To Preserve or to Burn

Instructions for Living in the Society of Fear, by Georges Bataille

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“ [...] death shroud existence, slave for a pittance

condemned to die before I could breathe

millions are screaming, the dead are still living

this Earth has died yet no one has seen”

I took a couple of economics exams at university. Despite my resistance, I achieved excellent results. There was, however, one thing I could never quite understand.

The study of economics begins from a small and rather boring premise. A fundamental assumption: on planet Earth there exists a finite quantity of resources relative to human needs, which are instead virtually unlimited. Scarcity is therefore the basic condition of life on Earth, making economics the science that analyzes how to efficiently manage those limited resources for as many uses as possible.

Sitting in study halls—between a coffee, a cigarette, and a shameless attempt to flirt with whichever girl happened to brighten those otherwise dreary days—I would sometimes lose myself in thought, my head buried in my hands.

“Scarcity.” “Limited resources.” Okay, that makes sense, I would tell myself. For example: at any given moment there is a finite tonnage of gold, magnesite, or whatever, on Earth. Solid, tangible matter.

But there was something I couldn't shake.

The objection that haunted me was this: the “resources” that economics textbooks filled their pages with did not include what was perhaps the most important and decisive one of all—namely, the vital energy carried by every human being.

More than that. By striking it from their chapters they also excluded the only “resource” that is potentially inexhaustible and self-regenerating.

I realize—and I realized even then—that my position was rationally indefensible. I was stabbing centuries of Western Reason in the back.

What the hell is “the vital energy carried by every human being”? Energy that is “inexhaustible and self-regenerating.” To hell with the first law of thermodynamics.

I used to imagine—it was a private amusement of mine, perhaps a way of exorcising the university studies I hated with all my being—bringing this argument up during an exam. Maybe with that assistant professor in his forties, balding and frustrated, who replied irritably to every email I sent him. I would have lectured him—fueled by yet another coffee—about this “vital energy” that no textbook ever mentioned. Partly to create chaos and make him lose a few more hairs; partly out of compassion, to awaken a spark of self-respect in him and make him rebel against the life that would likely see him die ordinary and forgotten.

None of that happened.

I got my top grade, the exam unfolded in the most lifeless tranquility imaginable, not a single hair was harmed on my sworn enemy's head that day, and he is probably still fighting, today as he was years ago, to see the words “full professor” printed on his office door.

But the idea of vital energy remained lodged in my mind.

A few years later, on the recommendation of a friend, I read a seemingly bizarre book. It was written by one of those men who pair anonymous lives—he worked as a librarian by day and wrote by night—with wild inner existences. The Accursed Share, by Georges Bataille.

At first I had the impression I was dealing with a charlatan. Someone who talked, among other things, about economics without mastering not only its more complex assumptions, but not even its most rudimentary foundations (I was still proudly clinging to my grade of thirty: Christ, it must have been good for something... wasn't it?).

I was on the verge of abandoning the book. Pride, however, compels me—at the cost of tremendous headaches—to finish every book I start, even when the words repel me like icy water under a shower. It often proves a useless and unproductive fixation; I simply waste time on people who have little worth saying.

This was not one of those cases.

Bataille belonged to that generation of writers—mostly philosophers, to be honest, who lived between the two World Wars—who spoke about a little bit of everything, mixing together the most diverse fields of knowledge. A very dangerous thing, since it is almost always a guarantee of intellectual fluff.

As far as I'm concerned, specialized knowledge is a blessing, perhaps accompanied by a broader vision capable of connecting highly specialized research into a larger horizon of meaning.

Yet in this case, the broader vision is there.

And it makes sense.

The author begins with a critique of the bourgeois society of his time. The principle that guides it, he writes, is that of “utility, that is, material utility. [...] It is limited to the acquisition and preservation of goods on the one hand, and to the reproduction and preservation of human life on the other.”

In simple terms: the production of material goods and the maintenance of the greatest possible number of human beings. This is the guiding spirit of bourgeois society.

Wonderful, in theory.

In practice, however, a society whose inspiring principle is simply “remaining alive” bears an unsettling resemblance to a patient in a medically induced coma, attached to machines in a vegetative state.

“The most appreciable part of life in bourgeois society coincides with the condition of productive social activity [...] a flat and unbearable conception of existence.”

