Copyright © Zygmunt Bauman & Leonidas Donskis 2016

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First published in 2016 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0811-2

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0812-9 (pb)

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Bauman, Zygmunt, 1925-

    Liquid evil / Zygmunt Bauman, Leonidas Donskis.

        pages cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-1-5095-0811-2 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-5095-0812-9 (pbk.)    1.  Good and evil.    I.  Title.

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But a few days after putting the finishing touches to the transcript of our conversation (published two years ago by Polity under the title Moral Blindness), we realized that our conversation needed to continue. Too many strings attached remained untied, and too many new ones, first invisible but by then increasingly salient, demanded to be put on record and tried to be tied. This was not the fault of authors stopping their analytical efforts prematurely, before the task had reached its completion – but the consequence of the very nature of the undertaking.

While evil as such – the object of our investigation – can be seen as a permanent, inalienable companion of the human condition, its forms and ways of operation, particularly in their present-day liquidized incarnation, are novel phenomena; they deserve separate treatment, in which precisely their novelty is cast in the centre of attention. It is in the nature of all liquids that they are incapable of keeping any of their successively adopted shapes and forms for long. Liquids are perpetually in statu nascendi – always ‘becoming’, rather than having acquired an accomplished form: a quality noted more than two millennia ago by Heraclitus, observing that one can't step twice into the same river, as noted by Plato in his Cratylus dialogue. What one can – and needs to – do, when aiming at its fullest possible representation, is to discover the river's sources and its most copious tributaries, trace the trajectory of the riverbed (or, if such needs arise, its multiple – coexisting or alternating – trajectories), and map them both (even if being aware that what can ultimately be achieved is more of the nature of a snapshot than of the conclusive, lasting image of the phenomenon in question).

This is exactly what we try to do in this book: to chart as fully as possible the currently most prolific sources of evil, and follow as many as possible of its trajectories at the present stage of our liquid-modern, deregulated and disorganized, atomized and individualized, fragmented, disjointed and privatized society of consumers. All the same, given the attributes of the object, the result needs to be viewed as a career-report of an on-going voyage of discovery.

Our conversation, in a nutshell, has been about the specifically liquid-modern mode of evil – a mode arguably yet more menacing and treacherous than evil's other historical manifestations because of being fractured, pulverized, disjointed and disseminated; starkly distinct from its immediately preceding variety, concentrated and condensed as it struggled to be, as well as centrally administered. For that reason, the present-day liquidized evil is hidden from sight and avoids being spotted, as well as recognition for what it is and what it portends. Liquid evil has the awesome capacity for effective disguises and for recruiting human – all-too-human – concerns and desires to its service under false – yet exceedingly difficult to debunk and falsify – pretences. To add offence to the injury, quite a few recruits are seduced into volunteering.

In an enormous number of cases, liquidized evil manages to be perceived as a friend eager to help rather than a fiend; in Joseph Nye's terminology, it needs to be counted among the ‘soft’ – as distinct from ‘hard’ – powers, deploying temptation instead of coercion as its basic strategy, as in the case of contemporary multifaceted surveillance building a data bank millions of times more capacious than all the secret services of the solid-modern past could only dream of (and even then on condition of possessing extraordinary imagination) – from information supplied 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, voluntarily or unknowingly, by the users of cellular telephones, of credit cards, and by senders or receivers of computerized messages. No longer is the Ministry of Love needed to force people to take war for peace and coercion for care and friendly assistance.

Liquid evil, like all liquids, has the awesome capability of flowing around the obstacles rising or standing on its way. Like other liquids, it drenches them on its way, moistens, soaks and all too often erodes and dissolves – absorbing the solution in its own substance to further enhance its body. In addition to evasiveness, this capacity renders effective resistance to liquid evil yet more formidable a task. Having impregnated in the tissue of daily life and entrenched in its very core, evil, when (if) spotted, makes all alternative modes of life look implausible, indeed unreal; lethal poison presents itself duplicitously as a life-saving antidote to life's hardships.

Of these and other adjunct traits of liquid evil, in their many manifestations, we attempt to make a (by necessity incomplete, but hopefully preliminary) inventory. Our intention is to prime the canvas, rather than paint a complete picture. We hope to sketch the area yearning for research as comprehensive as it is urgent and equip it with some – in our belief useful – conceptual tools.

