Do you not see, I have to do this! I have no choice. If I do not insist that you talk to these psychiatrists, we will stand accused of gross negligence. Think of it. We have to get this of the way and get back to life the way we want it to be. If there is anything that modern beings regard as infinite, it is no longer God; nor is it nature, let alone morality or culture; it is one’s own power. Creatio ex nihilo, which was once the marl of omnipotence, has been supplanted by its opposite, potestas annihilationis or reductio as nihil; and this power to destroy, to reduce to nothingness is possessed in our own hands. The Promethan dream of omnipotence has at long last come true, though in an unexpected form. Since we are in a position to inflict absolute destruction on each other, we have apocalyptic powers. It is we who are the infinite. To say this is easy, but the fact is so tremendous that all historically recorded developments, including epochal changes, seem trifling in comparison: all history is now reduced to prehistory. For we are not merely a new historical generation of beings; indeed, we are no longer what until today humans have been called “human beings.” Although we are unchanged anatomically, our completely changed relation to the cosmos and to ourselves has transformed us into a new species—beings that differ from the previous type of beings no less than Nietzsche’s superman differed from humans. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

In other words—and this is not meant as a mere metaphor—we are Titans, at least as long as we are omnipotent without making definitive use of this omnipotence of ours. In fact, during the short period of our supremacy the gulf separating us Titans from the humans of yesterday has become so wide that the latter are beginning to seem alien to us. This is reflected, to take a salient example, in our attitude toward Lestat, the hero in whom the last generations of our forefathers saw the embodiment of their deepest yearnings. Lestat strives desperately to be a Titan; his torment is caused by his inability to transcend his humanity. We, who are no longer finite, cannot even share this torment in our imagination. The infinite longing for the infinite, which Lestat symbolizes, and which for almost a thousand years was the source of human’s greatest sufferings and greatest achievements, has become so completely a thing of the past that it is difficult for us to visualize it; at bottom we only know that it has once existed. What our parents, the last humans regarded as the most important thing is meaningless to us, their sons, the first Titans; the very concepts by means of which they articulated their history have become obsolete. For instance, the antithesis between the Apollonian and the Dionysiac principle: The former denoted the happy harmony of the finite; the latter, the intoxication found in exploding the boundaries of the finite. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

Since we are no longer finite, since we have the explosion behind us, the antithesis has become unreal. The infinite longing some of us still experience is a nostalgia for finitude, the good old finitude of the past; in other words, some of us long to be rid of our Titanism, and to be humans again, humans like those of the golden age of yesterday. Needless to say this longing is as romantic and utopian as was that of the Luddites; and like all longings of this kind, it weakens those who indulge in it, while it strengthens the self-assurance of those who are sufficiently unimaginative and unscrupulous to put to actual use the omnipotence they possess. However, the starving working people who early in the nineteenth century rose against the machines could hardly have suspected that a day would come when their longing for the past would assume truly mythological dimensions—when beings could be appropriately descried as Titan who strives desperately to recover one’s humanity. Curiously enough, omnipotence has become truly dangerous only after we have got hold of it. Before then, all manifestations of omnipotence has become truly dangerous only after we have got hold it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

Before then, all manifestations of omnipotence, whether regarded as natural or supernatural (this distinction, too, has become unimportant), have been relatively benign: in each instance the threat was partial, only particular things were destroyed—merely people, cities, empires, or cultures—but we were always spared, it “we” denotes humankind. No wonder that no one actually considered the possibility of a total peril, expect for a few scientific philosopher who toyed with the idea of a cosmic catastrophe (such as the extinction of the Sun), and for a minority of Christians who took eschatology seriously and expected the World to end at any moment. With one stroke all this has changed. There is little hope that we, cosmic parvenus, usurpers of the apocalypse, will be as merciful as the forces responsible for the former cataclysms were out of compassion or indifference, or by accident. Rather, there is no hope at all: the actual masters of the infinite are no more imaginatively or emotionally equal to this possession of theirs than their prospective victims, for instance, ourselves; and they are incapable, and indeed must remain incapable, of looking upon their contraption as anything but a means to further finite interest, including the most limited party interests. Because we are the first beings with the power to unleash a World cataclysm, we are also the first to live continually under its threat. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

Because we are the first Titans, we are also the first dwarfs or pygmies, or whatever we may call beings such as ourselves who are mortal not only as individual, but also as a group, and who are granted survival only until further orders. We have just emerged from a period in which for Europeans natural death was an unnatural or at least an exceptional occurrence. A being who died of old age aroused envy: one was looked upon as one who could afford the luxury of a peaceful and individual death, as a kind of slacker who managed to escape from the general fate of extermination, or even as a sort f secret agent in the service of cosmic foreign powers though which one had been able to obtain such a special favor. Occasionally natural death was viewed in a different light—as evidence of being’s freedom and sovereignty, as a twin brother or Stoic suicide—but even the natural death was felt to be unnatural and exceptional. During the war, being killed was thus the most common form of dying: the model for our finitude was Abel, not Adam. In the extermination camps natural death was completely eliminated. There the lethal machines operated wit absolute efficiency, leaving no uneconomical residues of life. There the venerable proposition, All humans are mortal, had already become an understatement. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

