3 The four paradigms in the history of metaphysics

Since information technology is the most important instrument of power in existence, it is both productive and in every respect correct – particularly in connection with the transition to an informationalist paradigm – to divide the history of humanity into four, distinct information technology paradigms. So forget the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age and the other mythological constructions of industrialism, produced for precisely the purpose of writing history so that it culminates in the smoking factories of industrialism. Let us instead regard all societies in all forms and stages of development as various kinds of information societies, and let us view history as a story of the battle for power over the means of communication. Because whoever controls the channels for communicating truth and ideas also can be said to own and dictate the truth and the ideas.

The pattern which emerges in the information technology writing of history tells how spoken language, written language, the printing press, and the Internet have each created the foundations for their paradigm, and that these technologies, once they have had time to have an impact and play all their cards, have formed social structures that differ in important respects from what the world has shown before (see The Netocrats). We distinguish the four paradigms from each other by the sudden, revolutionary shifts between the different systems for information processing and different forms of communication that have occurred throughout history, and which have resulted every time in dramatically altered living conditions, power structures, social models, world views and what constitutes the human ideal.

For each and every one of these four information technology complexes has increased the quantity of information available in a given society to a revolutionary extent, which in turn has created entirely new social hierarchies with entirely new parameters for metaphysics and its assumptions and consequences. A pervasive social change means exactly this: not more of the old, but a qualitatively tangible change of an emergent nature. The old feudal Europe plus the printing press meant, after this epoch-making technology had been operating for long enough, not the same old Europe plus an interesting machine, but a completely new Europe that gave birth to industrialism, parliamentarism and the colonisation of the rest of the world. These new metaphysical narratives in turn radically changed both the world view and the human ideal, and thereby the entire power structure.

For reasons that we have detailed extensively in The Netocrats, these four information technology paradigm shifts should be regarded as the genuine revolutions that have driven history; created by the radically increasing amount of information available and the unique impact of their accompanying metaphors. The seemingly dramatic events that follow on from these paradigm shifts ought rather to be viewed as symptoms of the underlying, genuine revolution, which has its basis in radically changed material conditions and thereby also dramatically changed power structures. For what would capitalism be, for example, without the printing press as a metatechnology and without the watch (timepiece) as a metaphor? It is impossible to imagine the factories of industrialism and all the other capitalist institutions that emerged during the powerful expansion of capitalism in the 19th century without their armies of literate office workers and without the clock on the factory wall and the fob watches in the factory managers’ waistcoat pockets that divided the working day up into clearly delimited and measurable units.

Ideas of revolt and other seemingly sudden and dramatic changes are merely secondary by-products that followed on from these changing material conditions, rather than some kind of originating event. For example, the French Revolution of 1789 cannot be viewed as a genuine revolution per se, but rather as a symptom of an underlying genuine revolution, namely the printing press, which was invented in Germany just over 300 years earlier. The printing press set in motion a gigantic feedback loop by making books cheap and generally available, thus creating a mass audience for texts, which in turn paved the way for an explosive production and consumption of knowledge and abstract ideas. Thanks to France being the first country in Europe with widespread literacy – and also with an increasingly urbanised economy – the French Revolution became the first event of its kind and, as stated, in many respects is exemplary in political mythology. It constitutes the first sudden, dramatic evidence of the reality of the printing press revolution, and thereby in hindsight a clear dividing line between the feudalist and capitalist paradigms, often referred to as the new era’s emergent moment. But let us for the sake of clarity keep these revolutions separate from their symptoms.

The French historian Fernand Braudel quite correctly describes the art of writing as the definitive technology. Both the Enlightenment and the Reformation were built on the printing press revolution; they both rest heavily on words and text, which had of course suddenly became available in cheap, mass circulation. The cost of producing a single book fell from tens of thousands of pounds to just a pound or so per copy, converted into today’s money value. Thus the Enlightenment and the Reformation exploited the advantages of the printing press to such an extent that they transform words and text per se into metaphysics. The book, the newspaper and the banknote as well as the later electronic, one-directional printing press derivatives for communicating, namely radio and television, acquire a fetishistic status under capitalism.

The Enlightenment constructs a new humanist mythology in opposition to Feudalism’s monotheism – with the individual as the bourgeoisie’s substitute for the aristocracy’s God – while the Reformation constitutes religion’s backlash against the Enlightenment’s criticism of religion. Here, the hybrid between the God of feudalism and the new individual emerges when the Protestant theologians position the suddenly established direct dialogue between God and the individual at the centre of metaphysics. The Reformation quite simply recasts God as the perfect bourgeois individual, the atomistic God, Jesus. These consequences – fatal for the Catholic Church – of the printing press putting cheap, mass-produced, vernacular editions of the Bible into the hands of the people, were probably not something that Gutenberg, a pious Catholic, could reasonably have conceived of, which once again underlines that every dominant metatechnology plays out its hand regardless of any intentions of its inventor and other serious stakeholders. The Internet is going to do the same.

