” (FriedensForum 3/2024, p. 42) — a judgment that is certainly too sweeping, and he himself immediately cites counterexamples. In general, however, this coincides with my observations. However, it must be added that this underestimation of the mechanisms of PR, media, and advertising, in short, of propaganda, is certainly not unique to the leftist tradition, but fundamentally affects members of all political camps. Otherwise, it could not have worked. Recently, one can no longer speak of such a general underestimation; instead, the principle applies: only the other side spreads propaganda, not us. Or rather: only others are stupid enough to fall for propaganda, but I myself am immune to it.
44Erasmus already recognized this: “Then we cloak our illness with honorable titles. I seek the wealth of the Turks and put forward the defense of religion. I serve ambition, follow anger, wild and unbridled passion carries me away, and I give as my reason a broken contract, a violated alliance of friendship, the violation of I know not which of the points of a betrothal treaty or something similar.“ (”Sweet seems war to the inexperienced,” p. 82)
45This is what I referred to above as the “consciousness industry.” However, its foundations are older and more deeply rooted in our culture than it might appear at first glance, namely in a rigid utilitarianism that was initially characteristic of the bourgeoisie and then, in particular, of the petty bourgeoisie, but has since become total and has taken hold of society as a whole. I encountered its expression as early as high school in the form of people who explained to me that Latin was only needed by priests, or who lectured me that you couldn’t build a house with Homer. The transformation of universities from places of comprehensive education, where knowledge of the intellectual traditions of the West was kept alive, to places of training that are subservient to the demands of the economy, or their replacement by technical colleges, is a more recent symptom of this. The goal is no longer education as a value in and of itself, because it, too, is now just a bargaining chip, something from which one actually expects something else: namely, a career. This is particularly worrying given how much this development has even affected the so-called humanities, if they still exist at all: when I expressed my astonishment a few years ago that a sociology graduate did not even know who or what Tolstoy was, he disarmed me with the very simple reply: “What do you need that for?”
46I’m not sure if he said this verbatim anywhere, but I think it can be seen as the quintessence of his various writings on the “culture industry.”
47G. D. and F. G.: Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia I. Translated by Bernd Schwibs. – (Frankfurt a.M. 8th ed. 1997) (=stw 224)
48″On the other hand, there is something exaggerated, irrational, and pathogenic in the current relationship to technology. This is related to the ‘technological veil’. People are inclined to regard technology as an end in itself, as a force of its own, and to forget that it is the extended arm of man. The means—and technology is the epitome of means for the self-preservation of the human species—are fetishized because the ends—a dignified life—are obscured and cut off from the general consciousness of humans. […] It is by no means certain […] where the threshold lies between a rational relationship to it and that overvaluation which ultimately leads someone who devises a train system that brings the victims to Auschwitz as quickly and smoothly as possible to forget what happens to them in Auschwitz.” (Education after Auschwitz, pp. 99/100)
49See: https://www.infosperber.ch/gesundheit/medizin/hirntoten-menschen-tierorgane-transplantiert/
50This is the apt title of a thriller that takes up the theme: https://bastei-luebbe.de/Buecher/Krimis-Thriller/Die-Abschaffung-des-Todes/9783757700515
51 See: https://www.infosperber.ch/gesellschaft/trump-kam-mit-hilfe-von-transhumanisten-an-die-macht/
52 But the market economy has already found an answer to this problem as well. For all those who no longer find meaning in their lives, the transformation of suicide into an industry, into a commodity, is even beginning to take shape: https://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/wissen-technik/suizidkapsel-hofft-in-der-schweiz-fuss-zu-fassen/47156258
Written by:
Rosner, Ortwin