In the face of Western collapse, prostitutes are exchanging their dollars for gold, and a “famous American brand” has just purchased, for twelve million dollars, a gold toilet (101 kilos of 18 karat), called “America,” the work of the Italian conceptual artist Maurizio. … Cattelan. If the “famous American brand” could now acquire “Fuente”, Marcel Duchamp’s ceramic urinal, it would complete a bathroom on par, in terms of price, with those in the Salamanca neighborhood of Madrid, but in New York.
And if we’re talking about conceptual art, the CIA shouldn’t be too far away (see “The CIA and the Cultural Cold War”, by Frances Stonor Saunders), but this thread of imagination will take us to the golden toilet of “The Wallet”, Zelensky’s partner in Ukraine, and that’s not the case either, it’s one thing to fight against Russia with Jackson Pollock, it’s another to fight with Lindsey Graham. Or what goes from victory to defeat.
In his book “The Defeat of the West,” Emmanuel Todd, who knew how to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1976, began! (“The Final Downfall: An Essay on the Dissolution of the Soviet Sphere”), in a continuation of the book “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” by Max Weber, who saw on the eve of the 14 war in the rise of the West the rise of the Protestant world: the fear of damnation, the need to feel chosen by God, led to the creation of a work ethic and a strong individual and collective morality, although by abandoning the Catholic equality of men, with their condemned and elected, it produced the worst forms of racism (anti-blackness in the United States or anti-Jewish sentiment in Germany).
— Today, Todd says, the collapse of Protestantism means intellectual decline, the disappearance of the work ethic and massive greed (official name: neoliberalism): the rise becomes the fall of the West.
Weber explored the relationship between the Protestant Ethic and capitalism, and Erich Fromm saw the relationship between capitalism and anal eroticism (the infantile stage that corresponds to the Golden Age). A brilliant synthesis of both discoveries will be made by Norman O. Brown. Octavio Paz has left us the most suggestive pages about these relationships: There was a time when the face was close to the ground and the genitals; The face finds that memory unbearable, so it laughs or vomits; Sex tells us that there is a golden age; For the face, this age is excrement. “Life begins with tears and excrement…” (Quevedo). Stool is a corrupted sun, just as gold is frozen light, and the sun is embodied in bullion. Storing gold means storing life (the sun) and preserving excrement. Metamorphoses of gold and excrement constitute the secret history of modern society.
Luther receives the revelation in the toilet, at the moment when he empties his stomach. The dualism of sun and excrement is polarized, according to Paz, in the two great poets of the Counter-Reformation: Gongora, the poet of the sun, and Quevedo, the poet of excrement.