What the author seeks to challenge is not merely an economic model but an entire implicit anthropology: a vision of the human being reduced to an organism to be preserved and a productive force to be optimized.

Within this framework, everything that exceeds the logic of utility—play, risk, loss, intoxication, sacrifice—appears as a scandal, something to be contained or eliminated.

This, Bataille says, is the vision of life and humanity that bourgeois society attempts to impose.

But it is not the only possible one.

He contrasts it with what he calls “the real needs of society.”

In a striking metaphor he imagines a father and a son—that is, bourgeois society and ourselves, with our deepest desires.

“The contradiction between current social conceptions and the real needs of society resembles the narrow-mindedness that leads a father to oppose the satisfaction of the needs of the child dependent upon him. This narrow-mindedness is such that it makes it impossible for the child to express his own will. The father's constant concerns are housing, clothing, food. But the boy is not even allowed to speak about what gives him fever” (that is, what animates him in his vital desire).

And he concludes:

“...it is sad to say that conscious humanity has remained underage. It recognizes its right to acquire, preserve, and consume rationally, but excludes on principle unproductive expenditure.”

Each of us, at some point in our lives, has been that boy. Perhaps, in part, we remain him forever.

Because that voice that “has no right to speak” never truly disappears: it becomes internalized. Bourgeois society does not merely impose a model from the outside; it installs it within us in the form of self-control, prudence, and calculation. We become the guardians of our own excesses.

And what if a son, in order to be authentically himself rather than merely an extension of his father, had to betray him precisely? To reveal to both of them, by living courageously, exactly the kind of life the father himself failed to embody. A son worthy of the name is not the shadow of his parent but the necessary heresy against every dogma the parent tries to impose. Perhaps.

But let us return to Bataille's argument.

“Unproductive expenditure.” Dépense. From the French: expenditure, spending, consumption, cost.

Yet we must be precise: not every form of spending is dépense.

The consumption of goods, for example, remains within the logic of utility. It is expenditure in exchange for some kind of return. Whether it is a Labubu doll or the temporary illusion of having given meaning to a Sunday afternoon at the shopping mall—perhaps while holding your new furry little friend in your hands—the logic remains the same.

The expenditure of Bataille's dépense, on the other hand, is what breaks this logic. It is loss without return and without justification. It is that which serves no purpose whatsoever, and for that very reason opens up an entirely different realm of experience.

What Bataille reminds us of is that life is not made merely to preserve itself. It grows, exceeds itself, overflows. It produces more energy than is necessary for mere survival.

And, he argues, this is already visible in the way nature functions.

“The source and essence of our wealth are given by the radiation of the Sun, which dispenses energy—its wealth—without return. The Sun gives without ever receiving. Men sensed this long before astrophysics measured such incessant prodigality; they saw it ripen the harvests and associated its splendor with the gesture of one who gives without receiving. [...] Solar radiation produces an excess of energy on the surface of the globe. Living matter first receives this energy and accumulates it within the limits imposed by the space accessible to it.”

This image is decisive.

For Bataille, original wealth does not arise from exchange but from a unilateral gift, from a gratuitous excess.

And he continues:

“The Sun squanders its energy generously only in a second moment; first it uses it to the maximum for growth. Only the impossibility of continuing growth opens the way to squandering.”

This passage is crucial.

As long as there is room to grow, energy is reinvested. It is only when growth encounters a limit that the excess can no longer be accumulated and must be spent somehow.

Remaining within the example of solar energy, let us imagine a simple and concrete scenario.

Suppose there existed some point on Earth where nature, due to the particular conditions of its habitat, could no longer increase its biomass. This would not stop solar energy from continuing to flow. That energy could no longer be fully converted into new growth, because growth at that particular location had reached its limit.

What would happen to the solar energy then?

It would continue to radiate nonetheless: dispersing as heat, evaporation, decomposition, and the “useless” movement of living matter.

Leaves falling without any productive purpose.

Animals consuming more than strict survival requires.

Processes of “biological luxury” such as flowering or birdsong.

It is here that dépense appears.

At the moment when excess energy can no longer be translated into growth and instead resolves itself into expenditure that produces no utility in the strict sense, generating instead complexity and a proliferation of living forms.

Let us broaden the scope and see how the French philosopher's argument finds echoes in the deepest structures of reality itself.

According to General Relativity, space-time is not an immobile container inside which things simply happen. It is not a passive backdrop. It is dynamic and expanding.

