What Is to Be Done

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

— Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals [The “categorical imperative”]

The slogan “Freedom of Criticism” is at present the most fashionable one, and the most frequently employed in the controversies between Socialists and democrats of all countries. At first glance, nothing would appear more strange than this solemn invocation of freedom of criticism by one of the parties to the dispute. Can it be that voices have been raised among the leading parties against the constitutional law prevailing in most European countries, which guarantees freedom of science and scientific investigation? “Something is wrong here!”—any outsider must say to himself on hearing this fashionable slogan repeated at every opportunity, but who has not yet got to the bottom of the differences between the disputants. “This slogan is clearly one of those catchwords which are taken up by custom and almost become generic terms.”

— Lenin, What Is to Be Done? [1. Dogmatism and “Freedom of Criticism” (1902)]

1. Introduction

With the climax of the drama in the Middle East, the “debates” on social media are becoming increasingly intense, increasingly personal, and thus increasingly irrational.

On June 20th, I posted a response prompted by one such exchange, and announced that I would expand on it further:

Perhaps the irony escaped me, but as far as I can tell there is no state that denies Iran this right [to self-defense]; it’s even written somewhere in a UN manifesto.
Does Iran have the right to issue a fatwa against Salman Rushdie to have him killed?
Does Iran have the right to hang homosexuals from a crane?
Okay, the people of Iran are being held hostage by a bunch of infantile ayatollahs.
Just as Israel is being held hostage by a bunch of infantile rabbis.
Just as the “God-save-the-US-of-America” is being held hostage by infantile Christian zealots.
And just as we infantile, well-behaved, far-too-cozy citizens are being held hostage by a handful of billionaire corporations.
Maybe it’s time we stop safely playing rabid lunatics off against each other for show, from the comfort of our irony-loungers, and instead come up with a plan for how to defend ourselves effectively. It’s no small task, but this constant game of “being right” is a mess.
“What is to be done?”
That’s what I intend to work out. And I’ll try to avoid offering Lenin-style advice such as: “Communism must not be accompanied by an unfulfilled love life” — because that would mean something is already forbidden from the start.

This will not be an attempt to explain what’s wrong on both sides of the conflict (Israel versus Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran) — instead, I will try to take a step back and map out the problems I perceive in the discussions taking place across various media platforms, and above all attempt a diagnosis of what is going wrong within those discussions themselves.

In the footsteps of Immanuel Kant: not to explain what Archimedes’ law precisely entails; not to determine which behavior is “good” and which is “bad”; which artwork is beautiful, and why. He goes a level deeper (or higher), seeking to map the conditions and presuppositions of our thinking, our moral decisions, and our judgments. So not what constitutes a correct judgment in itself, but how such a judgment comes into being. He calls this form of critique (analysis) transcendental.

My text is anything but a final statement culminating in a well-argued conclusion; it is a search — and perhaps, to quote Rancière’s Ignorant Schoolmaster, not about finding what we expect to find, but always about finding something.

At this moment, as I see it, there are two central problems: religion and information processing. I will now subject both to closer investigation.

2. Religion

This, in and of itself, is already a headache file. In the media we find the full spectrum of opinions on the phenomenon of religion — from those who find solace and purpose in it, to those who consider it a backward and malignant force. There are plenty of examples on both sides.

Opponents in particular often find satisfaction in the absence of proof for the existence of God. The reasoning typically goes like this: if God exists, then how can He allow so much suffering? After all, He is supposed to represent the Unconditional Good. That is a fallacy — I believe it stems from a false premise (though I’m no expert in the field). First, you turn God into a kind of Santa Claus (the Unconditional Good); then you observe that the world is anything but unconditionally good — and therefore you conclude that God does not exist. As if human beings had no autonomy, no freedom to act — for better or worse.

In a late work, Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone, written in the midst of the French Revolution (1793), Kant attempts to relate the phenomenon of religion to reason. Religion arises from a moral need, and that need must be taken seriously — by investigating how it might be aligned with practical reason and, ultimately, with his formulation of the categorical imperative.

This work was not exactly well received. His central message — “Man is radically evil” — ran directly counter to the revolutionary optimism of the time. Humanity was in the process of taking its destiny into its own hands, and Rousseau’s maxim — that man is born an open and good being (all cards on nurture) — still echoed with hope.

After examining and rejecting the possible hypothesis that man is born from the good, Kant arrives at his inescapable conclusion: that humanity is rooted in evil. Radical evil — and the term “radical” here is meant literally; it comes from the Latin word radix, meaning root.

