PicoBlog

In a diary entry in 1910, while reproaching his education for doing him “great harm,” Franz Kafka jots down the following reflection: 

“I do not want to hear this reproach [of mine] contradicted; since I have already heard too many contradictions, and since most of the contradictions, moreover, have refuted me, I include these contradictions in my reproach and now declare that my education and this refutation have done me great harm in some respects.”

I imagine Kafka saying this tongue-in-cheek. He is too self-conscious to mean what he says without smuggling in a bit of self-deprecation. In fact, he takes the awful logic of the above statement up in his 1925 novel, The Trial. There the protagonist Josef K. is accused of various crimes. “Somebody must have slandered Josef K.,” says the opening line of that book, “for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong.” Any protests offered by the doomed protagonist serve only to confirm the rightness of his accusers. He is damned whatever he does or does not do. He is caught in a kafkatrap.

This is not Kafka’s term, of course, but one coined in 2010 by software developer and author Eric S. Raymond in reference to Kafka’s Trial. By definition, a kafkatrap is a sophistical rhetorical device—a fallacious argumentative strategy—that uses any denial by an accused person to serve as evidence of their guilt. This is, I think, one of the best interpretations of a phenomenon that we see everywhere nowadays. It is one of the signs of our time. Kafkatrapping is a logical fallacy but it is more than that as well. It also has a spiritual and metaphysical significance. It is my aim here to briefly discuss the former dimension of this particular sign of our times before touching on the latter.

Kafkatrapping operates algorithmically. It cannot tell you what things mean because it has no mind and denies any real minding of being. It can only really tell you what will happen to things once they have been force-fed through its unforgiving shredder-like code. We see this most clearly nowadays in how various tribal affiliations revolve around a series of recommendations, like those you might find when signed into an online store’s website: “If you liked Current Thing A, you will probably also like Current Things X, Y, and Z.” In the case of kafkatrap users, the formulation is likely to be more negative: “If you derive unnatural pleasure from discovering that Person A or System A is bigoted, you will probably enjoy believing that Person B or System B is bigoted as well, even if Person B and System B are innocent of any bigotry.”

Such an algorithmic procedure replaces thought with mere conceptual linkage. Content is nullified while discontent is amplified. Our ability to discern between things and consider their logical and ontological relations is sacrificed to an immediate and untested association. Association often assumes that combining or connecting two or more incomprehensible things is sufficient for generating comprehension. But the truth is otherwise. Even forms of political dissidence, as Christopher Lasch’s Angry Ghost points out, may gather around “algorithmic recommendation patterns.” One consequence of this is that beliefs get structured merely mimetically and so also fairly accidentally along lines of taste and preference rather than reason.

We should clearly despise the kafkatrap, this extended ad hominem, for being the manipulative tactic that it is. It can do nothing but disgrace and deflate people. Raymond writes of our chief example Josef K. that he is “enmeshed in a process designed to degrade, humiliate, and destroy him whether or not he has in fact committed any crime at all.” It seems that the “only way out of the trap is for him to acquiesce in his own destruction. Indeed, forcing him to that point of acquiescence and the collapse of his will to live as a free human being seems to be the only point of the process, if it has one at all.” Even though mild kafkatraps can be found in daily life, the algorithmic process of the kafkatrap is most common in our time in identitarian politics and cancel culture, which are fond of using shame to determine the shape of compliance and/or excommunication.

Perhaps there are other ways out of the kafkatrap than submitting to total self-implosion, but they are not obvious. Given how kafkatrapping functions algorithmically, the primary tendency nowadays of those who see the trick is to simply reject the paradigm that generated it. Certainly, this is part of the strategy I tend to adopt in discussions around the supposed issues raised by kafkatrappers. I cannot, after all, accept the premises upon which their kafkatrapping rests. This is a necessary and even helpful place to start. However, I also know that this risks generating a mimetic double ideology, which is likely to land us up with our hands full of another bouquet of alternate kafkatraps. Mere negation is never a sufficient defence against corrupt ideology. What is needed is a positive vision of what is good. There is, as this would imply, no lasting way out of kafkatrapping as long as the metaphysical dimension of the kafkatrap is not fully addressed. However, before getting to the metaphysics, some aspects of any kafkatrap are worth highlighting.

