Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: 

Contention 1 is inherency

No extinction impacts – world has already ended.

The Onion, 2011August 17, “Report: Apocalypse Actually Happened 3 Years Ago,” http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-apocalypse-actually-happened-3-years-ago,21143/

MENLO PARK, CA—Though the event went largely unremarked upon at the time, a report published Monday by the Kaiser Family Foundation has found that the apocalypse, or end of the world, occurred three years ago. "According to our data, the total collapse of all human civilization occurred on or around April 3, 2008," said foundation representative Jodie Palmenterri, citing numerous instances of environmental disaster, humanitarian catastrophe, and economic ruin as unambiguous signs that the world had ended. "Those who have worried for years that human culture was headed toward calamity can rest easy, because it already happened. We are living in a postapocalyptic world. This is it." Palmenterri went on to say that because the apocalypse does not resemble the eschatological predictions of any major religion, it's safe to assume the gods have all forsaken us.

US Nuclear renaissance now

Worthington, 12 – contributing editor for SmartPlanet (David, 2/9. “The U.S. nuclear renaissance has begun.” http:~/~/www.smartplanet.com/blog/intelligent-energy/the-us-nuclear-renaissance-has-begun/13058url:http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/intelligent-energy/the-us-nuclear-renaissance-has-begun/13058)

There are cooling towers on the horizon in the United States. The nuclear renaissance is slated to begin in rural Georgia with new reactors being built over the next five years, and work is already underway to leap another generation ahead. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) today announced that it has granted licenses to a consortium of utilities to erect two Westinghouse AP 1000url:http://www.ap1000.westinghousenuclear.com/||target="_blank" reactors at Southern Company’s existing Vogtle site, clearing a path to end a decades long hiatus in new construction. Westinghouse’s design incorporates passive cooling, which extends the duration under which a reactor can operate safely without outside intervention in the event of a disaster. The AP 1000 is classified as Generation III+ reactor.  Generation III+ reactors have more redundant com/blog/intelligent-energy/americas-nuclear-future/6946||target="_blank" than older reactor designs. Those include emergency cooling systems, a double containment system, and an ashtray like cooling area to capture molten fuel in the event of a meltdown.  Existing U.S. nuclear reactors require active cooling such as electric water pumps. Japan’s Fukushima used active cooling, and its reactors melted down last spring when external power was unavailable. There are a total of 104 nuclear plants in the U.S today that are dependent upon active cooling.  The meltdown risk associated with those legacy reactors and the high capital requirements of nuclear power are some of the reasons why no new reactor has been built in the U.S since the late 1970’s, when the 1979 Three Mile Island incident soured public sentiment.  For now, anti-nuclear sentiment has been marginalized. The U.S. is energy hungry and nuclear power is receiving generous government subsidies. The Vogtle reactors would power up to 1 million homes at a cost of US$14 billion, CNN htm?hpt=hp_t3||target="_blank"

Contention 2 is terrorism

Modern society is structured by nuclear terror. The desperate need to secure has converted the world into a security system and put it on planetary lockdown, leaving no depth, no difference, no other possibilities of existence. The key metaphor here is the nuclear power plant which as a mass of regulations and security measures is the crystallization of security at all costs with nothing to protect.

Baudrillard ’95  

(Jean, “Simulacra and Simulation: The Precession of  Simulacra”, pp. 34-37)

THE ORBITAL AND THE NUCLEAR

The apotheosis of simulation: the nuclear. However, the balance of terror is never anything but the spectacular slope of a system of deterrence that has insinuated itself from the inside into all the cracks of daily life. Nuclear suspension only serves to seal the trivialized system of deterrence that is at the heart of the media, of the violence without consequences that reigns throughout the world, of the aleatory apparatus of all the choices that are made for us. The most insignificant of our behaviors is regulated by neutralized, indifferent, equivalent signs, by zero-sum signs like those that regulate the "strategy of games" (but the true equation is elsewhere, and the unknown is precisely that variable of simulation which makes of the atomic arsenal itself a hyperreal form, a simulacrum that dominates everything and reduces all "ground-level" events to being nothing but ephemeral scenarios, transforming the life left us into survival, into a stake without stakes - not even into a life insurance policy: into a policy that already has no value).