Kant ultimately formulates three forms of evil. The “first evil” is weakness (I smoke cigars even though I know they’re bad for me, but I can’t help myself). The “third evil” is evil tout court, where the immoral crosses over into the amoral. The “second evil,” or impuritas, is the most complex. It is filled with ignorance and foolishness. (Incidentally, “foolish” is not the opposite of “intelligent,” but of “wise.”) The tragedy of this form of evil is that it can be committed with the best intentions — a lesser good that conceals a greater evil. The lack of knowledge is the root cause, often stemming from laziness, indifference, or foolishness. Hannah Arendt called this its banality. That’s why power, when confronted with a bitter truth, so often responds with the best of intentions. The road to hell is paved with them. Kant’s second evil represents, in many ways, the human condition par excellence.

According to Kant, evil is the inescapable condition for living in freedom.

Man must make himself what he is or will be in a moral sense, good or evil. Both are necessarily effects of his free choice; otherwise he could not be held responsible and would be morally neither good nor evil.

It is neither essential nor universally necessary to know what God does or has done for our blessedness. What is necessary, however, is to know what man himself must do to be worthy of that assistance.

2.1 Imagination

Religion is, alongside art and science, the quintessential domain of our imagination — our capacity to experience, create, or think of something that is not (yet) based on factual truth. And of course, this can take many forms, for better or for worse. There are countless examples of evil deeds committed in the name of one deity or another. The atomic bomb is undoubtedly a technological masterpiece, but its use in 1945 was among the darkest acts in humanity’s already disastrous history. Karlheinz Stockhausen — admittedly caught off guard by a question — initially considered the IS attacks on September 11, 2001, a masterful artistic articulation of Lucifer (a hero in his opera Licht). According to him, the attack was an unprecedented composition. All the ingredients were there: a masterful plan, thorough analysis and rehearsals, and perfect timing — first one tower, then a pause, and then the second — a dramaturgical masterpiece. (This was also reflected in how the attack was depicted in the following weeks: in slow motion, accompanied by Barber’s Adagio, zooming in on a stranded boot amid the rubble.) But then it dawned on him that something was fundamentally wrong: the audience of this ‘artwork’ had no idea what was about to unfold, and that they were, apparently, part of the piece — with over 3,000 deaths as a result. And a multiple of that in the ensuing war in Iraq, launched in response to 9/11 on false, fabricated grounds.

Still, no sane person would conclude from this that religion, art, and science should be banned.

I think we need to better understand the concept of doubt. It is a core element of imagination. We suspect something, try it out, analyze the consequences, and arrive at a judgment. It is precisely this aspect on which the sharpeners in all religions aim their arrows. Doubt is forbidden, the word of their deity is absolute. For that reason, art and science are by definition suspect. Irony as well, by the way.

This is also true in populist circles: art is tightly restrained, and science is reduced to mere opinion. There is no absolute truth anymore; everything is relative. Climate change? Vaccination? No, that’s just a viewpoint. The artistic value of Bach, Beethoven, Rembrandt, or Shakespeare? A product of the white colonialist male — that quality judgment is ‘normative’. Relativism flourishes in both left-wing and right-wing circles. Here, we truly face a fundamental problem: is a universal aesthetic judgment still possible, or is everything ultimately the result of a political power struggle?

2.2 Doubt

Doubt is not the opposite of conviction, determination, consistency, or purposeful action. Above all, it is the capacity for self-criticism — something that is largely lacking today on social media, often leading to endless back-and-forth shouting matches.

We set out to create something, which means we must plan, find or design tools and instruments, and gather other necessary objects; then we get to work and at some point pass judgment based on a critical analysis of what has been achieved so far. Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s somewhat good, or maybe it’s not good at all. In the latter case, you can start over again. Artists and scientists know this arduous process very well. Your capacity for self-criticism is seriously tested; there is a deadline, you’re tired, not everything has to be perfect, right? Or — and here lies a treacherous wolf in sheep’s clothing — perfection doesn’t exist at all, everything is normative, it all ultimately doesn’t matter, and we’re only fooling ourselves. You can learn to eat anything and find everything beautiful, if you want. Or can you?

3. Information Processing

In the first chapter of What Is to Be Done? we encounter the phrase “freedom of criticism” — which Lenin calls a slogan. Nowadays, we more commonly talk about ‘freedom of expression,’ which is already a dilution of that idea. Everyone and everything is allowed to claim whatever they want, and since ‘truth’ is mostly normative, and ‘criticism’ a misunderstood concept, we no longer have solid ground to stand on. Lenin stands like a seasoned apparatchik, ayatollah, rabbi, or priest firmly behind his dogma. No room for doubt. So what do we truly need to do here?

The biggest problem of recent decades is the enormous amount of information coming at us at exponentially increasing speeds. Technological development is advancing at a rate far beyond what our critical capacities can keep up with. Developing data streams without corresponding filtering techniques is disastrous.

