In the film, former revolutionary Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) has long tried to escape his militant past with the radical cell known as the “French 75.” But when his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) is endangered, he gets pulled back into the underground. Bob’s earlier partner and fellow activist Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), Willa’s mother, embodied the French 75’s Leftist creed, and Bob tagged along until the movement fractured, including a high‑profile operation at an immigration detention center that ignited a familiar Trump-style crackdown.

Years later, the group’s nemesis Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) resurfaces, now aligned with a clandestine, far‑Right, racist “Christmas Adventurers Club” and determined to root out the French 75 and their progeny, especially Bob’s daughter Willa. The confrontation between the two forces feels ripped from the headlines, driving the Right to vituperate against the film and the Left to vaguely take up its protagonists’ cause.

Many reviewers have been searching for a movie that might have served as a model or predecessor for One Battle After Another; as far as I know, they’ve all ignored the obvious choice, Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep, from 2012. That film also deals with Leftist ex-radicals confronting their past. Simplified, the story centers on recent widower and single father, Jim Grant, a former Weather Underground anti-Vietnam militant wanted for a bank robbery and murder, who hid from the FBI for more than 30 years posing as an attorney in Albany, NY.

Jim becomes a fugitive when his true identity is exposed, and he must find and enlist the help of with his ex-lover, Mimi, the one person who can clear his name. Mimi is still passionate about the goals of the Weathermen and unapologetic about her actions 30 years earlier, but Jim has become a responsible family man.

Jim asks Mimi to give herself up in order to save him and his 11-year-old daughter, Isabel. He doesn’t want to leave Isabel behind and repeat the mistake that he and Mimi made 30 years earlier by giving up their own daughter. When Mimi confronts Jim about selling out, he tartly replies: “I didn’t get tired. I grew up.” In the film’s final scenes, Mimi flees the cabin she is sharing with Jim to sail to Canada, but she turns her boat around and returns to the United States to give herself up; the next day, Jim is freed from jail and reunites with Isabel.

It’s true that, as one reviewer put it with acerbic wit, The Company You Keep exudes nostalgia for the time when terrorists were still people who looked and were dressed like “us” and bore recognizable Anglo-Saxon names. The film nonetheless has an authentic touch in its wistful, painful rendering of the disappearance of the radical Left from our political and ideological reality: these militant survivors are like sympathetic living dead, remnants of another era, strangers drifting in a strange world. No wonder Redford was attacked by conservatives for glamorizing terrorists. The film’s authenticity is evident not only in the generally sympathetic portrayal of ex-Weathermen, but even more in wonderful narrative details like the meticulous descriptions of underground life (how to check if one is trailed and shake off possible pursuers; how to create a new identity; and so on).

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The film fails, however, to confront the most problematic aspect of Weathermen activity: the group’s decision to take up violent action. While the film obviously sympathizes with the radical Leftist cause, its predominant tone is a rejection of violence, framed in terms of maturation, of the passage from youthful enthusiasm (which can easily turn into violent fanaticism) to mature awareness that there are things like family life and responsibility towards one’s children that no political cause should make us violate. Or as the hero says to his ex-lover: “We have a responsibility beyond the Cause. We have a baby.”

Read in this way, The Company You Keep is, as someone wrote about Neil Gordon’s novel upon which the film is based, le roman des illusions perdues, a novel of lost illusions.

But is the injunction to grow up, embrace family responsibility, etc., really a neutral apolitical wisdom that posits a limit to our political engagement? Or is it, rather, a way for ideology to intervene, preventing us from analyzing to the end the morality of violent resistance?

An honest analysis would not covertly attempt to justify violent terror by hiding behind family-values virtue-signaling, but has an obligation to analyze and judge it on its own terms. Let us imagine that Jim were to have no daughter — the problem of Weathermen strategy would remain. Without this type of radical self-examination, we end up endorsing the existing legal and political order as the frame that guarantees the stability of our private family lives. It’s telling that The Company You Keep is about the hero’s legal rehabilitation, about his effort to become a normal citizen with no dark past haunting him. He’s grasping for a happy ending, and the film supplies one in Hollywood style: the main figures go public, are soon liberated, and find a place in society.