The universe is therefore not moving “within” a pre-existing space-time, because space-time itself is continuously growing.

The Friedmann equations confirm that galaxies are not simply traveling apart through inertia within an already existing space-time that remains passive with respect to their motion. Space-time itself is stretching, continuously increasing its extent and carrying the galaxies along with it.

Like a football team playing on a field whose dimensions expand as the match progresses. A field where the players are not only chasing the ball but also the ever-receding boundaries of the pitch.

Today we also know that this expansion of space-time is not slowing down.

It is accelerating.

For the purposes of this argument, it is not important to dwell on why this is happening. That would require discussing so-called dark energy: a physical component that accelerates expansion while gravity works to restrain it.

Instead, let us focus on what the universe seems to be telling us through its continuous and accelerating expansion.

It shouts to us, every passing second, that its movement is not the weary pace of something being dragged along by events.

It transforms itself.

It redraws itself.

It opens itself and accelerates.

The universe has never sat idle with its hands folded.

From the very first moments of the Big Bang—which was not an explosion within a pre-existing space, but rather the emergence of space and time themselves—matter has followed trajectories of ever-greater organization and complexity.

From particles to stars.

From stars to chemical elements.

From elements to molecules.

And from molecules to life.

Within this cosmological narrative there is something that recalls Bataille's intuition of excess.

The universe does not appear merely concerned with maintaining what already exists. It constantly employs the energy at its disposal to generate new structures and new possibilities.

Human beings do not represent a break in this process but one of its most complex expressions.

Even consciousness itself can be interpreted, from this perspective, as the product of that creative abundance that runs through the cosmos.

Humanity is not a separate event, nor a second beginning.

It is a local configuration of the universe's process of expansion and increasing complexity.

A variation on the theme of its ancient symphony—beautiful and moving.

It is the threshold beyond which the universe, through its own organization, becomes capable of perceiving and representing itself.

As human beings, we are the way in which it is reborn as an experience of itself.

We are organized space-time, temporarily capable of consciousness.

Good.

Now let us try to read these phenomena through Bataille's lens.

The universe is not dragging itself reluctantly into existence. It is a continuous succession of transformations that occur because they are possible.

It expands and becomes ever more complex because the conditions governing it make all of this possible.

A human observer watching it unfold from the outside—expanding in size and complexity—could hardly avoid interpreting it as the most powerful and unstoppable form of will imaginable.

The truth, however, is that none of this happens through inertia, nor through any form of “will” as we understand it.

These processes occur simply because the conditions and laws of the universe make continuous expansion and increasing complexity possible.

In reality, power coincides with occurrence.

What can be, simply is.

The expansion of the universe and the emergence of increasingly complex structures are therefore not anomalies but the fundamental way in which excess energy transforms reality.

The possible is not a calculation. It is an excess of vital energy so violent that it demands to happen.

We belong to this story as well.

A human being is not merely an organism that consumes energy in order to survive. He is a form through which the universe invests its surplus in the production of complexity.

We are one of its most astonishing forms of dépense.

We are part of the overall picture and play an indispensable role within it, just as flowering, birdsong, and all manifestations of “biological luxury” in forests are integral parts of those ecosystems.

Bataillean dépense is present in the deep structures and fundamental laws of reality itself. It offers an image of reality's overflowing power. Reality does not merely preserve: it disperses and transforms beyond every strictly utilitarian purpose.

Reality is not parsimonious.

Nor is it built around the bare minimum.

It is built around the possible.

This is where the fundamental law of dépense emerges.

Through his biological example, Bataille is telling us that we are not dealing with a moral or cultural choice but with a structural necessity.

Excess is not an option.

It is inevitable.

“Excess energy can only be lost without profit.”

Period.

This excess energy cannot be retained indefinitely. It must be spent somehow.

What exceeds cannot simply be preserved and repressed without consequences.

Up to this point, we have observed the creative excess of dépense in forests and even in the expansion of the universe.

But Bataille was not writing a treatise on cosmology.

He was talking about us.

How does dépense manifest itself in human societies?

For Bataille, it can take elevated forms such as art, luxury, celebration, and the unproductive gesture.

Or it can return in devastating forms: war, compulsive consumption, blind violence, addiction, and the self-destruction of the body.

If a society forgets how to dissipate its excess symbolically—how to sublimate it—it will end up dissipating it catastrophically.