We witness this catastrophe unfold before our eyes in the media, one ‘fact’ after another, whose factual accuracy we cannot verify. To give a recent painful example: the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. During the attack around 1200 Israeli civilians were killed, and around 250 were taken hostage. And then all kind of unverifiable stories appear. Egypt claimed it had warned Netanyahu for this three days before the attack, Netanyahu denies. Further, horrific stories quickly circulated about women being raped and mutilated, babies being beheaded and burned in ovens, a pregnant woman having her belly cut open — the worst imaginable hell. And these stories also came from reputable media outlets such as the BBC and the New York Times. It has since become clear that no evidence was found to support these claims. In an interview with the media outlet Double Down News [DDN], former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (Netanyahu government, 2023/24) explained how these stories spread worldwide. It is a staggering insight into Netanyahu’s world. And yes, we cannot really verify the truth of Gallant’s statements either, but the least we can say is that they come from an unquestioned source — namely, Netanyahu’s own camp.

[see: interview Yaov Gallant]

• An interesting example of this problem around truth and fact is the so-called ABC conjecture, a notorious problem in number theory that the Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki claims to have solved in 2013. To this end, he developed pages upon pages of new theory, which unfortunately none of his mathematical colleagues could properly assess. I’m obviously not concerned here with the problem itself; it may well be that by now, twelve years later, the proof has been accepted or rejected. What matters here is the issue of a truth understood and judged by only one person. Can that really be called truth? In other words, if one person asserts a truth without a single other person able to verify it, is that a ‘truth’? How many people are needed to establish a truth as such? If only one person says that 1 + 1 = 2, and everyone else believes it is 3, for example because that suits them better, is it then 2 or 3?

Meanwhile, AI technologies have advanced so far that videos appear in the media whose authenticity is extraordinarily difficult to assess. Any government or interest group can make us believe whatever they want. And then the only thing left to us apparently is to shout even louder at each other to prove we are right. Facebook and other digital platforms are more than happy with this — the cash register in their stores keeps ringing.

3.1 Forms of Information

What forms of information do we have at our disposal, and does the form ultimately matter?


— To begin with, we have an enormous amount of written texts, ranging from ancient Chinese, Greek, and Arabic philosophers and scholars, to Kant, and onward into the twentieth century. No bits or bytes involved yet, but already this leads to so many problems that it all results in one big Babylonian confusion of tongues. Just among my circle of Facebook friends there is fierce debate over, for example, the meaning of Michel Foucault — for some a hero, for others the cause of Trump-style populism. And that concerns only one or two books. (I won’t engage further in that discussion here, but I cannot shake the impression that Foucault’s work has not always been read carefully; on both sides of the debate, mind you.)


— In addition, of course, we have images: traditionally consisting of prints, paintings, sculptures, artifacts, and architecture. From roughly the end of the 19th century, photography, film, and phonograph records were added — image and sound.


— At first, there were no digital techniques involved, yet confusion over interpretation and meaning was already enormous.


— Then came the digital age, across all media: text, image, and sound, which has unimaginably accelerated the speed of information.


— And more recently, the use of AI, which can reproduce all existing texts, images, and sounds in no time. But, more seriously, can also manipulate them.


It seems to me that this last observation answers the earlier question: artificially intelligent forms of information are of a new, different order. When interpreting, say, a dialogue by Plato, we may differ in how we interpret the text, but not about the physical text itself; that is factual. With AI-generated text (or images), we cannot be certain.

3.2 Filtering

Which methods can we develop to adequately interpret the flood of information coming at us? First and foremost, we must develop filtering techniques.


Two aspects are important here:
a) Which existing filtering techniques can we use, and which ones do we need to invent?
b) On what (substantive) grounds do we apply filtering?

More questions arise:
c) Could we perhaps deploy AI to help develop these filtering techniques?
d) And who will do this? It will require advanced programming skills.

4. Time, times, and half a time

As promised, no ready-made answers, only the identification of problems. I hope there are people willing to think along. That means we first need to devise a structure in which this can be a meaningful process. That will probably take some time, since we are all busy, busy-er, and half busy.

Important follow-up questions for me:
— How is a meaningful and truthful universal quality judgment conceivable? We might begin with an artistic judgment.
— Is it meaningful to view our current time as the ultimate end of the Romantic-Idealistic project?
— Which medium should we use? Facebook seems unsuitable to me; it would generate way too much noise.

Both the first questions are interconnected. An interesting book about Romantic Idealism is Rüdiger Safranski’s Romanticism: A German Affair.

“I’ll be back!”

— Cornelis de Bondt, June 21, 2025