Excellent blog post by Ugo Bardi. Excerpts:
In Seneca-style collapse, breakdown does not begin with institutional failure but with the exhaustion of the energetic, affective, and cognitive surpluses that once made belief, reform, and compliance feel worthwhile.
This is why Desertion (Franco Berardi) (footnote 4) should be understood not as nihilism but as rational ethics in a phase of energetic decline. When sovereignty no longer commands belief, reform operates only as deferred fantasy, and enforcement proceeds independently of legitimacy, continued libidinal investment ceases to be reasonable. Desertion does not name passivity or retreat. It names a strategic withdrawal of affect, belief, and hope from systems that can now reproduce themselves only by extracting ever more psychic and social energy, accelerating precisely because their energetic base is failing.
Desertion, in this sense, does not abandon law but accepts its transformation into residue: a memory of obligation without power, a standard that no longer authorizes enforcement yet continues to indict it. What is withdrawn is not ethics or agency, but participation in a juridical order that has exempted itself from the very obligations it claims to enforce. Under conditions of systemic exhaustion, where legitimacy has drained away but enforcement persists, withdrawal of libidinal investment becomes not nihilism but a necessary stance—one that does not presume inevitability or predict collapse, but refuses to act as if continued acceleration were the only remaining form of action, or as if restraint, refusal, and selective non-cooperation no longer mattered in the present.
And the reference mentioned:
Footnote 4 –
Franco Berardi, Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression (Repeater, 2024). Berardi interprets depression not primarily as individual pathology but as a systemic signal arising when psychic, libidinal, and cognitive energies are pushed beyond sustainable limits. In conditions of social and energetic overshoot, withdrawal (“desertion”) becomes a rational adaptive response rather than a nihilistic refusal: a reduction of participation that mirrors material contraction and Seneca-style collapse dynamics, in which systems unravel faster than subjects can consciously adjust. Desertion, in this sense, names an ethical refusal to continue supplying affective and cognitive energy to accelerating systems that can no longer be stabilized or reformed.
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