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10:42

(In »The free and open Internet versus the ecological apocalypse«)

According to the principle of necessary subtraction, the only right and reasonable thing for the radically convinced person on many historical occasions is to simply withdraw from the system – to refuse to participate in the social game, to quite simply leave the system in order to build up parallel, temporary utopias, whose objectives with time are made permanent – and to do this together with dedicated syntheist brothers and sisters. What is right and reasonable is not just to shoot at a hydra that in any case cannot be felled, since new heads constantly sprout where the old ones recently were, but to live out truth as an act and thereby rob the hydra of its oxygen. To think is namely not to understand the world. Thinking is not separated from the world in such a way that this is even possible. To think is instead to act. The syntheist agent is a human being who acts without necessarily being able to articulate a full understanding of exactly why. She lets intuition guide her. It is first on the basis of her actions that the syntheist agent can work out the necessary meaning, in order to retroactively give her action this meaning. It is in any case in this way that consciousness and intuitive action relate to each other: the former explains and legitimises the latter by creating an appealing narrative that matches the pattern in the surroundings with which one identifies.