When I was first invited to write about Martijn Benders’ Dream of the Piranha, I described it as a dangerous book — one that destabilises the reader, teasing thought out of its well-worn tracks and into unexpected terrains. Now, with The Eternal Hazing, Benders has presented us with a work of a different and no less vital character: a fierce, forensic meditation on contemporary crises, a philosophical exorcism aimed not so much at our dreams, but at the very structures of belief that bind and blind us.
Where Dream of the Piranha was a hallucinatory exploration of imagination’s betrayal, The Eternal Hazing offers a sobering confrontation with reality’s ongoing defacement — a lucid, relentless analysis of the emotional, political, and intellectual short-circuits that mark our era. If the former was the incantation of a poet-shaman, the latter is the scalpel of a philosopher in a field hospital, cutting through infected flesh to save what remains.
At its heart, The Eternal Hazing is a study of conditioning: of how entire populations can be led, through subtle and not-so-subtle mechanisms, into a state of paralysis, incoherence, and servility. Drawing upon examples from recent global crises — most notably the response to the coronavirus pandemic — Benders dissects the ways in which fear, conformity, and a hollowed-out concept of solidarity were weaponised against genuine thought and authentic life.
What distinguishes this work is its refusal to settle for surface-level critiques. Benders does not merely condemn the absurdities and hypocrisies of government measures, nor does he content himself with lamenting media complicity. Instead, he plunges into the psychological and metaphysical undercurrents that make such phenomena possible: the collapse of cognitive integrity under pressure; the eerie re-emergence of theological structures within ostensibly secular states; the transformation of truth-seeking into a new form of moralistic suppression.
One of the book’s most striking arguments is that the modern secular West, far from liberating itself from its Christian heritage, has in fact recast Christian forms of obedience and guilt into secular dogmas. The public health slogans, the sanctimonious appeals to ‘togetherness,’ the silencing of dissent — all, Benders suggests, are the echoes of an unresolved religious past, now weaponised in service of a different kind of orthodoxy.
This is no mere rhetorical flourish. Benders’ historical acuity allows him to draw sobering parallels with post-war Europe: the systematic suppression of dissident thought in Greece and Spain, for example, where the rhetoric of democracy thinly veiled the iron hand of authoritarianism. In The Eternal Hazing, he warns us that similar mechanisms are alive and well in our own time, merely cloaked in the language of safety, health, and communal responsibility.
Yet if this work is relentlessly critical, it is never nihilistic. Benders’ criticism is rooted in a profound respect for the complexity of human beings and the richness of genuine thought. His fury is reserved not for the inevitable difficulties of human life, but for the reduction of that life to mechanical compliance, for the betrayal of thought by institutions that once claimed to uphold it.
Philosophically, The Eternal Hazing occupies a different but complementary space to Dream of the Piranha. If the earlier work danced within the traditions of Nietzschean untimeliness and Bakhtinian carnival, this book aligns itself more closely with the tradition of parrhesia — the courageous and dangerous speech advocated by the ancient Cynics and later explored by Michel Foucault. Benders speaks here not as a detached analyst but as a participant who risks his position, his comfort, even his reputation to say what must be said.
This lends the book a bracing immediacy. Benders does not write from the safe heights of abstraction but from the shifting ground of lived experience. Having travelled through sixteen countries during the pandemic, he brings a rare comparative perspective, noting with clinical precision how different societies responded — and how, beneath apparent differences, common psychological patterns revealed themselves.
Stylistically, The Eternal Hazing is sharp, unsparing, but also supple. It shifts fluidly between philosophical reflection, political analysis, personal anecdote, and historical excavation. This elasticity of style is not merely aesthetic: it mirrors the complexity of the phenomena under examination and refuses the reader the comforts of linear, neatly packaged arguments. Reading Benders is thus an exercise in philosophical vigilance; one must remain awake, alert, capable of holding contradictory insights without succumbing to facile resolutions.
Within the philosophical canon, The Eternal Hazing situates itself within the lineage of thinkers who understand philosophy not merely as theory but as an existential commitment: Socrates, Diogenes, Camus, and Foucault are its silent interlocutors. It reminds us that philosophy, at its best, is not a profession but a form of life — one that demands courage, honesty, and an almost sacred refusal to accept the unacceptable.
For the contemporary reader, The Eternal Hazing offers not comfort but a necessary discomfort. It demands that we reconsider what it means to be ‘free’ in societies that increasingly define freedom as obedience, what it means to be ‘informed’ in cultures where information drowns understanding, and what it means to be ‘responsible’ in a moral economy where questioning itself is treated as a crime.
If Dream of the Piranha was a call to reawaken the wild powers of the imagination, The Eternal Hazing is a call to reclaim the sovereignty of thought. It is a map for those who refuse to sleepwalk through history, a companion for those who know that the price of genuine freedom is eternal, often painful, vigilance.
To read The Eternal Hazing is to enter a difficult but indispensable conversation — one that might at times unsettle, infuriate, even wound, but that ultimately strengthens the soul against the corrosive forces of our age.
It is not a book for the complacent. It is a book for those who would rather walk through fire than sleep in chains.
Dr. Benedict Altham
Department of Comparative Thought
St. Dunstan’s College, Oxford
May 2025