The fact that all human are mortal being more serious than we realize—if this proposition had been inscribed on the entrance gates to the gas chambers, instead of the usual misleading, “Shower Baths,” or “Conventional Housing,” it would have aroused jeers; and in this jeering laughter the voices of the victims would have joined an infernal unison with the voices of their guards. For the truth contained in the old proposition was now more adequately expressed in an new proposition—“All men and women are exterminable.” Whatever changes have taken place in the World during the ten years since the end of the war, they have not affected the validity of the new proposition: the truth it expressed is confirmed by the general threat hanging over us. Its implications have even become more sinister: for what is exterminable today is not “merely” all beings, but humankind a whole. This change inaugurates a new historical epoch, if the term “epoch” may be applied to the short time intervals in question. Accordingly, all history can be divided into three chapters, with the following captions: All human beings are mortal, All human beings are exterminable, and Humankind as a whole is exterminable. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

Under the present dispensation, human mortality has acquired an entirely new meaning—it is only today that its ultimate horror is brought home to us. To be sure, even previously no one was exempt from mortality; but everyone regarded oneself as mortal within a larger whole, the human World; and while no one ever explicitly ascribed immortality to the latter, the threat of its mortality stared no one in the face either. Only because there was such a “space” within which one died, could there arise that peculiar aspiration to give the lie to one’s mortality through the acquisition of fame. Admittedly the attempt has never been very successful; immortality among mortals has never been a safe metaphysical investment. The famous beings were always like those ship passengers of the Arabian Nights, who enjoyed the highest reputation abroad, but whose reputation enjoyed no reputation, because the very existence of the ship was totally unknow on land. Still, as compared with what we have today, fame was something. For today our fear of death is extended to all of humankind; and if humankind were to perish leaving no memory in any being, engulfing all existence in darkness, no empire will have existed, no idea, no struggle, no love, no pain, no hope, no comfort, no sacrifice—everything will have been in vain, and there would be only what which has been, and nothing else. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

Even to us, who are still living in the existing World, the past, that which merely was, seems dead; but the end of humankind would destroy even this death and force it, as it were, to die a second time, so that the past will not even have been the past—for how would that which merely had differ from that which had never been? Nor would the future be spared: it would be dead even before being born. Ecclesiastic’s disconsolate, “There is nothing new under the Sun,” would be succeeded by the even more disconsolate, “Nothing ever was,” which no one would record and which for that reason would never be challenged. Let us assume that the bomb has been exploded. To call this “an action” is inappropriate. The chain of events leading up to the explosion is composed of so many links, the process has involved so many different agencies, so many intermediate steps and partial actions, none of which is the crucial one, that in the end no one can be regarded as the agent. Everyone has a good conscience, because no one conscience was required at any point. Bad conscience has once and for all been transferred to moral machines, electronic oracles: those cybernetic contraptions, which are the quintessence of science, and hence of progress and of morality, have assumed all responsibility, while beings self-righteously washes their hands. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

Since all these machines can do is to evaluate profits and losses, they implicitly makes the loss finite, and hence justifiable, although it is precisely this evaluation that destroys us, the evaluated ones, even before we are actually destroyed. Because responsibility has been displaced on to an object, which is regarded as “objective,” it has become a mere response; the Ought is merely the correct chess move, and the Ought Not, the wrong chess move. The cybernetic machines are interested only in determining the means that can be advantageously used in a situation defined by the factors a, b, c….n. Nothing else matters: after all, the continued existence of our World cannot be regarded as one of the factors. The question of the rightness of the goal to be achieved by the mechanically calculated means is forgotten by the operators of the machine or their employers, for instance, by those who bow to its judgment the moment it begins to calculate. To mistrust the solutions provided by the machine, for instance, to question the responses that have taken the place of responsibility, would be to question the very principle of our mechanized existence. No one would venture to create such a precedent. Even where robots are not resorted to, the monstrous undertaking is immensely facilitated by the fact that it is not carried out by individual, but by a complex and vastly ramified organization. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

