The fake Günther Anders of conspiracy theorists

A few months ago, a text attributed to poor Günther Anders started circulating on the internet. On several sites, it is presented as a quote from The Obsolescence of Man, complete with “accurate” information (taken from Wikipedia…) about the “Jewish philosopher” who predicted today’s great world conspiracy as early as 1956. This quote is completely made up.

This text gets posted and reposted on sites, pages and groups of conspiracy theorists, no vax and the like. From what I managed to reconstruct, the original, in French, should be by Serge Carfantan, a spiritualist and “skeptical” philosopher who wrote a text “inspired” by Günther Anders:

Prosopopée de Serge Carfantan inspiré de Günter Anders, …

Not surprisingly, Carfantan’s text is sometimes also linked with Huxley – and it certainly remembers much more closely the dystopia of Brave New World than the reflections of The Obsolescence of Man.

Here is the phony quote:

In order to stifle any revolt in advance, one must not use violence. Methods like those used by Hitler are outdated. You need only develop such powerful collective conditioning that the very idea of revolt will not even cross people’s minds.

Ideally, individuals should be conditioned by limiting their innate biological abilities from birth. Then, we would continue the conditioning process by drastically reducing education in order to bring it back to a form of integration into the world of work. An uneducated individual has only a limited horizon of thought, and the more his thoughts are confined to mediocre concerns, the less he can rebel. Access to knowledge must be made increasingly difficult and elitist. The gulf between people and science must be widened. All subversive content must be removed from information intended for the general public.

Above all, there should be no philosophy. Here again, we must use persuasion and not direct violence: we will massively broadcast entertainment via television that always extols the virtues of the emotional and instinctive. We will fill people’s minds with what is futile and fun. It is good to prevent the mind from thinking through incessant music and chatter. Sexuality will be placed at the forefront of human interests. As a social tranquilliser, there is nothing better.

In general, we will make sure to banish seriousness from life, to deride anything that is highly valued and to constantly champion frivolity: so that the euphoria of advertising becomes the standard of human happiness and the model for freedom. Conditioning alone will thus produce such integration that the only fear – which must be maintained – will be that of being excluded from the system and therefore no longer able to access the conditions necessary for happiness.

The mass man produced in this way must be treated as what he is: a calf, and he must be kept a close eye on, as a herd should be. Anything that allays his lucidity is good socially, and anything that could awaken it must be ridiculed, stifled and fought. Any doctrine questioning the system must first be designated as subversive and terrorist, and those who support it must then be treated as such.

And this is the original Anders quote that “inspired” the manipulators:

Massenregie im Stile Hitlers erübrigt sich: Will man den Menschen zu einem Niemand machen (sogar stolz darauf, ein Niemand zu sein), dann braucht man ihn nicht mehr in Massenfluten zu ertränken; nicht mehr in einen, aus Masse massiv hergestellten, Bau einzubetonieren. Keine Entprägung, keine Entmachtung des Menschen als Menschen ist erfolgreicher als diejenige, die die Freiheit der Persönlichkeit und das Recht der Individualität scheinbar wahrt. Findet die Prozedur des „conditioning” bei jedermann gesondert statt: im Gehäuse des Einzelnen, in der Einsamkeit, in den Millionen Einsamkeiten, dann gelingt sie noch einmal so gut. Da die Behandlung sich als „fun” gibt; da sie dem Opfer nicht verrät, daß sie ihm Opfer abfordert; da sie ihm den Wahn seiner Privatheit, mindestens seines Privatraums, beläßt, bleibt sie vollkommen diskret.

Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, Beck, München 1961, p. 104

Here’s the English translation:

The stage-managing of masses that Hitler specialized in has become superfluous: if one wants to transform a man into a nobody (and even make him proud to be a nobody), it is no longer necessary to drown him in a mass, or to bury him in a cement construction mass-produced by masses. No depersonalization, no loss of the ability to be a man is more effective than the one that apparently preserves the freedom of the personality and the rights of the individual. If the procedure of conditioning takes place in a special way in the home of every person—in the individual home, in isolation, in millions of isolated units—the result will be perfect. The treatment is absolutely discreet, since it is presented as fun, the victim is not told that he must make any sacrifices and he is left with the illusion of his privacy or, at least, of his private space.

Extrapolated from the context, the text seems similar but Carfantan makes Anders say exactly the opposite of what he intended to say. The Obsolescence of Man is based on the theory according to which the “totalitarian” character of today’s society derives exclusively from technology. There is no conspiracy, no elite, no secret plan aimed at enslaving humanity: technology as such produces the commodification and reification of the subject. As a matter of fact, Anders would have said that the more one uses technology for his/her ends, the more one gets used by technology for its own ends. Consequently, those who believe to be “free” because they’re denouncing some “dictatorship” via Facebook, Youtube and Whatsapp are the first ones Anders would have labelled as stupid “masses”, unable to think and act freely. 🤦‍♂️

Please share. Thanks.