BP oil spill - the elements unleashed and running riot

The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico reminded me of a chapter in Friedrich Georg Jünger's "The Failure of Technology - Perfection without Purpose", which I have reproduced almost completely below. I hope it may help intelligent readers who want to go deeper in understanding what has happened than is given them in the typical media or environmental analysis. In fact, I would highly recommend this book, soon to be republished by Alethes Press, for a deeper understanding of the titanic nature of technology and its eventual intrinsically-inevitable failure as it approaches perfection.

In this chapter,  Friedrich Georg Jünger describes how technology is fundamentally based on the tapping, confining and controlled application/release of elemental energies in nature. In effect, these energies and forces of the earth are narrowly confined by man's technology into receptacles and machines that store and then transform them into motion, heat, etc. That is, they are carefully imprisoned. The extreme example of this is nuclear energy, in which the elemental forces of matter itself are tapped - once this unlimited reservoir of energy has been broken into by technology, the forces unleashed have to be handled extremely carefully, imprisoned in the highest security jails and only allowed very controlled outlets. When however they break free, their wrath is all the more violent, the more restrictively they have been confined. A nuclear meltdown or atomic bomb would be the most extreme example of the imprisoned energies gaining their freedom and wreaking havoc. An oil well uncontrollably gushing its elemental forces into the world is another excellent one.

As numerous paragraphs in the passages below will show (in red), Friedrich Georg Jünger managed to foresee in 1939 something very similar to what has now happened to the BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. Its deep fundamental causes are all present in his analysis. The following should also function as a warning for future jailbreaks of all the energies we have tapped into and then confined in our apparatus.

(I sometimes imagine the firestorm that will result if an industrial blaze in an urban area gets so hot that it begins to uncontrollably ignite all the confined flameable materials present in a typical modern city - all the petroleum in millions of car tanks and gas stations, all the oil-based synthetic materials present in every house and office, the gas pipelines, etc. Such an inferno, once beyond a certain heat, would not be controllable by Man's means; it would make all previous city infernos hearth fires by comparison. That this is subconsciously perceived by  society is evidenced by the astonishment and fear elicited by the sight of a simple open flame in the city, in an illegal garbage burning or campfire for example - un-imprisoned fire is completely absent in cities; and when it is seen, it immediately provokes fear, despite the fact that despite millions of confined blazes are happening in every moment in car engines, home furnaces, factories etc. If there is ever a jail break, we will do well to get far away.)

Anyhow, here is plenty of food for thought from F.G.J:

Whatever power technology produces, it draws from nature's reservoir in the same fashion as one draws a pint from a barrel. This holds true regardless how ingenious the means may be by which technology taps the sources of its power.

The technician has lost the age-old awe that restrained man from injuring the earth, from changing the shape of its surface. This awe in the past was very pronounced; its traces are found everywhere in the history of agriculture, and it reaches well into historical times....

The technician however proceeds without awe, as his methods show. To him, the earth is an object for intelligent and artful planning, a lifeless sphere subject to mechanical motion and exploitation by him who understands its mechanics. Ruthlessly the technician conquers the earth in his quest for power; he confines the elemental forces in engines where they must obey and deliver power. Elementary nature and man-made mechanisms controlled by human intelligence will clash and the outcome is an act of enslavement which presses elemental forces into service. Their free play is ended by force.

We gain a clear idea of this process is we imagine it as an act of tapping or bleeding. Man taps elemental nature and drains her forces. The wells and shafts driven into the earth everywhere to get at her underground treasures, those factories which extract the nitrogen from the air, or simply ways of transforming clay into bricks - these are all taps and drains....

With the progress of technology, the sum total of the contributions which it extracts from nature grows bigger and bigger. Elemental nature, through mechanical work, is being mastered; it is being conquered and exploited by man-made tools. But if we thought this to be the whole story, we would understand but half of it. We would have only a one-sided idea of the process. For all this seemingly one-sided pressure and compulsion, this engineered extortion of nature, has a reverse side, a counter-part. Because the elementary now floods with its power all things mechanical, it permeates and expands all over the man-made world which has conquered it. In other words, mechanization and elementarization are merely two aspects of the same process; they presuppose one another....

