In defense of brutalism

Why we embrace the ugliness

The barbaric World Wars - and the subsequent US-regime hegemony based on blood and corruption - brought us the cynicism and hopelessness we express through the deliberate ugliness of brutalist architecture. We didn’t just lose faith in the world; we lost hope in ourselves.

This post is a follow-up to ‘Why civilisations collapse: Peak existential absurdism.’

Civilisational loop

The deliberate decadence of civilisations occurs time and time again in human history. Art flourishes and degenerates, in lockstep with its civilisation. Contrast hopeful freedom-inspired magnificence of the Renaissance with the cold deathly surrender of Soviet brutalism; when people gave up on themselves, giving in to the barbarism of statist totalitarianism.

Whenever a part of humanity achieves peak civilisation - after the ecstasy of entitled hope and self-aggrandising marvels of art and engineering wears off - that’s the point on the thread of destiny… that’s where it is all doomed to end, again and again… with the cruel tease of divinity almost within our reach, taunting us, provoking us to grasp it… only to be reminded that we are unable and unworthy of even glancing at it.

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Once we finish our majestic towers of Babel, and after we climb as high as their foundations can hold, we finally see the truth: that there is no god in the sky, at least not the type of deity we had imagined. Instead, we discover reality: that we can’t climb any further, and that we were never worthy of the things we had imagined to be worthy of/

The ideals we inspired to achieve were never within our reach - or worse - perhaps they were never real in the first place. So, we vent this indignant disappointment through reactionary ugliness; sticking it in the face of our naive ancestors, cruelly egging us on to go after fool’s gold.

The truth we discover is not the answer to the riddle of existence, but rather, that the riddle of existence is unsolvable; by humans at least. This truth is the harsh realisation that existence is indeed absurd and bereft of transcendent meaning; for humans at least. We finally realise that anything humans build will not last, and its meaning will not transcend this frail existence.

This is our Gilgameshian conclusion: that our past hope for the future was misplaced. Our faith in ourselves, that which inspired us to do great things and fueled our ambition, was proven naively undeserved.

Our ideals of the past were nothing but pretentious self-righteous hypocrisy; a haughty self-aggrandising of the human that has yet to prove himself worthy of higher ideals. Our audacious attempt to touch higher ideals was inconsistent with what we truly are: less than ideal. We had hoped the mere attempt to reach ideals would make us worthy of them, but our attempt has accomplished the opposite: we rested complacent in our delusion of ideals, the lie spoken by all those majestic buildings: that we were great when we were not.

Thus, brutalism comes as a helpful reflection on our true nature; a reminder that we should never venture to fly too close to the sun, lest we disappoint ourselves.

So, we retreat into cynicism, deriving some joy from this tragicomical conclusion; the only universal entertainment from the irony of life’s futility.

We thus descend into brutalist architecture and buildings deliberately made not to last, because we no longer see the point of hopeful idealism; we don’t see meaning in ourselves, let alone beyond ourselves. We no longer see any point in looking up to the sky, because we’ve already built the tower of Babel as high as it can go, and there is nothing higher we can achieve. Was that it? We will never know what we desperately need to know. We will never escape our nature, and we will never become anything greater. No tech implant can improve who we are. And if the dehumanisation of a cyborg’s semi-existence is our only hope, then we are truly hopeless.

Idealist delusion

Look at all the majestic architecture of the past: beautiful and grand, temples of hubris, shrines to our own deluded greatness. They are nothing but desperate immortality projects of people who imagine they’ll live forever through timeless mausoleums, tributes to their vanity; “eternal” structures with plaques signifying names that no one will read in the realm of the dead.

The idealism of brutalism

Brutalism is a graceful acceptance of the gracelessness of our being. It is the grandiose manifestation of our earned humility in rejecting the humiliating arrogance of the past… the naive optimism, the joyful climb, the wide-eyed trip to destinations imagined and undeserved… the gall to look higher than we can see… the building of majestic structures that serve as nothing but churches of collective narcissism.

Brutalism expresses our disillusionment, not so much in our reality, but with ourselves. We reach brutalism when we finally understand the arrogance of undeserved grandiosity; the brut who saw himself divine.

