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Lem, COVID19 and Dutch politics
Whoever reads Stanislauw Lem Solaris, stays wondering how Hollywood film makers could have wasted so much from the original, when making 2002’s remake. Some of us, mostly the ones that like to pass as well educated, would sight and say that the soviet version of 1972 is superior. Yet both films don’t even start to get at the possibilities of humans facing a whole thinking planet, as Lem did.
Actually, no film even touched our limitations at dealing with a cosmic conscience, that almost as a second thought keeps playing with us by recreating failed duplicated of ourselves and our memories. Lem seems to tell us that at not understanding something, our ultimate defense is to endlessly think about ourselves. Perhaps. Perhaps that is what he also proposes in one of the short stories that composes “The Star Diaries”, specifically “the seventh voyage”. In that tale Ijon Tichy, the protagonist astronaut, keeps accumulating copies of himself, due to a defect in the time management of the spaceship. The whole thing goes up to he arguing with several tens of copies of himself, all trying to control and direct the failing spaceship at the same time.
The nightmare of living a repeated torture, or actually being tortured by the repetition of a single act is know to us from Sysiphus to Groundhog day. It is so that we envision cruelty and torture as a complicated and painful single act, or a succession of different actions, each more painful than the other. But the real torture is, perhaps after facing our own limitations, being confronted with ourselves again and again and again.
In our days it is hard to talk about torture without thinking in the different versions of lockdown that each of us experiences, even when in different countries and continents. I myself used to believe that if our society would ever face a pandemic, we would be in no time trying to survive some version (better or worse) of medieval Europe facing the plague, or perhaps one or another chapter of “The Walking Dead”. Probably we all thought so, and that belief parsimoniously explains the massive buying of toilet paper, around a year ago. Yet our pandemic was not to be so. Our pandemic has turned out to be a endless repetition of the same, mostly meaningless, reality. A reality that, after all, we ourselves create.
Consider dutch politics. Realize that the dutch public have been hearing their Prime Minister again and again and again, more or less each three weeks, saying the same platitudes that every other citizen could have read in their newspapers. Has Mark Rutte become some sort of modern priest, endlessly repeating the same message to confort a population that is slowly going crazy? Or is Mark Rutte the manifestation of a supernatural intelligence that is pushing us to face the sad limitations of our own intellect? That last hypothesis gains weight when realizing that this premier won elections a couple of weeks ago by a landslide, after having his own government crashed by the most obvious case of institutional racism that Europe has seen in decades. So... is it that we are so incapable of understanding politics, the country and life in general that we forced ourselves to suffer the same conservative, ethically bankrupt Prime Minister again and again, reelecting him for ever?