Leonidas Donskis    We live in a world without alternatives. It's a world that proposes a single reality and a world that labels as lunatics – or, at best, eccentrics – all those who believe that everything has an alternative, including even the very best models of governance and the most profound ideas (not to mention business and engineering projects). The world has probably never been so inundated with fatalistic and deterministic beliefs as it is today; alongside serious analyses, as if from a horn of plenty, flow prophecies and projections of looming crises, dangers, downward spirals, and the end of the world. In this widespread atmosphere of fear and fatalism, the conviction arises that there are no alternatives to contemporary political logic and to the tyranny of the economy or to attitudes towards science and technology and the relationship between nature and humanity. Not by any stretch is optimism the foolish exultation that we are here in this place and that our surroundings are warm, fuzzy and comfortable; rather, it is the belief that evil is transitory and does not vanquish humaneness (or only briefly when it does). Furthermore, optimism means a belief that hope and alternatives do indeed always exist. The conviction that a pessimist is an all-round loftier and nobler being than an optimist is not simply a relic of the modern, Romantic sensibility and worldview – it is something greater.

This situation goes all the way back to the monumental conflict between Christianity and Manichaeism – after Augustine (who, by the way, defeated his inner Manichaean and became one of the Fathers of the Catholic Church). Christians held evil to be a state of errant or insufficient goodness that could be overcome, while Manichaeans held good and evil to be parallel but irreconcilable realities. Optimism is, above all, a Christian construction – it's based on the faith that good can overcome evil and that unexplored possibilities and alternatives can always be found. But we live in an age of pessimism. The twentieth century was excellent proof evil was alive and well, and this has reinforced the positions of modern Manichaeans. They saw a world that could be temporarily abandoned by God, but not by Satan.

One question, though, remains unanswered: how meaningful is Manichaeism today? Disbelief that God is all-powerful, and that He is Love, is something that might have been greatly reinforced in the wake of the many atrocities of the twentieth century. Mikhail Bulgakov's enduring work The Master and Margarita – written in 1928–41 and published, severely censored, in 1966–7 – is imbued with a Manichaean spirit: the novel makes numerous mentions of the concepts of ‘Light’ and ‘Dark’ developed by the Persian prophet and eponymous architect of this belief system. The interpretation of evil in this great twentieth-century East European novel (Kafka's The Trial is in my eyes the great Central European novel of the twentieth century) is one that asserts the self-sufficiency of evil. This interpretation of Christianity is close to that of Ernest Renan in his Life of Jesus, a study with which Bulgakov was quite familiar.

Even Czesław Miłosz considered himself something of a closet Manichaean. After his encounters with the incomprehensible evils of the twentieth century – which arose in a world no less rational and humanist than our own, which had created world-leading cultures (for example, in Russia and Germany) – Miłosz came to see evil as an independent and self-sufficient reality, or, at least, as a dimension that is not in any tangible sense affected by progress or modern forms of sensibility, nor by the world of in-depth theories. He noted that French philosopher Simone Weil was also a closet Manichaean: she conferred a millenarian meaning on the phrase ‘Thy Kingdom Come’ in the Lord's Prayer. There's a good reason why Miłosz taught a course on Manichaeism at the University of California, Berkeley. In his book Miłosz's ABC, he situated the opening act of twentieth-century evil in the story of Bulgaria's Bogomils and the martyrdom of the Cathars in Verona and other Italian cities. All of the great East Europeans were Manichaeans to some degree – from Russia's Bulgakov through to George Orwell (who was an East European by choice).

Meanwhile, we live in an era of fear, negativity and bad news. There's no market for good news because no one is interested in it. (Although a fun and adventure-filled apocalyptic story is something quite different.) It is this that gives rise to the wholesale sowing of panic and the industry of fear – ‘breaking news’ that relies on commentaries with huge discrepancies, wherein the commentators often contradict themselves. Although some of these are occasionally insightful and well reasoned, most are hysterical and defeatist.

