The Antichrist by Joseph Roth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Malignant Ironies of the Big Lie

The principle beneficiary of communications technology is the Big Lie. Print media made the Big Lie possible. Telegraphy promoted the Big Lie by sterilising language. Telephony allowed the Big Lie by hiding the face of the Liar. Film and its variants tell the Big Lie by divorcing events from their context. Radio and television make the Big Lie entertaining. The internet disguises the Big Lie by protecting the Liar. Roth had sussed out the connection between technology and the Big Lie in 1933. Only recently has the world started to pay attention - not to Roth but at least to the connection.

To put the situation another way: technology has high-jacked language for the ends of those who control the technology. This has been the situation for quite some time. But only recently have the implications of this situation become clear: the Big Lie is unstoppable. This is Roth’s message. It is a message without hope. We are doomed because we cannot avoid the power of the technology. Even if we are aware of this power, and expose it, we are forced to submit to it in the very act of exposing it. We have become the Big Lie. We are shadows talking to shadows.

Although the world has always had more than a quorum of dictators, tyrants, and homicidal monsters, the mythical Antichrist had not arrived before the technology necessary to isolate and control language. The technology itself is the Antichrist, not those who temporarily direct it. They, after all, are as much dominated by it as the rest of us. The only thing that the technology allows is the production of “sounds without shape,” that is to say, disembodied signals, so that “To real things we give false names. Hollow words ring in our poor heads, and we no longer understand the meaning of the words.”

The Big Lie had triumphed through technology already when Roth wrote. Since then most of us have simply chosen to ignore the victory and our submission to the inevitable. This is probably prudent since we are all powerless in the face of such systematic evil. Consequently “We have instead granted the greater part of the short life that was gifted us to our shadows! We have not created life; we have lost it! We have not created; we have squandered! And we have squandered sinfully.”

Through the Big Lie, we are controlled by language, we make distinctions without differences, we learn to hate, we become willing to hurt and kill, not just others but ourselves. We become without anything that might be called reason. The “sons of Edison” are able to exercise less and less reason with every advance in ‘communication’ since language is the instrument of human reason, and language has been captured and imprisoned. In Babylon, at the Tower, we became merely confused. Now with instantaneous worldwide networks and translations, we are acutely dangerous.

In his Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky portrays the Grand Inquisitor as unable to recognise the returned Christ. This may be somewhat dark, but it is not hopeless. Roth’s story about being unable to recognise the Antichrist is, on the other hand, one of total despair. In our era of up-beat optimism about our ability to develop and regulate technology effectively, Roth is unlikely to go down well. His only practical suggestion is repentance, which probably can’t even be heard much less acted upon in the various Silicon Valleys and capitals of the world.

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