thinkers, including Pascal and Joseph de Maistre, who elaborated on the notion of the illegitimate origins of power, of a “founding crime” on which state power is based; to obfuscate these origins, one must offer the people “noble lies,” heroic narratives of the origins. One cannot but respect the brutal honesty of the first-generation founders of the State of Israel who in no way obliterated the “founding crime” involved in establishing the new state: they openly admitted they had no right to the land of Palestine, it was just a matter of their force against the force of the Palestinians. On April 29, 1956, a group of Palestinians from Gaza crossed the border to plunder the harvest in the Nahal Oz kibbutz’s fields; Roi, a young Jewish member of the kibbutz who patrolled the fields galloped towards them on his horse brandishing a stick to chase them away; he was seized by the Palestinians and carried back to the Gaza Strip. When the UN returned his body to the Israelis, his eyes had been gouged out. Moshe Dayan, the then Israeli Chief of Staff, delivered the eulogy at his funeral the following day:
Let us not cast blame on the murderers today. What claim do we have against their mortal hatred of us? They have lived in the refugee camps of Gaza for the past eight years, while right before their eyes we have transformed the land and villages where they and their ancestors once lived into our own inheritance.
It is not among the Arabs of Gaza but in our own midst that we must seek Roi’s blood. How have we shut our eyes and refused to look squarely at our fate and see the destiny of our generation in all its brutality? Have we forgotten that this group of young people living in Nahal Oz bears the burden of Gaza’s gates on its shoulders?38
Apart from the parallel between Roi and the blinded Samson (which plays a key role in the later mythology of the Israeli Defense Force), what cannot but strike one is the apparent non sequitur, the gap, between the first and the second paragraph: in the first paragraph, Dayan openly admits that the Palestinians have every right to hate the Israeli Jews, since they had taken their land; his conclusion, however, is not the obvious admission of guilt, but rather the need for a full acceptance of “the destiny of our generation in all its brutality,” or in other words, the assumption of the burden—not of guilt, but of the war in which might is right, in which the stronger force wins. The war was not about principles or justice, it was an exercise in “mythic violence”—an insight totally obliterated by recent Israeli self-legitimization. As in the case of feminism, which taught us to discover the traces of violence in what appears, in a patriarchal culture, as a natural authority (of the father), we should remember the grounding violence obliterated by today’s Zionism—Zionists should simply read Dayan and Ben Gurion.
This brings us to the contemporary liberal idea of global justice, whose aim is not only to characterize all past injustices as collective crimes, for it also involves the politically correct utopia of “restituting” the past collective violence (towards blacks, Native Americans, Chinese immigrants . . .) by payment or legal measures. This is the true utopia, the idea that a legal order can make recompense for its founding crimes, thereby retroactively cleansing itself of its guilt and regaining its innocence. What lies at the end of this road is the ecological utopia of humanity in its entirety repaying its debt to Nature for all its past exploitation. In effect, is not the idea of “recycling” part of the same pattern as that of restitution for past injustices? The underlying utopian notion is the same: the system which emerged through violence should repay its debt in order to regain an ethico-ecological balance. The ideal of “recycling” involves the utopia of a self-enclosed circle in which all waste, all useless remainder, is sublated: nothing gets lost, all trash is re-used. It is at this level that one should make the shift from the circle to the ellipse: already in nature itself, there is no circle of total recycling, there is un-usable waste. Recall the methodical madness of Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon” in which everything, up to and including the prisoners’ excrement and urine, should be put to further use. Regarding urine, Bentham proposed the following ingenious solution: the external walls of the cells should not be fully vertical, but lightly curved inside, so that, when the prisoners urinated on the wall, the liquid would drip downwards, keeping the cells warm in winter . . . This is why the properly aesthetic attitude of a radical ecologist is not that of admiring or longing for a pristine nature of virgin forests and clear sky, but rather that of accepting waste as such, of discovering the aesthetic potential of waste, of decay, of the inertia of rotten material which serves no purpose.
The Utopia for a Race of Devils
This, finally, brings us to the core of the liberal utopia. For liberalism, at least in its radical form, the wish to submit people to an ethical ideal held to be universal is “the crime which contains all crimes,” the mother of all crimes—it amounts to the brutal imposition of one’s own view onto others, the cause of civil disorder. Which is why, if one wants to establish civil peace and tolerance, the first condition is to get rid of “moral temptation”: politics should be thoroughly purged of moral ideals and rendered “realistic,” taking people as they are, counting on their true nature, not on moral exhortations. Here the market is exemplary: human nature is egotistic, there is no way to change it—what is needed is a mechanism that makes private vices work for the common good (the “Cunning of Reason”). In his “Perpetual Peace” essay, Kant provided a precise formulation of this key feature:
many say a republic would have to be a nation of angels, because men with their selfish inclinations are not capable of a constitution of such sublime form. But precisely with these inclinations nature comes to the aid of the general will established on reason, which is revered even though impotent in practice. Thus it is only a question of a good organization of the state (which does lie in man’s power), whereby the powers of each selfish inclination are so arranged in opposition that one moderates or destroys the ruinous effect of the other. The consequence for reason is the same as if none of them existed, and man is forced to be a good citizen even if not a morally good person.
The problem of organizing a state, however hard it may seem, can be solved even for a race of devils, if only they are intelligent. The problem is: “Given a multitude of rational beings requiring universal laws for their preservation, but each of whom is secretly inclined to exempt himself from them, to establish a constitution in such a way that, although their private intentions conflict, they check each other, with the result that their public conduct is the same as if they had no such intentions.” A problem like this must be capable of solution; it does not require that we know how to attain the moral improvement of men but only that we should know the mechanism of nature in order to use it on men, organizing the conflict of the hostile intentions present in a people in such a way that they must compel themselves to submit to coercive laws. Thus a state of peace is established in which laws have force.39
One should pursue this line of argument to its conclusion: a fully self-conscious liberal should intentionally limit his altruistic readiness to sacrifice his own good for the good of others, aware that the most effective way to act for the common good is to follow one’s private egotism. The inevitable obverse of the Cunning of Reason motto “private vices, common good” is “private goods, common disaster.” There is in liberalism, from its very inception, a tension between individual freedom and objective mechanisms which regulate the behavior of a crowd—early on, Benjamin Constant clearly formulated this tension: everything is moral in individuals, but everything is physical in crowds; everybody is free as individual, but merely a cog in a machine when part of a crowd. Nowhere is the legacy of religion clearer: this, exactly, is the paradox of Predestination, of the unfathomable mechanism of Grace embodied, among other places, in market success. The mechanisms which will bring about social peace are independent of the will of individuals as well as of their merits.
The tension internal to this project is discernible in the two aspects of liberalism, market liberalism and political liberalism. Jean-Claude Michéa perspicuously links this to two meanings of the term “right”: the political Right insists on the market economy, the politically correct culturalized Left insists on the defense
