Franz Kafka |

In an interview to disinformation the great Robert Anton Wilson: Robert Anton Wilson ‘There are two kinds of crimes. Crimes which everybody agrees are a crime, that’s crimes with victims. If I get mugged or burglarized or somebody in my family gets hurt or killed I want the police tod o something about it and I’m eager to cooperate with them and so is everybody else of a sound and rational mind. We don’t want burglars and thieves and muggers and murders running around loose. On the other hand, when you’re trying to control victimless crime, nobody is very eager to help the police.

People who are smoking pot aren’t eager to turn themselves in and their friends aren’t eager to turn them in, either, in most cases. The whores don’t want to turn in the Johns; the Johns don’t want to turn in the whores. The gamblers don’t wnat to turn in the bettors; the bettors don’t want to turn in the bookies and so on. Nobody wants to do anything about victimless crimes, meaning things that people do consensually that they want to do and that they’re enjoying doing and there’s no victim to be found anywhere. So nobody wnats to help the police, ergo, the only way you can wage a war against sin –which is want these victimless criimes laws are all about– the only way you can wage a war like that is by spying on everybody more and more, creating the apparatus of a totalitarian state, which means higher and higher taxes. This is why so many conservatives lately are coming out in favor of ending the war on drugs: it’s getting so goddamned expensive.

The only way the goverment has any chance at all of winning is to establish a totalitarianism wackier and more total than Orwell’s 1984. We’ve already got the ‘Piss Police’ which is something that Orwell dind’t even dream of. Even Franz Kafka couldn’t imagine a society so crazy that you have to give urine samples before you can hold a job! There’s no way of winning without totalitarianism far beyond anything ever practiced by Hitler or Stalin or imagined by the wildest satirist. That’s the only way they can win. And that costs too damned much money. The people who are running it, they’re not trying to win. They know they can’t win; they just want to keep the war going because it makes money for everyone.

It’s a wonderful excuse to increase police power and surveillance so that they know everything that we’re doing so that nobody can be plotting subversion of any sort without them knowing about it. Like the old joke goes, ‘When four men sit down to plot against the goverment, three of them are goverment agents and the fourth is a damned fool’. Well that’s getting more and more true all the time. The war on drugs is an excuse for more surveillance. They’re scared stiff of us. They’re more afraid of us than we are of them’.

Franz Kafka was born in Prague on July 3, 1883 — 129 years ago today.

The first book from Kafka that I read was The Metamorphosis and I loved it greatly, however at the time I was not aware of the main theme behind most of his writings: “The Absurd.” Then I watch the movie The Trial based on the book by the same name of Kafka, and then it click. Te trial is a frightening example of the absurdity of the human condition.

In “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Albert Camus discusses the works of Kafka. According to him, Kafka’s works are perfect examples of what he terms “The Absurd.”

Here are some passages from Camus Essay “Hope and the absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka”

The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to reread. His endings, or his absence of endings, suggest explanations which, however, are not revealed in clear language but, before they seem justified, require that the story be reread from another point of view. This is what the author wanted.

But it would be wrong to try to interpret everything in Kafka in detail. Nothing is harder to understand than a symbolic work. A symbol always transcend the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.

There is in the human condition a basic absurdity as well as implacable nobility.

In The Trial, Joseph K. is accused. But he doesn’t know of what. He is doubtless eager to defend himself, but he doesn’t know why. The lawyers find his case difficult. Meanwhile, he does not neglect to love, to eat, or to read his paper. Then hi is judged. But the courtroom is very dark. He doesn’t understand much. He merely assumes that he is condemned, but to what he barely wonders. At times he suspects just the same, and he continues living. Some time later two well-dressed and polite gentlemen come to get him and invite him to follow them. Most courteously they lead him into a wretched suburb, put his head on a stone, and slit his throat. Before dying the condemned man says merely: “Like a dog.”

Camus is primarily drawn to Kafka’s works because of the lucidity with which they present the fundamental dilemma that for him defines absurd reasoning. On the one hand, Camus says we hope to find some meaning—or God, or order, or explanation—in the universe, and on the other hand, we are faced with a senseless multiplicity of things that do not organize themselves in any way that promises an answer. (Q)

I’m going to leave you with a short animated film by director Piotr Dumala entitled “Franz Kafka” that resembles very well the suffocating worlds created by Kafka in his writings.

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