Here lies the decisive point of his thought.

The difference is not between dissipating and not dissipating.

It is between forms of dissipation.

Between a loss that is recognized and ritualized—and a loss that returns as crisis and destruction.

When a society forgets its symbolic and socially codified rituals of dépense, it does not eliminate excess.

It represses it.

And what is repressed does not disappear.

It accumulates.

The more a society organizes itself around the ideals of preservation, security, and risk reduction, the more unstable this accumulation of vital energy becomes.

Excess, deprived of avenues of expression, does not vanish.

It radicalizes.

Until it finds a way out.

Then dépense returns, but in a degraded form.

No longer celebration, but crisis.

No longer sacrifice, but destruction.

No longer chosen loss, but imposed loss.

A society that makes preservation its absolute principle does not eliminate dépense.

It merely loses control over it.

These are powerful pages.

They possess that contagious vitalism that animates us only during certain moments of our lives—usually the most fertile ones.

Books like this force those who read them to realize how little we honor the days we are given to live.

It is not one of those texts that set out from the beginning to offer rosy and optimistic visions of reality, only to end up selling cheap illusions and comforting lies.

Rather, it is a book—setting aside the sections where the author ventures into debatable economic analyses—that is at once spiritual and pragmatic.

It succeeds in speaking about something that cannot be measured or touched, vital energy, yet something that all of us experience directly in one way or another.

It was an electrifying reading experience.

For days I felt intoxicated by that generous and creative vision of life.

Even today, perhaps after the initial fever that tended to amplify its effects has faded, the fire released by those pages still burns through everything I do.

I felt strong.

Open.

Dynamite.

The most dispiriting days at the office—which only weeks before had crushed my spirit—became opportunities to express that excess of vitality.

I found it everywhere.

Truly everywhere.

In my meals: I was hungrier and ate more.

In my evening workouts, which despite the exhaustion of the workday I no longer felt like postponing.

In the plans for the days, weeks, and months ahead that blossomed naturally in my mind.

It was a state of inner serenity and openness to the world that I had experienced only at certain moments in my life.

Usually when a series of favorable external circumstances aligned and gave me an excuse to be happy.

This time, however, everything began from within.

From a new conviction.

“On the surface of the globe there occurs a movement resulting from the passage of energy at this point in the universe [...] But this movement possesses a form and laws that are, for the most part, unknown to those who use them and depend on them. [...] Humanity exploits certain material resources, but if it limits their use to the resolution of immediate difficulties, it assigns to the forces it has set into motion an end that they cannot truly have. Beyond our immediate ends, their activity in fact pursues the useless and infinite fulfillment of the universe [...] The living organism receives, in theory, more energy than is necessary for maintaining life. The excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system; if the system can no longer grow, if the excess energy cannot be entirely absorbed by growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit, spent willingly or unwillingly, gloriously or catastrophically.”

There is us.

And there is the “system.”

The system in which we are embedded, whether we like it or not.

The world in which we live, whether we like it or not.

Whether it moves or remains still, whether we like it or not.

That reading had turned me into dynamite, yes.

But the world around me seemed motionless.

Not literally: things happened, bodies moved, days passed.

Yet it felt as though everything had already been decided in advance.

As though every gesture had been carefully calculated beforehand, every impulse corrected and channeled until it became harmless.

The same energy I had felt vibrating through the pages of Bataille's book seemed, out in the world, restrained and treated with suspicion.

I gradually realized that this was not merely a difference in intensity.

It was a divergence of principle.

Where I had glimpsed a life that overflowed and exceeded itself, wasting itself without justification, I found instead a life dedicated to preservation, protection, and careful management.

Not simply a matter of living less.

But of living against something:

Against risk.

Against loss.

Against the unforeseen.

Again, not different degrees of intensity.

Different principles.

Different foundations for understanding what it means to live a life to its fullest expenditure.

My discomfort slowly took on a clearer shape.

It was not caused by nostalgia for some lost intensity.

It arose from perceiving the gap between a vision of life as expansion and a world that seemed organized entirely around its own reduction—around becoming smaller, safer, and more harmless.

My thoughts eventually spiraled into a bizarre short circuit. I found myself sympathizing with those who, in these years of chaos and suffering, had become champions—so I thought deep down, and I am somewhat ashamed to admit it—of the movement of vital energy.

At any cost.

