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Book Review: Shock Induction (Chuck Palahniuk)

B. Kline — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 02:54:54 +0000

Book Review: Shock Induction (Chuck Palahniuk)

Shock Induction (2024) is the latest novel from Chuck Palahniuk (note the standard spelling; the query used a common variant). Published by Simon & Schuster in October 2024, it’s a slim, roughly 240-page dark satirical parable that blends dystopian speculation, postmodern experimentation, and hypnotic literary tricks.

I have previously reviewed Palahniuk’s “Not Forever, But For Now”.

Another Chuck Palahniuk novel to review… and another disappointment and let down. Am I getting older and growing out of Chuck? Or is Chuck growing out of Chuck himself? Is he just a shell of his former self or is it that there are too many other authors in a similar vein? Perhaps my joy of his writing style just isn’t there anymore. I’m not sure, but lets dive into a bit with this review.

Shock Induction by Chuck Palahniuk

Back of Book Cover Blurb

The description and back of the cover blurb on Shock Induction, by Chuck Palahniuk, as per GoodReads:

From the bestselling author of Fight Club comes a dark, satirical parable about a string of mysterious high school disappearances, the seedy underbellies of billionaires, and the tough choices we make in the face of an uncertain future. In Shock Induction, the best and brightest students at a seemingly reputable high school are disappearing. Every day it seems another overachiever is lost to an apparent suicide. But something far more sinister is lurking beneath the surface. These kids have been under surveillance since birth, monitored and measured by an online service called “Greener Pastures.” It’s here, in Greener Pastures, that billionaires observe and recruit the next generation of talent. The highest test scores, the best grades, and the most niche extracurriculars just might land these teenagers an enticing offer at auction. A couple billion dollars in exchange for the remainder of your life and intellectual labor sounds like a pretty fair deal—doesn’t it? In a high school only Chuck Palahniuk could imagine, students must choose between the risk of following their dreams or the security of money and a lifetime of servitude to the world’s wealthiest and most elite—but how much of a choice do they truly have?

–Shock Induction (GoodReads)

Book Review

Description

The story is set in 2037 and centers on Samantha Deel, a precocious, talented high-schooler (strong student and aspiring singer) trapped in a grotesque, abusive home life with pill-popping, gasoline-huffing parents and a lecherous uncle. At her school, the best and brightest students are vanishing one by one—officially chalked up to suicides, but something far more sinister is at play. These overachievers have been tracked since birth through “Greener Pastures,” a shadowy online surveillance and auction platform where billionaires and elites bid on young talent. The winning bid buys a teenager’s entire future: their intellectual labor, creativity, and life in exchange for vast wealth and “security.” It’s framed as an irresistible deal in a world where following your dreams looks riskier than selling your soul to the highest bidder.

Palahniuk layers in government experiments with “ERE poisoning” (chemicals supposedly laced into books to manipulate readers’ emotions and focus) and weaves in real hypnotic techniques. The title itself refers to “shock induction”—a sudden jolt (a word, image, or repetition) used in hypnosis to break someone out of their normal thought stream and make them suggestible. The narrative itself tries to do this to you, the reader: short, pointillistic chapters that mimic doom-scrolling on a phone, sudden fourth-wall breaks (“Psych!”), pages of repetitive mantras (like the word “avocado”), and interpolated passages or quotes from classics (The Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, Alice in Wonderland, Shakespeare, David Copperfield). The prose swings between minimalist and maximalist, surreal and deadpan, laced with Palahniuk’s signature grotesque humor, drugs, sexual weirdness, and off-color jokes.

At its core it’s a scathing update on themes he’s explored since Fight Club: the illusion of choice under late-stage capitalism, the commodification of human potential, the failures of the American education system, surveillance as the new normal, and language itself as the ultimate brainwashing tool. It’s pitched (by reviewers) as The Truman Show meets The Hunger Games meets Euphoria with an Alice in Wonderland twist—a “coming-of-rage” story about a rebellious misfit trying to seize control of her own narrative.