It is not the direct threat of atomic destruction that paralyzes our lives, it is deterrence that gives them leukemia. And this deterrence comes from that fact that even the real atomic clash is precluded - precluded like the eventuality of the real in a system of signs. The whole world pretends to believe in the reality of this threat (this is understandable on the part of the military, the gravity of their exercise and the discourse of their "strategy" are at stake), but it is precisely at this level that there are no strategic stakes. The whole originality of the situation lies in the improbability of destruction.

Deterrence precludes war - the archaic violence of expanding systems. Deterrence itself is the neutral, implosive violence of metastable systems or systems in involution. There is no longer a subject of deterrence, nor an adversary nor a strategy - it is a planetary structure of the annihilation of stakes. Atomic war, like the Trojan War, will not take place. The risk of nuclear annihilation only serves as a pretext, through the sophistication of weapons (a sophistication that surpasses any possible objective to such an extent that it is itself a symptom of nullity), for installing a universal security system, a universal lockup and control system whose deterrent effect is not at all aimed at an atomic clash (which was never in question, except without a doubt in the very initial stages of the cold war, when one still confused the nuclear apparatus with conventional war) but, rather, at the much greater probability of any real event, of anything that would be an event in the general system and upset its balance. The balance of terror is the terror of balance. Deterrence is not a strategy, it circulates and is exchanged between nuclear protagonists exactly as is international capital in the orbital zone of monetary speculation whose fluctuations suffice to control all global exchanges. Thus the money of destruction (without any reference to real destruction, any more than floating capital has a real referent of production) that circulates in nuclear orbit suffices to control all the violence and potential conflicts around the world.

What is hatched in the shadow of this mechanism with the pretext of a maximal, "objective," threat, and thanks to Damocles' nuclear sword, is the perfection of the best system of control that has ever existed. And the progressive satellization of the whole planet through this hypermodel of security.

The same goes for peaceful nuclear power stations. Pacification does not distinguish between the civil and the military: everywhere where irreversible apparatuses of control are elaborated, everywhere where the notion of security becomes omnipotent, everywhere where the norm replaces the old arsenal of laws and violence (including war), it is the system of deterrence that grows, and around it grows the historical, social, and political desert. A gigantic involution that makes every conflict, every finality, every confrontation contract in proportion to this blackmail that interrupts, neutralizes, freezes them all. No longer can any revolt, any story be deployed according to its own logic because it risks annihilation. No strategy is possible any longer, and escalation is only a puerile game given over to the military. The political stake is dead, only simulacra of conflicts and carefully circumscribed stakes remain.

And the security system is so successful it has made itself redundant. The State only exists to guard against the possibility of threat, which really is the possibility of a possibility of something bad happening. To justify this, threats are mass produced, everything becomes a threat and populations are exterminated as an elaborate staging of war theater. The State becomes the terrorist so it has something to do.

Baudrillard, 2004 Jean, The Phantom Menace “The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact,” 117-121

At this present stage of a networking of all functions - of the body, of time, of language - of a drip-feeding of all minds, the slightest event is a threat; even history is a threat.

It is going to be necessary, then, to invent a security system that prevents any event whatever from occurring. A whole strategy of deterrence that does service today for a global strategy.

