2 The three dramatic revolutions of the Internet age

The term religion stems from Medieval French where it signified the strong and heartfelt sense of community that prevails within a collective, a group of people who make up a congregation through establishing this loyalty to each other. This French term in turn originates from the Latin re-ligare: to reconnect with somebody or something, to connect again with those who, for some reason or other, have lost contact with each other but who ought to, and/or want to, belong together. So if we follow this term back to its source, we find that in its original sense religion ought to be seen as a social practice, organised with the purpose of creating strong and enduring ties between people, an affinity that in some cases, but far from always, also includes affinity between people and a set of gods, a theism.

According to the Austrian monk David Steindl-Rast, religious practice starts with doctrine, which is followed by ethics and finally consummated in ritual – all with the purpose of creating a social emergence, to unite people around an entity that they experience as greater than themselves individually, and greater than the sum of the group of individuals. This is definitely something worth bearing in mind: the original point of religion was to create affinity and loyalty within a dynamic collective. In this context, God is no more than the arbitrarily chosen name for the sense of belonging that people seek. Nowhere is this usage of God as a productive object of projection clearer than in the person who has failed in life in his or her own mind and is bravely struggling for self-restitution. When Bill Wilson founds Alcoholics Anonymous in the United States in the 1930s for example, it was with the unshakeable conviction that religion – in whichever form it appears, as long as it preaches a sense of belonging that is greater and mightier than the small, cramped prison, which is how the addict experiences his/her own subjectivity – is the best possible springboard out of alcohol addiction. Religion is that within us which is greater than ourselves and for precisely this reason it is closer to our hearts than our fragile little egos.

Note that philosophy is religion according to the definition we are now putting forward. It follows from this that religion can also be philosophy. In this context, it is important to understand that reality is not quite as real as we are biologically and socially programmed to believe. While philosophy tries to come as close to the truth as possible in life’s chaos of information, religion transforms this information and formulates its own particular truth based on this approximation. When truth is thus regarded as an active endeavour, by definition philosophy should be regarded as truth, while religion is philosophical truth manifested in practice. Syntheology constantly returns to this concept of truth as an act. The passion for activism is the very foundation of syntheist ethics.

Philosophy is founded on metaphysics, and metaphysics in turn is founded on theology. However solid the logic in a world view may seem, its logic is nonetheless based on a metaphysical assumption that is a functional but blind faith and definitely not any form of knowing. Under the primitivism of hunting and gathering, the tribe’s presumed primordial father and mother constituted the theological foundation for the collective’s ancestor worship. Primordial fathers are definitely not just any people at all, since unlike all others they lack parents – accordingly they must be a form of primitive god with extraordinary power. Under feudalism, God took over the role of the metaphysical foundation. God is the common primordial father of all tribes, the primordial father of primordial fathers. In this way, the particular stories of small tribes are bound up with the universal stories concerning human beings of larger regions and the forces that wreak havoc in their lifeworld. Monotheism is born.

With the Cartesian revolution in the 17th century, the metaphysics of individualism arrived on the scene, with Man gradually replacing God as the theological foundation, even if this revolutionary change was kept hidden as far as possible in order to avoid outbursts of ecclesiastical rage. God is thus not dead to start with; God has only gone to bed and fallen asleep. But ultimately, what role does His potential presence play when His creation is perfect anyway? The main thing for the individualists is that God has become superfluous, which enables the individual to slowly but surely take His place. It soon became evident that humanism fitted perfectly as the religion for the new capitalist and industrialist paradigm, and society clung to humanism and its individualist and atomist ideal right up until the late 20th century, when the network society emerged with full force and the idea of the network as the new metaphysical foundation caught on. Syntheism is the metaphysics of the Internet age. A shift is necessary because the philosophy of every paradigm must have its own blind but nonetheless relevant faith as a basic axiom. The masters of informationalism – the netocrats – quite simply perceive the network as the most striking metaphor for the necessary metaphysical foundation of the paradigm.

This requirement of a – conscious or subconscious – underlying metaphysics as a platform for all philosophical argumentation means that all speculation must start from an occasionally declared but at times concealed theological assumption. The two main alternatives that crystallise out from Antiquity and onwards are laid bare in the antagonism that arises between the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, where Plato launches the dualist tradition, which prizes cosmos over chaos, the idea over matter, and also foreshadows thinkers such as Paul, Saint Augustine, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and among contemporary thinkers Alain Badiou; while Aristotle represents the monist tradition, where chaos precedes cosmos and matter is primal in relation to the idea, and foreshadows thinkers such as Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Friedrich Nietzsche, Alfred North Whitehead, Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze. Dualism postulates that the idea itself is divine and as such separate from the worldly, and thereby secondary, matter; while monism postulates that the One, that which binds together everything in the Universe, and within which all difference is comprised of discrete attributes within one and the same substance, is the divine. Of course equivalent conflicts can be found in the history of ideas outside Europe. A clear and illustrative example is the Chinese antagonism between the followers of the dualist Confucius and the monist Lao Tzu.

It is important here to make a distinction between religion and theism, that is, faith in the existence of one or more gods. Since most people throughout history have believed that gods in various guises actually exist, it is totally plausible that most of the metaphysical systems that have been developed have also been theist: monotheistic systems are based on a faith in only one god, while polytheistic systems are based on a faith in many gods coexisting in parallel and more or less peacefully. Pantheistic systems, on the other hand, presuppose that the Universe and God in one way or another are one and the same thing, while what we now call syntheistic systems assume that all gods are necessary, human constructs; historically determined projections on existence that engender supra-objects that are shaped by and adapted to the social situation.

