Feeling bored?Fragmented to smithereens by (a)social media and technology? Starved for existential meaning? Well, I might just have the antidote for you, stressing the ”anti” in (at least) two ways: Antti Balk’s massive tome Balderdash: A Treatise On Ethics is the anti-thesis of the contemporary fatigue that drains us all.
With an impressive page count of 560 pages, the book is a veritable onslaught about the signs of the bizarre times we live in – and there are many. However, let me make it clear that this is not essentially a cynical or bitter tirade against human folly. That would be too easy. Too easy for Antti Balk, anyway. His work is so meticulous and para-academic that you feel engulfed by argumentative intelligence instead of tsunamied away by emotionally reactive spurts.
If this is a treatise on ethics, it is decidedly a shocking one. Never before have so many examples of single-minded and double-spoken human hypocrisies been so eloquently amassed. In chapter after chapter, Balk spills corrugated beans about how things really are. Or, rather, how they’re not what they’re claimed to be in public discourse and ”civilized” meta-language.
Food, war, disaster, politics, science, religion, education, behaviour, sexuality, climate change, the history of progress (and regress) are but some of the topics included. Although divided by more or less thematic chapters and augmented by no less than 1591 footnotes (!) and a selected (!) references section of 30 pages (!), Balk’s book is basically one single flow of intense clarification.
The tone is humorous but never in a way that undermines the degree of poignancy. As a result, Balk suavely joins the ranks of classic, critical minds (iconoclasts like Gore Vidal, Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken spring to mind). And, again, it never spills over to cynicism, although there’s approximately one million possibilities in this book. Instead of going bleak and morose, one just revels in the amazing number of facts Balk has amassed. And how distinctly he draws conclusions and serves them up for the goo-goo-eyed reader.
Quotes to illustrate the tone of the tome could be numerous. When looking, I actually didn’t get further than the title pages, and this is a quote from another source: ”I am treated as evil by people who claim that they are being oppressed because they are not allowed to force me to practice what they do.” (D Dale Culledge) A finer description of the madness of our invertobratic culture couldn’t have introduced this book.
Were you waiting for the Apocalypse at the end of 2012? Well, it’s been around for a long time already, and Balderdash (which it surely isn’t) lets you follow the traces of the intricate self-destructive patterns of ”la comedie humaine”. To tackle such dystopic subjects in a well-researched yet entertaining way is not an easy task. But here it is. You just keep reading, convinced (rightly so) that the book is like a vaccine that actually doesn’t cause narcoleptic side effects. On the contrary, this is a real eye-opener and a fantastic read: a fierce pick-me-upper in the mass-media-muck-a-mush. A crash (and burn) course in dystopian dialectics.
Balk’s own ethical perspective is that of the individual against... Not so much against the masses or society as such, but rather the effects of the masses’ willingness to obey blindly for a piece of the illusion of safety. But it’s important to note that this is not a Crowleyan or Randean rant in favour of prefab libertarian agendas. In fact, several isms and ologies abound in the book too, as warning examples. In a time when common sense has never been more un-common, Antti Balk lets us have it in blow after blow after blow.
Balk’s focus is to just display, occasionally with a sardonic remark. That’s the real strength of the book, as, again, it would have been too easy to just go ballistically cynical. However, his allegiance to the individual in alliance with nature’s ever-revolving cycles and changes stands crystal clear: ”To live is to change. All laws, all customs, all standards that produce uniformity are in direct opposition to Nature’s imperative to change and develop through variety. The forces that resist change, resist life.”
I suggest that you buy the book, read it, be utterly amazed... Things aren’t always what they seem, right? There’s always more to find if you scratch the surface of what seems too well-polished. This book will help you start scratching. Beware though: some of the most polished surfaces are probably your own!
That my Finnish friend Antti Balk has written such a brutally honest and critical masterpiece makes me proud as hell.
Antti P Balk: Balderdash: A Treatise On Ethics (Thelema Publications, Helsinki-London-Washington, 2012)
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