In One Battle After Another, however, as the title of the film clearly indicates, the battle goes on: Willa takes the torch and continues the underground struggle. There is another change: in The Company You Keep, Weathermen fight against the imperialist system itself, while in One Battle After Another, the contemporary descendants focus on helping the illegal Latino immigrants to avoid expulsion and find a place in the US homeland. In other words, they are not working against the system as such, they work to enable immigrants to integrate into the system. And since the system is not the enemy, the enemies of the revolutionaries are not just gray bureaucratic enforcers of the law displaying the banality of evil, i.e., what we perceive as the “normal” structure of power. Rather, they are ridiculous figures caught in obscene enjoyment, living caricatures.

Penn’s Steven Lockjaw combines excessive masculinity and sexual desire with nervous gestures signaling that he is all the time close to a psychic breakdown; the Christmas Adventurers Club is a fantasized caricature of an elite racist group that has no place in today’s global society where black and Asian men and women can also occupy top positions of power (Rishi Sunak, Kemi Badenoch, Usha Vance).

Steven’s sexual attraction to Perfidia — he at one point forces her to have sex with him — is particularly revealing. Steven is totally obsessed by Perfidia since she embodies a Leftist revolutionary version of his own wild subjectivity. Only, she lacks his inner obstacles and nervous tics, and thus freely enacts what during the 1968 eruptions in France was called jouir sans entraves, “enjoying without obstacles.” There is no gap for her between her violent political activity and intense promiscuousness — she fully enjoys reckless sex in the midst of a “terrorist” act, following the same stance also in how she talks, seamlessly combining brutal acts with dirty speech. Her shifting identity leaves no space for a permanent partner, and no wonder that she betrays even her revolutionary Cause. After the betrayal, she is given by the government a new identity and sanctuary, but she disappears even from there, so that nobody knows where she is….

As such, Perfidia also embodies the form of the film — or, as the critic Pietro Bianchi says, “Perfidia’s role should not be interpreted primarily at the level of content, but rather structurally. All the narrative events set in motion throughout the film depend on the consequences of her actions, but equally on her absence. Every character is thus forced to orbit around the void she creates — with the odd result that the true protagonist of the film appears on screen for no more than twenty minutes, at the beginning.”

Therein resides the falsity of the film: as its “absent center” (as Bianchi puts it), Perfidia is a masculine fantasy constructed to cover up what Lacan called the feminine non-all, the hysterical fragility of the feminine subjectivity. Perfidia is precisely the dream of a Woman as all, of a woman who is phallus. It is crucial to note that, if we take away from the story its “absent center,” the spectacular plurality of its excessive inconsistent actions falls apart. The gap that separates the two films is most palpable at the level of form: while The Company of Men remains firmly within the constraints of the standard psychological realism, One Battle After Another is, as Peter Bradshaw noticed, “at once serious and unserious, exciting and baffling, a tonal fusion sending that crazy fizz across the VistaVision screen — an acquired taste, yes, but addictive.”

The film is full of crazy brilliant moments — not just the hypnotic car chases, but also the convent of revolutionary nuns who practice how to use machine guns. It really introduces a new way of telling a story, as it unfolds in an inconsistent plural space where brutal obscenity can coexist with pathetic humanist engagement.

Yet this formal excess aims at dazzling and fascinating us, so that we ignore the ambiguity of the film’s ethico-political stance. It is easy to propose, in the manner of the late Frederic Jameson, that the inconsistent dispersed plurality of the film bears witness to the fact that today’s global financial capitalism can no longer be narratively presented as a totality, so that the film’s failure to properly represent the society it depicts is in itself an indicator of the truth of this society: an indicator of the fact that today what Jameson called “cognitive mapping” of our situation is structurally impossible.

However, Perfidia as the film’s “absent center” mystifies this impossibility — Perfidia acts as a universal mediator of the film’s dispersed content; she impersonates the excessive and destructive logic of today’s capitalism at its purest. Compared with her, the “bad” figures like Steven Lockjaw and members of the Christmas Adventurers Club are pale shadows of this logic. It is difficult to imagine a more antifeminist film than One Battle After Another.