As we look around today we feel that we are living in a giant mill which works day and night at a furious, feverish pace.... This is the workshop of the Titans. The industrial landscape is volcanic in its character, and thus all the companion-signs of volcanic eruption are found, especially in the areas of heavy industry: lava, ashes, fumaroles, smoke, gases, night clouds reddened by flames - and devastation far and wide.  Titanic elemental forces captured in marvelous engines are straining against pistons and cylinder walls as crankshafts are moving and delivering an even flow of power. All the elements are racing and raging through the jails of man-made apparatus; all those boilers, pipelines, gearboxes, valves are steely and bristling with reinforcements, as is every jail, designed to keep its inmates from escaping. But who can remain deaf to the sighing and moaning of the prisoners, to their raging and ranting, to their mad fury, as he listens to the multitude of new and strange noises which technology has created? Characteristically, all these originate from the meeting of the mechanical with the elemental; they are produced by the outflow of elementary forces from the contraining might of the machine....

At a certain stage of technological progress, the individual begins to become aware that he has entered into a danger zone. Gradually the smug satisfaction which the observor derived from the sight of some marvelous piece of machinery, gets mingled with a sense of impending danger; fear befalls him....

The realization that man has to pay a price for every increase in power the machine gives him, that he must give an equivalent in return, is a realization that had not yet dawned in the early days of technology. In those days, boundless economic confidence predominated, an unshakeable optimism about the future.... As technology approaches perfection, however, the chorus of optimistic voices grows weaker, because experience gradually teaches not only the advantages but also the disadvantages which the new tools bring. Only by experience do we learn that our technological apparatus has its own laws, and that we must be on our guard against getting in conflict with them.

The industrial accident may serve here as an illustration. As mechanization progresses, industrial and traffic accidents increase until they far exceed the casualties of war. Since even the most ingenious inventions cannot eliminate these accidents, it is clear that they must be due to some basic discrepancy between the operator and the mechanism he operates. The operational accident occurs when man fails to function as a human machine, where he no longer acts in accord with the automatic mechanism he is operating. The operational accident, in other words, occurs precisely where we are human, where we try to assert our independence of the machine, be it by a lack of attention, fatigue, sleep, or preoccupation with nonmechanical things. It is in such moments of human weakness that the suppressed elemental forces break loose, get out of control and wreak their vengeance by destroying both the operator and his machine. The law, now in the service of the technical organization, punishes the negligent operator for his failure to control his automaton with automatic regularity....

By its progressive mechanization, technology not only accumulates those energies which obey rational thinking and are its faithful servant. With the aid of these energies, it does not merely create a new work organization that directs both production and consumption. In the same process of mechanization, technology also accumulates forces of destruction which, once unleashed, turn upon man with elemental impact and a fury all the greater, the closer technology advances to perfection....

There are many to whom such destruction seems senseless and inexplicable because they do not understand the connection between destruction and technology, although they could see the same kind of disorder in any industrial accident. They do not grasp the fact that, together with technological progress, the violent and destructive forces of disorder also progress apace....

We now realize the existence of various danger zones which we can distinguish by the varying degrees to which they are menaced by destruction. Those zones where the interaction between man-made mechanics and natural elements is most intense, that is, where technical progress has advanced the farthest, as in big cities and highly industrialized regions; those are also the zones where destruction can have the greatest quantitative effect. 

BP oil spill - the elements unleashed and running riot

"My Thing" and "God's Thing"

Max Stirner's "The Ego and its Own" (Der Einziger und sein Eigentum) was a fundamental text for Ernst Jünger´s development of the figure of the Anarch. In Eumeswil, Ernst Jünger summarizes the "cardinal points or the axioms of Stirner's system, if one cares to call it that" as being just two - two however which "suffice for thorough reflection":

1) That is not My business.
2) Nothing is more important than I.

During my own reading of Stirner, I find myself regularly re-reading the first chapter, "All things are nothing to me". I see in this chapter the whole metaphysical basis for Stirner's radical concept of individual autonomy; it also suffices to corroborate Jünger's summary. A few quotes from the chapter are in order. This first one opens it:

What is not supposed to be my concern? First and foremost the good cause, then God's cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice; further, the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally, even the cause of mind and a thousand other causes. Only my cause is never to be my concern. 'Shame on the egoist who thinks only of himself!'