Steven Spielberg's recent film, Minority Report, provides an illustration of such a system. On the basis of brains endowed with a gift of pre-cognition (the 'precogs'), who identify imminent crimes before they occur, squads of police (the 'precrimes') intercept and neutralize the criminal before he has committed his crime. There is a variant in the film Dead Zone (directed by David Cronenberg): the hero, who, following a serious accident, is also endowed with powers of divination, ends up killing a politician whose future destiny as a war criminal he foresees. This is the scenario of the Iraq war too: the crime is nipped in the bud on the strength of an act that has not taken place (Saddam's use of weapons of mass destruction). The question is clearly whether the crime would really have taken place. But we shall never know. What we have here, then, is the real repression of a virtual crime. Extrapolating from this, we can see looming beyond the war a systematic de-programming not only of all crime, but of anything that might disturb the order of things, the policed order of the planet. This is what 'political' power comes down to today. It is no longer driven by any positive will; it is merely a negative power of deterrence, of public health, of security policing, immunity policing, prophylaxis.

This strategy is directed not only at the future, but also at past event') - for example, at that of 11 September, where it attempts, by war in Afghanistan and Iraq, to erase the humiliation. This is why this war is at bottom a delusion, a virtual event, a 'non-event' Bereft of any objective or finality of its own, it merely takes the form of an incantation, an exorcism. This is also why it is interminable, for there will never be any end to conjuring away such an event: It is said to be preventive, but it is in fact retrospective, its aim being to defuse the terrorist event of 11 September, the shadow of which hovers over the whole strategy of planetary control. Erasure of the event, erasure of the enemy, erasure' of death: in the insistence on 'zero casualties' we see the very same imperative as applies in this obsession with security.23

The aim of this world order is the definitive non-occurrence of events. It is, in a sense, the end of history, not on the basis of a democratic fulfillment, as Fukuyama has it, but on the basis of preventive terror, of a counter-terror that puts an end to any possible events. A terror which the power exerting it ends up exerting on itself under the banner of security.

There is a fierce irony here: the irony of an anti-terrorist world system that ends up internalizing terror, inflicting it on itself and emptying itself of any political substance - and going so far as to turn on its own population.

Is this a remnant of the Cold War and the balance of terror? But this time it's a deterrence without cold war, a terror without balance. Or rather it is a universal cold war, ground into the tiniest interstices of social and political life.

This headlong rush by power into its own trap reached dramatic extremes in the Moscow theatre episode, when the hostages and the terrorists were jumbled together into the same massacre. Exactly as in Mad Cow Disease: you kill the whole herd as a precautionary measure - God will recognize his own. Or as in Stockholm Syndrome: being jumbled together in death makes them virtually partners in crime (it is the same in Minority Report: the fact that the police seize the presumptive criminal before he has done anything proves a posteriori that he cannot be innocent).

And this is, in fact, the truth of the situation: the fact is that, one way or another, populations themselves are a terrorist threat to the authorities. And it is the authorities themselves who, by repression, unwittingly set the seal on this complicity. The equivalence in repression shows that we are all potentially the hostages of the authorities.

By extension, we can hypothesize a coalition of all governments against all populations - we have had a foretaste of this with the war in Iraq, since it was able to take place in defiance of world opinion, with the more or less disguised assent of all governments. And if the world-wide demonstrations against war may have produced the illusion of a possible counterpower, they demonstrated above all the political insignificance of this 'international community' by comparison with American Realpolitik.

We are dealing henceforth with the exercise of power in the pure state with no concern for sovereignty or representation; with the Integral Reality of a negative power. So long as it derives its sovereignty from representation, so long as a form of political reason exists, power can find its equilibrium - it can, at any rate, be combated and contested. But the eclipsing of that sovereignty leaves an unbridled power, with nothing standing against it, a savage power (with a savagery that is no longer natural, but technical). And which, in a strangely roundabout way, might be said to get back to something like primitive societies, which, not knowing power, were, according to Claude Levi-Strauss, societies without history. What if we, the present global society, were once again, in the shadow of this integral power, to become a society without history? But this Integral Reality of power is also its end, A power that is no longer based on anything other than the prevention and policing of events, which no longer has any political will but the will to dispel ghosts, itself becomes ghostly and vulnerable. Its virtual power - its programming power in terms of software and the like - is total, but as a result it can no longer bring itself into play, except against itself, by all kinds of internal failures. At the height of its mastery, it can now only' lose face.

