Equipping themselves for the end are also those who want to breed the people “biologically”—for, despite the opposite appearance, this breeding and the call for it are only the consequences of a previously instituted and unquestioned sovereignty of the machinational in itself (in the sense of a not yet overcome “liberal” notion of progress).
The future ones, in the essential sense, are to be recognized by whether they equip for the end or prepare the beginning and the transition. In the meantime, the most fateful ones exercise their handiwork, the ones who apparently equip themselves just as much for technology and for what is of today as also for the “other”—those who want to rescue only the past, whether from sheer greed for power and | hatred of everything creative or (which is basically the same) from an incapacity to create.
Therefore, the future ones are difficult to recognize, especially since, if they are indeed such, they keep silent.
89
Are we questioning the truth of beyng in order to ground an originary affiliation—or are we setting out to explain beings on the basis of beings and “master” them? Yet this “mastery” is not a sovereignty, but only a poorly veiled slavery within a procedure which must go on to its end.
Why should we halt something which must go on to its end? The end, however, is never the last, if we understand end as the mere running out of the no-longer-conquered beginning. The last, however, is in its necessity the supreme transfiguration of the first.
90
“Culture”—in itself affiliated at all only to the age of the commencing modernity—is today merely an appendage of technology and on the one hand serves to veil the irrevocable tyranny of technology and on the other hand helps anesthetize the masses, who are supposed to be fobbed off with the “cultural assets” previously denied them. The consequence is that, for example, | during a performance of Hamlet, a performance which otherwise would lack all necessity, the country people cough and spit and sleep and at the most impossible times break into laughter—this then is called “people’s culture.” In itself an entirely unimportant occurrence and yet, seen essentially, the sign of a boundless mendacity and perplexity—not of the “people,” but of those who furnish the people “culture.” And that in turn is only an expression of the universal machination into which humans are displaced—