what is the goal of human life? and are we making progress toward that goal? looking squarely at human history, and asking not about a theoretical goal i just made up, but about the real goals that real people really have, i propose the following account: the goal of human life is to be subordinated, and the story of history is the story of bottoms chasing tops. on any other account, the shape of human history is incomprehensible; on this one, everything falls neatly into place. human beings need food, clothing, shelter, and someone to tell them what to think and do and to beat them senseless if they don't. as hegel insisted, the key to history is 'the master-slave dialectic'.
that gives rise to the social contract, under which, as rousseau so cogently puts it, we are free to be forced. as many have remarked, fifty shades of grey is an excellent parable of political history, a kind of more's utopia for an enlightened age like ours. indeed, in fifty shades of grey, history itself reaches its culmination in perfect self-consciousness.
as with any philosophy of history, whether vico's or herder's, hegel's, marx's, or colingwood's, the true test is how well it can help us half-assedly periodize the past and tendentiously pretend to predict the future. this one works great like that. primitive humans had to invent someone to whom to subordinate themselves. this was the asinine period. then came the rise of 'civilization' where people were all sexed up about emperors and pharaohs and caesars and stuff. this was the age of groveling, when they thought of their tops as babygods. as hegel said when he got a gander at napoleon, whom he called 'history all up in that ass': 'do me'. but we in secular modernity know that the point is just to find any old assad or clinton in the storm. in the amazing terminal stage of advancement for which we groan, we will be able to acquiesce effortlessly to the entirely arbitrary will of anybody at all: we have reached the end of history, the rapine epoch. that will be followed by a well-deserved extinction, and so good night.
history, hence, is a structure of antinomies, and we must ask: who will subordinate the subordinators? that is the real issue that evolution has been driving at, the reason we are conscious. thus, the professional dominatrix working over statesmen in london or dc is key to understanding the necessary dialectical unfolding of history itself. pimps are very conceptually important too, if for no other reason than to subordinate the dominatrices. (i use 'pimp' not in its contemporary acceptation as a general term of praise, but in its old-fashioned sense to mean a trafficker in human flesh. and yet my philosophy of history proves with apodeictic certainty that the current use of the term is entailed by the inevitable unfolding of the human spirit itself in time.)
the ideal of total human subordination is of course shared by the left and the right, and provides the only possible basis for the final synthesis of the will of the absolute in time and simultaneously the only possible culmination of the material structure itself of nature itself, or whatever. total human subordination is the only way to aufhebung our alienation and shit, erase our individual differences, and become as one in a sort of human gazpacho. we begin to realize that the point isn't who you are subordinated to or why, but the sheer fact of subordination itself, which is a turn-on and resolves all the contradictions we've struggled through for all these millennia.
human history can be seen as the triumphant march toward the realization of this goal; hegel thought so, for example, and he called the goal 'freedom', by which he meant a subordination so thorough that you could count ultimately on your own death by erotic asphyxiation. in that sense, human history really has been a triumphant march toward freedom. 10,000 years ago, most people wouldn't even have understood the concept of government. imagine how sexually frustrated they were! now any person anywhere is under surveillance and can be killed at any moment by a drone strike ordered up on a whim by people of the caliber of distinguished professor michael hayden. it is the orgasm at the end of history, baby.