Critique

Shock Induction is Palahniuk doing what he does best—weaponizing the novel form itself—but pushed further into experimental territory than most of his post-Fight Club work. The meta-hypnosis gimmick is genuinely clever and ambitious: the book isn’t just about mind control and commodified youth; it tries to perform it on the reader through repetition, disorientation, and literary Easter eggs. When it works, the effect is unsettling and exhilarating; clarity dissolves, you feel the trance setting in, and the satire lands with real sting. Samantha is one of his stronger recent protagonists—empathetic, furious, and believable in her teen angst without tipping into caricature—and the surreal set pieces and dark humor keep the pages turning even when the structure gets labyrinthine.

Many longtime fans (including some reviewers) hail it as his strongest book in years—a return to the subversive, mind-bending energy of Rant, Haunted, Invisible Monsters, or Survivor after some recent misfires. It’s a love letter to reading itself, treating literature as a drug that can rewire you, while simultaneously daring casual readers to keep up. The collage style (short bursts juxtaposed like phone-scrolling potato chips) and pointillistic convergence of tiny disparate pieces can deliver more emotional punch in a few pages than many linear novels manage in hundreds.

That said, the very things that make it bold also make it divisive. Goodreads sits at a lukewarm ~3.2/5, and plenty of readers find the non-linear, confusion-inducing structure maddening or opaque rather than hypnotic. Supporting characters often feel thin, some sections read like scattered messes, and the second-person social-commentary passages occasionally tip from playful into preachy. It alienates fans who just want another tight, accessible gut-punch like Choke or Fight Club; this one demands endurance and rewards re-reading (you’ll almost certainly miss references the first time). The “hypnosis on the reader” trick can backfire into frustration instead of fascination.

Ultimately, Shock Induction is Palahniuk evolving on purpose—pushing away from the persona that made him famous thirty years ago and challenging readers to grow with him. It’s not a perfect or universally enjoyable novel, but it’s a fearless, fucked-up, thought-provoking one that lingers like a literary contact high (or poisoning). If you’re in the mood for a chaotic, satirical fever dream that treats the act of reading as both salvation and trap, it delivers. If you want straightforward storytelling, you’ll probably feel hypnotized… into putting it down early. Worth trying if you’ve ever loved Palahniuk at his weirdest.

In the lineage of writers who have stared into the abyss of human commodification—Camus’s stranger alienated from meaning, Orwell’s Winston broken by surveillance, Beckett’s figures reduced to waiting in ashbins, Ligotti’s puppets aware of their strings—Chuck Palahniuk has long positioned himself as the American heir apparent. His early work weaponized the grotesque to expose the hollow core of consumerist masculinity and corporate myth-making. Yet with Shock Induction (2024), that once-sharp blade has dulled into something closer to performative frenzy, a book that gestures toward profundity while mostly succeeding in exhausting the reader.

The premise arrives with the familiar Palahniuk bite: in a near-future 2037, elite high-school students are vanishing, not into suicide as the official story claims, but into literal auctions run by the shadowy “Greener Pastures” platform. Billionaires bid on youthful potential, purchasing entire futures in exchange for wealth and security. Samantha Deel, our narrator and aspiring singer, navigates this dystopia amid abusive parents, hallucinogenic experiments, and the book’s central gimmick: “shock induction” itself, a hypnotic technique mirrored in the prose through repetition, fourth-wall ruptures, interpolated passages from Gatsby, Moby-Dick, Shakespeare, and Alice in Wonderland, and pages that dissolve into mantras (“avocado” repeated ad nauseam) meant to disorient and entrance.