What does the concept of liquid evil signify? How can it be best understood these days when so many phenomena are made up of mutually exclusive qualities and characteristics? I would argue that liquid evil, contrary to what we could term ‘solid evil’ – the latter being based on a black-and-white social perspective, in which we can easily identify the resilience of evil in our social and political reality – assumes the appearance of goodness and love. More than that, it parades as a seemingly neutral and impartial acceleration of life – the unprecedented speed of life and social change implying the loss of memory and moral amnesia; in addition, liquid evil walks in disguise as the absence and impossibility of alternatives. A citizen becomes a consumer, and value-neutrality hides the fact of disengagement.

Individual helplessness and forsakenness, coupled with the state's denial and refusal of its responsibility for education and culture, go along with the heavenly marriage of neoliberalism and state bureaucracy, both of them insisting on the individual's responsibility not only for their life and choices in a free-choice-free world, but for the state of global affairs as well. In Moral Blindness (2013), you and I, Zygmunt, discussed a disturbing phenomenon, which I would describe as a post-academic university. An awkward amalgam of medieval academic ritual, specialization, a blatant and blunt denial of the role of the humanities in modern society, managerialism and shallowness sets a perfect scene for such a post-academic university, the playground for enormous pressures, the latter coming from technocratic forces disguised as the genuine voices of liberty and democracy – first and foremost, the market-oriented forms of determinism and fatalism, which leave no room for the idea of any alternative, including critical thought and self-questioning.

The mission and raison d'être of the post-academic university seem to lie in its overt shallowness, flexibility, submissiveness to the managerial elites, and also in adaptability to the calls and assignments coming from the markets and the political elites. Hollow words, empty rhetorics and countless strategy games appear as the quintessential form of this sort of tyranny of shallowness best embodied in the post-academic university. It is a strategy without a strategy, as the latter becomes merely a language game. The Wittgensteinian idea of language games was applied by Gianni Vattimo to describe technocracy walking in disguise as democracy, or today's politics without politics, all reduced to a series of language games. As you, Zygmunt, would have it in Liquid Modernity (2000), today's strategies without strategies, or politics without politics, are tantamount to ethics without morality.

‘Outside the Church there is no salvation’ (extra ecclesiam nulla salus) – this expression is ascribed to Saint Cyprian of Carthage, a bishop of the third century. We have a modern equivalent of this sort of civilizational logic, though, since ours is a corporate and quasi-medieval world where an individual does not have an existence outside of an institution which frames and moulds them. The Academia is the New Church nowadays. This is why the role of dissent, secular heterodoxy and the alternative in this world is far more problematic and complex than it may seem at first sight.

No alternatives are allowed. Privatization of utopia signifies the arrival of the new condition, under which no society is deemed to be good and just: only individual life stories can be success stories. As such, they tend to become our new utopian dreams in a utopia-free, or dystopia-ridden, world. TINA, or the acronym for There Is No Alternative (first forged by Margaret Thatcher, and then redefined and reinterpreted by you, Zygmunt), allows a point of departure when dealing with this uniquely new and unprecedented phenomenon – namely, one's ultimate belief in social determinism and market-based fatalism, the major difference between earlier decades and our time being the fact that, whereas Sigmund Freud's dictum informed us that biology is destiny, our dictum could be that the economy is destiny.

George Orwell saw clearly that the new forms of evil tend to walk in the guise of goodness and love. Thou shalt love Big Brother. Contrary to the predecessors of Oceania's Party – Jacobins, Bolsheviks and Nazis alike – no martyrdom is allowed. Your life will go unnoticed, and nobody will know anything about your existence. Or you will be swiftly and silently reformed to force you to assume and adopt the vocabulary that you had long denied passionately and consistently. Evil is not obvious and self-evident anymore. Low-intensity political oppression and human rights violation, as well as low-intensity military conflicts, obfuscate and obliterate the dividing line between war and peace. War is peace, and peace is war. Neither good news nor bad news remain un-ambivalent and clear nowadays: even if there is no war or any other calamity going on, it becomes impossible to discuss it without scaremongering, by the fear industry. Good news is no news. Bad news is the news by definition.

