Outside, of course, only those who knew how to wish and sail in the sworn team made their fortune. The crews on the discovery ships were the first objects of naïve and effective group modelling processes that were re-described in the present day as ‘corporate identity’ techniques. On the ships, the advancing pioneers learned to want the impossible in a team whose members were all dreaming in the same direction. In psychohistorical terms, the central New European principles of constant progress and general enrichment, which became amenable to politicization from the nineteenth century onwards, are essentially projections of team visions from the early days of nautical globalization back onto a national and social horizon. They constitute attempts to transfer the categorical Forwards of seafaring back onto the circumstances of settled life. One can read Ernst Bloch's writings – to name an eminent example of generalized progressivism – as if he had reformulated socialism from the position of the seaside and recommended it as a dream of emigration to New Worlds filtered through reason. Progress is emigration in time: as if it were wisdom to make people to believe that, with the aid of productive forces freed from greed for property, one could turn the entire world into a South Pacific paradise. For this reason, the party of objectively fulfillable wishes must always be right.1
But the dream of the main prize that comes to us outside will, at least, help the new globonauts to look the horror of exteriority in the face. That is why the seafarers and their crews are not simply psychotics whose loss of touch with reality at home makes them suitable to discover new worlds in the unknown; often enough, they genuinely have one foot on the ground of untrodden paths, and undoubtedly it is often well-suited to reality, especially on the high seas, to postulate the imminent miracle. The mightiest captains are those who commit their crews most effectively to the pure Forwards, particularly when it seems sheer insanity not to turn around. Without a constant, strict spell of optimism on board, most of the early expeditions would have been thwarted by demoralization. The leaders kept their crews mentally on course with visions of fame and riches for the discoverers; but draconian punishments were also among their techniques for success. Had the Portuguese Magellan, after the mutiny of his captains off St Julian on the Patagonian coast of South America on 1 April 1520, not overruled the objections of the next men in command, marooning and executing Spanish nobles along with the other rebels, he would not have made it unmistakably clear to his people what it means to be on an unconditional outward voyage. And had he not, as Pigafetta recounts, forbidden on pain of death any talk of a return home or the lack of provisions, then the westward journey to the Spice Islands – which would become the first circumnavigation of the world – would probably have been over in its first fifth.2 On his first crossing, Columbus, as he recorded in the logbook of the Santa Maria, falsified his information about the distance they had covered ‘so that the men would not be frightened if the voyage were long’.3 Facing a nascent mutiny during a storm off the East African coast, Vasco da Gama had the compasses, maps and measuring instruments of his captains thrown into the sea to eliminate any future thoughts of turning back among his crew. Experiments of this kind gave rise to a veritable expedition psychology on board these delusionally bold ships, driven by the constant, acute coercion to part the optimistic minds from the despondent.
Only when these naval insights returned to the people on land would the thing known in later times as the progressive mentality become possible – a commitment to a resolute Forwards. Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa – the classic disaster seascape of the empire – painted in 1818/19, highlights the maritime origin of the difference between progressive and regressive psychology. One can immediately distinguish the depressive group on the left part of the raft from the hopeful group on the right; the former stare into their own misery, while the latter espy the saving ship on the horizon. Faced with extreme conditions, these shipwrecked men wage a conflict that was constitutive of the Modern Age: that between hopes and discouragements.4 Since the mutiny of Vasco da Gama's captains and its suppression, the globalization campaign has been a constant war of moods and a battle for group-hypnotic means of orientation – and more recently, programming power in the mass media and consultation power in businesses. On the progressive side, it was not infrequently the courage of desperation – allied with an inextinguishable physiological optimism – that kept the world ‘revolution’ of the non-turners going. The pessimists on board would later be the potential and actual mutineers against the project of modernity, including the rediscoverers of the tragic consciousness. They tend, with eminently sensible pretexts, to abandon undertakings in which they do not see themselves and those close to them as the winners. The history of these abandonists has yet to be written. Its motto, latently or manifestly, is the call of ‘Stop history!’ that makes allies of apocalypticists, tragedians, defeatists and pensioners.5 And yet the combined gravity of the calm-keepers, the losers, the off-putters and their literary tribunes achieved little against the unleashed visionary energy of the project-makers and entrepreneur-charlatans. Today, as yesterday, all of these live off their productive errors and the followings spawned by those errors. Through their auto-hypnotic talents, practical natures manage time and again to build up empires around themselves from self-deceptions that succeed in the medium term.
Because the practices of the captains were based not on delusion and motivational spells alone, however, but also on incontestable geographical competencies and actually worked-out nautical routines, the insane New European wish projects occasionally gained the chance to make themselves a reality. Only thus can fear be converted into ecstasy on the oceans; only thus do records of ecstasies become logbooks; and only thus are the cargo holds filled with treasures. Every ship on the open sea embodies a psychosis that has set sail, and each is also real floating capital. As such, it participates in the great work of modernity: developing substance as a flow.