As Though an Invisible Hand Managed to Teleonomize All This Mess, to Normalize This Anomie
We should be amazed not that there is so much chaos and violence, but that there is so little and everything functions so well. Given the level of aggression of every car driver, the frailties of the equipment and the mad scrambles of the traffic, it’s a miracle thousands aren’t killed everyday, a miracle we only rarely slaughter each other and only a few of these disastrous possibilities come to fruition. When you see the immense bureaucratic chaos, the number of absurd decisions, the universal fraud and squandering of our civic virtues, you can only be amazed by the daily miracle of this machine which, somehow or other, keeps on going, dragging its detritus along in its orbit. Apart from a few episodic breakdowns (no more frequent, ultimately, than earth tremors), it’s as though an invisible hand managed to teleonomize all this mess, to normalize this anomie. This is perhaps the same miracle as the one which prevents everyone from succumbing daily to the idea of death or to suicidal melancholia.
~Jean Baudrillard
Cool Memories II ~ {trans. Chris Turner} ~ Cambridge : Polity Press, 1996 / pg 18