Palahniuk’s writing style has, over the past two decades, settled into a predictable pattern of these same formal tricks. What once felt revolutionary— the fractured timelines of Rant, the typographic assaults of Invisible Monsters, the oral-history collage of Snuff—now reads like a signature stamp applied to every new manuscript. Repetition is not a scalpel but a blunt instrument; gaps and white space are not voids of existential dread (as in Beckett or Ligotti) but literal breathing room inserted between micro-chapters. The fourth-wall asides, the sudden “Psych!” interruptions, the pages of single-word loops: these are no longer innovations but reflexes, the literary equivalent of muscle memory that has atrophied into tic.

One cannot escape the suspicion that an editor’s quiet directive hovers over every draft: hit the page quota. Where Steinbeck or Orwell achieved devastating economy by saying only what must be said, Palahniuk appears to pad deliberately—repeating phrases until they lose all charge, stretching single ideas across blank expanses, tossing in extraneous literary quotations not for resonance but for bulk. The result is a book that feels contractually obligated to be a novel rather than artistically compelled to exist. The hypnosis gimmick, meant to indict the reader’s own suggestibility under late capitalism, instead indicts the author’s reliance on the same old bag of effects to reach an arbitrary word count. What could have been a lean, Camus-like parable of commodified youth balloons into a repetitive fever dream that mistakes quantity for hypnotic depth.

The intent behind all this is clear, even admirable on paper. Palahniuk seeks to make the novel a literal instrument of mind control, turning reading into a drugged experience that critiques how language, surveillance, and late capitalism erode autonomy. One can almost hear the echo of Freud’s talking cure gone wrong, or Vonnegut’s meta-fictional winks in Slaughterhouse-Five, but stripped of restraint and replaced with frantic collage. Where Lewis (C.S.) might have layered allegory with moral gravity, Palahniuk opts for bombardment: short, pointillist chapters mimicking doom-scrolling, sudden “Psych!” interjections, grotesque sexual asides, and chemical-laced absurdities.

The result is less hypnotic than irritating. The experimental form—once innovative—here feels like exhaustion rather than revelation. The narrative fractures so relentlessly that coherence becomes optional; supporting characters blur into caricatures, and the satire lands with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. The commodification of youth is a potent theme, ripe for existential dread in the tradition of Orwell or Camus, yet it is buried under so much noise—and so much visible filler—that the critique flattens into gesture. One finishes the book not enlightened or unsettled, but merely relieved the assault has ended.

For readers who prize the stoic endurance of Beckett’s minimalism or the quiet terror of Ligotti’s cosmic pessimism, Shock Induction offers only sporadic glimpses of what might have been: a few razor-sharp lines on the illusion of choice, a haunting image of potential sold at auction. But these moments are drowned in excess. Palahniuk, who once channeled Lynchian surrealism with precision, now seems content to mimic its chaos without the underlying discipline.

This is not the abyss staring back; it is the abyss shouting over itself until the reader walks away. Two stars: for ambition that occasionally flickers, and for reminding us how far the once-vital provocateur has wandered from the clarity that made his best work endure.

Chuck’s Writing Fall Off

Chuck Palahniuk arrived in the 1990s like a literary Molotov cocktail, his early novels—Fight Club, Choke, Lullaby—delivering a visceral, black-comic assault on consumerist masculinity and the hollow rituals of late capitalism. In those books the grotesque served the satire: every spilled bodily fluid or deadpan monologue felt necessary, the way Vonnegut’s absurdism or Orwell’s surveillance state felt necessary. The prose was economical, the formal tricks earned, and the reader emerged shaken but strangely clarified, as if the author had performed a controlled demolition on the American Dream. For a time Palahniuk stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the writers this ledger reveres: a pulp Camus, a Lynch of the paperback rack, a stoic who refused to look away from the abyss and instead spat into it.