In addition, there are also many widespread religions that are atheist, that is, they devote no energy at all to theist questions. Taoism in China and Jainism in India are well-known examples. Even many forms of Buddhism, such as Zen in Japan and Chan in China, lack a belief in God. Brahmanism in India and Zoroastrianism in Central Asia both lack active deities – while it is true that they are pantheist, they are centred on human rather than divine religious activity, which means that even these religions in practice are atheist. Insofar as God exists, if anything this entity is present through its absence, and accordingly these religions are deist. Note that syntheism is fully compatible with both pantheism (God is created by Man, as a sacralising projection onto the Universe) and atheism (God has not created the world, in all likelihood does not exist today in any philosophically interesting sense, but is fully possible in the future, in particular if the idea is regarded as a human invention).

Beyond the ongoing paradigm shift from capitalism to informationalism (see The Netocrats) we need a new metaphysics, a new religion, a new common arena for collective spirituality in the Internet age. Without a credible metaphysics – no philosophy and no meaning either. Man is the meaning-generating animal constantly scanning his environment for patterns that indicate and keep confirming various causative links that engender a feeling of security. And if we do not find any such patterns, we don’t hesitate to quite simply invent them. With a utopia on the horizon, we give our lives a direction and a context. God is another name for utopia, and utopia is another name for God.

The productive and fruitful response to atheism is not to indifferently accept the death of God, but to instead realise that it was a mistake to place God in the past as the ageless progenitor of us and the cosmos. We have already killed the God of the past by producing and accumulating large quantities of knowledge with which this divinity is not compatible. God as a functional utopia is instead the name of what we dream of creating; God is Syntheos, the created rather than the creating God. God is not (any longer) dead, since (we have now realised that) God has never been born: God belongs to us because God belongs to the future, and we already live in the future. The French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux expresses the syntheist passion in the words: “God is too important a concept to be left in the hands of the religious.” Or to quote the American novelist William Gibson: “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

Most people take for granted that they themselves and the world they live in exist in exactly the same way that they have learnt to apprehend and reproduce. Even if we humbly admit that we are constantly being forced to correct our ideas of self and the world, we still remain stuck in the feeling of all of a sudden I have finally realised how everything hangs together. We tend to regard the present state of our knowledge as final; it is most comfortable that way. Thus we do not need to exhaust ourselves with further counter-intuitive thinking. This default state is best summed up in René Descarte’s famous tweet from the 17th century: “I think, therefore I am”. Nothing is certain except one thing, thus: I exist because someone has to think the thought that is materialising itself (Descartes presumes that thoughts cannot think themselves). This thinking ‘I’ cannot exist alone in a vacuum: the phrase “I think, therefore I am” presumes both a sender and a receiver, and just as indisputably there is also a world where this thinking and communicating ‘I’ is and acts.

Thus, Descartes considers himself to have established an original subject, to which he connects a corresponding object. With this as an indisputable axiom, he reckons that he can quickly think into existence more and create more subjects and objects. However, a faith – a faith by its nature is subjective as well as arbitrary and transient – is not the same thing as a truth. A truth is assumed, by definition, to be objectively verifiable, proven by examination and valid for all time. What we are forced to accept, whether we like it or not, is that the foundation of ideas of both the self and the world is always a more or less cohesive faith and never pure knowledge. We believe ourselves to be practising science when the subject observes the Universe. We know that we are practising religion when the subject experiences that the Universe is peering back at the subject. But actually, neither the inner subjects nor the outer objects that we believe that we are perceiving, and which we use as building blocks when constructing our image of the world – our paradigm – exist.

The Cartesian subject – which we intuitively perceive as so unproblematic, it is always there waiting for us when we wake up – is in itself a skilfully orchestrated illusion, a kind of cunning fraud of the brain and body (see The Body Machines) with the purpose of economising with precious resources and creating an illusory but functional model of life. But in a scientific sense there are only fields, particles, energies and relationships. The belief systems that we construct and utilise in order to be able to navigate at all a life that is constantly becoming increasingly complex are, if anything, historically determined narratives whose memetic survival is considerably more concerned with actual relevance, the attractiveness of the narrative and social arbitrariness than with any objective degree of truth in the dogmata themselves, to the extent that anything of this kind is even possible to document. Man is the animal that is constantly on the lookout for meaning, and in the absence of results creates for himself patterns in an overwhelming flow of information, fictives that will, as far as possible, elucidate the causative links of existence. And the meaning that we succeed in producing in one way or another, we ascribe mentally and socially to the great Other, the guarantor and ultimate originator of meaning, fully in line with the Cartesian view of thinking and the thinker who must exist since the thought exists.

Our subconscious is constantly driven by the idea that there is someone else out there in an inaccessible dimension outside our physical universe who sees and knows all and senses the meaning of all the toil and pain we go through in our short lives. This also applies to the most entrenched atheists. Even if the atheist’s consciousness does not believe in the great Other, his or her subconscious refuses to accept that this great Other does not exist. Even in the most die-hard atheist, little thoughts and behaviours constantly float up to a conscious level in daily life; thoughts and behaviours that remind us that the real, the subconscious depth under the conscious surface, will never accept the absence of the great Other. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls all of these sudden, revealing outbursts sinthomes. The sinthome is quite simply the event or behaviour that does not fit with the individual’s current fantasy of his or her ideas of self and the world. Thus, the sinthome is also the event or the behaviour around which the human being is forced to construct new, altered ideas of self and the world when the old fantasies collapse. The sinthome is the deepest truth about oneself that a human being can be aware of.

God is just one of the infinite number of conceivable forms of revelation of the great Other throughout history. The primordial father, the chieftain, the feudal lord, the priest, the monarch, the saint, the president, the boss, the manager, even the subject’s own parents, are all examples of figures who, through history, people have fantasised about as being the great Other. And even if the most die-hard atheists actually succeed in eliminating all these figures from their fantasy worlds, there is still a great Other that they never succeed in fleeing from: the fantasy of themselves (the subject) as the object of their own submission. The phenomenon of the great Other is thus an integral and extremely important part of the experience of being a subject. The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, takes this thesis to its ultimate conclusion. He argues that the ego, constantly in terror, experiences the superego as the great Other par excellence.