Stirner goes on to explain how God, mankind, the Sultan have all only concerned themselves with their own egoistic concerns. The individual on the other hand is supposed to forget his own egoistic cause and serve theirs. To which Stirner protests:

God and mankind have concerned themselves with nothing and for nothing but themselves. Let me then likewise concern myself for myself, who am equally with God the nothing of all others, who am my all, who am the only one (der Einzige).

If God, if mankind, as you affirm, have substance enough in themselves to be all in all to themselves, then I feel that I shall still less lack that, and that I shall have no complaint to make of my 'emptiness'. I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing (schöpferische Nichts), the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.

Away, then, with every concern that is not altogether my concern! You think at least the 'good cause' must by my concern? What's good, what's bad? Why, I myself am my concern, and I am neither good nor bad. Neither has meaning for me.

The divine is God's concern; the human, 'man's'. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true, the good, just, free, etc, but solely what is mine (das Meinige), and it is not a general one, but is - unique (einzig), as I am unique.

Nothing is more to me than myself!

Stirner wants to create a tabula rasa by actively clearing the field of his consciousness from all the egoistic external causes which impose themselves on him and want to manipulate him - religion ('God'), humanity ('mankind'), other powerful men ('the Sultan'). He reduces them all to nothing by actively annihilating their psychological relevence to him - they mean nothing to him. An inner void is created, which, he explains, is not emptiness, but rather a creative nothing, within which he, as all that remains, is free to create his world anew.

For when nothing else such as God, mankind, society fills him with its claims, then all that remains is he, the ego, alone in a state of absolute creative freedom. And out of himself, what is his naturally arises to fill the void, which is to say, 'his property'. Thus the title of the book, "The Ego and his Property".

(A double title would be more accurate - "The Ego/Only One and his Property" - since it is not just the ego that is critical but the fact that it alone remains when all else has been psychologically annihilated.)

At this point, I would make a personal distinction regarding the Ego and God. It is a departure from Stirner's personal feelings towards 'God', but perhaps not from the spirit of the Only One. And I suspect not from the spirit of Jünger´s Anarch.

As a result of his own personal and cultural background, Stirner clearly saw 'God' as one of the foreign causes that had so often distracted or perverted the attention of egoists through the ages from their own causes. Thus God and religion had to be effectively annihilated within the ego's consciousness, so that it was empty and free to realize its own cause.

I fully agree with psychologically annihilating all external egos that want to steal my cause from me. But in my personal case, I never had a strong influence of religion in my upbringing; thus, in this respect at least, I have nothing to annul or fight against within myself. "God and religion are already nothing within me", to put it in his terms.

However I like to believe that higher powers exist in the universe, and even that they may see a bigger and clearer picture than I do. I call these powers 'the force of destiny', but others may call them 'God'; and in what follows, destiny should be remembered when the word 'God' is used.

Ideally I would like to reconcile myself as an ego with God-destiny. For me, this is possible, and I express it as "doing my thing":

God-destiny - no less than I - wants nothing more and nothing less than that I 'do my thing'. Doing my thing will be suffice me for my lifetime, and it will also be right for me, since it corresponds to what I am.

God-destiny would be as disappointed by my straying into irrelevent philanthropy as into irrelevent 'vice'. But do not misunderstand me - my thing will certainly comprehend activities and natural impulses that are normally called philanthropic and vicious. But what meaning have these categories for me - from my perspective, I can do no 'good' or 'bad' thing, only my thing. Indeed, what is 'good' for me is doing my thing; and what is 'bad' is not doing my thing, but the things of someone or something else's.

I can equally well call this God's perspective, because he too only wants me to do my thing. Indeed, he prays that I will do it, because he created me to do my thing.