Even at the cost of embracing evil.

Wars and displays of raw power projected onto the world.

The mystical-religious breath that justifies the right to crush whoever stands in the way of one's path toward greatness.

But also that destructive and “domestic” form of vitalism that plunders other people's lives through personal relationships—not conquering territories but conquering people, using and bending them to one's own ends. Usually without ever recognizing one's own inner devastation.

In other words, I found myself embracing dépense in its destructive and catastrophic form.

That energy which, once denied, must find some way to emerge and realize itself.

Deep down, however, I knew mine was more a theatrical pose of excess than a deeply held conviction.

I simply could not accept a world that treated the future as a threat rather than a promise, shrinking itself smaller and smaller.

I wondered whether I was the one who was mistaken—or whether the true error belonged to those prophets of disaster and “happy degrowth,” those who had trapped the world in a deathly stillness, in that false calm that always precedes the most devastating storms.

There are eras that organize themselves around a positive ideal.

Others learn to survive only by avoiding the worst.

Ours, I told myself—and still tell myself—belongs to the latter category.

It promises neither greatness nor freedom nor expansion.

Only protection.

Reduce harm.

Absorb impacts.

Anticipate risks.

Manage uncertainty.

Security has become the moral principle of our age.

A small age.

For small men and women.

Reflecting on Bataille and the world we inhabit in these terms reminded me of another great book I had read years earlier.

Its author, like the French philosopher, occupied a somewhat marginal position.

Someone who had dismantled, through the force of argument, the excesses of our obsessive desire to medicalize and psychologize society at all costs.

In How Fear Works, Frank Furedi describes with remarkable precision a shift in meaning that transformed Western societies beginning in the 1980s.

“At that time, alarmist and disoriented responses to a wide range of concerns—the AIDS epidemic, global pollution, urban crime—indicated that society had become maniacally obsessed with fostering a climate of fear and cultivating a predisposition toward panic.”

In other words, concrete dangers no longer mattered as much as the atmosphere of fear itself.

Fear ceased to be a circumscribed reaction to a specific threat and became a cultural climate.

Someone might object.

Since the 1980s, the world may indeed have become objectively less safe for those who seek a peaceful life. Risks may genuinely have multiplied and lurk around every corner.

Let us assume—for the sake of argument, since determining whether this is true is not actually essential—that this is the case.

In Furedi's interpretation, it changes nothing fundamental.

A culture of fear has emerged that now exists independently of reality itself, within people's perceptions.

Reality exists, certainly.

But so does our perception of reality.

And that perception, in turn, feeds back into reality, shaping expectations and decisions.

Contemporary society does not merely register dangers.

It amplifies them.

Then disseminates them.

Then internalizes them.

We live immersed in a grammar of vulnerability that magnifies our fears of the world.

Childhood.

Health.

Education.

Language.

Relationships.

Public space.

Every sphere of life is recoded as a potential site of harm.

Uncertainty is no longer something to pass through.

It is no longer the necessary condition under which we exercise our will and make decisions that shape our lives.

Today uncertainty itself is treated as an evil to be neutralized.

Prudence—which I struggle not to call by its true name, cowardice—ceases to be one virtue among others and becomes the supreme criterion of legitimacy.

Furedi insists that this sensibility no longer concerns only exceptional threats.

It colonizes ordinary life.

“Concern about high-profile threats is accompanied by a regime of constant anxiety regarding more mundane and ordinary risks of everyday life. Diet, lifestyle, and child-rearing practices, together with dozens of other aspects of daily existence, are now obsessively scrutinized for the risks they allegedly pose.”

It is the sign of a civilization that has stopped inhabiting the world as a proving ground and has begun treating it as a hostile environment to be disinfected.

It was here that I found Bataille's reflections converging with those of the English sociologist.

They illuminated one another, producing a brighter and more powerful light.

Because what appears in Furedi primarily as a moral and political diagnosis—the advance of the security impulse, precaution at all costs, and supreme suspicion toward risk and toward anyone who promotes a voluntary, proactive attitude—finds in Bataille a deeper, anthropological counterpart.

The French philosopher reminds us, as we have seen, that life is not made merely to preserve itself.

It grows.

It exceeds.

It overflows.

It produces more energy than survival alone requires.

And that excess cannot be retained forever.

It must be spent.

Through dépense.

The world cannot simply be administered conservatively.