By the mid-2000s the trajectory had already begun its slow, unmistakable descent. Snuff, Pygmy, and Tell-All retained the surface shocks but lost the underlying necessity; the transgressive elements started to feel like contractual obligations rather than organic eruptions. What had once been radical fragmentation—Invisible Monsters’ typographic violence, Rant’s oral-history collage—hardened into a reusable template. Repetition, once a hypnotic scalpel, became a blunt hammer. The fourth-wall asides, the sudden “Psych!” interjections, the pages of single-word loops or white space masquerading as existential pause: these no longer destabilized the reader so much as they announced, with increasing weariness, that Chuck Palahniuk was doing the Chuck Palahniuk thing again. Where Beckett pared language to the bone until silence itself screamed, Palahniuk began padding the silence with filler, as if an editor’s page-count quota had become the true antagonist.

The later novels—Adjustment Day, The Invention of Sound, and especially Shock Induction—confirm the pattern has calcified into self-parody. Each new book arrives with the same checklist: a dystopian premise commodifying human potential, a precocious narrator steeped in pop-culture detritus, interpolated literary quotations that feel less like dialogue with the canon and more like literary name-dropping to pad the word count. The hypnosis gimmick in Shock Induction is emblematic: what could have been a lean, Camus-like parable about the auctioning of youth instead bloats into repetitive mantras and micro-chapters that mimic doom-scrolling so faithfully they induce the very boredom they purport to critique. One senses the author no longer trusts the story to carry its own weight; instead he stretches, repeats, and inserts gaps the way a contractor adds unnecessary drywall to meet square-footage requirements.

This is not the gentle maturation of a Steinbeck or the deliberate minimalism of a Ligotti; it is artistic entropy. The once-fearless provocateur now seems trapped inside the very brand he helped create, recycling the same shocks until they lose their voltage. The result is work that gestures toward the abyss but never quite stares into it—content instead to shout the same slogans louder, longer, and with more white space. For readers who still demand the stoic clarity and moral gravity that once defined Palahniuk at his best, the decline is not merely disappointing; it is a quiet betrayal of the very transgressive promise that made his early books endure.

Overall Rating

I gave Chuck Palahniuk’s Shock Induction two stars in my review because, while the premise holds genuine promise, the execution ultimately collapses under the weight of its own exhausted tricks. The novel imagines a near-future where talented teenagers are auctioned off to billionaires through a platform called “Greener Pastures,” framed through the lens of hypnotic “shock induction” techniques that the prose itself tries to replicate via repetition, fourth-wall breaks, literary collages from Gatsby, Moby-Dick, and Shakespeare, and pages filled with looping mantras. I acknowledged the ambition—echoing themes from Camus, Orwell, and early Palahniuk—but found the fragmented, pointillist style and constant interruptions less hypnotic than irritating. What once felt radical in his work now reads like a tired formula: short chapters mimicking doom-scrolling, gratuitous white space, and repeated phrases that seem designed more to pad the page count than to deepen the satire on commodified youth and surveillance capitalism. The result is a book that gestures toward existential dread but delivers mostly noise and caricature, leaving the reader relieved when it ends rather than unsettled or enlightened.

Looking back at my review, I see it as a lament for Palahniuk’s artistic decline. His early novels delivered necessary grotesquerie with precision and purpose; now the same tools—repetition, meta asides, grotesque asides—feel recycled and obligatory, lacking the stoic economy of Beckett, the cosmic quiet of Ligotti, or the moral clarity of Orwell and Steinbeck. I rated it two stars to reflect that disappointment: flashes of potential exist, but they drown in excess and self-parody. In the future, I hope Palahniuk steps away from the branded formula that has calcified around him. A leaner, more disciplined novel—one that trusts the story instead of padding it—could rediscover the raw power that once made his voice essential, letting the abyss stare back with fresh clarity rather than shouting the same slogans louder and longer.