This is, literally, the 'Hell of Power'

Terror is so strongly internalized into our social structure and life itself that we seem constantly on the verge of extinction and luckily we always somehow overcome. The solution is not to stop before the brink. We need our nuclear plants to explode to free us from neurotic security.

Baudrillard in 81 Jean, “Simulacra and Simulation” p. 55-57

Harrisburg, the whole world waits for something to blow up, for destruction to announce itself and remove us from this unnameable panic, from this panic of deterrence that it exercises in the invisible form of the nuclear. That the "heart" of the reactor at last reveals its hot power of destruction, that it reassures us about the presence of energy; albeit catastrophic, and bestows its spectacle on us. Because unhappiness is when there is no nuclear spectacle, no spectacle of nuclear energy in itself (Hiroshima is over), and it is for that reason that it is rejected-it would be perfectly accepted if it lent itself to spectacle as previous forms of energy did. Parousia of catastrophe: substantial food for our messianic libido.

But that is precisely what will never happen. What will happen will never again be the explosion, but the implosion. No more energy in its spectacular and pathetic form-all the romanticism of the explosion, which had so much charm, being at the same time that of revolution-but the cold energy of the simulacrum and of its distillation in homeopathic doses in the cold systems of information.

He continues

In the film, also, real fusion would be a bad argument: the film would regress to the level of a disaster movie - weak by definition, because it means returning things to their pure event. The China Syndrome, itself, finds its strength in filtering catastrophe, in the distillation of the nuclear specter through the omnipresent hertzian relays of information. It teaches us (once again without meaning to) that nuclear catastrophe does not occur, is not meant to happen, in the real either, any more than the atomic clash was at the dawning of the cold war. The equilibrium of terror rests on the eternal deferral of the atomic clash. The atom and the nuclear are made to be disseminated for deterrent ends, the power of catastrophe must, instead of stupidly exploding, be disseminated in homeopathic, molecular doses, in the continuous reservoirs of information. Therein lies the true contamination: never biological and radioactive, but, rather, a mental destructuration through a mental strategy of catastrophe.

If one looks carefully, the film introduces us to this mental strategy, and in going further, it even delivers a lesson diametrically opposed to that of Watergate: if every strategy today is that of mental terror and of deterrence tied to the suspension and the eternal simulation of catastrophe, then the only means of mitigating this scenario would be to make the catastrophe arrive, to produce or to reproduce a real catastrophe. To which Nature is at times given: in its inspired moments, it is God who through his cataclysms unknots the equilibrium of terror in which humans are imprisoned. Closer to us, this is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security. Besides, therein lies terrorism's ambiguity.

Our call for nuclear explosions is a pointed recognition that terrorism is a byproduct and expression of organization. Terror, violence, terrorism are inevitable. It’s only a question of how they are expressed. Our choice then is to embody the figure of the terrorist as a redirection of State violence against an absolute security, because it is killing of ideas instead of people

Baudrillard, 2005 Jean, Cultural critic The Intelligence of Evil, 163-4

To speak evil is to say that in every process of domination and conflict is forged a secret complicity, and in every process of consensus and balance, a secret antagonism.

'Voluntary servitude' and the 'involuntary', suicidal failing of the power systems - two phenomena that are every bit as strange as each other, on the fringes of which we can make out all the ambivalence of political forms. This is to say that:

- immigration, the social question of immigration in our societies, is merely the most visible and crudest illustration of the internal exile of the European in his own society.

- terrorism can be interpreted as the expression of the internal dislocation of a power that has become all-powerful a global violence immanent in the world-system itself. Hence the attempt to extirpate it as an objective evil is delusional given that, in its very absurdity, it is the expression of the condemnation that power pronounces on itself. That, as Brecht said of fascism (that it was made up of both fascism and antifascism), terrorism is made up of terrorism and anti-terrorism together.