Paradigm shifts entail dramatic conflicts, since for obvious reasons the prevailing power structure strives to preserve the status quo at any price for the purpose of defending its own privileges against the new, burgeoning elite. Therefore, with both violence and moralising nostalgia, the old power structure tries to keep the society fixed in the old paradigm for as long as humanly possible. That somebody voluntarily gives up the advantages bestowed on them by virtue of their class is a rare occurrence indeed. But the ice floe in the rapids on which civilisation to date has been standing eventually becomes so small that civilisation must migrate to another ice floe. With this sooner or later inevitable jump, the power structure and its writing of history changes radically, because everything must be hastily adapted to the new conditions for survival that are linked to and built into the new ice floe. Therefore it is always the new and not the old rulers – those who have most to gain and absolutely nothing to lose from the altered prioritisations within the new metaphysics – who are the fastest to change ice floes and adapt to the new rules for survival. The new metaphysics forces the pace, and the leap between the ice floes thus accelerates the rate of the shift of power between the elites of the two paradigms.

Every paradigm is accompanied by its own narrative, its own production of truth, circling around an essential starting point for its metaphysics. Each and every one of these narratives in turn contains three components: a cosmology, a romance and a linear history of the formative events in the past of the new paradigm, determined after the fact. As Hegel points out, these components are characterised throughout metahistory by an underlying requirement of necessity. What is metahistorically radically new in the case of syntheism – the metaphysics of the Internet age – is that it is based on contingency rather than necessity as its principle. Syntheism is indeterministic, not deterministic.

The information technology metahistory began with the tribe’s oral camp fire stories about itself in the spoken word society (mythos). Thereafter followed the painstakingly documented story of God’s fate and adventures in the written word society (logos), which in turn was followed by the printed story of the idolised human being in the mass media society (ethos). The corresponding transition in our time means that we now gather around the narrative – spread at lightning speed – of the holy network in the Internet society (pathos). The paradigm shifts are supremely material; the suddenly increased quantities of available information enable a powerful expansion of complexity and specialisation in human relations. Simultaneously, the new forms and extent of communication in our society are dictating a radical qualitative change in the conditions of the cultural ecosystem. This results in the older paradigm collapsing, and with it also its outmoded narrative and power structure. The old story must be replaced by a new, more credible metanarrative, which contains and popularises the allegories and metaphors that are relevant for the new paradigm. Above all, the new history must reflect the new power structure and its assumptions, or else it will not achieve acceptance or be spread.

The new power structure is strengthened by a new metaphysical narrative and vice versa. In this way, history repeats itself at every information technology paradigm shift. The tribe’s story is the foundation of paganism and its primitivist power structure. The story of God’s creation and control of the world forms the foundation of monotheism and the feudal power structure. The story of the genesis and perfection of Man as a rational being is the foundation of individualism and the capitalist power structure, while the story of how networks give content and meaning to everything in existence forms the foundation for syntheism and the informationalist power structure. Paganism uses survival as a metaphysical engine, while monotheism’s metaphysical engine is eternity and that of individualism is progress. Syntheism’s metaphysical engine is the event (see The Global Empire).

Primitivism is the first paradigm; it is based on the revolutionising emergence of spoken language and is characterised by nomadism, hunting, fishing and gathering. Primitivist metaphysics is based on reverence for one’s ancestors and respect for the tribe’s oldest members, since these are the collective’s most reliable and resource-rich knowledge bank, and thus also the key to survival, the engine of primitivist metaphysics. The narrative of nomadism revolves around the concept of history as circular with the regular return of the seasons as its dominant symbol. Existence is not linear, has no direction, time instead runs in recurring cycles; there is no development, everything is instead repeated ad infinitum. To be a human being is to be a member of a tribe, and within the limits of the tribe’s structures, to take responsibility for ensuring that this perpetual repetition is maintained. Strangers constitute competitors for the tribe’s resources, wherefore one either flees from them or beats them to death when one happens upon them. The human being who does not belong to the tribe is therefore not a human being at all, but an animal that can basically be treated as nonchalantly or brutally as one pleases.