My GoodReads Rating: ** out of *****
My LibraryThing Rating: ** out of *****
Overall GoodReads Rating: 3.16 (as of 3.14.26)

Other Book Reviews

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Book Review: Create Dangerously (Albert Camus)

B. Kline — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 18:16:53 +0000

Create Dangerously by Albert Camus

Create Dangerously

Live dangerously, think dangerously, create dangerously. This can be a wonderful way to sum up the life – and writings – of Albert Camus. One of my favorite writers, his works have profoundly touched me in my own writing, in my own way of thinking, and my life in general. One of my biggest inspirations for writing, alongside Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell, Spinoza, Antonie de Saint Exupery, Aldous Huxley, Philip K. Dick, Nietzsche, and a host of others. Creating dangerously is something that gets to the core of writing, and gets to the core of what writers SHOULD do. It doesn’t mean “no fear or no worries” but it does mean to take risks, to write what needs to be written, to create what needs to be created. Art for art’s sake. To hell with the dictator, to hell with the public, to hell with who might cause you trouble for the creation. Create dangerously. Think dangerously. Live dangerously.

Albert Camus

Portrait of Albert Camus from New York World-Telegram and Sun Photograph Collection, 1957 (photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

Albert Camus was a famous writer, an existentialist writer that helped herald in the existentialist movement alongside Sartre and others. His “brand” of Existentialism was “Absurdism”, insofar as that life has no inherent meaning and it is up to us to find meaning, or to find purpose, or to just live, in an absurd world.

The following comes from his biography on Wikipedia:

Albert Camus (/kæmˈuː/^[2] kam-OO; French: [albɛʁ kamy] ^ⓘ; 7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960) was a French philosopher, author, dramatist, journalist, world federalist,^[3] and political activist. He was the recipient of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44, the second-youngest recipient in history. His works include The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Fall, and The Rebel.

Camus was born in Algeria during the French colonization, to pied-noir parents. He spent his childhood in a poor neighbourhood and later studied philosophy at the University of Algiers. He was in Paris when the Germans invaded France during World War II in 1940. Camus tried to flee but finally joined the French Resistance where he served as editor-in-chief at Combat, an outlawed newspaper. After the war, he was a celebrity figure and gave many lectures around the world. He married twice but had many extramarital affairs. Camus was politically active; he was part of the left that opposed Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union because of their totalitarianism. Camus was a moralist and leaned towards anarcho-syndicalism. He was part of many organisations seeking European integration. During the Algerian War (1954–1962), he kept a neutral stance, advocating for a multicultural and pluralistic Algeria, a position that was rejected by most parties.

Philosophically, Camus’ views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. Some consider Camus’ work to show him to be an existentialist, even though he himself firmly rejected the term throughout his lifetime.

Albert Camus – Wikipedia

Absurdism

Absurdism is the philosophical thesis that life, or the world in general, is absurd. There is wide agreement that the term “absurd” implies a lack of meaning or purpose but there is also significant dispute concerning its exact definition and various versions have been suggested.^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5] The choice of one’s definition has important implications for whether the thesis of absurdism is correct and for the arguments cited for and against it: it may be true on one definition and false on another.^[6]

In a general sense, the absurd is that which lacks a sense, often because it involves some form of contradiction. The absurd is paradoxical in the sense that it cannot be grasped by reason.^[7]^[8]^[9] But in the context of absurdism, the term is usually used in a more specific sense. According to most definitions, it involves a conflict, discrepancy, or collision between two things. Opinions differ on what these two things are.^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4] For example, it is traditionally identified as the confrontation of rational man with an irrational world or as the attempt to grasp something based on reasons even though it is beyond the limits of rationality.^[10]^[11] Similar definitions see the discrepancy between intention and outcome, between aspiration and reality, or between subjective assessment and objective worth as the source of absurdity.^[1]^[3] Other definitions locate both conflicting sides within man: the ability to apprehend the arbitrariness of final ends and the inability to let go of commitments to them.^[4] In regard to the conflict, absurdism differs from nihilism since it is not just the thesis that nothing matters. Instead, it includes the component that things seem to matter to us nonetheless and that this impression cannot be shaken off. This difference is expressed in the relational aspect of the absurd in that it constitutes a conflict between two sides.^[4]^[1]^[2]