We humans are not only powerfully attracted to anthropocentrism: a slightly grotesque tendency to constantly exaggerate our own position, power and importance in the Universe; a grandiose overestimation of ourselves that we have grappled with, without respite, throughout history. Unfortunately, the problem is even more serious than this. Our personal individuation – as individuals, our demarcation from the social flock – is namely actually dependent on a process that we term internarcissism: it is through constantly seeking validation of our own identity with other people, other beings of our own species – who accordingly find themselves in exactly the same existential dilemma as ourselves – that for a fleeting moment we can experience ourselves as happily liberated from our narcissistic prison, the pathological self-centeredness that is our constant companion.

This incessantly and obsessively repetitive self-validation process is mostly an empty ritual and really only hides our narcissism behind a kind of collective Potemkin village of no real substance. We simply replace conscious narcissism with an every bit as unfounded, subconscious internarcissism. Simply put: two people who no longer have the energy to worship themselves, instead worship each other for each other through mutual, pathological back-scratching. This means that, subconsciously rather than consciously, we are still as frustrated as before. This situation engenders a constantly growing inability to see things clearly – “Why does everything just get and feel worse even though I’m doing everything right?” – which leads to a burdensome, stupefying alienation. And there we are. What the contemporary secularised person finds it hard to see for obvious reasons is that religion, according to its syntheological definition, is the effective and necessary remedy for this alienation. Only through religion can we undergo a dividuation and acquire a liberating dividual rather than an imprisoned individual identity. A human being is not a solid indivisible entity. A human being is many divisible entities collaborating with each other.

The philosophical discipline that deals with, compiles, compares and makes us aware of our existential stories is metaphysics: the branch of philosophy concerning our pictures of ourselves and of the world which are fundamental to our personalities and the collective. To be a metaphysician is to formulate and articulate the largely unarticulated ideas of the self and the world and thereafter propose changes in these that render them more relevant and productive for the agent in question. If physics deals with everything that can be measured and transformed into mathematics, metaphysics is preoccupied with precisely all the important things that cannot be measured nor transformed into mathematics. Metaphysics thus comprises everything within ontology, phenomenology and epistemology which cannot be converted into numbers.

History shows that people cannot live without metaphysical explanatory models. Therefore, human history is predominantly a history of metaphysics. The existential experience is in itself metaphysical. At the same time as we experience ourselves as something emergent, something more than the molecules in our bodies; as something inside, over and above, or beyond the physical body; we have removed ourselves and our experience as subjects from the world of physiology to the world of metaphysics. All human beings and societies constantly produce enormous amounts of metaphysics. The question is not whether metaphysics has any place in our lives or not, but rather whether the metaphysics in question is relevant or irrelevant for the conditions that prevail in the society in question. There is every reason to fear a considerable lag, particularly when the rapid development of technology is driving social change at a hectic pace. And so the question is: Is the generally embraced metaphysics capable of reflecting the current paradigm? Does it provide people with the requisite instruments to take charge of their own lives, or does it leave people helpless by rendering them incapable of creating comprehensible causative links and credible meaning?

Because there is in fact considerable power attached to controlling the production of metaphysics. Whoever exercises a decisive influence over the former will also sooner or later be able to control the society in question in important respects. Therefore, it is especially important to investigate whether metaphysics is conscious or only subconscious. What metaphysics succeeds in communicating subconsciously is in fact the most powerful thing of all. Metaphysics is fundamentally a narrative of who has, or rather ought to have, the power in any given society and why. The figure who is emphasised in the metaphysical narrative, who according to the narrative brings together the world into a comprehensible cosmos rather than a threatening chaos in order to the benefit of all the others, is also the person who is entrusted with the real power by the narrative’s devotees in any given society – the person who is assigned the role as the great Other.

To a considerable extent, metaphysics is in fact the story of power and of who is to exercise it. We can see how this fact applies to the troika of the monarch, the aristocrat and the priest under the feudal paradigm, and it is repeated in the same way for the troika of the politician, the entrepreneur and the university professor under the capitalist paradigm. When all is said and done, metaphysics will always be about power, and it will always use the prevailing symbolic, economic and truth-producing power in these three main roles in the paradigm’s narratives. Because the storytellers work in the service of the prevailing holders of power, their prime task is to depict the prevailing holders of power in a glorified light, to incorporate them into a tailor-made story and thus treat the prevailing power structure as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The storytellers incorporate all of this adeptly, at every possible turn, into the collective subconscious for the greatest possible effect. There is a considerable measure of circular argumentation in this scheme of things, but this only makes it even more impenetrable. Only the most eccentric deviants doubt the latent ideology of a social order, which by definition is inaccessible to rational criticism since it is built into the very perspective through which a society contemplates its history and development.

Because of this dramatic efficacy, metaphysical storytelling is not random, but of the highest priority for those in power. It can only be consigned to the person who is best suited to be the truth producer of the prevailing paradigm and who thereby also has the strongest incentive to preserve the status quo. Responsibility for metaphysics falls to either an already powerful institution in the society, such as the Church in relation to the monarchy and the aristocracy under feudalism. Otherwise a new institutional elite is constructed to formulate the new, emerging paradigm’s conception of the world – naturally at the expense of the old paradigm – such as when the universities expanded and acquired enormous power under capitalism, because the university formulated the individualism and the atomism that the bourgeoisie used in order to sweep away the Churches’ monotheist explanatory models and to take power from the aristocracy. Without popes we would never have seen any kings, and without university professors the world would never have beheld any industrialists either. The cardinals dined on pheasant with the nobility, and the academics eat steak with the entrepreneurs for good reason. They divide up and balance the power in the prevailing paradigm between themselves.