Therefore, when I refer to liquidity of evil, I mean that we live in a deterministic, pessimistic, fatalistic, fear-and-panic-ridden society, which still tends to cherish its time-honoured, albeit out-of-date and misleading, liberal-democratic credentials. The absence of dreams, alternatives and utopias is exactly what I would take as a significant aspect of the liquidity of evil. Two ideas of Ernst Bloch and Karl Mannheim proved prophetic: whereas Bloch regretted that modernity lost the warm and humane spirit of a utopian dream, Mannheim strongly felt that utopias were effectively translated into political ideologies, thus stripping them of alternative visions and confining them to the principle of reality, instead of imagination. The liquidity of evil signifies the divorce of the principle of imagination from the principle of reality, the final say being conferred upon the latter.

The seductive powers of evil are coupled here with disengagement. For centuries, as we know, the very symbol and embodiment of evil was the Devil, whether making his appearance as Mephistopheles in the legend of Faust – ranging from medieval tales to Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust – or as Woland in Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. This was the old news, though. The old ‘good’ Devil represented solid evil with its symbolic logic of the quest for human souls and active engagement in human and earthly matters. He simply pursued his goal trying to reverse and delegitimize the established social and moral order.

This is to say that solid evil was a sort of amorally committed and actively engaged evil, with a solemn promise of social justice and equality at the end of the time of the world. Liquid evil, on the contrary, comes up with the rationale of seduction and disengagement. Whereas Prometheus and Satan, according to Vytautas Kavolis, as we will see from the upcoming dialogue, were two protagonists of subversion, uprising and revolution, the heroes of liquid evil attempt to strip humanity of its dreams, alternative projects and powers of dissent.¹ In doing so, they act as protagonists of counterrevolution, obedience and submission. The logic of solid evil was to win the soul and to conquer the world by imposing the new rules of the game; yet the logic of liquid evil is to seduce and retreat, changing its appearances all the time. ‘Seduce and disengage’ – this is the very motto of the Proteus-like hero of both liquid modernity and of liquid evil. I know what is to be done, yet I refuse to engage, leaving my object or seduced victim to her or his own devices – that's the name of the game. From now onwards, drowning in the ocean will be called freedom.

Our freedom today becomes localized in the sphere of raw consumption and self-renewal. Control, surveillance, a dispositional asymmetry of power parading as freedom of choice, the fear industry and privacy exposure games make up the complex combination of the sociocultural condition that here we metaphorically call TINA and liquid evil. Promising all of humanity that you will allow and foster freedom, equality, justice, reason, pursuit of happiness, human rights, powers of individuality and association, social mobility, living without borders, and then disappearing suddenly, leaving individuals in their countless identity games mistaken for freedom, while also reminding them that it is up to them to solve the world's problems, without being able to rely much on institutions, fellowship and engagement – this is liquid evil's tried and tested strategy.

This is why I assume that the real symbol of liquid evil is a kind of Big Mr Anonymous, or collective Don Juan. Don Juan, in your eyes, Zygmunt, is modernity's real hero. Don Juan is the face of modernity, whose power lies in constant and incessant change. At the same time, his is the power of self-concealment and retreat for the sake of an asymmetry of power. Solid modernity was about the conquest of territories and their utilization for the sake of the state or any other power structure. Liquid modernity is about a hide-and-seek power game, be it a military strike followed by retreat or any other destabilizing action. Therefore, liquid evil, in terms of military campaigns, tends to disrupt the economy and life in certain territories or societies by bringing there as much chaos, fear, uncertainty, unsafety and insecurity as possible, instead of assuming responsibility and taking on the burden of remaking or transforming them. At this point, terrorism appears as a pure expression of liquid evil. Imperialism is about solid power games, yet terrorism is always about the liquidity of evil – even its sinister logic of speaking up in favour of society, coupled with disdain for a concrete society that is sacrificed for individualized power games, should not deceive us.

The seducer, who retreats by leaving a void, disenchantment or death, is a hero of liquid evil. The existential Don Juan comes to establish the asymmetry of power whose very essence lies in being able to observe the other without being seen. ‘Chi son'io tu non saprai’ (‘Who I am you do not know’) – these words from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, written by the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte (who had Don Juan getting intimate with 2,000 women), reveal the crux of the modern manipulator's asymmetry. You do not see me because I will withdraw and leave you when it is no longer safe for me to stay with you and reveal too much of myself and my hidden suffering or weakness. Who I am you will never know, although I will find out everything about you. Yet there is an illusion left to the object of obscure desire that they will get as much attention and self-revelation as they could possibly need. An anonymous Internet comment delivering toxic lies, mortally wounding, hurting and brutally insulting us – that is, individuals with first and last names – is nearly a perfect expression of the liquidity of evil that operates on the ground and is deeply entrenched in our mundane practices. Who I am you do not know.

