Tag: Violence

  • We Are Ruled by a Lord of the Flies

    We Are Ruled by a Lord of the Flies

    “Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close! I’m the reason why things are what they are.”

    —William Golding, Lord of the Flies.

    For anyone thinking that Putin had overstepped boundaries when he invaded Ukraine, it turns out he was only ahead of the curve. Since that time we’ve had genocidal warfare visit Palestine, a president kidnapped from Venezuela, a starvation blockade imposed on Cuba and a criminal aerial bombardment come to Iran. Multiple crimes, in other words, and committed by successive presidential administrations of the West’s flagship state. No wonder the United Nations Secretary-General recently denounced international relations as a “law of the jungle.”

    The Jungle Book

    It must be a vestige of colonial history that conjures images of undulating spear tips and blood-stained fur whenever the jungle is invoked. This sort of iconography probably accounts for the jungle island setting of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the story about a group of schoolboys who get marooned during a military evacuation amidst a nuclear war. Initially, the boys are quite “civilized.” They elect a chief, hold orderly assemblies using a conch shell and maintain a signal fire to attract rescuers. But it doesn’t take long for these trappings of civilization to melt away under the tropical heat. Conflict divides the boys when the signal fire goes out and the hunting of a pig arouses primitive instincts, culminating in a spree of orgiastic violence. The aggressive faction of boys consumes the other by way of floggings and outright murder, and they eventually set the island on fire in an effort to flush out their first elected chief. 

    The great pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus wrote: “Fire of all things is the judge and ravisher.” We see this in Lord of the Flies, with the signal fire representing civilized order and the brush fire representing the desperate plunge into chaos and savagery. Golding possessed a cynical view of human nature that sees people animated by sadistic impulses in the service of selfish interests and power. This is a common position on human nature, also articulated by Chinese legalist philosophy and Thomas Hobbes’ “war of all against all” that characterizes life in a state of nature. Sigmund Freud adopted this position in his later writings as well, asserting the existence of a “primary mutual hostility of human beings” which civilization must tame by setting “limits to man’s aggressive instincts.”1

    One commonality between Golding, Hobbes, Freud and the Chinese legalists is that they were all heavily influenced by the demoniacal experience of warfare.2 Witnessing first-hand the human capacity for violence leaves scars on the human psyche that are well documented. Through allegory, Golding asserts that Satan’s captain, Beelzebub—the Lord of the Flies—is not an external supernatural force, but is actually a force inside us, a force within. Freud appeals to the death instinct in order to explain human aggression, similar to Hobbes and the legalists who view aggression as a simple fact of our nature. 

    Human Nature?

    Once that view of human nature is accepted, it is explained that human beings enter a social contract and form civilization as a refuge from our own terrifying base instincts. Violence and corruption in the world can be chalked up to inherently brutal instincts that inevitably infect all of our carefully designed social institutions and best laid plans. Although civilization can never be perfect, it remains the thin red line between orderly society and the violent anarchy of nature.

    The only problem with that argument is that it isn’t true. There is real world evidence that rejects the cynics and supports a view that humans are naturally cooperative rather than hostile: in 1965 a group of six teenage boys from Tonga found themselves stranded on a remote Pacific island. Far from descending into an orgy of violence, they built shelter and divided chores. They worked together and planted a garden, hunted feral chickens, collected rainwater in deadwood and rotated cooking duties. They maintained a fire and strummed a makeshift guitar and sang songs in the evenings to lift their mood. 

    The experience of the Tongan castaways gels with Raymond Kelly’s “Prehistoric warlessness” hypothesis, asserting that conflict and violence between human groups was virtually non-existent up until the Neolithic Revolution.3 That does not mean that there were no instances of homicide or executions within groups—nobody has that answer—but systematic warfare was simply not a feature of the Paleolithic economy that dominated human evolution for hundreds of thousands of years. This is because incredibly low population densities, combined with relatively high natural abundance, provided no incentive for humans to engage in inter-tribal violence.

    In our actual state of nature, warfare offered little gain in terms of resources but had the potential to destroy both warring parties with only a few casualties on both sides. It was therefore preferential to seek new territories on which to hunt and gather rather than fight over them. This is what explains human migrations out of Africa and our species’ rapid spread around the globe. 

    In a footnote, Karl Marx argues that philosophers “must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch.”4 Our human nature in general demands that we eat, drink, breathe, shelter, reproduce, etc. Modern human behaviour, such as language, art, music, abstract thought, planning and tool making arose to meet those needs. We can recognize that the universal behavioural traits of humans could not have been achievable in a Hobbesian “war of all against all” state of nature—every one of them required positive social intercourse in order to become characteristic of our species. It follows that cooperation in the context of low population density and relative natural abundance was the state of nature that defined our prehistoric evolution and are suggestive of “human nature in general.”