At least not without consequences.

The security impulse.

Precaution at all costs.

Supreme suspicion toward risk.

The deathly paralysis that follows from them.

All of this comes at an enormous cost.

If a society forgets how to dissipate its excess vital energy symbolically, it will dissipate it anyway—but catastrophically.

It is here that Bataille and Furedi intersect in a dangerous way.

The meeting point of their theories becomes decisive.

What is the culture of fear, after all, if not a systematic attempt to block Bataillean dépense?

To avoid risk is to avoid loss.

To avoid loss is to subordinate everything to utility and preservation.

To continuity without disruption.

To place the world—and the human beings who inhabit it—on a hospital bed, confined to an induced vegetative state.

But life, even when subjected to absolute prudence, does not cease to overflow.

Energy that can no longer express itself through momentum, daring, and challenge is simply forced to change form.

It does not disappear.

It accumulates as pressure.

Ours is a civilization that has made utility and the elimination of suffering its implicit metaphysics.

Every action must justify itself.

Every activity must produce a return.

Every experience must demonstrate its functionality.

The ultimate goal, like a Russian nesting doll, is to defuse the catastrophic potential of the future by sterilizing the present.

Even things that once belonged to the sphere of pleasure are now recovered in therapeutic and performance-oriented terms.

We rest in order to work better.

We exercise in order to relieve workplace stress.

We meditate in order to regulate productivity.

We even come to love only under the sign of compatibility and emotional management.

As long as another person helps us love ourselves, we tolerate them.

The moment they cease to confirm us, cease to exist within the function we assigned them, we label them toxic.

In such a symbolic regime, any gratuitous loss lacking immediate justification can only be interpreted as incomprehensible madness.

Those who consciously choose risk are branded irresponsible for violating the imperative of safety, which has become society's unwritten but universally recognized law.

Conflict itself becomes pathologized.

As a result, we no longer know how to inhabit disagreement.

We experience it only as a battle for self-affirmation.

What would happen if we simply accepted the possibility that we might need to reconsider things we take for granted?

If we faced the discomfort generated by that possibility?

We no longer want to know.

We would rather visit the latest therapist, walk out of the office with a prescription in hand, head straight to the pharmacy, and then go home to swallow our drops.

Furedi captures this process particularly well when he insists on the transformation of vulnerability into the defining characteristic of the contemporary individual.

“Our culture of fear is founded upon—and reinforces—a fatalistic view of humanity. [...] Must we define ourselves through our vulnerability? Must we be afraid? The moment we begin asking such questions, we are already on the path toward recognizing that there is always an alternative. Whether we adopt the philosophy of precaution or embrace a more courageous approach to risk depends on how we understand what it means to be human.”

A society that speaks incessantly about fragility ultimately produces individuals who perceive themselves primarily as exposed and damageable, and therefore in need of protection.

Freedom itself ceases to be an original value and becomes a negotiable good.

People become increasingly willing to surrender portions of it in exchange for security and immunity from harm.

Not only in politics, where the compromise between liberty and surveillance has become a permanent feature of modern life, but also in ordinary existence.

In our schools and universities.

In the language we use.

In the relationships we cultivate.

In our symbolic spaces.

We constantly ask to be protected from judgment and disagreement, from the uncomfortable word that opens the harsh experience of exposure.

Insecurity is no longer a trial to be faced.

It becomes a potentially lethal threat to be prevented.

In this sense, the culture of fear is not simply a system for managing risk.

It is a pedagogy of renunciation.

We have learned not to dare.

Not to expose ourselves.

Not to push against limits in order to cross them.

And yet it is precisely this movement that produces its opposite.

A society that restricts every avenue for voluntary loss does not eliminate negativity.

It postpones it.

Concentrates it.

Then causes it to explode all at once.

Where it is no longer possible to lose in a shared, symbolic, and ritualized manner, people end up losing badly.

Without common forms through which to connect with others.

Without any sense of proportion.

The repressed dépense then returns in forms we know all too well.

It returns in economic crises, where apparently rational accumulation culminates in sudden collapse.

For years the system retains, expands, monetizes.

Then the pressure is released through the massive destruction of capital—that is, of lives and futures.

One could cite, among many examples, the Clinton-era social housing policies of the 1990s and the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 that followed.

It returns in sudden social violence and the polarization that sets public life ablaze.