In this age of our painful quest for attention and of our obsessive, compulsive self-discovery and self-exposure, we constantly need a new promise and a repeatedly reinforced illusion that we – plain Janes or simple Simons – can gain world attention too. Not just stars and world leaders but you, an ordinary mortal, can be important to someone because of the way you look or act or live or because of what you have or do or desire, or because of what you find funny or worth showing or talking about – in short, things all too human and easy to understand. We have begun acting like emigrants, even when we no longer set foot outside our own house or home town: thirsting for companionship and authentic human ties, we think that this, when it happens, is a short-lived miracle that will end soon – therefore, we must intensify this experience, for we don't know when it will come our way again.

Simply put, our freedom today becomes localized in the sphere of consumption and self-renewal but it has lost any connection with the most important thing: believing that you can change something in the world. This belief was shared by all the great prophets, theoreticians, ideologues and writers of modernity. Today all the great utopias have vanished. We are living in a period of dreary novels of warning and dystopias, though even the latter quickly turn into objects of easy, uncomplicated consumption. The sense of determinism and fatalism, strengthened not only by our failure to understand why and how economic systems crash and why we are beset by social crises, but also by our total dependence on far-away markets and currency fluctuations in distant lands, fosters the illusion that we as individuals are able to change things only by spontaneous reactions, acts of benevolence and compassion, kind words and intense communication. All that is left seems to boil down to technical instruments and more intense human relations. During outbreaks of the plague in Europe, the logic of carnivals, mass feasting and even orgies was predominant as well.

As you observed, Zygmunt, technology and social networks have become new forms of control and separation.² You see everyone; they all expose themselves, register and take part – fine: you only need to figure out how to keep everyone in a scheme in which there are no possibilities of hiding anything from the controlling structures of the state. Privacy is dying in front of our very eyes. It simply no longer exists – not only because there are no longer any messages unread and uncontrolled by outsiders or things that, as classical literature testifies, a human being had the right and even duty to take with himself to the grave. What has disappeared is simply what used to be rightly called a secret – it has become either a good traded over the counter, an object of exchange, a password to momentary and short-lived success, or else a weakness showing you have something to hide, thus enabling blackmail and the exertion of pressure to rob you of your last vestiges of dignity and independence. People no longer have secrets in the old, honourable sense, and don't even understand what that could possibly mean.

People gladly publicize their intimate life in exchange for momentarily having the spotlight turned on themselves: such feasts of exhibitionism are possible only in an age of unsteady, twittering connections and of unprecedented alienation. Some of those who expose themselves on Facebook are like those whose blogs resemble burps and belches in which they, full of narcissism, heave up their crises and frustrations; others are merely temporarily overcoming their feelings of isolation and insecurity. In this sense, Facebook was indeed a brilliant and timely invention, after all. Just when social separation and isolation became unendurable, when it was no longer bearable to watch bad television and to read the sadomasochistic press, Facebook came into the world.

But with it also came possibilities of mortal danger and fatal evil. For Facebook embodies, as you might say, the essence of the DIY phenomenon: do it yourself. Take off your clothes, show us your secrets – do it yourself, of your own free will, and be happy while doing it. DIY. Strip for me babe.

What has happened to our privacy? This question is being addressed nowadays with ever-increasing frequency. Of American society and its privacy crisis, Sarah E. Igo writes:

There was a time when secret services and the political police worked hard to extract secrets and to get people to open up the details of their private and even intimately personal lives. Today these intelligence services should feel simultaneously exhilarated and unneeded: what should they do in a situation where everyone is telling everything about their own business themselves? But even if people don't disclose what they're doing, whom they dislike and how they got rich, they still willingly reveal who they communicate with and who they know. And it's impossible not to participate in that structure. If you leave it, you lose your sense of past and present, you sever contact with your classmates and your colleagues, you don't pay your dues, and you get separated from your community. In virtual reality and in Facebook, what vanishes is a fundamental aspect of real freedom: self-determination and a free choice of association rather than being sucked into a friendship simply because technology does not allow you to lead a civilized life otherwise.