If, as a do-gooder, I try to do more than my thing, that is, someone or something else's things, then I necessarily go off-track, I 'sin' in the original Greek meaning of missing the mark. Neither will doing some other 'good', thing compensate for not realizing my thing, for I can only ever do that other thing imperfectly, bungle it in comparison to how I would succeed in my thing. This mistake may even go very sour, as Jünger points out in Eumeswil:  

"As for the do-gooders, I am familiar with the horrors that were perpetrated in the name of humanity, Christianity, progress. I have studied them. I do not know whether I am correctly quoting a Gallic thinker: ‘Man is neither an animal nor an angel; but he becomes a devil when he tries to be an angel.’ ”

I have time, energy and ability only enough for my thing - anything else I do will result in an imperfect realization of what I was born for, what God, nature, my destiny created me for - doing my thing, nothing else.

So make yourself, your 'God' and your destiny happy and do your thing - nothing more is asked of you and you can do nothing better than that!

"My Thing" and "God's Thing"

Technology, principles and sustainability

This blog entry regarding the importance of restraining principles in the exploitation of technology may seem to have little to do with the anarch or Ernst Jünger, however it did emerge from a discussion of whether Jacques Allul was an anarchist or something other. Hence I include it.

(I can only imagine Ernst Jünger would agree with Allul's ideas, since they correspond closely to his notions of the titanic abuse of science. His brother Friedrich Georg Jünger also often wrote about the unprincipled application of technology.)

As Allul explains in this interview, in certain middle age societies, a rule regarding technology existed which forbad the use of iron tools in working the earth. Although the people of the time knew that these would undoubtedly have been more efficient, the earth was considered a mother whom the use of hard tools would have injured.

In the light of our unrestrained use of technology today, we may think such a rule out-dated, inapplicable to us and above all inefficient - and yet when we look at how mining (and mechanized agriculture) have degraded and impoverished the earth in the last centuries, we understand that there was a real sense to this rule, that it contained simpler but greater wisdom than our technological cleverness. Such a rule or principle would have prevented the rape of the earth that we have witnessed in recent centuries.

Back then the extent to which our "iron" technology would progress would have been inconceivable - and probably considered demonic. Yet in consideration only of their own simple technology, without reference to all the mistakes we have since made, these civilizations followed a principle which protected the earth and ultimately also them. And had we maintained this principle, we would also have avoided our current environmental troubles.

We can learn from this that technology requires the guidance of principles - even when it seems that little damage can be done. One never knows to what extent a a contemporary technological development may progress. A conservative principle protects one from this danger. It allows stability, an equilibrium, to develop in a system - 'thus far and no further'.

That is to say, restraining principles applied to our technology would allow the development of that magical "sustainability" which so fills our rhetoric today.

Above all it must become clear that it is not more and better technology that will bring salvation, sustainability - it is new restraining principles for its use. Whether these are religiously or rationally-based is irrelevent - religious ones would probably work better for the masses.

Incidentally, Allul doesn't come across as an anarchist to me - he evidently values what tradition may offer. It is only the modern desacralization of nature that he objects to.

Technology, principles and sustainability

The Titanic Games

I was recently in Vancouver, Canada coincidentally at the same time as the Winter Olympic Games, and it occured to me that the name Olympic Games is completely inaccurate and even dishonest. Let me explain.

One of Ernst Jünger's key symbols to characterize our post-enlightenment world is that of the titans from Greek mythology. His (and his brother Friedrich Georg Jünger's) idea is that we are living in a titanic world, in which the old gods have been defeated or have retreated out of human reach. Where there are no gods, the titans step in to fill the gap and exercise their powers.

Although an anarch takes no sides in the eternal struggle and alternation of titans and gods in world history, he should always understand the world he is living in, in order to best manage his relationship with it. This is part of his commandment to "Know the rules".

For an anarch, it is thus absurd to see the words "Olympic Games" used, especially when their organizers try to maintain an association with the ethics and spirit of the original Olympic Games. No, our modern games should rightly be called the Titanic Games, not only because we live in a titanic world, but because almost everything about these games in titanic in spirit.

Our Titanic Games are not about the spirit of peace and human excellence and companionship. The titans are literally the "overstretchers" and so their games are above all about about achieving extremes of performance at all costs: a new world record is the absolute prize, even more than a gold; performance-enhancing technology is as much a part of the games as human achievement (doping as much as equipment and training technologies); all performances are analyzed on the spot with numerical criteria and statistics; and even their Opening Ceremonies are flashy spectacles of technological prowess rather than artistic measure.