    Civilization of Corruption

    On the other side of the ledger is “human nature as modified in each historical epoch.” While our general characteristics concretized during the epoch of primitive communism, the expression of human behaviour began to vary wildly as environmental changes led to sedentary living, resource scarcity and class divisions that gradually permeating the social structure. The biological demands on human beings led us to developing a potential for many behavioural expressions—including turning our hunting spears on one another. But this potential for warfare and organized violence went unfulfilled until population growth and sedentism made it an economic necessity for one group to defend territory against another. From the Neolithic Revolution onward, a technological arms race and complex division of labour emerged to satisfy our biological needs. The resulting base and superstructure is history.

    Jean-Jacques Rousseau rightly scolded Hobbes for taking modern, “civilized” people and ascribing their flaws to nature.5 The philosophical question is this: does human nature corrupt civilization or does civilization corrupt human nature? Marx and Rousseau affirmed the latter, and that is also where the preponderance of anthropological evidence lies. It is not our nature that commands a world plagued by corruption, greed, ecological destruction and warfare. Indeed, our ability to recognize these things as defects affirms a natural revulsion towards them. Although we have the capacity for greed and violence, we also have instincts that lead us toward love, generosity and cooperation. 

    Resource scarcity has prodded human beings into unleashing some of their worst potentialities. The good news about our current capitalist mode of production is that scarcity has become largely artificial by way of tremendous leaps in productive technology. It is entirely possible to defeat scarcity with a new, cooperative mode of production that finally unleashes our best potentialities. Until then, we are ruled by a Lord of the Flies, but not in the way that Golding imagined. The Lord of the Flies is not an internal, but an external force; an alien process of capital accumulation and rigged market forces that determines our class standing and incentivizes our worst behaviours.

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader edited by Peter Gay (W.W. Norton, 1989): 750. ↩︎

    2. Specifically World War II, the English Civil War, World War I and the Warring States period of China, respectively. ↩︎

    3. Raymond C. Kelly, “The evolution of lethal intergroup violence,” in PNASVol. 102, No. 43: 15294-15298. ↩︎

    4. Karl Marx, “Conversion of Surplus-Value into Capital” in Capital, Vol. One. He is specifically critical of utilitarians here, pointing out the utility of human behaviour can vary wildly depending on the mode of production available. ↩︎

    5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (Online Library, 2008): 23. ↩︎
  • The Psycho-Capitalist Dystopia of “Alien”

    The Psycho-Capitalist Dystopia of “Alien”

    There is something elemental to the vastness of outer space with its infinity of stars and planets and eternal unknowns that lend off-planet stories a conspicuously epic quality. After all, this is the realm of gods and titans, Zarathustra and Siddartha, heaven and angels, Star Trek and Star Wars. Even on the small screen there is Battlestar Galactica, motored by existential warfare, the fate of the entire species in the hands of one starship’s crew.

    Ridley Scott’s Alien blows in from the spindrift of ancient cosmology and the modern space opera, an oddity considering the spartan scope of the story. The premises of the original Alien trilogy require little imagination for today’s audience situated in the capitalist society. In the original, there is the blue collar crew of the Nostromo, tugging 20,000,000 tons of mineral ore to Earth. In the sequel, Aliens, the United States Colonial Marine Corps are sent to an extraterrestrial corporate outpost on a relief operation. And Alien 3 takes place on a prison planet. There is nothing glamorous or awe-inspiring around the cosmos in this franchise—it is a place for the utilitarian, for the rugged, for the criminally deranged. Nothing we can’t find on present-day Earth.

    The Masterpiece

    Alien sets an understated tone for the two that follow. There are installments outside the original trilogy that deviate from this mould—and they suffer for it. But the 1979 classic had first built the resonance with a mass audience that was required for the future sequels to be developed. The film opens with views of the Nostromo and the mountainous ore refinery it stages as cargo. The seven member crew awaken from stasis—hypersleep, to cope with the years-long interstellar voyages. The crew believe they are nearing Earth but we soon learn that their ship’s operating system has awakened them on a company order to investigate a mysterious transmission emanating from a moon they are passing by.

    Right away we see that capitalist class relations are integral to this plot; while the crew is reluctant to undertake such a dangerous assignment, they are ultimately compelled to do so under threat of “total forfeiture of shares.” At one point Dallas, the captain, bluntly states that the only “standard procedure is to do what the hell they tell you to do.”

    The imbalance of power is clear. If the crew refused to comply, the Weyland-Yutani corporation might lose an opportunity to profit but the crew would have to surrender their income, all for naught their many years spent aboard the starship. Even more lopsided, the crew is forced to risk their lives to investigate a potentially lucrative discovery while any proprietary claims would be held by Weyland-Yutani. The Marxist view on wage labour comes into focus: “The worker in capitalist society becomes dehumanized, regarded by the capitalists as simply another piece of equipment which is necessary for the production of profit. The workers become less than human…since they are forced to sell their lives in order to ‘make a living.’”1

    The film taps our collective anxiety that the unquenchable profit-motive underpinning our economy has lead us to transgress boundaries that were not meant to be crossed. Nuclear accidents, ocean acidification, weapons of mass destruction, the hole in the ozone layer, microplastics permeating our bloodstreams, viral lab leaks, artificial intelligence run amok—there is no shortage of potential disasters pending in a world of blind capitalist production. Films such as Planet of the Apes, The Terminator, The Day After Tomorrow and 28 Days Later all play on this collective fear.