But what does this say about our society? We are led to disturbing conclusions about human freedom no less than to an unwanted but warranted recognition that all of humanity is indeed becoming a nation that, though displaced and humiliated, is liked and hallowed: a Facebook nation. In the contemporary world, manipulation by political advertisement is capable not only of creating people's needs and their criteria of happiness, but also of fabricating the heroes of our time and controlling the imagination of the masses through successful biographies. These abilities make one pause for thought about a ‘velvet’ totalitarianism – a controlled form of manipulating consciousness and imagination that is cloaked as liberal democracy, which allows the enslavement and control even of the critics.

What remains deeply underneath is increasing social control and mass surveillance which reveals what happened to politics outpaced by technology. Whether we like it or not, technology does not ask us if we desire it. Once you can use it, you must do so. The refusal relegates you to the margins of society left without being able to pay your dues as a tenant or to participate in a public debate. The state which does not use mass surveillance becomes unable to justify its excessive use of secret services and spying techniques. Curiously, this tendency goes hand in hand with the spread and explosive proliferation of forms of self-display and confessional culture in general, whether in popular or even in highbrow culture.

With sound reason, then, Sarah E. Igo concludes:

Therefore, technology will not allow you to remain on the side-lines. I can transmutes into I must. I can, therefore I must. No dilemmas permitted. We live in a reality of possibilities, not one of dilemmas. This is something akin to the ethics of WikiLeaks, where there is no morality left. It is obligatory to spy and to leak, though it's unclear for what reason and to what end. It works both ways – for and against the state – yet it never assumes responsibility for a truly anguished individual. It's something that has to be done just because it's technologically feasible. There's a moral vacuum here created by a technology that has overtaken politics. The problem for such a consciousness is not the form or legitimacy of power but its quantity. For evil (by the way, secretly adored) is where there is more financial and political power. If this is so, we deal a blow to ethics, since technology comes to fill the gaps left by politics and public morality: once you are connected, you are absolved and relieved. The media is the message, and living online becomes an answer to the dilemmas of our modern existence.

As mentioned, the net society is the fear-ridden society. It becomes a perfect place for the entire fear industry and organized scaremongering. It highlights and exposes the rise of technocracy disguised as democracy. At the same time, the net society and its public domain nourish and nurture such indispensable constituent parts of technocracy as value-neutrality and instrumentalism in all

Moral BlindnessEnsaio sobre a cegueiraThe Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity

lebensunwertes Leben

These are the lessons to be learned or to be ignored again. This is why this book on the forms of evil, the old and the new, would be unthinkable, Zygmunt, without your conceptual adjective ‘liquid’. It is a book about liquid evil, which surfaces and manifests itself far beyond any sort of theology and demonology of evil. The book is far more about evil situations and our mechanisms of disengagement and the abandonment of our sensibilities than about the supposed demons and fiends of our time.

    Indeed, a spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of the absence of alternative.

As a matter of fact, such a process of blending was already fairly advanced well before the Wall had fallen. The earlier blending, however, undertaken and perpetuated inside the territorially sovereign supra-national camps, was still less than planetary because it was confined by the territorial limits mutually enforced onto each other by the reciprocally antagonistic camps – even if each of the two competing camps aspired to planetary domination. By laying wide open the heretofore off-limits and out-of-bounds sectors of the planet to the neoliberal member of the spectre siblings, the fall of the Berlin Wall inspired and propagated a Fukuyama-style mentality of the end of history. The centuries-old sibling rivalry between spectres, time and again lapsing into a fratricidal war, has finally reached its end – so it insinuated; and thus the victor, the neoliberal spectre, found itself left alone on the planet, no longer challenged and no longer forced to lean over backwards in order to keep in check, contain or convert its alternatives – now conspicuous solely by their impending absence. At least its prophets and apostles believed this to be the case. The two Bushes, father and son in quick succession, in cahoots with their respective British amanuenses Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, had to learn the faultiness and disingenuity of their conviction the hard – gory, shameful and humiliating – way.

⁵⁶

Invisible Cities

⁷

⁸in statu nascendi

Liquid Modernity

Over the recent years, evil has conformed, and continues to conform, to these fluid proclivities and habits.