At the very end, Bob gives Willa a letter of hope from Perfidia, in which she apologizes for her actions and vows to reunite with her family in the future. Is this a letter which arrives at its destination, as Lacan would have put it, a letter which announces a pacifying denouement, or just another irrelevant promise? What will happen if Perfidia really returns to Steven and Willa? Will they be a happy family where the daughter will just disappear from her job, from time to time? I presume that the film on purpose leaves this open, that it is irrelevant to its logic. One Battle After Another, like The Company Of Men, ends in a tension between revolutionary spirit and parental moral responsibility, but while The Company Of Men implicitly proposes a formula (yes to revolutionary engagement, but an engagement which should not violate parental responsibility), One Battle After Another merely juxtaposes multiple stances and playfully stages their interaction.

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So what about love between revolutionaries? From what we know about love among the Bolshevik revolutionaries, something unique took place there, a new form of love-couple emerged: a couple living in a permanent emergency state, totally dedicated to the revolutionary Cause, ready to sacrifice all personal sexual fulfillment to it, even ready to abandon and betray each other if Revolution demanded it — but simultaneously, totally dedicated to each other, enjoying rare moments together with extreme intensity. The lovers’ passion was tolerated, even silently respected, but ignored in the public discourse as something of no concern to others. There are traces of this even in what we know of Lenin’s affair with Inessa Armand.

The title of Freud’s short text from 1914 “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” provides the best formula for how we might navigate these disjunctures. In our case, the trauma to be worked through is that of Weathermen. Redford’s earlier film engages in nostalgic remembrance but fails to resolve the key dilemma. One Battle After Another tries to fill in this gap by directly repeating the traumatic memory: the movie imagines how Weathermen would look today, in a radically different historical situation, and also ends in a failure.

What is needed is an actual grappling with the trauma: an analysis of what was wrong in the Weathermen experience itself. Here, we should proceed in a ruthless way that will hurt many Leftist sensibilities: the real Weathermen were focused on anti-imperialist resistance, especially in Vietnam, but today, with the exploding crises in decolonized Third World countries, we can see that anti-colonial struggle also had deep limitations, which is why it often ended in authoritarian and corrupted new regimes.

Violent help to illegal immigrants is also problematic: it helps big capital (providing cheap labor and lowering the wages of American workers through arbitrage) and simultaneously gins up support for Trumpian populists. While I am fully aware that often violence is often needed and fully justified, I suspect that in today’s United States, direct small-scale single acts of violence like those practiced by the Weathermen have no chance against the Trumpian state and would only serve to intensify its brutal logic and oppressive measures. They amount to a public request to the White House: “Please send the National Guard to our town!” The focus, instead, should be on sabotaging the corporate digital control over our lives.

In short, there is nothing revolutionary in One Battle After Another. Today, we need weathermen to learn which way the wind blows. One Battle After Another depicts a group with no weatherman giving them orientation. With its helter-skelter form it celebrates disorientation itself as radical freedom.

The first thing to renounce is thus any notion of the global linear progress of humanity, whether formulated by Karl Marx, postulated by liberals like Francis Fukuyama (who declared the end of history) or dominated by Enlightenment dialectics. Marx’s overall vision of history is that of a linear succession of “progressive” modes of social development from primitive societies through the Asiatic mode of production, slavery, feudalism, capitalism to socialism and communism. Problems arise almost immediately with the historical dynamic Marx envisioned; to start with, the notion of an “Asiatic mode of production” is clearly problematic (it is an empty category into which Marx threw whatever didn’t fit his Eurocentric logic of history, and thus in itself a receptacle for squashed dead birds). As for socialism, Rosa Luxemburg’s claim that “the future will be socialism or barbarism” proved to be wrong also: what we got in Stalinism was a socialist barbarian, and the corpses are still being counted. As for liberalism, its state of crisis is obvious, so much so that even Fukuyama has renounced his notion of the end of history.