And that, if it is the incarnation of fanaticism and violence, it is the incarnation of the violence of those who denounce it at the same time as of their impotence, and of the absurdity of combating it frontally without having understood anything of this diabolical complicity and this reversibility of terror. The violence you mete out is always the mirror of the violence you inflict on yourself. The violence you inflict on yourself is always the mirror of the violence you mete out. This is the intelligence of evil.

If terrorism is evil - and it certainly is in its form, and not at all in the sense in which George W. Bush understands it - then it is this intelligence of Evil we need; the intelligence of, the insight into, this internal convulsion of the world order, of which terrorism is both the event-moment and the image feedback.

Thus we are resolved: The United States federal government should substantially reduce restrictions on energy production of nuclear power in the United States

Contention 3 is implosion

The system is imploding and we’re stuck inside. The nuclear is at point of obsessive stockpiling of information, security and regulations that collapses into an absurdity of useless databases, repressed anxiety and regulatory nightmares that is a tipping point for systems of control beyond which control is lost.

Baudrillard ’95

(Jean, “Simulacra and Simulation: The Precession of  Simulacra”, pp. 41-42)

The nuclear is at once the culminating point of available energy and the maximization of energy control systems. Lockdown and control increase in direct proportion to (and undoubtedly even faster than) liberating potentialities. This was already the aporia of the modern revolution. It is still the absolute paradox of the nuclear. Energies freeze in their own fire, they deter themselves. One can no longer imagine what project, what power, what strategy, what subject could exist behind this enclosure, this vast saturation of a system by its own forces, now neutralized, unusable, unintelligible, nonexplosive - except for the possibility of an explosion toward the center, of an implosion where all these energies would be abolished in a catastrophic process (in the literal sense, that is to say in the sense of a reversion of the whole cycle toward a minimal point, of a reversion of energies toward a minimal threshold).

Beyond this point, everything is pointless. The will to live and know is replaced by the duty to continue doing so. We are imprisoned within systems of knowledge that we are required to keep building and believing in because of the terror of the alternative

Baudrillard 2005 Jean, rockstar from Mars, Intelligence of Evil: The Lucidity Pact, 19

And yet there are no proofs of this reality's existence - and there never will be - any more than there are proofs of the existence of God. It is, like God, a matter of faith. And when you begin to believe in it, this is because it is already disappearing.

It is when one is no longer sure of the existence of God, or when one has lost the naive faith in a self-evident reality, that it becomes absolutely necessary to believe in it. We invested reality with the whole of our imaginary, but it is this imaginary that is vanishing, since we no longer have the energy to believe in it.

Even the will has gone out of it.

The passion for reality and the passion for truth have gone.

All that remains is a duty of reality, a duty of truth.

Henceforth we must believe in it. As doubt sets in everywhere, as a product of the failure of the systems of representation, reality becomes an absolute imperative; it becomes the foundation of a moral order. But neither things nor people obey a reality principle or a moral imperative.

It is the excess of reality that makes us stop believing in it.

The saturation of the world, the technical saturation of life, the excess of possibilities, of actualization of needs and desires. How are we to believe in reality once its production has become automatic?

The real is suffocated by its own accumulation. There is no way now for the dream to be an expression of a desire since its virtual accomplishment is already present.

Deprivation of dreams, deprivation of desire. And we know what mental disorder sleep deprivation induces.

That’s collective suicide

Robinson, August 10 Andrew, political theorist and activist based in the UK, 2012, “An A to Z of Theory | Jean Baudrillard: Hyperreality and Implosion,” http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-9/

For Baudrillard, this is a consequence of the disappearance of causes and the power of effects. It reflects something deeper: the world is held collectively responsible for the system. If the system is infringed, the world will have to be destroyed. Or rather, we are ‘psychologically programmed to destroy ourselves’ if the system collapses. We could think of this as the code blackmailing reality. Though the code is tautological and does not depend on reality, it holds reality responsible for itself, and punishes reality if it collapses or crashes.

