Prognoses for the Twenty-first Century - Ernst Jünger

Part Six

Translated by Bruno Zimmer and Michael Halfpenny

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While highly dangerous, the growing spiritualization is also capable of defying annihilation – in war for example, the reduction to an exchange of formulas. The defeated side resigns, as in a game of chess. If he overturns the game's table, he will meet the fate of the giants.

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Even the world state will not do away with violence, since it belongs to creation. War transforms into police actions of smaller and larger scale. With a monopoly on nuclear weapons insurrections have no potential, yet terror will increase.

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The progress of technology can also result in magic. The transmission of thought into action is beginning to occur in some areas, especially in transportation. Even a phone call is not as simple as it seems. Light barriers, transplants, chimeras, dead men appearing on-screen, and so on.

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There are more and more biotopes in which you hardly have to move your hand to act. Such a state has already been written out of history because it is pleasing. Nietzsche foresaw this condition in the “Last Man” and Huxley detailed it. The interim levels out. This is associated with fellahization - an existence without historical conscience and higher aspiration - one lives for the day.

The elites become more rare and more powerful, because they too reach the limit where thought is transformed.

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Titans live and act in time. Their power is confirmed in the Eternal Return. This eternity is not the end of time and the ages, but their infinite continuation. One cut and their end is reached.

The Titans do not need prayers; they are served through work. They are highly respected, although their name is hidden behind their action. And so it is that today one no longer says Uranos, but Uran. Even Pluton, although earth-mighty, does not number among the Olympians.

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The gods are not eternal but timeless – insofar as the prayers addressed to them do not fulfill earthly hope, they are fulfilled beyond all hope.

The arrival of the gods can be guessed at – yet, neither calculated nor predicted. Nonetheless, they must appear, because without gods there is no culture. Before the great shifts, there are naive and well-founded expectations directed towards the emanations.

A phenomenon may for a thousand years or more continue to warm as a reflective gleam and answer as an echo, but it weakens with time and with it the theology grows weary. Every sermon becomes a more or less well-done eulogy. Therefore it still has its strongest effect at the tombs.

In the Interim, gods are anachronisms, even in poetry; it is best to neutralize their names. In correspondence with this, the divine, in order to appear in high spiritualization, needs neither the mask of animals nor of humans. Sure enough, new mutations also require a new level of knowledge. There will be no lack of it since the shears cut sharpest as they begin to close.