There should be no holds barred in the pursuit of squashed birds. Russia and China like to present themselves as partisans of a new multi-centric world order in which all ways of life will coexist as equal and in which Western colonial economic and ideological domination will finally be swept away. In this rhetoric we might see whole cages of squashed birds swept aside with the West, not only economic and political but also the flattening of feminism, gay rights and general human freedoms. A fairly recent example might be the debate that took place in the Ugandan parliament in February 2023 as the legislature contemplated a further toughening of the anti-gay law — where the most radical proponents demanded the death penalty, or at least life imprisonment, for those caught in the act. Anita Among, speaker of the parliament, stated: “You are either with us, or you’re with the Western world.” We live in an era of unholy alliances, collaborations and conjunctions of ideological forces which disrupt the standard binary of Left and Right. Feminist, gay and trans struggles are denounced as an instrument of Western ideological colonialism used to undermine African identity. If this type of thinking continues to be allowed to define the debate, the possibility of being a gay Ugandan, a feminist Ugandan, a trans Ugandan can be redefined out of existence; another casualty of a narrow definition of “progress”.

The miserable reality is that the promise of decolonisation can be co-opted as a screen for other processes, its liberatory potential caught in the vice-like grip of a too-rigid definition of what moving forward means. The people of numerous African countries, from Angola to Zimbabwe, exist under more or less corrupt social systems in which the gap between the “masters” and the poor majority — the gap in wealth, in power, in privileges and freedom — is arguably even wider than under colonial rule. “Decolonisation” in these circumstances can function almost as a metaphor for the emergence of new class-based hierarchies. While there are, of course, a myriad of arguments that one can advance against any suggestion that things were “better” under colonial rule, if we fail to recognise the potential for decolonial movements to be absorbed into problematic regimes, the new Right will do it for us (as they are already doing in the case of South Africa, bloviating about the inability of black people to run the country “properly”). Mao said: “Revolution is not a dinner party.” But what if the reality after the revolution is even less of a dinner party? This in no way implies that we should abandon progress — we should rather redefine it, and the first step towards doing so is to be able to acknowledge uncomfortable realities, even those which appear squalid and mangled, and especially those we find shameful and grievous. We need less squashed birds hidden in trunks while we applaud the false living bird distracting us from capitalist corruption and authoritarian power.

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The two articles Marx wrote on India in 1893 (“The British Rule in India” and “The Future Results of British Rule in India”), usually dismissed by postcolonial scholars as embarrassing cases of Marx’s “Eurocentrism”, are today more interesting than ever. Marx outlines, without restraint, the “profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism” of the British colonisation of India, right up to the systematic use of torture prohibited in the West but “outsourced” to Indians (really there is nothing new under the sun — these were the Guantanamos of 19th-century British India). All he adds is: “can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.” 

Despite the mention of “destiny”, one should not wholly dismiss the notion of the “unconscious tool of history” as naive teleology, an ends-justify-the-means fatalistic “trust into the Cunning of Reason which makes even the vilest crimes instruments of progress”. The point Marx is making is simply that the British colonisation of India created conditions for the double liberation of India: from the constraints of its own tradition as well as from colonisation itself. Today, of course, such a standpoint appears all too naive — now we know how the British colonisers destroyed local industries in India and provoked havoc with tens of millions dead. Of course, we would never say that the horrors of colonisation were worth the price of progressing towards some nebulous utopian future. A much more modest stance should be adopted: Great Britain’s actions in India were inexcusable and the direct outcome a devastating catastrophe; however, once this catastrophe happened it opened up a new path for India. That “however” is an uncomfortable adverb to dwell in, but it remains open to hope as neater historical narratives do not.

When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer delineate the contours of the emerging late-capitalist “administered world” (verwaltete Welt), they are presenting it as coinciding with barbarism, as the point at which civilisation itself returns to barbarism. A kind of negative telos of the whole progress of Enlightenment, as the Nietzschean kingdom of the Last Men: “One has one’s little pleasure for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health. ‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.” At the same time, Adorno and Horkheimer nevertheless warn against the more direct catastrophes (different forms of terror, etc.). The liberal-democratic society of Last Men is thus unimaginably awful, the only problem being that all other societies are worse, so that the choice appears as one between bad and worse (or a rock and a hard place). The ambiguity here is irreducible: on the one hand, the “administered world” is the final catastrophic outcome of the Enlightenment; on the other hand, the “normal” societal path is continually threatened by catastrophes, from war and terror to ecological disasters. We are required to battle these catastrophes while simultaneously bearing in mind that the ultimate catastrophe is the apparently “normal” structures and rhythms of the “administered world”. In other words, we are walking a kind of Moebius path: if we progress far enough on one side, we reach our starting point again. Does the same not hold for progressivism in general? After centuries in which visionaries of all stripes dreamed of what humanity might achieve together. The only indubitable “progressive” goal that humanity can pursue today, in view of ecological and other threats, is to simply survive.