This generalisation of responsibility can be traced back to the loss of symbolic exchange. Generalised, unlimited responsibility occurs because nothing is exchanged anymore, the terms of exchange are simply exchanged among themselves. The system produces nothing but vertigo and fascination. Generalised responsibility becomes the same as generalised irresponsibility and the collapse of social relations. Values such as responsibility, justice and violence continue to circulate only as simulations imposed by the state. This in turn is fatal for the ‘scene’ of politics.

The system is confronted by the soul. It is our choice of disorganization that challenges systems of control with the inexpressibility of a life that refuses to be reduced to a productive subject. Redeems humanity.

O’Mahoney 2012 Paul, Ph.D. in philosophy at University College Dublin, January, “Klossowski’s Nietzsche and Baudrillard’s Concept of the Code,” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies Volume 9, Number 1 (January 2012) http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-9_1/v9-1-mahoney.html

It was the “unexchangeable depth” of the soul which ultimately eluded the code of everyday signs, spectacularly so in the case of Nietzsche. “For it is gregariousness that presupposes exchange, the communicable, language: being equivalent to something else, namely, to anything that contributes to the conservation of the species, to the endurance of the herd, but also to the endurance of the signs of the species in the individual” (Klossowski: 60). But what is exchanged, what can be made equivalent (what, to take up Baudrillard’s terms, can enter into the domain of or a relation of value) is never the fundamental impulses of the soul. Thus Klossowski wonders: “Is everything that is singular, incommunicable and unexchangeable (that is, everything that is excluded from what we call the norm) not only condemned to muteness, but also condemned to disappear, or at least to remain ‘unconscious’?” (Ibid.). It would appear so. The eternal return, Nietzsche’s both Nietzsche’s most fantastic phantasm and simulacrum, is the mark of his singular profundity: “Now since it was a question of a high tonality of soul, Nietzsche maintained that its thought attested to his own singularity: the unintelligible depth remained the criterion of the unexchangeable” (Ibid.:72). The unexchangeable itself also remains the criterion of uniqueness: “The obsession with authenticity, namely, with his unexchangeable and irreducible depth, and all his efforts to attain it – this is what constituted Nietzsche’s primary and ultimate preoccupation. Hence his feeling of not having been born yet” (Ibid.:140). Though the possibility remains of recognition of others of similar character or spirit – compare the “unexchangeable (non-communicable) character of certain ways of living, thinking and feeling” (Ibid.:127) with the restricted “everyday codes” evolved by certain individuals (Ibid.:5) – it is the singular and unexchangeable character of an existence that defines it. Discussing the “fecund” individuals which Nietzsche hopes to bring forth, and which alone would justify the existence of the species, Klossowski reminds that “this overabundance of the fecund individual soul is something unexchangeable and hence without price” (Ibid.:153).

This is an act of freedom that escapes the limits of traditional moral discourse about life. Somethings are just more important than living

Baudrillard ’2

(Jean, “The Spirit of Terrorism: Hypotheses on Terrorism”, Verso 2002, translated by Chris Turner, pp. 68-70)

All the same, we should try to get beyond the moral imperative of unconditional respect for human life, and conceive that one might respect, both in the other and in oneself, something other than, and more than, life (existence isn’t everything, it is even the least of things): a destiny, a cause, a form of pride or of sacrifice. There are symbolic stakes which far exceed existence and freedom - which we find it unbearable to lose, because we have made them the fetishistic values of a universal humanist order. So we cannot imagine a terrorist act committed with entire autonomy and ‘freedom of conscience’. Now, choice in terms of symbolic obligations is sometimes profoundly mysterious - as in the case of Romand, the man with the double life, who murdered his whole family, not for fear of being unmasked, but for fear of inflicting on them the profound disappointment of discovering his deception. 3 Committing suicide would not have expunged the crime from the record; he would merely have passed the shame off on to the others. Where is the courage, where the cowardice? The question of freedom, one’s own or that of others, no longer poses itself in terms of moral consciousness, and a higher freedom must allow us to dispose of it to the point of abusing or sacrificing it. Omar Khayyam: ‘Rather one freeman bind with chains of love than set a thousand prisoned captives free.’ Seen in that light, this is almost an overturning of the dialectic of domination, a paradoxical inversion of the master-slave relationship. In the past, the master was the one who was exposed to death, and could gamble with it. The slave was the one deprived of death and destiny, the one doomed to survival and labour. How do things stand today? We, the powerful, sheltered now from death and overprotected on all sides, occupy exactly the position of the slave; whereas those whose deaths are at their own disposal, and who do not have survival as their exclusive aim, are the ones who today symbolically occupy the position of master.