Brutalism is humility achieved after generations of hubris. We deliberately make ugliness in hopes of atoning for the hubris of our past… our ancestral projects of self-glorification. The brutal architecture, the modern art, the self-loathing ideologies, the self-destructive behaviours… we are punishing ourselves for the folly of self-delusion, our conscious belief in the the lie of our “greatness.”

Brutalism is revenge against our ancestors for the false hopes they gave us with the marvels we inherited, the obligation to chase the unreachable.

Humans keep proving they are unworthy of the things they had hoped for. For the organising of our societies, we still rely on the threat of the lethal violence of government, instead of looking to incentives, and violence only in self-defense. We are not civilised… we never were civilised. We still function as packs of wild animals (governments). We will never be civilised before we acknowledge the immorality and inefficiency of coercion in human affairs. Understanding this may be the only glimmer of hope we still have. But before we, as a society, understand that voluntaryism is the only ethical principle on which to base our civility, we cannot have a truly civilised civilisation. All cultural accomplishments achieved under the barbaric superstition of coercive government were mere glimpses of what we could have without it.

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Brutalism, as the conscious denial of undeserved inspiration, has always emerged as the last stage of a civilisation: the cynicism, the disappointment, the disenchantment with life, the accumulated regrets, the self-parody, the self-loathing, the self-destruction.

Brutalism is, on a civilisation level, the appreciation of the tragicomical nature of life… that we dared to dream so intensely in our youth, so bold in our aspirations, only to inevitably hit the wall with a realisation: we were never worthy of the heights we’d dreamt.

What can brutalism be other than the manifestation of decadence and degeneration, the inevitable sunset of the life of a civilisation? Brutalism serves as a reminder that we cannot escape our mortality by proxy through an immortal civilisation, or buildings that will crumble to dust. All things must end. This is the curse and blessing of our time-bound existence.

And if this realism is pessimism for you, then you’ve been spoiled.

History

Deliberately ugly brutalism is the expression of our subconscious loss of inspiration from the realisation that we were never as great as we had hoped to be; our imagined potential of the past was highly overestimated.

We came to this rude awakening in the 20th century when we, through our collective unconscious, realised that humans weren’t capable nor worthy of the ideals that had inspired them. And we aren’t… look at us! We look to coercive warmongering government to solve our problems, not because we don’t understand how stateless systems do self-government work, but because deep down we fantasise about brutalising our neighbour by proxy. We see the government’s mass-killers-for-hire, and we thank them for their “service” instead of spitting in their merc-scum faces. They blow up children from afar and slaughter hopelessly outgunned mullahs from unmanned vehicles, and we hold them as the supposedly ultimate masculine ideal? If these are our ideals, then brutalist ugliness is the least of our problems. Complaining about the ugliness of brutalism is thus burying our heads in the sand; a hypocritical denial of and distraction from how truly ugly our species is.

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The bottom line

The utter destruction of 20th century warfare, and especially the barbarity of WW2, shows us that there is no point investing in effort or emotion in beautiful architecture.

The deliberate decimation of Germany, especially that of cultural Dresden, was probably the final blow to inspirational hopeful architecture depicting higher ideals. If the architectural beauty of a city like Dresden can be instantly leveled by a few psychopaths in suits and military gimp suits, then the pursuit of such idealism is indeed futile. By that point, we had proven to ourselves how unworthy we were of beauty and the inspiration it brought us; we had realised how little we deserved our own hopes and dreams.

Brutalist architecture is just a low emotional investment in things we’ve come to realise won’t last; not in physical form nor in transcendent meaning.

Brutalism is the nobility of not wanting what we don’t deserve.

Embrace this harsh truth; that we never were worthy of such beauty… not really. And if you still crave for beauty, first strive to make yourself worthy of it before seeking it. To claim what is not yours is pride and hubris.

In the end, brutalist ugliness is getting in touch with our humility. Brutalism is a realistic expression of who we are. Such ugliness is not ideal, but neither is the way we organise our societies through coercion rather than through voluntary incentive.

Fix the inside of your house before tending to its exterior. To do the opposite is to be pretentious and hypocritical.

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