First, it is bound up in generalisation. More technically, it’s reliant on panchreston. This refers to a lazily inclusive but oversimplified explanation that is intended to account for all possible variations and contingencies within an area of concern. Panchreston typically accounts for things by means of a nebulous monocausality, indicated usually by an empty signifier like patriarchy or systemic racism. But such things cannot by any standard of reason be considered as actual causes or explanations for anything. By transferring responsibility to a terminological haze, it evades being of any practical use. Unfortunately, this by no means suggests that it evades being profoundly damaging if used to inform action. The kafkatrap reifies stereotypes. While it denigrates metaphysical realism, it essentialises any analysis it offers. It believes its own hype while specificity is denied any legitimacy. The actual quirks and quiddities of people and their subjectivities and historical situations matter nothing when a kafkatrap is unleashed.

If you are accused, for instance, of being the product of and participant in some form of ‘systemic’ thoughtcrime—sexism or racism or other anti-Current-Thingist bigotry or whateveraphobia—any specifics that you supply to contest the claim will be deemed evidence of your culpability. The strength of your counter-arguments matters nothing. The fact that you oppose the Current Thing is sufficient to confirm your delinquency. Whether you have done anything to deserve any accusation is beside the point. The accusation and your guilt are identical. It is, in this, rather satanic. Satan, in the Judeo-Christian scriptures, is the accuser.

The kafkatrap is, as this would suggest, a metonym of a larger ideology that is dualistic in an odd way. It suggests that the world consists of two kinds of people, the guilty who know they are guilty and the guilty who have yet to recognise that they are guilty. As far as the ideology is concerned, no one is innocent. The best shot at some semblance of innocence is tribal allegiance itself, but this is a fragile thing. At some point and in some way, everyone is going to be guilty of an infringement. The allegiance of the tribe is not to its members but to its ideology. Again, this is one of the consequences of the algorithmic structure of kafkatraps. The details matter nothing. The medium is the message—and the massage.

Second, by being rooted in generalisations, kafkatraps rely heavily on resemblances. This is a component of its insistence upon guilt by association. If you, by accidents of birth and appearance that you have no control over, look like someone who did atrocious things at some point in history, you’re doomed. If you happened to get along with someone who turned out later to be guilty of thoughtcrime, my condolences to you. Denouncing friends and family becomes a high priority for kafkatrappers. Notably, any ontological gap between the universal and the particular is invalidated. The accused are never merely guilty of a crime; they are concrete instantiations of the crime. They become the sin they are accused of. Being can be reduced to whatever ignorance dictates. This has been most horrific in power-fear regimes like communist Russia (see, for example, The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) and current communist China (see, for example, Ai Weiwei’s 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows), but the West has its own unique forms of tyranny even today. 

Third, as suggested in Kafka’s anxious diary entry, the kafkatrap grants priority to reproach. Vague expressions of disappointment and disapproval are essential to any kafkatrap. The point of the trap is to wrap the world in a web of guilt and judgement, with the mortifying result that people feel that they in some way helped to spin the very web they are now ensnared in. They are somehow both the perpetrator and victim not of any specific crime but of the indistinct conditions gestured to by the kafkatrap. Even while the guilt in question is free-floating, it is psychologically dependent on the fact that, as human beings, we are unavoidably porous to the feelings and desires of others. We are emotionally and mimetically interdependent. It is this porosity that gives any kafkatrap traction.

Fourth, as already implied, the kafkatrap is aimless. There can be no doubt that certain outcomes are the result of the so-called logic of the kafkatrap, of course. But the only outcomes that kafkatrappers are concerned with are those immediate to the process of kafkatrapping itself. The process is the point. The efficient cause has become the final cause. This process is then introjected by those who have been caught in the kafkatrap. The functional result of this is that they inevitably become participants in kafkatrapping others. Conversion to the dysangel, the bad news, requires converting others to it as well. Shared guilt is easier to bear this way, perhaps. This is one reason why people who are found guilty by some or other kafkatrap are encouraged by their friends to ‘never apologise.’ It’s not that apologising is wrong. We need humility, after all, and a way to correct our errors going forward. However, an apology should be avoided in this case because to apologise is not primarily about any specific crime committed. Rather, to apologise in this case is primarily to consent to the unacceptable terms of the kafkatrap.