This choice is the fatalistic acceptance that the system both trends towards total control and that total control is simultaneously impossible. Our vision of this impossibility is a warning to clear a collapsing building and a call for its controlled demolition.

Baudrillard 2005 Jean, rockstar from Mars, Intelligence of Evil: The Lucidity Pact, 21-22

Do we have here a negative destiny or quite simply the absence of destiny: the coming of a relentless banality, linked to the integral calculus of reality?

Destiny has not pronounced its last word.

It can be felt at the very heart of this integral realization, at the heart of this power, in that internal convulsion that follows out its logic and hastens its effects, in that maleficent reversal of the structure itself that transforms a positive destination into a murderous finality: this is where the very principle of evil lies and where the intelligence of evil must come into play.

Let us suppose two antagonistic trends:

Integral Reality: the irreversible movement towards the totalization of the world.

The Dual Form: the reversibility internal to the irreversible movement of the real.

It seems evolution (or involution) towards an integral universe is irresistible. But it seems, at the same time, that the dual form is indestructible.

There is no way for us to guess how this contradictory double movement will work itself out. We are faced with a confrontation between a dual form and total integration which cannot be resolved.

But only in appearance is there no solution, since this confrontation is constantly prey to a secret disintegration, to the dissent working away at it from the inside. It is the global violence immanent in the world-system itself which, from within, set" the purest symbolic form of the challenge against it.

There is no way to see a reconciliation here and, in all lucidity, there is nothing to tell us which force is the likely winner. Not from impartiality, since secretly we have already taken sides, but out of an awareness of the inevitability of this eternal divergence, this insuperable antagonism.

The integral drive and the dual drive: this is the Great Game. The very idea of completion, of Integral Reality, is unbearable, but the dual form, the form that denies any final reconciliation, any definitive accomplishment, is also very difficult - and perhaps even impossible - to conceive in its radicalism.

And yet it is in this lucid vision of an endless reversion, in this denial of any objective solution, that the intelligence of evil, if it exists, is grounded.

Contention four – Baudrillard isn’t just fancy talk

Here’s your piece of context – imagining the worst case scenario helps us recognize our anxieties as overblown and survivable. Think of the aff as a cognitive strategy to deal with nuclear terror

Adams Stephanie, therapist runs Beginnings Counseling and Consulting, Overcoming Anxiety Through the Power of the Worst-Case Scenario, http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/overcoming-anxiety-through-the-power-of-the-worst-case-scenario

As you’ve already guessed, this is the “Worst-Case Scenario” Strategy. You may have already worked with a variation on this technique; it isn’t necessarily new. But after dealing with a high volume of anxiety clients, I’ve become able to explain it in a series of simple steps. There are only two steps, so if you want to escape the pain of anxiety, you can’t afford not to read on.

First, describe for yourself the worst-case scenario of the situation you fear, i.e. the source of your anxiety. Let’s take social anxiety as an example. If you have social anxiety, you might start feeling faint when you start thinking about being in a room with a lot of people and possibly being laughed at for something that you said.

Let’s set aside how unlikely it is that someone would be so rude as to laugh at you in a public setting. When you have anxiety, it doesn’t matter whether the situation is likely. The anxiety has taken control.