Hatred spreads and can no longer be contained within the ordinary mechanisms of disagreement.

It returns in wars, which, after decades of relative calm, have once again gained ground throughout the world.

War is, Bataille argues, the quintessential form of catastrophic dépense—the moment when what has found no other avenue of dissipation is consumed through real destruction.

It returns in our bodies.

In burnout.

In addiction.

In compulsive behaviors.

In all those forms through which the impossibility of risking oneself outwardly is converted into an inward loss that hollows us out from within.

This is perhaps the cruelest paradox of our age.

The society that seeks to shield life from every shock ultimately produces more violent explosions because it has lost the forms through which excess can be experienced without turning into ruin.

It has not become a less destructive society.

It has become a society that destroys more badly.

At the root of this anti-vitalist and security-oriented drift that underlies the culture of fear, Furedi argues, lies a fatalistic and anti-humanist conception of the human being.

This vision does not merely make people more anxious and fearful.

It diminishes their potential.

It teaches them to distrust themselves, others, and the world.

It nourishes misanthropy and skepticism regarding our ability to reason and act accordingly.

On this point Furedi is explicit:

“The most effective way to challenge the perspective of fear and the anti-humanist and fatalistic vision of humanity that follows from it is to introduce into society values that offer people the hope and confidence they need to confront uncertainty effectively.”

Today, the individual is defined by vulnerabilities and problems.

Society reimagines the reasons for living together around its protective function toward members considered fragile and exposed.

The future is assigned a single task: preventing the worst, which is already assumed in advance.

Not imagining and building something new.

The final pages of How Fear Works on courage and the Enlightenment can also be read as an indirectly Bataillean response, even though they emerge from a different intellectual tradition.

Where the culture of fear constructs individuals to be preserved, the Enlightenment invoked by Furedi places at the center human beings capable of judgment, risk, and autonomy.

Where our age calls for safe spaces and immunity from pain, Furedi reminds us that freedom exists only where uncertainty is accepted.

Where one chooses to run the risk of the world rather than retreat into the obsession with protection.

He writes:

“Hannah Arendt went so far as to argue that courage not only inspires hope in society but also guarantees its capacity to exercise freedom. It helps individuals and society avoid being overwhelmed by their fears.”

This is a crucial point because it shows that the opposite of fear is not recklessness.

It is a higher conception of what it means to be human.

The courage to expose oneself.

The subtle difference between freedom and a passivity that resembles servitude is therefore a matter of attitude.

Of the vision we hold of ourselves as human beings.

The entire struggle takes place along a very thin boundary.

An extraordinarily thin one.

That is why it has been so easy for prophets of catastrophe and advocates of sterile decline to persuade billions of people of the validity of their anti-humanist and fatalistic conception of humanity.

Bataille, however, goes even further.

For him, a society that wishes to be free must do more than relearn the value of courage.

It must relearn how to lose.

It must recognize that a life organized entirely around preservation is a mutilated life.

That excess is not a pathology to be disciplined but a truth of the human condition that cannot be ignored.

That not everything which matters can be justified through utility.

That there exist necessary forms of waste and fertile forms of unproductivity—gestures that are worth infinitely more precisely because they protect nothing.

The problem, then, is not simply that we live in a civilization that is too afraid.

The problem is that we live in a civilization that has lost the human meaning of loss itself.

It sees sacrifice and calls it scandal.

It sees conflict and calls it a defect.

It sees risk and already imagines destruction.

It sees excess and sees only deviance.

One is almost tempted to say: it sees violence and immediately begins repeating slogans about “crossing over to the wrong side,” labeling it abuse under every circumstance, regardless of context.

In doing so, the surplus of vital energy produced by our universe seeks other outlets, and life becomes opaque and devastating.

From this perspective, the transformation of fear into the guiding beacon of society—a beacon supposedly meant to protect us from suffering—is not an antidote to catastrophe at all.

It is one of the ways catastrophe is prepared.

A society that elevates security above all else ultimately subordinates everything else—freedom, truth, courage, judgment—to the necessity of preventing harm.

But a community that no longer knows how to take risks no longer knows how to live.

And that which fails to live when it should does not simply die.

Sooner or later, it explodes.

Our age has not abolished dépense.

It has merely destroyed the forms through which it could still appear as celebration, courage, and vital expenditure.

That is why it now encounters it as collapse.