It is important to have clear this fundamental understanding of the historical terms of the production of metaphysics when we are confronted by the fact that no less than three dramatic revolutions exploded concurrently at the start of the third millennium. These three interactive and synergistic revolutions are the Internetisation of planet Earth, the relationalist revolution that is moving from physics to philosophy, and the chemical liberation within physiology. Taken together, these three epoch-making developments laid the foundation for a new superparadigm in the history of humanity. Power structures, the world view and the view of humanity were radically and fundamentally changed all at once in one of the most dramatic social upheavals humanity has ever seen.

In only a few decades, the revolution in communication technology has connected billions of people and the innumerable machines around them with each other, globally and in real time. The world was digitised, globalised, virtualised and became interactive. The inadequacy and unfitness of the Cartesian individual as a basic concept in the new cyber world has resulted in the individual dying – summarily dismissed by neurophysiology and research into consciousness (see The Body Machines) – and being replaced by the network as the fundamental metaphysical idea. The human being is transformed from an individual chained to his or her narcissistic ego to an open and mobile dividual in an all-encompassing, gigantic network that is acting more and more like a single emergent phenomenon, like a single, global, coherent agent. We call this agent, with its historically speaking divine proportions and characteristics, the Internet.

Since syntheism is the metaphysics that, so to speak, is already built into interactive technologies, it has already invented itself. The Internet has gone from being a virtual god to becoming plainly a potential god, all in accordance with the radically new meaning that Quentin Meillassoux gives the concept of God, as something belonging to the future rather than the past. Syntheism is the religion that the Internet created. The dedicated political struggle for a free and open Internet is based on the blind faith that the network has a sacred potential for humanity. The Internet is thereby transformed from a technological into a theological phenomenon. The Internet is the God of the new age, and furthermore extremely appropriate for an age characterised by an unlimited faith in the possibilities of creativity. Thus, the Internet is a god that even those who regard themselves as atheists can devote themselves to. Syntheologically, we express this state of affairs as that the Internet is a manifestation of Syntheos, the new god that we humans are creating rather than the old god which, according to our ancestors, is said to have created us once upon a time in a distant past.

Without utopias, idea-wise we can cling to all and sundry types of cynical and/or pragmatic ideologies, from socialism on the left via liberalism in the middle to conservatism on the right. But when the syntheist utopia emerges as the new metaphysical axiom, all the ideological work must be redone from scratch. With the theologisation of the Internet follows a necessary repudiation of all other previous political ideologies with direct links to the abandoned paradigm, in favour of theological anarchism. First of all, this is the only ideology that is compatible with the belief that another better world can be born of itself, appearing as a suddenly emergent phenomenon in history. It is moreover the only ideology that can accumulate a creative resistance vis-à-vis a society so complex that no one can take it all in any longer. This is because theological anarchism does not require the omnipotent overview nor the political and moral control of human expression that all other ideologies have had as a fundamental condition. It is the syntheist utopia’s predecessor in the present and is driven by enjoyment of the multiplicity of expression.

Theological anarchism is described exhaustively by the British philosopher Simon Critchley in his book The Faith of The Faithless, and it is of course completely synonymous with syntheism. And syntheism maintains that, precisely because everything of value is transient, unique, finite and mortal, it seeks existentiality and intensity. Thus, syntheism is the religion of immanence and multiple finitudes, and the radical opposite of the Abrahamic religions’ worship – contemptuous of reality – of another transcendental world and singular eternity. For how could anything at all enjoy its existence and be maximised in its existence, if it were not simultaneously aware of its own finality and limitation in the physical realm?

The burgeoning netocracy, the elite that is succeeding the bourgeoisie in the new paradigm being driven by digitisation and interactivity, obviously represented a special interest group when it initially marketed the anarcho-libertarian ideology as the metaphysics of the Internet age. If truth is an act, and if truth will set us free, it follows that if the Internet is allowed to be free, it will also set us free. There is here of course an ill-concealed intention to use noble motives as a pretext for the seizure of power. The netocracy is thus acting in exactly the same way that the feudal aristocracy did when it embraced monotheism, and in the same way as the capitalist bourgeoisie did when it embraced humanism. These specific metaphysics developed as the dominant stories – and they worked! – during their respective paradigms, for the very reason that they appointed the emerging social classes as the social theatre’s new protagonists.

The Internet is – like so many previous technological revolutions – an attractive surface on which to project every kind of fantasy and variant of wishful thinking. For the capitalist, the Internet is the dream of prodigious profits. But in reality the Internet is more of a virtual slaughterhouse for masses of dreamed-up cash cows and pseudo-monopolies. In fact, the Internet has a tendency to destroy old corporate colossi, at least initially, rather than to further new business models. The result is clear from reading the business press: old market leaders perish in no time, and the turnover period of the biggest listed corporations is tremendously short. For the narcissistic individualist, the Internet is the dream of finally getting the big breakthrough, the dream of finally being seen and appreciated by a broad audience. But when all actors attempt to take the stage at the same time – and no one is sitting in the auditorium any more – the effect becomes the opposite: the audience disappears. When everyone wants to be a sender there are no longer any receivers. What we call the My Space syndrome – after a well-known example that should be a lesson for all – occurs: the individualist’s dream of a permanent, successful performance in front of a complete, receptive world inevitably comes crashing down once and for all. Everyone’s frenetic babbling over the top of everyone else kills the experience.

