Someone who neither consumes nor produces is redundant - according to the cutthroat logics of late capitalism. International elites claim that overpopulation is our greatest problem. If the population needs to be reduced, who will have to disappear asks Trojanow in his humanist essay that argues against the redundancy of humankind. In his forceful analysis he covers points such as devastation caused by climate change, ruthless neo-liberal politics on the labor market and the apocalypses presented in mass media that we, the seeming winners, fervently consume. One thing we have failed to realize is that these issues also concern us. They concern everyone and everything.

Theweleit describes the laughter of killers using a selection of case studies, including German soldiers in British prisoner of war camps during WWII, who are said to have told each other about the atrocities they had committed with considerable mirth. The laughter masks another aspect of killing for pleasure however; the cold rationality with which murderers speak when they justify their acts in public. Anders Breivik’s defence in court starts to sound like a statistical analysis of Norwegian immigration figures, for instance. Theweleit’s essay reveals the language of justification as a foil for sadism, because, according to the author’s provocative argument, anything can be ‘justified’; we should avoid believing a word of it.

Terrorists shoot into a crowd at Bataclan in Paris killing dozens; Guardians of public morals have thousands beheaded during the French Revolution with the aim of realizing the "ideals of enlightenment"; Dostojevsky's "Demons" murder because their nihilism has destroyed any sense of morals – What goes on in these minds? How can people declare themselves lords over life and death, thus putting themselves above God? When they act in the name of God or political ideals, Wali claims provocatively, they are in fact enacting the opposite: What drives these murderers is a fascination with violence, the feeling of absolute power, the desire to spread mortal fear, and the wish to destroy the social fundament of trust.