Various components of the absurd have been suggested and different researchers often focus their definition and inquiry on one of these components. Some accounts emphasize the practical components concerned with the individual seeking meaning while others stress the theoretical components about being unable to know the world or to rationally grasp it. A different disagreement concerns whether the conflict exists only internal to the individual or is between the individual’s expectations and the external world. Some theorists also include the metacognitive component that the absurd entails that the individual is aware of this conflict.^[2]^[3]^[12]^[4]

An important aspect of absurdism is that the absurd is not limited to particular situations but encompasses life as a whole.^[2]^[1]^[13] There is a general agreement that people are often confronted with absurd situations in everyday life.^[7] They often arise when there is a serious mismatch between one’s intentions and reality.^[2] For example, a person struggling to break down a heavy front door is absurd if the house they are trying to break into lacks a back wall and could easily be entered on this route.^[1] But the philosophical thesis of absurdism is much more wide-reaching since it is not restricted to individual situations, persons, or phases in life. Instead, it asserts that life, or the world as a whole, is absurd. The claim that the absurd has such a global extension is controversial, in contrast to the weaker claim that some situations are absurd.^[2]^[1]^[13]

The perspective of absurdism usually comes into view when the agent takes a step back from their individual everyday engagements with the world to assess their importance from a bigger context.^[4]^[2]^[14] Such an assessment can result in the insight that the day-to-day engagements matter a lot to us despite the fact that they lack real meaning when evaluated from a wider perspective. This assessment reveals the conflict between the significance seen from the internal perspective and the arbitrariness revealed through the external perspective.^[4] The absurd becomes a problem since there is a strong desire for meaning and purpose even though they seem to be absent.^[7] In this sense, the conflict responsible for the absurd often either constitutes or is accompanied by an existential crisis.^[15]^[14]

Absurdism – Wikipedia

Book Review: Create Dangerously by Albert Camus

‘To create today is to create dangerously’

Camus argues passionately that the artist has a responsibility to challenge, provoke and speak up for those who cannot in this powerful speech, accompanied here by two others.

Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York’s underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Create Dangerously (Back of Book Blurb) – GoodReads

As I said above in the introduction to this review – “live dangerously, think dangerously, create dangerously” could be a motto for Albert Camus. And its at the heart of what this small little book is all about. This tract is only 53 pages, of a small sized book. Its fast paced but not a quick easy read, you can easily find yourself reading over a page to regain, or to reorient, or to reread what you just read. Fully embracing, falling into what Camus is saying. Its two essays and one speech, but it packs so much into these 53 pages. I believe the two essays were also at one time used as speeches as well. So, in that sense this is just three speeches laid out in essay form each.

According to a quick Google search, the three speeches were:

CREATE DANGEROUSLY – University of Uppsala, 1957
DEFENSE OF INTELLIGENCE – L’Amitié Française, 1945
BREAD AND FREEDOM – Labour Exchange of Saint-Étienne, 1953

The artist, the writer, the author, the creator is propelled to create, to do so, to not be silenced. It is imperative for a writer, for an artist; to do what is right to him or herself. To write or create regardless of what penalties one might face, no matter the force and the opposition. One is forced by all that is strong and right in the world, to create, no matter the outcome.

Lets break down the individual speeches / essays a bit more:

1) Create Dangerously

Camus is deeply concerned about the tormented relationship between the artist and the public, that is, the society in which he lives. Because the art of nowadays must deal with the masses. It must accept to be either engaged in some kind of historical commitment or corrupt by popularization, a choice the old masters had always been spared until the middle class prevailed and culture became accessible to the masses.

Today everything is changed and even silence has dangerous implications. To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing. The question is how, among the police forces of so many ideologies, the strange liberty of creation is possible.

…

We know now that they exist, because the masses have become stronger and keep people from forgetting them.

