Jünger's mountain range of narrow-mindedness

This morning I happened across the social media profile of someone I had “hidden” from view but hadn’t remembered hiding. Now why did I do that? I wondered. Ten seconds of scrolling and five glib, dismissive, cocksure, and plainly stupid political memes later: Oh, yeah—that’s why.

I’m currently reading The Glass Bees, a 1957 science-fiction novel by the great German soldier, writer, and thinker Ernst Jünger. The novel’s narrator, Richard, an unemployed former soldier, is offered a shady job by Zapparoni, a titan of the robotics industry—what we would now call a tech billionaire in a field we would now call nanotechnology.

When they meet, Zapparoni has questions for Richard about the memoirs of one of Richard’s old army comrades who has risen to high rank, a man named Fillmor, “who always knows what is possible” and so “doesn’t occupy himself with the absurd or the impossible.” That is, “a man without any imagination.”

My evil star, however, had fated me to be born in times when only the sharply demarcated and precisely calculable were in fashion. There were many days when I had the impression of meeting only prison wardens—wardens, moreover, who voluntarily crowd to these positions, are satisfied with them and enjoy them. “Of course, I am on the Right, on the Left, in the Middle; I descend from the monkey; I believe only what I see; the universe is going to explode at this or that speed”—we hear such remarks after the first words we exchange, from people whom we would not have expected to introduce themselves as idiots. If one is unfortunate enough to meet them again after five years, everything is different except their authoritative and mostly brutal assuredness. Now they wear a different badge in their buttonhole and mention their relationship to another monster; and the universe now shrinks at such a speed that your hair stands on end. In this mountain range of narrow-mindedness, Fillmor was one of the highest peaks.

Both authoritative and changeable, possessed of a “briskly disposing intelligence” that shunts everything immediately into “sharply demarcated” categories, given to cant and platitudes and displays of right thinking, and, above all, hubristically self-assured—this should be a familiar type.

Let us call this the Age of Fillmor.