Here’s how you take back that control: Step One is to ask yourself, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

You may freeze up when you hear this question. Or, you might be nonplussed. “Are you kidding me?” You might say to yourself. “I’m always thinking about this! There’s never a time I’m not thinking about the worst that could happen!”

There’s a critical point of difference here. The worst-case scenario might consume your thoughts, but do you ever sit down with those worried thoughts and see them through to completion? Anxiety wins most of the time because it’s like a constant buzz saw in the back of someone’s brain, nagging and whining. It can’t be escaped! But, at the same time, the person's not really paying attention to it. They’re trying, with all their might, to ignore it.

Although it might seem strange right now to pay attention to the thing you’ve been trying to avoid, it’s what you have to do in order to get past it. Take it out of the dark, and into the light. Examine it, and ask yourself, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

This can be a little tricky to define. It might seem like in the social anxiety scenario above, the worst-case scenario would be getting laughed at. For our purposes, that’s NOT the worst-case scenario. The laughter is actually the source of anxiety. The worst-case scenario is the potential result of the feared action.

For the social situation above, the absolute worst-case scenario would be that you are so overcome with shame and hurt from the laughter that you drop dead then and there.

Think I’m being silly? No! The anxiety is a formidable opponent. It holds you in thrall with this idea of a horrible, undefinable evil that will happen to you. Define the evil, and it begins to lose the power, because you see it for what it is.

When you’re defining the worst-case scenario, start with the absolute worst and go up from there. Some lesser (but still significant) fears might be that you start crying, blushing or become unable to speak.

After you’ve come up with some potential challenges, (Step One) there is one more step that is essential. You won’t overcome the anxiety without this step, so please, see it through to completion.

Here’s Step Two: figure out how you will get through the worst-case scenario.

The key word here is you. You are the only one who can defeat the anxiety. Focus on your own unique abilities and strengths. Anxiety tries to win by taking your power away. So think about how you will take that power back.

Using the example again, take a social anxiety sufferer. Imagine the worst-case scenario with that person: getting laughed at for something they said, and subsequently dropping dead. How can they overcome that experience?

Well, after this they’re not going to be worrying anymore, are they?

Please understand me. I'm not trying to be flippant! But I do firmly believe that overcoming anxiety revolves around survival. You have to know that can get through anything. It may be painful, it may have awful consequences, but YOU – powerful YOU – will get through it.

Just for the sake of having a little bit more to work with, let’s go with a slightly less intense worst-case scenario. This time, after being laughed at, the person becomes paralyzed, unable to speak. Embarrassing, certainly. But unmanageable? Definitely not.

What could this person do to get through it? If they’re unable to speak, they can’t really joke back. But they could shrug their shoulders. They could wave the laughter off, and go text a friend for support. They have options. Anxiety doesn’t end their choices. Really, it only expands them.

Ignorance is a philosophically cogent position. Admitting it creates the humility necessary to create wisdom - it’s a better style of thinking.

Gardner and Tetlock 2011 Dan, columnist and senior writer with the Ottawa Citizen, and Philip, Leonore Annenberg University Professor @ UPenn “Overcoming Our Aversion to Acknowledging Our Ignorance” Cato Unbound 7-11 http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/07/11/dan-gardner-and-philip-tetlock/overcoming-our-aversion-to-acknowledging-our-ignorance

But the pessimists are right, too, that fallibility, error, and tragedy are permanent conditions of our existence. Humility is in order, or, as Socrates said, the beginning of wisdom is the admission of ignorance. The Socratic message has always been a hard sell, and it still is—especially among practical people in business and politics, who expect every presentation to end with a single slide consisting of five bullet points labeled “The Solution.”

We have no such slide, unfortunately. But in defense of Socrates, humility is the foundation of the fox style of thinking and much research suggests it is an essential component of good judgment in our uncertain world. It is practical. Over the long term, it yields better calibrated probability judgments, which should help you affix more realistic odds than your competitors on policy bets panning out.

Humble works. Or it is at least superior to the alternative.