All Against All

There is a sentence that became known as a film title — Werner Herzog, 1974, about Kaspar Hauser, the foundling thrown into a world that does not want him: “Every Man for Himself and God Against All.” The sentence has an older, friendlier sister, the familiar “Every man for himself, and God for us all.” There, above the swarm of the isolated, at least one instance still stands that holds it together. Herzog cuts the “for us” and sets “against all.” What remains is the isolation, and a God who no longer protects but persecutes.

Anyone who looks at the world today can think the sentence one step further, and it is not a large step. If everyone is only for himself and no instance stands above him any longer — neither a God nor his worldly deputy, a binding order — then no one is needed who stands against all. The isolated see to it themselves. “Every man for himself” becomes “all against all,” not out of malice, but because unbound self-interest sooner or later collides with that of the other. This is no new insight. Hobbes described the war of all against all nearly four hundred years ago and called for a sovereign to tame it. What is remarkable about the present is not the diagnosis. What is remarkable is what has taken the sovereign’s place. For no sovereign is missing — there is plenty of power being exercised; the only question is in what form. What is missing is the sovereign who stands for all. The people, who were meant to take on this role, have remained a chimera as sovereign — invoked in every constitution, effective in no crisis. And where the sovereign who binds fails to appear, the longing for the sovereign who rules returns.

One can read it off a single company in the summer of 2026. Volkswagen, the emblem of German industry, has proclaimed a strategy meant to shrink its worldwide production; the reports of these days speak of tens of thousands of jobs that could fall, of German plants said to be on the brink. The board is not acting wrongly in this. It states soberly that the company does not earn enough on its cars, and draws the conclusion. Its duty is to the shareholders, and it reaches exactly to the edge of the balance sheet. That at this edge lies a city that would not exist without the plant; a state that holds a fifth of the shares and at the same time must protect its citizens’ jobs; hundreds of thousands whose livelihood hangs on the utilisation of halls — that is the remainder for which the calculation has no entry.

One can step back from this picture and ask why the board’s calculation comes out as it does; then it appears that behind it stands no single decision but a mechanism. It begins with something regarded as a virtue: efficiency. Whoever produces more efficiently than he himself consumes creates a surplus, and the surplus must go somewhere — it must be sold, elsewhere, to those who are not yet so far along. Thus the virtue becomes a compulsion to export, and the export a contest of displacement: the more efficient undercuts the less efficient and takes over his market. An entire doctrine, that of comparative advantage, exists to construe this as a gain for all — both sides specialised, both profited. The doctrine holds only under assumptions that describe a world which does not exist: that capital stays in the country instead of migrating to the highest return; that the displaced worker effortlessly finds new employment instead of falling into poverty; that trade balances even out, instead of one country’s surplus being another’s deficit; that a destroyed industry returns, instead of the knowledge, the suppliers and the training vanishing with it. None of these assumptions holds. A Chinese electric car costs several thousand euros less than the comparable German one, a Chinese special machine a fraction of the price; the German manufacturer who then shrinks his plants acts as consistently as the Chinese one who undercuts him. At the end of this road stands a question no one asks: who still buys, once the most efficient has displaced all the others? The export has then consumed its own market. That is “all against all,” written soberly as an equation.

In this situation stands a single figure on whom the whole can be studied. The minister-president of the state that holds the shares sits at the same time on the company’s supervisory board. As head of the state he must protect the plants and the voters; as a supervisory-board member he must represent the interest of a company whose advantage lies in developing and building where it is cheaper — and that has long been China. His way out, to have the models developed there built in Germany as well in future, is the attempt to bring two loyalties into alignment for a moment, and at the same time the quiet admission that the substance long since arises elsewhere: the German halls as places where what was conceived elsewhere is bolted together. This man is not the sovereign who stands above the opposition. He is the place where it runs through a single person.

The same once more, in the political realm: a continent wishes to keep a strategic industry and cannot manage it, because every decision must pass through a web of governments, institutions and competition authorities, each of which acts reasonably for itself. None is the adversary; together they are the blockade. No war arises, only standstill — the peaceful form of the opposition, in which the interests do not fight one another but merely neutralise one another.

Above all this stand instances once meant to keep the whole in view — audit offices, institutes, councils. They still function, but they only record the failure, thoroughly and correctly, and do not avert it; from organs of steering they have become organs of recording. They are not against all. They are only no longer responsible for anything.

And yet it would be wrong to say that the place of Herzog’s God has remained empty. It is occupied, only inconspicuously, and one hears it in the language. The markets “react,” the markets “punish,” the markets “reward,” the markets “lose confidence,” the markets “demand” reforms. That is not how one speaks of a mechanism; that is how one speaks of a deity — omniscient, because it seems to know the true value of all things; omnipotent, because no government can resist it for long; unfathomable, because no one understands it but only interprets it. Yet the markets are a man-made institution that follows man-made rules; behind the impersonal word stands a manageable number of persons whose interests — low taxes, loose rules, mobile labour — coincide remarkably closely with what “the markets” seem to demand. But they are treated as though they were as immovable as gravity. That is the God who has taken Herzog’s empty throne: not one who tames the “every man for himself,” but one who sanctifies it — who lends the falling-apart the word “without alternative” and thereby turns it from a decision into a fate.

At this point the observer is tempted to use the word “inevitably” — “every man for himself” becomes “all against all” inevitably. But that would already be claiming too much. It is no law of nature. There are counterexamples, and they are instructive, because they show what it depends on. Where the opposition was actually prevented, it never happened through an appeal to reason or community, but because someone had once arranged the conditions so that coming apart was more expensive than staying together. Such arrangements hold as long as their calculation holds. They are not indissoluble; they do not make the opposition impossible, only harder than togetherness. And that is apparently the most that can be achieved.

What is unsettling about the present is not that people have become worse. They have not. What is unsettling is that such arrangements have become harder to build than before and easier to dismantle, and that the God invoked over the whole is no longer a binding one, but one who blesses the loosening. The threshold at which “every man for himself” tips into “all against all” has not been crossed. It has only become lower, and no one stands before it any more.

This longing has a name, even if it is seldom spoken. When isolation becomes unbearable and no binding order any longer contains it, one calls for the strong man who solves the problems — for Caesar, who draws power to himself and promises order. The older republic knew a second figure: Cincinnatus, fetched from the plough, who took the full authority, set the situation in order, and, when it was done, gave the power back and returned to his field. Both are answers to the same distress. But only one of them is still called for today. Caesar is familiar to everyone; Cincinnatus is hardly known to anyone. That is perhaps the most precise finding about the present: not that power is missing, but that of its two figures — the one that takes and the one that gives back — only the first remains imaginable.

Whether it stays that way is open. The sober observer has no forecast and no advice. He merely notes that the sentence which fifty years ago described the fate of a single abandoned individual today fits the whole without much effort — and that this is perhaps the truly remarkable thing.