Albert Camus – Create Dangerously

Camus is not blinded, nor is he ignorant of ideological faith and bias and prejudices. He’s perfectly aware of the implications of the so-called Socialistic Realism of his time, a delusional attempt to depict a ‘leftist’ reality that inevitably became mere propaganda: the masses were to be portrayed only as the ideal masses of the red utopia, and the writer’s grasp on reality could only be focused on the future – that is, on the non-existent. What we need today is, according to Camus, a creativity that is aware of its own potential. Today’s art is threatened by a dangerous lack of contact with the physical and emotional reality of life.

One of the many reasons I find Camus endearing, and more interesting than most other existentialist writers (like Sartre, or Kierkegard, or Weil) is that he is optimistic. He is looking forward, he is proud of where he is, proud of the future for mankind, and doesn’t have such a bleak and irreverent view of what mankind is or the future of mankind. Camus’ vision is hardly the bleak, depressing cliché of so many existentialists. He forwards an ideal concept of art as an achievement of all mankind throughout history, a common endeavor and a common task of both writers and readers. “Every man, on the foundation of his own suffering and joys, builds for all.” This may not be the core of Existentialism, but it certainly is the core of Existence.

2) Defense of Intelligence

It is interesting that as a system, as a society, that we have to “defend intelligence”. That intelligence, that reasoning and rationale, is in need of defense. That rational thinking, that reasoning, that intelligence isn’t the end goal in and of itself. But sadly, this is where we are at – and here he is talking of this in the 50s. And now, in the 2020’s, so little progress has been made, if anything, we have regressed on intelligence, regressed on our anti-academic and anti-scholarly work, regressed on our positions, our desire for intelligence, our desire for reasoning.

His speech here, done in 1945, was quick, and short, ten minutes, and aimed at France. Aimed at a nation just starting to heal and cure itself of all the wounds from all the recent tragedies that it has endured. n order to overcome the hatred and tension left behind by the war, Camus says, any desire for revenge must be put aside once and for all. Only a new political mentality can lead to a new start and a real change, in which there are neither partisans nor collaborators anymore.

What determined the fall of European civilisation and the ascent of barbaric dictatorships was the lack of respect for intelligence and intellectuals, who had been conveniently used as a scapegoat – or an enemy – by most governments.

The last and most long-lived victory of Hitlerism is to be found in the shameful scars made on the hearts of those who fought it most vigorously.

Albert Camus – Defense of Intelligence

3) Bread and Freedom

The last of the speeches / essays in “Create Dangerously” – this speech was delivered in 1953 for a labor exchange. A critique of the exploitation of freedom, shamelessly betrayed by the Soviet Revolution and often seen by the western government as an annoying ‘inconvenience’ of democracy. Once again indeed, Camus’ thought is not influenced by any political faction.

In this, he discusses how freedom – human freedom – are the same as justice. No justice can be devoid of intellectual freedom, and no intelligence can exist without social justice. Prejudices, biases, hatred, cannot exist within intelligence. An intelligent man cannot hate willfully and ignorantly. For reasons without merit. (ie. the color of someone’s skin, or who they love, or gender, etc.) This speech also shows the most unexpectedly, delightfully optimistic Camus, eventually suggesting a universal brotherhood between the intellectual and the worker as their only chance to fight back whenever their freedom is in danger.

Its amazing how timeless these three essays / speeches feel. How relevant they are in 2024 (with the upcoming election especially playing heavily in all of our minds, as well as the past several years with COVID, and American politics, and the wars that have started), and how timeless and prescient they feel. The issues at hand in these speeches are still issues at hand. Propaganda, freedom of speech, not giving into hatred, intellectual freedom, social justice, justice as a whole, human freedom, the role of an artist, etc – it all is as relevant today as it was in 1945, 1953, and 1957. We lost Albert Camus too early, too young. His words and wisdom are still needed to this day, and he should be essential reading for everyone. Not just artists.

Freedom is not a gift received from a State or a leader but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all.

Albert Camus

My GoodReads Rating: ****
My LibraryThing Rating: ****.5
Global GoodReads Rating: 3.82 (as of 2.13.24)

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