If the organization of an undertaking is “all right,” and if the machines function smoothly, the performance too seems “all right” and smooth. Each participant, each intermediary, performs or has insight into only the job assigned to one; and certainly each works conscientiously. The specialized worker is not conscious of the fact that conscientious efforts of a number of specialists can add up to the most monstrous lack of conscience; just as in any other industrial enterprise one has no insight into the process as a whole. In so far as conscientia derives from scire, for instance, conscience from knowledge, such a failure to become conscious certainly points to a lack of conscience. However, this does not mean that any of the participants acts against one’s conscience, or has no conscience—such immoral possibilities are still comfortingly human, they still presuppose beings that might have a conscience. Rather, the crucial point here is that such possibilities are excluded in advance. We are here beyond both morality and immortality. To blame the participants for their lack of conscience would be as meaningless as to ascribe courage or cowardice to one’s hand. Just as a mere hand cannot be cowardly, so a mere participant cannot have conscience. The division of labor prevents one so completely from having clear insight into the productive process, that the lack of conscience we must ascribe to one is no longer an individual moral deficiency. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

And yet it may result in the death of all humankind. The action of unleashing the bomb is not merely irresponsible in the ordinary sense of the term: irresponsibility still falls within the realm of the morally discussible, while here we are confronted with something for which no one can even be held accountable. The consequences of this action are so great that the agent cannot possibly grasp them before, during, or after one’s action. Moreover, in this case there can be no goal, no positive value that can even approximately equal the magnitude of the means used to achieve it. This incommensurability of cause of effect or means and end is not in the least likely to prevent the action; on the contrary, it facilitates the action. To murder an individual is far more difficult than to throw a bomb that kills countless individuals; and we would be willing to shake hands with the perpetrator of the second rather than of the first crimes. Offenses that transcend our imagination by virtue of their monstrosity are committed more readily, for the inhibitions normally present when the consequences of a projected action are more or less calculable are no longer operative. The Biblical “They know not what they do” here assumes a new, unexpectedly terrifying meaning: the very monstrousness of the deed makes possible a new, truly infernal innocence. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

The situation is not entirely unfamiliar. The mass extermination under Hilter could be carried our precisely because they were monstrous—because they absolutely transcended the moral imagination of the agents, and because the moral emotions that normally precede, accompany, or follow actions could not arise int his case. However, can one speak here of “agents”? The beings who carry out such actions are always co-agents: they are either half-active and half-passive cogs in a vast mechanism, or they serve merely to touch off an effect that has been prepared in advance to the extent of 99 percent. The categories of coagent and touching off are unknown in traditional ethics. This is not to be interpreted as a justification of the German crimes. The concept of collective guilt was morally indispensable: something had to be done to prevent these crimes from being quickly forgotten. However, the concept proved inadequate because the crime in question transcended the ordinary dimensions of an immoral act; because a situation in which all perpetrators are merely co-perpetrators, and all non-perpetrator are indirectly perpetrators, requires entirely new concepts; and above all because the number of dead was too great for any kind of reaction. Just as being can produce acoustic vibrations unperceivable by the human ear, so they can perform actions that lie outside the realm of moral apperception. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

The saying of Jesus cannot authenticated by anyone as being historically true. However, every illumined being can authenticate them as being mystically true. Those who can understand the mystery of what is called by theologians (not by philosophers) the Incarnation, will understand also that the crucifixion of Jesus did not last a mere sic hours. It lasted for a whole thirty-three years. His sufferings were primarily mental, not physical. They were caused, not by the nails driven into his flesh at the end of his life, but by the evil thoughts and materialistic emotions impinging on his mind from his environment during the whole course of his life. Nonetheless, without either a Long or Short Path previous history of a being may still find oneself in the higher consciousness. This shows that Grace alone is a sufficient cause. Second, aside from the feeling of disgust with the World through failure to pass one’s school examinations, the only preparation which some undergo are falling involuntarily and profoundly into a trance state for three days. Here, these beings are pulled in away from the sense and outer awareness by a strong force. This shows that depth of inner penetration of the mind’s layers and length of period that contact is held with the Overself are the two important governors of the result attained. Go as deep as you can; stay there as long as you can; this seems to be silent message of the experience. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

Sokrates was an awakener of beings. He tried to stir their minds by questions, and their conscience by revealing fresh points of view. This being who came among them to tell of a deeper kind of life that would give them unearthly peace, who sought to bless them by removing an ancient curse from their history, was rejected, yet Jesus had to do what he did, to say what he said. Human beings must learn to put the Worldly existences into the proper proportions. As one is also a human being, one should be able to reduce one’s own egoism and tranquillize one’s own desires and recast one’ sense of values until the great peace comes over one and one is enlightened. “Gather together whatsoever force ye can upon your march hither, and we will go speedily against those dissenters, in the strength of our God accord to the faith which is in us,” reports Alma 61. 17. After a certain day when she underwent an experience wherein God seemed to take out her heart and carry it away, Saint Catherine of Siena remained peaceful and contended for the rest of her life. She could not describe that inner experience but said that in it she had tasted a sweetness which made Earthly pleasures seem like mud and even spiritual pleasures seem far inferior. The miracles of Christ were an expression of special power manifested by Him in virtue of His special mission to humanity. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14