The possibilities and pitfalls of technological and scientific advancement have been the stuff of centuries’ worth of dreaming about human progress, yet here too we find ourselves treading a viciously circular path. Free development, experimentation and research leads to Artificial Intelligence, which not only threatens to supplant the human mind but is intended specifically to overcome its limitations, to replicate humanity without its frailties. Leaving aside more abstract questions about what this would look like and mean should it be achieved, one does not have to look very far for the dead birds littering the path to “progress” like autumn leaves, from the astronomical energy costs burdening a burning planet to the people whose jobs will increasingly be done by AI. This is what blind commitment to an uncritically adopted idea of “progress” looks like; proponents of AI talk about the freedom it brings, but are vague on freedom from what, for who and what for. Freedom for humanity to dedicate itself to leisure, art or meditation? Or freedom for an oligarchy of technocrats from the slightest tethering to the social contract, in exchange for reducing humanity to a cog in the endless self-reproduction of AI?

This brings us to the relationship between progress and freedom. The axiom of modern philosophy is that progress is, at its most fundamental, progress in freedom. (This is how Hegel conceives the development of the entire history of humanity: in Oriental despotism only the despot is free; in antique slavery only the few are free; and with Christianity all are free.) However, problems with the definition of freedom explode here from the very beginning.

Within the Enlightenment tradition, there is true freedom only if all are equally free, while for conservative liberals equality limits freedom; then there is the opposition between individual freedom and collective freedom (freedom of a nation advocated by fascism). For socialists, freedom is actual only when its material and institutional conditions are present (free education and press, healthcare), while for liberal conservatives, such measures already limit the full freedom of individuals (recall how US Republicans opposed Obamacare, claiming that it will limit the freedom to choose your own doctor).

The issue is further complicated by the post-Sixties shift away from economic and political freedom to cultural freedom. Why, after the Sixties, have so many problems come to be perceived as problems of intolerance, not as problems of inequality, exploitation and injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, not emancipation or political struggle? The immediate answer is the “culturalisation of politics”, in which political differences, differences conditioned by political inequality, economic exploitation and so forth are neutralised into “cultural” differences, different “ways of life”, which are something given, something that cannot be overcome, but merely “tolerated”. The cause of this culturalisation is the retreat or failure of direct political solutions, such as the welfare state. Tolerance is the post-political ersatz of these solutions: “the cultivation of tolerance as a political end implicitly constitutes a rejection of politics as a domain in which conflict can be productively articulated and addressed, a domain in which citizens can be transformed by their participation.”

The squashed dead bird here is politics itself. And this bird remains squashed even after the rise of the Rightist new populism.

How, then, should we orient ourselves in this mess? Our starting point should be that there is no such thing as progress in general. But true progress must aim at retroactively redeeming all the squashed birds of the past progresses — not redeeming them in reality, but redeeming the potentiality that was present in them.

***

A version of this essay appears in Slavoj Žižek’s latest book Against Progress, part of the new Žižek’s Essays series, published by Bloomsbury on 31 October.

Such reactions bear witness to our shallow times. They focus on the similitude of the gesture with others (from Dada to Banksy and some “eco-vandalists”), while ignoring the crux of the matter: the fate of Assange. Molodkin is not performing an act of modern art — he is trying to save a human life. Nor is he alone in this. Behind the WikiLeaks founder stands a collective of artists and patrons animated by a profound insight: do we have the right to enjoy great works of art while ignoring the horror from which they emerged?

In his essay, “Theses on the History of Philosophy”, Walter Benjamin wrote: “There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.”