This last feature of the kafkatrap seems rather Pauline in its nature, doesn’t it? “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” he writes in his letter to the Romans. Is this not proof that the theological is ideological? I’d say no. Ideology is decayed theology. It rips from context what is meant to be taken as a component of a complex whole and uses unworlded parts to dominate the whole and denigrate wholeness. We need to therefore read, without ideological blinkers, what St. Paul writes. His point is not that all have sinned in precisely the same way. Within this conception of sin, the specifics matter a great deal. I must take responsibility for my own sins, of course, as must anyone else. But I do not have to apologise for crimes I did not commit and I do not have to apologise for crimes committed by those I resemble. Mind you, taking credit for good deeds done by others that I resemble would be a similar folly.

St. Paul was all too aware of what happens when accusation becomes the driving force behind all proclamations and actions. We should remember that he was, before his conversion, a persecutor of Christians. He was once a kafkatrapper par excellence. After his conversion, in fact, he came to realise that his own saviour was caught in a kafkatrap. Christ was subjected to torture and crucifixion because his guilt was determined beforehand by state and religious authorities. Any evidence offered to prove his innocence was irrelevant in his trial. It is by no means insignificant, therefore, that kafkatrapping takes on the structure of scapegoating violence, which the gospel narratives so clearly expose and counteract, as René Girard shows in his work. Christ is utterly unlike the victim who wants to victimise in the name of victimhood. While dying on a Roman execution stake, he forgives those who have turned against him, and so contradicts any hint that vengeance should be sought—even for this most terrible of crimes.

Ah, but putting an end to guilt and reciprocal violence is not the aim of kafkatrapping. The accusers see sin as entirely universal. All have sinned in the same way by supporting a systemic sin. This sin is inescapable. That is what it means to be systemic. Its lack of specificity implies its unsolvability. This is why, caught in the web spun by kafkatrappers, people who accept the ideology must always ‘do the work’ and ‘keep the conversation going.’ If degenerate so-called intellectuals like Robin Di Angelo and Ibram X. Kendi are to be believed, it is impossible for racism to be stopped, for instance. Even Martin Luther King’s and Steve Biko’s hope for colourblindness, a properly practical answer to racism, is reframed by kafkatrappers like these, the new Pharisees in town, as yet more evidence of systemic racism.

It is this last point that most clearly reveals something about the metaphysics of the kafkatrap, or perhaps its anti-metaphysics. The fact that the ‘sin’ and ‘guilt’ paradigm of kafkatrappers denies all specificity implies a defiant inversion of the way that great religious traditions treat sin. In Christianity, to take the religious tradition I am most familiar with, sin is regarded as an obvious and terrible curse. But it is a curse because it denies the good and corrupts being. Sin implies a failure to recognise the good. However the cure to our sin gets addressed, harping on about the sin at the expense of refocusing our attention on the good can only ever be counterproductive. But in any ideology that resorts to kafkatrapping, the sin itself is the foundation and the aim. It can point to what is wrong but it has no good to point to. If the perennial tradition wants to return us to being, the 5-minutes old ideology cares nothing for being and only for the void. This is precisely why kafkatrapping tends to only amplify the very so-called problems it is apparently trying to solve. Kafkatrapping and nihilism are allies.

So what of the metaphysical meaning of what is evidently a denial of reason? In the early monastic tradition, the spiritually inclined became fascinated by a rather unusual and complex phenomenon that went by the name acedia. Typically, the word is translated as sloth, but it implies much more than mere laziness. It suggests boredom with being itself. It refers to metaphysical boredom. It is this, I believe, that is at the root of all kafkatrapping. To use terms borrowed from Gestalt psychology, it seems to me that the kafkatrap is the figure while acedia is the ground. Kafkatrapping creates chaos and scandal because the kafkatrappers are bored. Idle hands are still a devil’s workshop.

Acedia implies a more general disgust with the things of God, a loss of meaning, and even despair at ever attaining salvation. The simplest evidence of it for those ancient monastics was found in any tendency to seek distraction over time in prayerful meditation. Still, there are various manifestations of the phenomenon, from a general listlessness to a tendency to seek out a frenzy of activity instead of contemplation. It seems to me that the latter is more common in our time, although endless doomscrolling and searching and computer gaming and binge-watching are typical expressions of the former. We see sloth manifest most obviously in activism—especially of the more frantic and ineffective kind. The fact that in so many universities, activist scholarship is proliferating is one sign of this. 