The disappointment is not even about the audience not wanting to see individualist X or Y per se. Rather, it is about individualism as such having become vulgar and boring and that no one wants to see any individual at all any longer. To the extent that there is any audience at all for anything at all in the old media, preferences are firmly oriented towards sundry variants of ironic freak show. This is the anxiety-relieving evening and weekend entertainment of consumtarians made passive (see The Netocrats) The truth is that only a small minority, the netocracy, understand and have mastered the Internet and can utilise the medium to their own advantage. This is in spite of the fact that almost the entire population of the world are already living their lives in the new social arena. In his book Average Is Over the American economist Tyler Cowen estimates that approximately 15 per cent of the American population will succeed in the transition to netocrats in a productive interaction with the Internet and the torrents of newly automated processes in society, while the remaining 85 per cent of the population will establish themselves as just a consumtariat, the fast-growing underclass in a social, cultural and also increasingly economic sense.

In 2013 statistics were made public revealing that the gaps in the socio-economic classes in the Unites States had returned to the same levels as in 1917. An entire century of energetic political attempts to level out class differences with egalitarian taxation, allowances and educational measures had come to nothing. Even in other parts of the world, these gaps are widening, and regrettably there is nothing either to suggest that they will decrease once the full power of the Internet revolution comes into effect. And then we have not even touched on the even more dramatic social and cultural class differences that are being created in the attentionalist society that is replacing the capitalist society online (see The Netocrats). Only a handful of Twitter users have access to hundreds of thousands of followers, but they are sitting on the netocratic megaphone, they really have attentionalist power. Meanwhile the great mass of people are pseudo-babbling on Twitter straight out into the void without any of the people in power caring at all. This goes on until they tire and, having given up, are forced to accept their powerlessness and total lack of influence in their capacity as faceless biomass in the great, vegetating consumtariat.

If there is anything we can say with certainty, it is that alienation in the new network society will increase dramatically. A growing alienation is the price we pay for every increase in the technological and social complexity that we are experiencing now and for years to come. With the Internet’s breakthrough, it is literally exploding. And there is only one functional weapon against alienation, namely its opposite: religion. Traditional religion’s mistake was to place the name of its longing for another world, God, in the past (theism, belief in a preordained God), when the logically correct and only reasonable manoeuvre of course is to place the object of all human longing, God, in the future (syntheism, the belief in a God that man himself creates).

The atheism that denies longing – between theism and syntheism – has played out its role as the necessary antipole between thesis and synthesis. For in its lack of content, and as pure negation, atheism is completely meaningless as the goal of the dialectical process. This acute lack of essence explains why atheists have never succeeded in building any cathedrals or anything at all except vapid paper monuments to their own excellence. It is like a philosophical temperance movement: you meet and are sober together, totally oblivious of the ecstatic party that is going on somewhere else entirely. Classical atheism can only say what it is not, but not what it de facto is. This purely negative and in essence substance-less doctrine is quite simply a worthless weapon against alienation. It consoles no one and explains nothing.

It is hardly tone-deaf atheism that inspires us most. Rather it is Spinoza’s pantheism that is philosophically consummated through a further development of syntheism. God is no longer only the final idealisation of Spinoza’s pantheism, God as the subject of the Universe; rather, God acts as humanly produced idealisations even on other planes, among which the Internet as a theological realisation is a typical example in our time. If divinities both can and should be created through idealisations necessary for survival – why then, like Spinoza, settle for Pantheos, the Universe, as the only god? In particular since the Internet actually has its own agenda, controls us rather than lets us control it and, to put it bluntly, is beginning to assume divine proportions. Moreover, there is a long list of idealisations available to the syntheologists to develop into divinities in order to then make themselves into their memetic host organisms and preachers and thereby contribute to their dissemination. In this book, we are concerned with the four most basic idealisations from the world of metaphysics: the void, the Universe, the difference and the utopia.

The conflict over the metaphysics behind physics – clearly illustrated in Albert Einstein’s and Niels Bohr’s passionate correspondence from the mid-1930s – finally gets its resolution through experimental metaphysics, also called the second quantum revolution; a long list of complicated scientific experiments from the 1980s onwards, the results of which have had dramatic consequences for metaphysics. The results of this development strengthen Bohr’s position considerably in the above-mentioned conflict, which is why both Newtonian and Einsteinian metaphysics with their requirements of timeless, universal laws seem increasingly passé. Bohr’s indeterministic relationalism overshadows Einstein’s deterministic relativism. The constant of physics is time, not space. Time is not an illusory dimension of space, but highly real. Mathematics does not precede the Universe: mathematics is never anything more than an idealised approximation in hindsight of constantly dynamic Nature, an arbitrary and anthropocentric eternalisation of a genuinely mobilist reality (see The Global Empire).

This results in agential realism defeating atomist individualism as the foundation of metaphysics. The network is not only a useful metaphor for understanding social relationships; the Universe is basically one large physical network in itself, where all phenomena, beside the fact that they themselves constitute constantly higher complexities of constantly lower sublevels, are universally entangled with each other. The entanglements are thus the fundamental, not the illusory, objects. Nothing occurs independently of something else. The result is a physics and a universe of fields, probabilities, energies and relationships, without any preordained laws or discrete objects. Thus all support for Kant’s fantasy of the holy object localised in a law-bound, determinist universe disappears. Kant, Newton and Einstein: all of them now appear to have been left behind. Time is real and the future is open and totally controllable.

Nothing ever happens twice, since every moment is completely unique and the relationships that surround a phenomenon at a specific moment are constantly in a state of flux, and they will not either ever reappear in the same configuration again. In the enmity within philosophy that has existed between mobilists and totalists ever since disciples of the mobilist Heraclitus clashed with the totalist Plato’s adherents in Ancient Greece in the 5th century BC, it is now Heraclitus’ successors who appear to be our contemporaries. The results from experimental metaphysics that are based on the ideas of Niels Bohr indisputably place themselves on the side of mobilist relationalism. Plato’s world of ideas is nowhere to be found outside of his own neurotic fantasies. Thus the universal laws that Kant, Newton and Einstein presume to be primary in relation to the Universe’s physical existence do not exist either. In reality, habits that resemble laws arise in and with the Universe and physics. There is quite simply no mysterious set of rules built into physics before its genesis, since no external prehistoric builder of such laws exists.