Bataille writes, with a force that cannot leave one indifferent:

“Human life, distinguished from its juridical existence and considered as naked life unfolding upon an isolated globe in celestial space, from day to night, from one region to another; human life can in no case be limited to the closed systems assigned to it by certain reasonable conceptions. The immense labor of abandonment, flow, and storm that constitutes it could be expressed by saying that it begins only with the deficit of such systems. At the very least, the measure of order and moderation that it admits has meaning only from the moment when the forces ordered and restrained with moderation are released and lost for ends that cannot be subordinated to anything for which an account can be given. It is only through such insubordination, however miserable, that the human species ceases to be isolated amid the unconditional splendor of material things.

In fact, in the most universal sense, whether alone or in groups, human beings are constantly engaged in processes of expenditure. The variation of forms entails no alteration of the fundamental characteristics of these processes, whose principle is loss.

A certain excitation, whose total is maintained throughout alternating circumstances at a relatively constant level, animates communities.”

This is where everything comes together.

The universe overflows.

Life overflows.

Human beings overflow.

Not metaphorically, but structurally.

According to Bataille, excess is not an accident that occasionally appears in reality. It is one of reality's most fundamental characteristics.

And if this is true, then many of the categories through which we interpret ourselves become questionable.

Perhaps we are not beings whose highest calling is preservation.

Perhaps we are not creatures whose purpose is merely to avoid pain.

Perhaps the deepest meaning of life is not security.

Perhaps the attempt to organize an entire civilization around the elimination of risk contains a contradiction from which no society can indefinitely escape.

Because what exceeds must find expression.

Always.

The only question is how.

Gloriously or catastrophically.

Creatively or destructively.

As art or as war.

As celebration or as collapse.

As courage or as resentment.

As sacrifice freely embraced or as devastation suffered unwillingly.

This is why Bataille's argument is not merely political, economic, or philosophical.

It is existential.

It concerns the way we choose to inhabit our finite lives.

Whether we interpret ourselves primarily as vulnerable beings in need of protection, or as living manifestations of a surplus that seeks expression.

Whether we understand freedom as something dangerous to be managed or as the very condition under which life becomes fully itself.

Whether we see uncertainty as a defect to be eliminated or as the space within which new possibilities emerge.

The question is not whether excess exists.

It does.

The question is whether we will acknowledge it and give it meaningful forms—or continue repressing it until it returns in forms we can no longer control.

Seen from this perspective, many of the pathologies of contemporary society begin to appear in a different light.

Not merely as failures of management.

Not merely as technical problems.

But as symptoms of a civilization attempting to deny something fundamental about itself.

A civilization trying to preserve life while forgetting how to live.

Trying to eliminate loss while losing the very conditions that make existence meaningful.

Trying to secure the future by draining the present of its vitality.

And perhaps that is why so many people experience a vague but persistent sense of suffocation.

A feeling that something essential has gone missing.

Not because they necessarily desire danger, violence, or chaos.

But because they intuit that a life entirely organized around avoidance eventually ceases to feel alive.

The promise of total security conceals a hidden cost.

A shrinking of horizons.

A narrowing of possibilities.

A reduction of existence itself.

The tragedy is that this reduction often presents itself as wisdom.

As responsibility.

As maturity.

As care.

Yet beyond a certain point, it becomes something else.

A refusal of life.

Or at least a refusal of those dimensions of life that cannot be calculated, guaranteed, insured, or controlled.

Bataille's challenge remains unsettling precisely because it asks us to reconsider what we take to be obvious.

It asks whether a society can remain healthy when it recognizes only utility.

Whether a culture can remain creative when it fears loss above all else.

Whether human beings can flourish when they are taught primarily to protect themselves.

And whether courage, sacrifice, risk, celebration, and even certain forms of waste are not aberrations to be corrected but indispensable expressions of what we are.

In the end, perhaps the issue is not simply economic, political, or cultural.

Perhaps it is spiritual.

A question about what kind of beings we believe ourselves to be.

Whether we see ourselves as fragile creatures whose highest aspiration is preservation.

Or as participants in a universe that expands, transforms, creates, and exceeds itself.

A universe in which possibility itself appears as an irrepressible force.

A universe that never merely conserves, but continually risks becoming something more.

And so the question remains.

Do we want to find the courage to live again?

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To Preserve or to Burn

Instructions for Living in the Society of Fear, by Georges Bataille