In Vancouver, it was only in the ice dance competition that I could detect any remnant of the Olympic Games.

The Titanic Games

The Concorde and the Titanic - Cassandra's warnings

This is a rare departure from the anarch theme - but I saw a newspaper article today relating that the Concorde disaster of a few years ago was probably caused by panels of titanium lying on the runway and I simply can't resist!

In various places in his work, Ernst Jünger speaks of the prophetic nature of the Titanic's fate. In his words, Cassandra has hardly ever spoken as unambiguously: in the name of the ship; in the overweaning technical pride associated with it; in its sinking on a maiden voyage between the Old World and New World.

The symbolic context is of course the Titans of Greek mythology, whose return to power the world is now experiencing. "Titan" literally means "overstretchers of power", and it is as a result of an imbalance between their power and their wisdom that the Titans drive themselves, after only a brief reign, to a catastrophic end. In Ernst Jünger's conception, we have been living in a developing Titanic phase ever since the Enlightenment.   During the 21st century we will see the absolute mastery of the Titans - and the beginning of their fall. This is unavoidable, part of the life-cycle of the earth.*

In the current return of Titan forces, technology is the key to their worldly powers - and they use it without restraint, to its absolute limits, without concerns for balance and "sustainability", to resort to a popular word. Humans living in this Titanic phase become intoxicated by their seeming mastery over all things as a result of technology. Their pride swells, nothing seems impossible. They have become like the gods, masters over nature.

And so they build ships like the Titanic and airplanes like the Concorde - unsinkable, masters of vast spaces, luxurious even as they break the speed of sound at 10,000 meters or cross the icy Atlantic to the accompaniment of lobsters, champagne and Dixie music.

Titanic humanity takes great pride in such achievements - but then disaster strikes! The unsinkable Titanic, the pride of humanity, is destroyed by a simple iceberg on its maiden voyage. And now the Concorde, its equivalent of the air, is brought down in a flaming inferno by random bits of technical junk, made by its parents' and baptized with their name.

With the Titanic, Cassandra spoke loudly to the whole world - with the Concorde's felling by titanism, it is more of a whisper to the initiated, to those who listen for her signs.

(* As an anarch, it is a matter of understanding and adapting to this reality, this higher necessity - ideally even extracting advantage from it. Where possible, an anarch may also try to contribute to an equivalent understanding among others "with ears to hear". But he understands that the basic course of this process from birth to catastrophe cannot be avoided.)

The Concorde and the Titanic - Cassandra's warnings

Secondary sources and the anarch

"Secondary sources". This academic expression comes often to mind during online discussions on Ernst Jünger. From these exchanges, it seems that secondary sources have different values and meanings to different people. Why this is so relates directly to the anarchic quality in that person - or its absence.


In the popular sense, secondary sources are external authorities commenting on the intellectual or artistic productions of the subject of one's own studies. In this process, the first person is thus the student, the second person the work or its author they are studying, while the third person (the "secondary source") is another individual commenting on the second person's work.

From that last sentence, it should be obvious why my explanation of the all-too-obvious is not superfluous. As an anarch who takes his own authority and own understanding as more relevent than all others - and concedes that right to every other individual -  I ask myself why the "secondary source" is not called a tertiary one, since that is the position of that participant in the process? This question reveals much about the being of many intellectuals and academics.


Laughable as it may sound (!), many of them apparently undervalue themselves. For even when they are the formal author, the creator of a particular intellectual work - and should therefore be making the ultimate judgements on the subject of the work - they often lose themselves (and are lost to the reader) in useless and confusing comparisons of "secondary sources". The original face and intelligence of the first person disappears - he becomes a mere MC or DJ of other people's intellectual productions.


(The active first-person contribution to this kind of intellectual production is so minor and indirect that one should really call its author a "tertiary source" of his own work. This means that the primary source is absent - "there is no-one at home" in the work. Metaphysically speaking, the secondary and tertiary sources take on their own collective life and a new academic work "just happens", without conscious direction. This sophisticated "cut and paste" process spins itself out into myriad abstract constellations in the academic world, so that new intellectual creations and discussions may contain absolutely nothing original and moreover have moved into total disconnection with any real world. If detached objectivity was the original motivation for this approach to ideas, it has now degenerated into pure self-serving nonsense.)