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 AD) called sloth a sin against charity, and if there is anything that a kafkatrap is, it is this. It is a denial of love, and so also a loss of deep joy. Most obviously, it is an intellectual sin, although it can and does affect all other aspects of life. Evagrius Ponticus (345–399 AD), the most perspicuous diagnoser of this demon, is especially aware that acedia stifles the intellect, the chief function of which is to contemplate God. Metaphysical boredom can be defined by a general lack of care and a lack of spiritual energy. Evagrius suggests that, among other things, this affects how we perceive time. We find time passing more slowly, such that we more easily seek to fill it with trivialities. He also points out how this shapes our perceptions of space. We start to feel confined, hemmed in, and stifled. Therefore, somewhat surprisingly, acedia does not show up only in the posture of a slouch but also in the derangement of the endlessly distracted. No one is lazier than the person who cannot stay put, who always needs to keep the stimulation going. No one is lazier than a busybody. 

As we should expect from this, acedia gives rise to warped perceptions. It causes a loss of proportion and a failure to allow us to be truly attuned to the genuine nature and relations of things. Acedia is particularly manifest in five ways, noted by Evagrius: (1) in a kind of interior instability, accompanied by a constant need to change the scenery even if it means causing chaos; (2) in an exaggerated, let’s say covidian, concern for personal health; (3) in an aversion to any sort of manual work, accompanied often in our time by the rise of mechanised bureaucratic procedures; (4) in an aversion to carrying out one’s duties to one’s immediate neighbours; and (5) in a general sense of discouragement. Declinists of all historicist stripes are perhaps the most guilty of that last one, but it is difficult not to miss how these manifestations are evident everywhere. Confounding all chronological snobbery, this ancient insight into our capacity for listlessness seems to be more perceptive than many contemporary interpretations of the wayward soul.

And so, that little kafkatrap, the logic of accusation and guilt without redemption, is evidence of a general failure to love. Intellectual inertia is a sign of an inability to love. But isn’t it odd, then, that so many of the kafkatraps in our time seem to have issues of social justice in mind? Is that not somehow born out of a desire to love? I think not. I think that social justice, as defined by the intellectually fractious, is love’s counterfeit double. Its apparent love is really for some unspecified general conception of humanity, not for the neighbour who is right there in front of the one doing the kafkatrapping. Kafkatrappers, I would say, are in fact utterly hateful in their refusal to offer to the accused one of the clearest demonstrations of love: an opportunity for the other to be recognised and properly understood.

So then, what is the cure? For Evagrius, the cure is many-pronged, but high on his list is sheer perseverance—a word that reminds me of Simone Weil’s concept of attention. “Perseverance is the cure for acedia, along with the execution of all tasks with great attention. Set a measure for yourself in every work and do not let up until you have completed it” (Eight Thoughts, 6:17-18). In essence, the only way to contradict a loss of love and attention is to pay attention and dedicate oneself to love. The often difficult work of carefully working out nuances is something we should commit to. Proportioning some thoughts with others, for example, is an act of love. Seeing how details fit within the whole is of vital importance. Easy answers need to be reconsidered within their contexts. Kafkatrappers want no nuances, no proportion, and no love. They are too lazy to see a need for such things.

If acedia means hatred of being itself, it is no surprise that it leaves destruction everywhere that it treads. But I do not think acedia has to win. In fact, I don’t think it can ultimately win. It is trying to overcome reality with an illusion, and in the end, this is like trying to stop a speeding train by placing a small stuffed toy in front of it. I know that we do not like being bored and it is a tragedy that we are living in a time in which the primary war, the primary form of genuinely systemic trouble, is against any and all forms of sustained attention. We are all casualties in this war. In fact, as some research suggests, many of us would rather electrocute ourselves than be bored. But, mercifully, attention and perseverance and love can be learned. 

For Evagrius, this means learning at least five things: (1) that we need salvation and cannot journey alone; (2) that we need the double-effort of contemplation and work; (3) that we would do well to meditate on death and our own finitude, which amounts to getting into the details of our own lives against categories that seem to elude being itself; (4) that we need to contradict falsehood with truth; and (5) that we need to learn deep fidelity to being; we need to persevere, in other words, in living the truth and not merely paying lip service to it. We need a metaphysics of the intimate universal: goodness, yes, but goodness recognised and dutifully carried out; beauty, certainly, but beauty in beautiful acts and beautiful things; truth, definitely, but truth specifically applied within a life well lived; and unity, of course, but unity that transcends and includes real, concrete, and very present differences.

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