The act of Molodkin’s collective heroically makes visible this barbarism. It is desperate and brutal, of course, but what if it is the only way we can raise awareness about what goes on in HMP Belmarsh? The true question is therefore: why is Assange such a thorn in the side of the knaves of our political establishment? And the answer is: because he is not a fool like the majority of the critical Left.

In his “Seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis”,[1. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge 1992, p. 182-183.] Lacan makes the distinction between two types of the contemporary intellectual, the fool and the knave. In short, the Right-wing intellectual is a knave, a conformist who refers to the mere existence of the given order as an argument for it and mocks the Left on account of its “utopian” plans which necessarily lead to catastrophe. By contrast, the Left-wing intellectual is a fool, a court-jester who publicly displays the lie of the existing order, but in a way that suspends the performative efficiency of his speech. Today, after the fall of Socialism, the knave is a neoconservative advocate of the free market who cruelly rejects all forms of social solidarity as counterproductive sentimentalism, while the fool is a postmodern cultural critic who, by means of his ludic procedures destined to “subvert” the existing order, actually serves as its supplement.

A joke from the good old days of Really-Existing Socialism perfectly illustrates the futility of fools:

In 15th-century Russia, a farmer and his wife walk along a dusty country road. A Mongol warrior on a horse stops at their side and tells the farmer that he will now rape his wife. he then adds: “But since there is a lot of dust on the ground, you should hold my testicles while I’m raping your wife, so that they will not get dirty!”

After the Mongol finishes his job and rides away, the farmer starts to laugh and jump with joy. The surprised wife asks him: “How can you be jumping with joy when I was just brutally raped in your presence?” The farmer answers: “But I got him! His balls are full of dust!”

This sad joke revealed the predicament of the period’s dissidents: they thought they were dealing serious blows to the party nomenklatura, but all they were doing was getting a little bit of dust on the nomenklatura’s testicles, while the nomenklatura went on raping the people. Is today’s critical Left not in a similar position?

Our task is to discover how to go a step further. Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach held: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Our version should be: “Critical Leftists have hitherto only dirtied with dust the balls of those in power; the point is to cut them off.”

This is exactly what Assange did. To cut a long story short, Assange is our Antigone, for a long time kept in the position of a living dead — isolated in a solitary cell with very limited outside contact and no conviction or even official accusation. He is just waiting for extradition, as the snare around his neck is gradually but inexorably pulled shut.

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In the case of Assange, time is on the side of the US and UK: they can afford to wait, counting on the fact that the public interest will gradually dwindle, especially due to other global crises that dominate our media (the Ukraine and Gaza wars, global warming, the threat of AI). What is happening to Assange is thus increasingly reported on the margins of the mainstream media: the fact that he sat in solitary confinement for years was just part of our lives. Assange is thus the victim of the new apolitical neutrality.

Assange should be mentioned whenever we are tempted to praise our Western democratic societies with their human rights and freedoms, or whenever we criticise Muslim, Chinese, or Russian oppression: his fate is a reminder that our freedom is also seriously limited. Assange is thus the victim of a new apolitical neutrality. We no longer care for him, his imprisonment increasingly met with indifference.

Some liberals criticise Assange for focusing on the liberal West and ignoring the even greater injustices in Russia and China, but they miss the point. WikiLeaks, after all, also exposed many documents that bear witness to the horrors outside the liberal West. However, these injustices are highly visible in our media — we read about them all the time.

The problem with the West is that we tend to ignore countries with even greater injustices (suffice it to mention Saudi Arabia, which is definitely worse than Iran). Sometimes we feel free because we ignore our unfreedoms, while in Russia and China people are fully aware of their unfreedoms. “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?”(Matthew 7:3). Assange taught us to pay attention to the plank in our own eyes. More precisely, Assange taught us to see the hidden complicity between the planks in our eye and in our enemy’s eye, to discover the solidarity and parallels between our opponents. For our own good, we should not allow him to fall into this darkness of invisibility.

And if you still think Molodkin’s gesture is wrong and counterproductive? OK, but then don’t lose time analysing it as an artistic gesture and instead search for more efficient ways to help him. In this situation, nobody with a clear conscience has the right to engage in distanced aesthetic judgments — our fate is at stake.