    In Alien, it takes shape after three crew members disembark from their ship and discover an extraneous vessel crashed into the rocky surface of the moon. Upon entering, they first find a dead extra-terrestrial pilot, and next, a hull “full of leathery objects…like eggs or something.” A spider-like creature erupts from an egg and sizzles through Kane’s visor, attaching itself to his face. 

    In his Poetics, Aristotle finds that “every tragedy falls into two parts—Complication and Unravelling.”2 The complication occurs early, when the Nostromo receives the radio transmission and is forced by Weyland-Yutani to dock on a moon of a gas giant in the Zeta Reticuli star system. The unravelling occurs after the spider-like creature—a facehugger—has fallen from Kane’s head, the crew sitting down to one last meal before returning to stasis. This is a famously gruesome scene where a parasitic organism explodes from Kane’s chest in a geyser of blood. The fate of the ship is essentially sealed at this moment. Weyland-Yutani demands the return of the alien at the expense of the workers’ lives and the rapidly-growing parasitoid picks off the remaining crew one-by-one, able to turn them into eggs and begin its ghastly lifecycle anew.

    The Horror

    Deductions about many plot elements of this film can only be made at the point of unravelling when this parasite, this xenomorph, is unleashed on the crew of the Nostromo. First, it is clear that we are not watching a science fiction so much as a horror. The vacuum of outer space is a sublime backdrop for a horror film because the muteness of the void approximates the silence of death and non-existence. The producers understood this and created the artful tagline: “In space no one can hear you scream.” 

    Another visible element concerns the derelict alien ship containing the eggs. While the ship did not reach its intended destination, the deadly cargo must have had a destructive purpose all along, with the eggs intended to be dropped as bombs on an unassuming indigenous population—xenomorphs being the ultimate bioweapon. This bioweapon doesn’t merely kill its targets; it impregnates them, it is birthed by them and it destroys them in the voracious service of replicating its species. In Hinduism there is Shiva, the paradoxical god of both creation and destruction who simultaneously creates and destroys the universe in a cosmic dance.3 An element of divinity, of fetishization, is put forward which is further alluded to in the prequel film Prometheus. 

    The xenomorph was expressly designed by Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger with strong sexual overtones: a phallic head and a drooling vagina dentata for jaws. This represents the male fear of castration while the impregnating facehugger leaping from the egg evokes rape. The unity of creation and destruction—of reproduction and death—is given a modern form in Alien although it is not a new concept. Religious allegory aside, Sigmund Freud discovers this unity at the psychoanalytic level and likens the release of sexual orgasm to dying itself: “This accounts for how similar the state following complete sexual gratification is to dying, and for the fact that in lower animals death and the procreative act coincide.”4 For Freud, the death drive innate to living things appears as “aggression and destruction” when it is turned toward the external world.5

    The Mythology

    The xenomorph is the physical embodiment of the death drive, a product of “alien interspecies rape” and the death of its host.6 The aggression and destruction projected outward is total and directly avails its life instincts and reproduction. The android, Ash, in the film describes it as the “perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.” It necessarily takes up the most extremely rapacious form of both life and death, its species pullulating ceaselessly over a mountain of blood-stained corpses and shattered rib cages. 

    In feudal Europe it was believed that demonic incubi and succubi would sexually attack people as they slept with repeated interactions resulting in death. In antiquity this attribute is seen in satyrs and various demi-gods, and in the nomadic society it is seen in mystic and impetuous animals in nature. There is a primordial fear of death and sex working here and its cultural expression is determined by the economic mode of production that situates society. This exemplifies what Marx and Engels say in The German Ideology, that it is “material production” that alters the existence of people, including “their thinking and the products of their thinking.” 

    What Giger, Scott and O’Bannon created with Alien is a space-age capitalist interpretation of the demonic, sexually violent archetype. It is no coincidence that workers, grunt soldiers and prisoners bear the weight of deadly encounters with the parasites in the original trilogy and always under the orders of the soulless Weyland-Yutani corporation. Taking the metaphor further, the xenomorphs symbolize the overwhelming totality of capitalism itself: they flourish by devouring their two sources of wealth, nature and human beings.7

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1.  “Editor’s Preface” in Essential Writings of Karl Marx (Red and Black Publishers, 2010), 16. ↩︎

    2. Aristotle, “Selections from Poetics,” in Art and Interpretation: An Anthology of Readings in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Broadview Press, 1998), 34. ↩︎

    3. John M. Koller, Oriental Philosophies, Second Edition (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), 111-2. ↩︎

    4. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Broadview Editions, 2011), 113. ↩︎

    5. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (Broadview Editions, 2016), 91. ↩︎

    6. Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon described Alien as a movie about “alien interspecies rape.” www.buzzfeed.com/alisonwillmore/19-movie-monsters-that-look-like-penises-and-vaginas ↩︎

    7. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One. Paraphrasing: “Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the labourer.” ↩︎