Cars are modern human sacrifice | Forum

The immorality of those families whose children are burnt alive on motor ways. They have money heaped on them by social welfare institutions and they go and spend it on consumer goods, which the right-thinking regard as sordid. But they have never had to see their kids die before they could buy a car and, hence, have never felt the need to send them off for inexpensive holidays on those coaches which, as if by chance, always have fatal accidents. The immorality of those who eat their children in hard cash merely corresponds to the immorality of the social institution which recompenses their death.

Everything in this vicious circle is abject: chance, which kills the poorest children, social charity which turns their deaths into a source of income, the parents who benefit from it to enjoy a short spell of wealth and decent society which stigmatizes them, for rumour does not condemn them at all for their indiscreet behaviour but for not handling the money rationally by putting it in the bank, for example, but instead spending it unscrupulously, thus verifying that they were indeed the victims of a divine justice.

The whole of the social is there in its logical abjection. It is the poor who die and it is they who deserved to. It is this mediocre truth, this mediocre fatality which we know as 'the social'. Which amounts to saying that it only exists for its victims. Wretched in its essence, it only affects the wretched. It is itself a disinherited concept and it can only serve to render destitution complete. Nietzsche is right: the social is a concept, a value made by slaves for their own use, beneath the scornful gaze of their masters who have never believed in it. This can be clearly seen in all the so-called social reforms which inescapably turn against the intended beneficiaries. The reforms strike those whom they should save. This is not a perverse effect. Nature herself conforms to this willingly and catastrophes have a preference for the poor.

Has a catastrophe ever been seen which directly strikes the rich - apart perhaps from the burial of Pompeii and the sinking of the Titanic ?

Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

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The immorality of those families whose children are burnt alive on motor ways. They have money heaped on them by social welfare institutions and they go and spend it on consumer goods, which the right-thinking regard as sordid. But they have never had to see their kids die before they could buy a car and, hence, have never felt the need to send them off for inexpensive holidays on those coaches which, as if by chance, always have fatal accidents. The immorality of those who eat their children in hard cash merely corresponds to the immorality of the social institution which recompenses their death. Everything in this vicious circle is abject: chance, which kills the poorest children, social charity which turns their deaths into a source of income, the parents who benefit from it to enjoy a short spell of wealth and decent society which stigmatizes them, for rumour does not condemn them at all for their indiscreet behaviour but for not handling the money rationally by putting it in the bank, for example, but instead spending it unscrupulously, thus verifying that they were indeed the victims of a divine justice. The whole of the social is there in its logical abjection. It is the poor who die and it is they who deserved to. It is this mediocre truth, this mediocre fatality which we know as 'the social'. Which amounts to saying that it only exists for its victims. Wretched in its essence, it only affects the wretched. It is itself a disinherited concept and it can only serve to render destitution complete. Nietzsche is right: the social is a concept, a value made by slaves for their own use, beneath the scornful gaze of their masters who have never believed in it. This can be clearly seen in all the so-called social reforms which inescapably turn against the intended beneficiaries. The reforms strike those whom they should save. This is not a perverse effect. Nature herself conforms to this willingly and catastrophes have a preference for the poor. Has a catastrophe ever been seen which directly strikes the rich - apart perhaps from the burial of Pompeii and the sinking of the Titanic ? <ol><li>Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories</li></ol>

If we consider the superiority of the human species, the size of its brain, its powers of thinking, language and organization, we can say this: were there the slightest possibility that another rival or superior species might appear, on earth or elsewhere, man would use every means at his disposal to destroy it. Humans won't tolerate any other species - not even a superhuman one: they see them selves as the climax and culmination of the earthly entreprise, and they keep a vigorous check on any new intrusion in the cosmological process. Now there is no reason why this process should come to a halt with the human species, but, by universalizing itself (though only over a few thousand years) that species has more or less fixed it that an end be put to the occurrence of the world, assuming for itself all the possibilities of further evolution, reserving for itself a monopoly of natural and artificial species. This is not the ferocity of wild and predatory animal species, for these are part of cycles, and are located within constantly reversible hierarchies: neither their appearance nor their disappearance ever puts an end to the process. Only man invents a hierarchy against which there is no possible appeal, in which he is the keystone. This is a sort of ferocity raised to the second power, a disastrous pretension. The ferocity of man as a species is reflected in the ferocity of humanism as a way of thinking: his claim to universal transcendence and his intolerance of other types of thought is the very model of a superior racism.

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If we consider the superiority of the human species, the size of its brain, its powers of thinking, language and organization, we can say this: were there the slightest possibility that another rival or superior species might appear, on earth or elsewhere, man would use every means at his disposal to destroy it. Humans won't tolerate any other species - not even a superhuman one: they see them selves as the climax and culmination of the earthly entreprise, and they keep a vigorous check on any new intrusion in the cosmological process. Now there is no reason why this process should come to a halt with the human species, but, by universalizing itself (though only over a few thousand years) that species has more or less fixed it that an end be put to the occurrence of the world, assuming for itself all the possibilities of further evolution, reserving for itself a monopoly of natural and artificial species. This is not the ferocity of wild and predatory animal species, for these are part of cycles, and are located within constantly reversible hierarchies: neither their appearance nor their disappearance ever puts an end to the process. Only man invents a hierarchy against which there is no possible appeal, in which he is the keystone. This is a sort of ferocity raised to the second power, a disastrous pretension. The ferocity of man as a species is reflected in the ferocity of humanism as a way of thinking: his claim to universal transcendence and his intolerance of other types of thought is the very model of a superior racism.

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