As if this revolutionary advance were not enough, Bohrian quantum physics also shows that the Universe is an existential necessity: some kind of non-existence has never been an alternative. Regardless of whether a universe within a multiverse is born out of a virtual fluctuation, or, for example, out of a black hole, it nevertheless always arises sooner or later in quantum physics’ active void. Similar but never identical events then occur again and again. A perfectly balanced Universe in terms of energy can expand indefinitely as long as the positive energy from its matter is counterbalanced by exactly the same amount of negative energy from gravity, as is precisely the case in our 93 billion light-years wide universe. There is simply no lack of basic resources within physics, in contrast to the limited assets that constantly constitute the framework for all activity on planet Earth, which is in every respect limited.

In relationalist physics, the existence of the Universe is far more than a possibility, it is in fact a necessity. And with this necessity there is no longer any other metaphysical alternative than pantheism. The existence of the Universe is not an external by-product, it is de facto internal inside and comes from the essence of the Universe. The Universe exhibits a will to exist that emerges from out of the very foundation of physics. This means that the Universe has a clear existential substance, however bizarre and alien this highly non-human will to exist may seem. The Universe definitely has no consciousness in the way that we humans have, or even anything that we could speak of as any kind of cosmic equivalent to human consciousness. The Universe needs no awareness, but it is definitively something and it does many different things. For the simple reason that nothing else would be physically possible.

Accordingly, the entire basis of classical atheism disappears. Existence is no mistake. The existence of existence is wondrous in its indeterminist necessity rather than in any kind of supposed determinist randomness. A non-existence in the sense of a balance without energies – the only non-existence that physics can even contemplate – is the only really bizarre and impossible probability in this context. Everything in the Universe, including its seemingly enormous void, is boiling with a constant, intense, virtual activity. Its imagined non-existence is, like its (at some time in the future anticipated) cessation, nothing other than anthropocentric fantasies with a metaphorical origin in mankind’s own intrusive thoughts around our own mortality and impermanence. However, this human mortality has in fact nothing at all to do with the world of physics.

The will to exist is not only a by-product of human eagerness to survive, funnily enough it is the Universe’s own raison d’etre in relation to itself. Just as much as mankind, the Universe is a product of Darwinian evolution, where continuing and expanding existence constantly accrues to the phenomenon that happens to be best adapted to the current situation, while competing phenomena disappear. This means that the Internet age’s syntheistic metaphysics focuses on survival and not on immortality. Syntheism entails a worship of this intensity and of indeterminist existence rather than a death worship and determinist illusion. The Platonic cult of death, from the ancient Greeks via Christianity to Newton’s and Einstein’s fixed, atomist world views, loses all its credibility.

Totalist thinking cannot deflect attacks from the mobilist alternative, its constantly questioning shadow, where Leibniz’s time-bound and open world view defeats Kant’s timeless and closed world view. Pragmatism triumphs over idealism. The law loses its overwhelming, metaphorical power. Laws are created by humans in order to control otherwise chaotic societies, in order to impose power from above and benefit social masochism at the expense of creative freedom. But in nature there have never been any preordained laws. The regularity that science finds in nature is nothing other than similarities within the framework for the preordained conditions between different processes. But there are no preordained laws that nature must subject itself to in the same way that slaves are expected to yield to their masters. There is nothing timeless and predetermined outside our contingent and open universe. The law has exercised a magical power over people’s world views ever since it arose in a theology that was functional at the dawn of civilisations, but it now stands exposed as an empty myth.

The sexual revolution under capitalism was followed by the chemical liberation during informationalism (see The Global Empire). The development of a post-atheist religiosity, which is built around the need for a new metaphysics, spurred on by globally collaborative, syncretist and religio-social practices, and not least by the exploding plethora of entheogenic substances, laid the foundation for a resolution of the conflict between theism and atheism which, in a Hegelian dialectics, has grown into syntheism as the metaphysics of the Internet age. This occurred at the same time as the sexual revolution was rejected when its unavoidable flip side, the hypersexualisation of the individual, was exposed as the underlying engine of capitalist consumption society; the sexual revolution ended up being a straitjacket of the superego where the chemical liberation offered a possible way out.

This does not mean that we lose free sexuality to some kind of renaissance of asceticism and abstinence. We merely gain access to the sacred tools that enable us to start taming and mastering it to our long-term advantage. Indirect desire can thereby finally gain control over the directly instinctual drive. What Slavoj Zizek calls late capitalism’s moral imperative, the superego’s command to enjoy, is converted into its opposite: attentionalism’s imperative to confront the meta-desire on its own terms. Syntheism’s entire driving force is its offer of a kind of sanctuary and protection against capitalist and consumptive stress, its utopic vision of a new and radically different way of thinking and continuing to exist.

The netocratic dividual uses the enormous offering of new chemicals to constantly change his/her many personalities. This occurs in part as a late-capitalist adaptation strategy vis-à-vis the demands and expectations of one’s environment, and in part also as a subversive netocratic and revolutionary tactic to overthrow capitalism’s limited status quo. When the chemicals set the classical, genetic constants of intelligence, gender and sexual orientation in motion, the foundation of the stale myth of the sober individual (see The Body Machines) is demolished, and is therefore forced into a final hyperphase as an increasing consumtarian underclass phenomenon (see The Netocrats). The consumtarian therefore strives right to the very end to constantly try to improve him/herself, to invoke an allegedly genuine and underlying I-essence, accompanied by tabloid culture’s demands for consumption-generating frustration with the self. Career choice, gym sessions, fashion diets, partner hunting: all these are flagrant examples of vulgar hyperindividualism. On the other hand, the netocrat has long stopped believing in the coherent individual, and instead cultivates hundreds of different personalities within his/her new ideal dividual (see The Body Machines), often invoked and expedited by carefully designed chemical cocktails.