Feudalism is the second paradigm, which starts from the emergence of written language and is characterised by permanent settlements, land ownership, agriculture and the domestication of livestock. Society’s focus lies on the domestication of animals and plants and a low-intensity class struggle between the aristocrats and the peasants. Written language was invented and started to develop as early as more than 5,000 years ago by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, after which it arose in three other places (Egypt, the Indus Valley and China) roughly simultaneously and independently of each another. But it exploded in use over the entire Eurasian landmass during the period that the German philosopher Karl Jaspers calls the Axial Age (Achsenzeit in German) between 800 and 200 B.C. The Chinese, Indian, Iranian, Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Greek cultures flourished during the Axial Age, since for the first time it became possible to build empires (an order from the administrative centre of the empire could be expected to arrive un-garbled and be implemented as intended out in the provinces), and it was at this time the world was also blessed with the first formalised world religions – for example Zoroastrianism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism and Judaism – and the first documented philosophy. It might be added that additional advanced civilisations in for example Italy, Ethiopia and Peru developed soon thereafter.

Written language, which by this point in time was technically very advanced, was quickly disseminated across the Eurasian landmass. It soon proved to be an extremely efficient instrument of power in the form of keeping accounts and spreading propaganda for its – at least initially – few users and their masters. This is never clearer than when its most important product becomes widely accepted: the magical law. In conjunction with the arrival of the law, a metaphysics was produced in which all forms of social mobility were presented as an anarchical threat to the cohesion of the society, a danger that must be combated. For example, Zoroaster devotes half of his holy scripture Gathas – which was authored orally in Central Asia as early as 1700 BC, to be written down only many generations later – to praising enterprising settlers and condemning irresponsible nomads.

Feudal metaphysics achieved the intended effects by preaching totalism and dualism to enable the unimpeded formulation of eternal truths as the foundation for the law. Steadfastness and obedience are everything, there is no room left for openness or questioning of the prevailing order of any kind. The state is presented as founder, upholder and guarantor of the holy law and all the good values that it claims to represent, in the same way that monotheist religion preaches that God is founder, upholder and guarantor of existence as a whole. Paul is therefore quite right when he builds his Christian theology on the premise that the law is the manifesto of the drive.html">death drive, an assertion of the drive.html">death drive with the aim of restricting and economising with the intensity of life. This becomes all the more clear when the metaphysical ideal of feudalism, the law-abiding citizen, is asserted as a personification of the drive.html">death drive itself.

What is brilliant about the law is that it is based on a clear representation of the divine. Although it pays homage to God – to pay homage to someone who anyway never interferes with anything costs nothing, and it is therefore also the oldest metaphysical trick in the book – but what is important is to whom the law pays homage, but that it is based on something physically absent so that, with the homage as camouflage, it can furtively hand over the actual power to the (self-appointed) representative of the object of homage. The monarch who is present therefore becomes the representative on Earth of the absent god (with ancient Egypt’s pharaoh as the most flagrant example). To obey the monarch is thus in practice to obey God, which must be seen as a powerful incentive. Power thereby ends up with the monarch and his allies, the landed aristocracy and their common truth producer, the monotheistic religion. The feudal paradigm’s triangle of power is thus complete. The monarch, the aristocrat and the High Priest can sit down to an expensive and well-prepared dinner in peace and quiet together and in complete understanding share the power and the glory between themselves.

The law’s external and eternal values are pitted against the internal and arbitrary values of chaos. And the idea follows on from the principle, which says that the values of metaphysics must be external and eternal in order for the narrative to hang together, that mankind must be offered the possibility of becoming one with the law, that mankind should be able to become external and eternal in relation to the internal, mental limitation and physiological transience that she/he experiences existentially every day of the week. The idea of eternal life as the reward for the law-abiding citizen for his/her demonstrated fidelity and reliability throughout life is born, and with this essential prerequisite in place, monotheistic metaphysics, which revolves around the idea of eternity, arrives with full force. Previously every tribe had had its own mythological progenitor, but with monotheism all tribes – since they have begun to trade and communicate with each other whenever this can be more profitable than, each according to his abilities, killing each other – get one and the same progenitor, God. Hinduism in India keeps its local subordinate deities and Catholicism in Europe cultivates its saint myths, but all feudal metaphysics is based on a solid monotheistic foundation where God is the personification of the law. It turns out to be a metaphysical necessity in order for feudal society to be able to maintain its cohesiveness and endure over time.

Capitalism is the third paradigm in the information technology writing of history. It emanates from the multifarious offshoot effects of the printing press and is characterised by the mass media, urbanisation, capital accumulation, mass education, industrialisation, globalisation and a class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the workers. The Reformation expresses the definitive deification of the printed word. With this deification, monotheism’s blind faith in the possibilities of the manifestation is replaced by individualism’s blind faith in the potential of the proclamation. Capitalism is the golden age of the printed and mass-distributed ideologies. And since new proclamations can be constructed on top of old proclamations – when yesterday’s objectives in the factory have been attained, they are replaced by today’s new and loftier objectives for tomorrow –a metaphysics evolves out of the magic of the proclamation around progress as an idea. Similar to the way in which eternity is portrayed in monotheistic metaphysics, progress is portrayed in individualist metaphysics – regardless of whether it concerns liberalism’s evolving, individual person, or socialism’s five-year plan, collective society – as the manifestation of the indivisible, as something external and eternal in relation to all of life’s obvious transience.