An anarch or an Only One in Stirner's sense never loses sight of himself and his first-person reality to this degree.  He strives to remember himself, keep himself at the center of the process. He is always his own primary source. The external work being studied - and in a broader sense, the whole outer world - is a secondary source, and others commenting on it are tertiary sources. (So actually we could simplify and call all externalities secondary sources to him, even when they comment or interact with each other.)

An anarch makes a conscious effort to always recall the second of Stirner's two commandments (as defined by Jünger):

"Nothing is more important than I."

This does not mean he is a naive egotist. He does not actively disregard secondary sources - "everything is my business, but Nothing is My business". As a pragmatist, he realizes that the world is filled with human insights whose expressions at least can be harvested, eaten and digested by him to form his own material.

But no external sources, not even those elevated secondary/tertiary sources such as angels, gods, or Nobel Prize Winners, are necessarily valuable or sacred to him.

Above all, they are never more important to him than his own genuine self-won understanding of the matter at hand.


For at the end of the day, what does the understanding of another mean, if he himself does not understand and cannot therefore benefit from this understanding? What good does it do him if he can fool the whole world into believing he understands by remixing the words and ideas of others, but has no real utility from it? (The answer of course is that vanity provides its own illusionary reward. But the anarch prefers even a gram of real understanding to a ton of flashy illusion.)

As an aspiring Anarch, I try to keep myself the primary source - even when I read Ernst Jünger. He would have wanted it no other way.

Secondary sources and the anarch

Mauerfall - Fall of the Berlin Wall

Before he pushed the first domino in the symbolic "Fall of the Wall" in Berlin tonight, Lech Walesa said no politicians could have foreseen before 1989 that the Wall would fall - which goes to show how much more clearly an anarch understands history and therefore reality:

"At various times, I have stood between the barricades - for example, during March 1848, after the fateful shot was fired in front of the castle, then again at the end of the two great wars between the red flag and the swastika. I was there when the great barricade hardened into a wall and once again when it was razed".

"Verschiedene Malen stand ich dort zwischen den Barrikaden, so in jenem März, nachdem vorm Schloß der verhängnisvolle Schuß gefallen war, dann wieder am Schluß der beiden großen Kriege zwischen der Roten Fahne und dem Hakenkreuz. Ich war dort, als die Barrikade sich zur Mauer verhärtete, und wiederum, als sie geschleift wurde".

Ernst Jünger, "Eumeswil", published in 1977.

(I will not speculate here on what an anarch would have to say regarding the new personal freedom won in that moment - if anything, then probably not too much.)

Mauerfall - Fall of the Berlin Wall

Cain, Tubalcain and the Anarch

China's 60th Anniversary national day

What would an anarch have to say to the above spectacle? Here's what the Ur-Anarch Ernst Jünger wrote in "Glass Bees":

When new models were displayed to the masses at the great parades in the Red Square or elsewhere, the crowds stood in reverent silence and then broke into jubilant shouts of triumph. What was the meaning of this thunderous roar, when on the ground turtles of steel and serpents of iron rolled past, when in the sky triangles, arrows, and rockets shaped like fish, arranged themselves with lightening rapidity into ever-changing formations? Though the display was continual, in this silence and these shouts something evil, old as time, manifested itself in man, who is an outsmarter and setter of traps. Invisible, Cain and Tubulcain marched past in the parade of phantoms.

Cain, Tubalcain and the Anarch

The anarch - a wolf, a master spy?

It occurs to me that one could explain and differentiate the Anarch and the Waldgänger with at least a couple of analogies ....

One could bring the old English expression "a wolf in sheep's clothing" to bear on the Anarch, who appears to be like the masses around him but underneath is not at all. He can be social but he is not socialized. Unlike the socialized beings around him, he remains fundamentally a free loner, even with his sheep's clothing on. He has strong, sharp teeth, which he hides, so they are not pulled "for the common good of the herd" - he may need them in an emergency.