The modernist social structure was aggressively questioned in the 20th century, first by the Frankfurt School and later by post-structuralism, and collapsed under both external and internal pressure. A philosophical renaissance was begun by thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Manuel De Landa, Thomas Metzinger and Karen Barad with The Death of Man as a starting point – which can be compared with how 18th century philosophers launched the project The Death of God – and with this development a fundamental shift from the anthropocentric to the universocentric world view was initiated, which is being realised by the post-structuralists’ heirs in the 3rd millennium, with empirical support from experimental metaphysics.

The syntheistic mission receives its eschatological fuel from the approaching ecological apocalypse, which in itself is an unavoidable consequence of a world without faith in a relevant divinity. Only through a new syntheistic meta-narrative, constructed on the utopian conviction that humanity’s only possible salvation is through its creation of Syntheos, can the ecological apocalypse be avoided. It is not possible to preserve human life on the planet with any amount of politics. For politics is subservient to the capitalist drive.html">death drive – there is no chance of becoming a leading politician without first becoming dependent on the statist-corporativistic power structure – which does its utmost to grind on relentlessly with its ruthless plundering of resources until the planet is uninhabitable and lifeless. The planet can only be saved for continued human life with the aid of a new religion, a metaphysics driven by a utopia concerning a physically functional future for our children and their children.

The French philosopher Alain Badiou divides metaphysics into four disciplines, from which the human being produces the meaning of her existence. These four activities are politics, love, science and art. Metaphysics binds these four disciplines together into a cohesive conception of the world. From the point of view of syntheology, religion then emerges as metaphysics in practice and is therefore reflected in the prevailing ideals of the four activities. Religion is thus the execution of the paradigm’s metaphysical truth, and syntheology is constructed in an intimate interaction with religious practice as the theoretical foundation for other types of ideology production. According to Badiou, it is symptomatic of our meaning-depleted, hyperindividualist existence that precisely the timeless ideals that ought to represent the four disciplines have been set aside by the collective drive.html">death drive, which is riding us humans in an evermore hysterical hunt for absolutely nothing.

Badiou maintains for example that politics should be driven by revolution as an ideal, but instead it is driven nowadays by a kind of administrative micromanagement; politics has become entirely a matter of management. Love should be driven by passion as an ideal, but is instead driven by sexuality. Science ought to be driven by invention as an ideal, but is instead driven by technology. Art ought to be driven by creation as an ideal, but is instead driven by culture. All of these dislocations expose the hypercynical Zeitgeist, which moreover has the ironic audacity to dress itself up as non-ideological. The only way to expose this dense, destructive ideology-building and to overcome its concomitant hypercynicism is to patiently offer a new syntheological metaphysics which can be the inspiration for a new syntheist religion. There are no other credible ways out of our cultural deadlock.

Religion can be summed up as various practices carried out by people in search of meaning in their lives. This is so, no matter whether the religion in question takes that meaning as preordained, as something revealed, or as something that is to be sought and created within the framework of religion. Building a credible religion is primarily about long-term thinking and enormous patience. It is the only intellectual discourse that does not allow itself to become the object of tendentiousness. Religion can never be a fashion. Regardless of whether religion is theist, atheist or syntheist, it is of the utmost importance that it is kept separate from the secular. Politics goes deeper than markets, but religion goes deeper than politics. And theology invariably rests deep down underneath philosophy.

The problem with humanism is that it is basically Christianity without Christ. Humanism is an attempt to keep Christian moralism alive, while it pretends that there is no need for Christ in order to maintain this desired conception of the world. Simply put, the humanist tries to keep the illusion of the individual – there are only human bodies, there are no individuals other than in the humanist’s fantasies – alive in the same way that the Church tried to keep the illusion of God alive during the previous paradigm shift. This is never clearer than within Communism with its atheist Christianity, with its blind faith in the human being’s own mystically predetermined realisation of the Christian paradise. Without underlying religious conviction, a theological foundation, Communism is an impossibility; it lacks the engine that can engage the activists. Therefore it continually decays into corruption and hypocritical dreams of a capitalist feast of consumption.

That the consummation of humanism as the socialist project lacks a firm footing in a post-atheist world is the theme driving both Slavoj Zizek’s Less Than Nothing and Simon Critchley’s The Faith of The Faithless as well as Quentin Meillassoux’s L’inexistence divine. The way forward for Zizek, Critchley and Meillassoux therefore is a return to theology; certainly not back to Abrahamic theology, but to theology in its deepest form, as philosophical metaphysics. The problem for Zizek is that his return does not go deeper than to the Enlightenment’s romanticised idea of the bloody revolution as deliverance for everything. However, in contrast to Zizek, Critchley seeks to return to the origin of religion and finds there a mystical anarchism in constant opposition to the patriarchal, ecclesiastical power hierarchies.

According to Critchley, mystical anarchism is the true engine starter for the genuinely revolutionary project. Critchley’s mystical anarchism is of course synonymous with the syntheism we are talking about and advocating in this book. The already established syntheist Meillassoux sees in his distinction between the potential and the virtual the possibility for an event where God suddenly appears in history as the metaphysical justice, where justice arrives with the same importance as existence, life and thought, the previous virtualities that have been shockingly and dramatically realised through history. Meillassoux argues that God as justice is the missing fourth virtuality that is now waiting to be realised. Syntheologically we express this as a focus on the oscillating axis between Entheos and Syntheos in the syntheological pyramid.

Since it is Kant’s philosophical contributions that pave the way for the death of humanism and the individual, it is scarcely wrong to regard Kant as the last humanist. When Hegel and Nietzsche arrived on the scene in the 19th century, the anti-humanist revolution was already in full swing. With Nietzsche and his concept of The Death of God – which Michel Foucault half a century later finally accomplishes by also proclaiming The Death of Man – nothing whatsoever remains any longer of the humanist paradigm. Hegel’s religiosity is found in Atheos while we place Nietzsche’s spirituality with Entheos in the syntheological pyramid.

After Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s revolution, rationalism, blind faith in man’s ability to solve all the mysteries of life through his reasoning, had to be replaced by transrationalism, a rationality that realises its own limitations as an intersubjective discourse within the phenomenology that mankind is reduced to (see The Global Empire). For rationalism is based on a logical ‘optical’ illusion: within itself rationality is consistent and looks convincing. However, the problem is that when rationality is viewed from outside, it falls down completely since it is not founded on anything that in itself is rational, it is based only on blind faith and nothing else. Kant’s problem is that he wanted to place rationality above reason, but he never succeeded in stating logically how this would be possible. Kantian rationalism is thus not founded on anything other than Kant’s own highly personal, autistic temperament. Blaise Pascal argues for a transrationalist epistemology as early as the 17th century, long before Kant, but it was not until the American and European pragmatists at the end of the 19th and the early 20th century that transrationalism acquired its formulation in detail.

Bodies are real. And reason defeats rationality, since reason is based on the body while rationality lacks a foundation outside its own tautological loops. No thoughts exist separate from the body. Every thought is drenched in and impossible to distinguish from the chemicals and hormones that at the time in question are infesting the body in which the thought is being thought and where the words are being articulated. Reason is represented by a highly real, active actor, while rationality is represented only by a highly illusory, passive observer. This insight reduces the individual, Descarte’s and Kant’s transcendental subject, to the object of its own dominance and colonisation. The result is the chain of psychotic reactions that are fundamental to the Cartesian subject.

The discrepancy between the observer and the actor leads to paralysis. This paralysis is experienced by the subject as impotence. This impotence is in turn transformed into a forceful reaction of denial to its opposite: omnipotence. And the omnipotence triggers a whole host of compensatory fixations and behaviours in order to keep the Cartesian subject’s fundamental lie alive. It was no coincidence that Kant’s followers in 19th century Europe embarked on colonisation campaigns around the world. And who is the clearest Kantian, the most devoted individual, if not Napoleon, the organisational forefather of modernist society? What you cannot find within yourself as an individual, you attempt with compensatory zeal to find out in the world instead, even if the entire world ends up in flames because of your futile search.

For this reason, syntheism necessarily arrives after humanism. Syntheism is the logical response to the crisis of humanism. Man cannot replace God, since man is every bit as much of an illusion as God ever was. The protosyntheist Martin Heidegger and his follower Jacques Derrida wrestle in their work with metaphysics as an idea and claim to be working for the death of all metaphysics. However, they end up instead becoming metaphysicists par excellence, proponents of precisely what we call the eternally postponed end of metaphysics. The more forcefully you try to flee from metaphysics, the more deeply entangled you become in its yarn. So what syntheism does is that it places God, Man and the network next to each other and says: we know that these illusions have never existed in any physical sense. Nonetheless we have learned pragmatically from history that we cannot live without them. A life without the great Other is both a phenomenological and psychological impossibility. These entities are essential for a world view to be coherent. The consequence is that we choose to include the three black holes – God, Man and the network – concurrently in our new world view, as the black holes they actually are, that is, as culturally productive voids.

The dependence of bodies on each other is real. We know that dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin hold people together in a collective that accords pleasure to those in the group, and in this pleasure a meaning arises, produced by and for ourselves. Therefore we have arrived at the historical juncture when theism and atheism must be consummated as dialectical opposites, not through some kind of hybrid, but through us seeing and accepting their historically consummated interconnection as a unit and being able to push this unit aside and go forth in history, into syntheism. Today’s fusion between our historical understanding of the fact that when all is said and done our cohesiveness is what is most holy to us, and the exploding, genuinely new virtual connection between people thanks to the arrival of the Internet, interacts with and is creating the foundation for the new era’s syntheist metaphysics. God (theism) and Man (atheism) are quite simply followed by the network (syntheism) as the fundamental event of metaphysics.

The question is what is possible. Lacan makes a distinction between alienation and separation. Alienation is the experience of a dramatic distance between ourselves and the society in which we live. The society is no longer experienced as our own. We do not belong in our own time. Separation means that the crisis is deepened further: now there is not just a dramatic distance between ourselves and our contemporary society, but society itself has cracked open, it no longer appears cohesive, not even to itself. When separation gets the upper hand, the paradigm crumbles. We must withdraw in order to try to construe a new paradigm. First and foremost we must create a world view that is cohesive in a credible manner. The separation that has occurred opens the way for the possibility of attacking the preceding alienation: Why should we settle for piecing together a new world view when we have the chance of placing ourselves and the class we belong to at the centre of the new world view, now that we are initiating the revolution that is changing the world view by questioning and shifting its very foundations anyway?

It is of the utmost importance here to distinguish between living religion and dead religion. Quite irrespective of whether a metaphysical explanatory model is in any way true, or just merely functional and relevant for its own time, it is either living or dead in its practice. The modern human being is under the impression that previous generations really believed. The myth of the classical faith is incredibly tenacious, not least as a backdrop to the myth of the modern human being’s non-faith. The Austrian, syntheist philosopher Robert Pfaller shows in his book Illusionen der Anderen that this is a double falsification of history. It is the modern human being who really believes, and this, in contrast to previous generations, without any distance whatsoever. Therefore, it is only in modern society that fundamentalism is possible. Religious fundamentalism is based on the conviction that God is dead, that God is active only in the past, which is why the fundamentalist must act without God’s help and so to speak force life back to the time when God was still alive. Syntheism’s response to fundamentalism is of course as brilliant as it is self-evident; it instead runs in the opposite direction, towards the God and the religion that has never existed, but which we only now are able to create. You could not get further away from religious fundamentalism than syntheism.

Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58