But the analogy only goes so far and the differences are equally revealing. The anarch's relationship to the sheep around him is not predatory - this wolf's enemy is the shepherd and his dogs, not the sheep. When he is smelled out, he is forced to throw off his disguise, run for the cover of the woods, use his teeth if necessary in defense - in short, become a Waldgänger.

Another analogy - this time not mine but Jünger's - is the master spy, who disguises his true nature and loyalties and lives smoothly integrated into a world that is essentially foreign to him. Like the Anarch, his true mission remains his secret and it is entirely different from those around him. Like the Anarch, he puts on a false mask, a foreign uniform and he must resist identifying with those around him and their causes - when the mission is a very long one, this difficulty is not to be taken for granted - spies are turned, as free souls are lost to the world. Lastly, the ordinary people around the spy are not his enemies but rather their master and his watchdogs. An Anarch with philanthropic tendencies, may even, like certain spies, come to empathize with the ordinary innocents around him, secretly feel that in his small way he may be helping to free them from a bad master.

As with the wolf analogy, the differences are also important to note here. The master spy knows from the start who he is and what his mission is; the Anarch has first to lose himself to society and then laboriously to rediscover his true identity, his true heimat, his mission in life. The Anarch has no aspirations to contribute, however indirectly, to the defeat of the society he is embedded in - he is not an anarchist. Though he may go to great lengths to serve an external cause, if his own integrity or the challenge appeals to him, he will not ultimately martyr himself to it. And finally, the Anarch works for no other master, he is his own.

The anarch - a wolf, a master spy?

Anarch and Waldgänger (1)

Comments I made on differences and commonalities in Ernst Jünger´s figures of the Anarch and the Waldgänger (the Forest Goer) went over well on a Jünger mailing list (http://de.groups.yahoo.com/group/juenger_org/ ), so I have reworked and copied them below.

(For clarification, the Waldgänger was first developed in Jünger´s study "Der Waldgang" (The Forest Flight). Although it precedes "Eumeswil" and the Anarch chronologically (1951 vs 1977), in metaphysical terms much in the concept of the Anarch is already contained in that of the Waldgänger. The two do not exclude each other, but rather the former further develops the latter. In terms of level of being, they are more or less identical - differences only concern existential situations and the specific strategies that result.

Thus, although Jünger had not yet coined the word Anarch when writing "Der Waldgang", he said then that one could be a Waldgänger in the heart of the city, a clear foreshadowing of an Anarch. Later, when he explicitly refined the Waldgänger into an Anarch in "Eumeswil", he specified that the Anarch is the free man living in private autonomy within society; he becomes a Waldgänger when he is uncovered as a spiritual outsider and forced to flee society to preserve this autonomy. An Anarch thus comprehends a Waldgänger as a weaker form to be resorted to in an emergency. Just as an undiscovered Waldgänger living peacefully in the city was already in essence an Anarch. But on to the copied discussion ...)

From "Der Waldgang":

Man sleeps in the forest. When he awakens and realizes his power, then order is reconstituted.

Man does not become a Waldgänger (and by extension an Anarch) only then when he enters or flees to the literal forest: at the deepest level of being, each single man is already in the forest, is already a forest-goer, the forest being the original untamed core of his being. But in his sleep he has lost sight of this, forgotten where he is, hypnotized by dreams which are not even his. In sleep, he dreams the dreams that society has implanted in him and he is controlled by them, their slave, without having the slightest sensation of the chains. He (merely!) needs to awaken from the illusion to see that he (and not the protagonist of his dreams) is really in his own forest, and he has always been there. With this awakening, the Anarch/Waldgänger discovers the metaphysical separation of that forest from the tamed world, its absolute autonomy from civilization that wants to trap him, hypnotize him, seduce him, control him in its various ways for its own selfish purposes. Now he can make a realistic attempt to become his own master, to restore his own order to his life. Whatever it may have promised, in the dream there was never a real possibility of that, it was always another´s order.

If existential difficulties require it, the Anarch is forced to flee to the literal forest and transform into the Waldgänger form. But in his inner wilderness nothing changes - there he remains master where ever external life may take him.

Anarch and Waldgänger (1)