When the Enlightenment eliminates God as the cohesive factor for metaphysics – either, as the deists do, by anaesthetising Him, or as the atheists do, by killing Him off – the focus is shifted onto the individual, the idea of Man himself as the existential atom and the very cornerstone of existence and the social model. Thus, metaphysics no longer allows any angels who come to prophets to hand down the truth, which is already perfectly formulated by God, from God to Man. Man must instead construct his own metaphysics, and Man reckons that this is best done by deriving the truth directly from his/her own lifeworld, by basing a world view on empirical facts and defending it with logical arguments. However, this ambition requires in itself an unfounded and illogical faith in Man’s innate ability to take in and understand all of life with his limited intellect and imperfect access to information. This blind faith is rationalism – the irrational core of individualist metaphysics that gives the individual divine qualities. The individual is made into a being that suddenly grasps, comprehends and has mastered absolutely everything in her own wishful thinking.

This blind faith becomes irresistible when the capitalist paradigm’s eponymous engine, that is, capital, is set in motion after the breakthrough of the banknote press in the 17th century. With the arrival of capital, for the first time in history the symbol becomes even more important than what it claims to represent. And with this representationalism, this worship of the symbol, follows social homogeneity as the norm. It is a fact that the search for homogeneity dominates the entire capitalist paradigm. An example of this is that it becomes near-impossible to maintain neurodiversity – the rich flora of various personality types developed under millions of years of nomadic tribal life that de facto distinguishes humanity biologically – as an ideal once capitalism becomes generally accepted. From the late 18th century, neurodiversity is scorned by all available means, and instead a steady stream of pathological diagnoses is produced, based solely on suddenly realised, presumed dysfunctional relationships to capitalism’s constantly shifting production ideal.

Everything that deviates from capitalism’s two human ideals – different forms of the capitalist himself as master and different forms of the factory worker as slave – is branded as an expression of psychological disease that must be remedied or, in the worst case, eliminated altogether from the social body (with Nazism’s and Stalinism’s mass purges during the 20th century as an entirely logical consequence of this reasoning). This is because capitalism’s industries not only necessitate demands for a constantly increasing level of education among the general public, but also the medical treatment of a steady stream of newly created psychopathologies as a normatively necessary practice. In their study Dialectic of Enlightenment Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno show how this constantly growing production of pathology ultimately degenerates into skull measuring and the race theories of the Nazis and the Fascists in the 20th century. Fascism and Nazism are, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, quite simply rationalism taken to its ultimate conclusion. With blind faith as a foundation, one can place on top of it any logic at all; sooner or later the result will always be socially (self-)destructive madness.

According to Kant and his followers, rationalism is a necessary linchpin in individualist mythology. Individualism requires blind faith in Man’s own thinking – given time and necessity – being able to understand and solve all the world’s riddles and problems. While rationalism does accept that the individual is not omnipotent today, for the individual is evidently a mortal being, but with the individual’s omnipotence – since she actually is a latent god – according to rationalism, the solution to the problem can only be a matter of time. From the early 19th century onwards, individualist metaphysics becomes as conveniently as it is effectively self-fulfilling: individualism is proclaimed from the universities, and at the same universities, professors and researchers are also organised as individuals, encased in increasingly specialised subject area atoms, where they devote their days to quoting one another within closed coteries under the pretext that they are engaging in some sort of objectively true knowledge production. And as long as one stays within the mythology of individualist metaphysics – and why wouldn’t you, if you are part of the elite that reap the full rewards of it – it is hard to see the individualised human being in relation to the atomised world in any other way. The external signals that interfere with the generally held mythology are of course immediately removed by the system itself.

It is only when the Internet arrives with full force towards the late 1980s and early 1990s that society is endowed with an environment where holism and generalism are fostered at the expense of the academic world’s atomism and specialism. It is also only after the advent of the Internet that criticism of the individualist axiom begins to grow. The new paradigm with its new power structures requires a new mythology; a new narrative of the developing information, communication and network society in the Internet age. The informationalist paradigm is characterised by interactivity as the dominant form of communication, the cyber world as the geographical arena, attention rather than capital as the driving force socially, as well as the production, consumption and above all social reproduction of media as the main occupation (we have written about all of this extensively in The Netocrats). Informationalism is driven by the event as its metaphysical horizon, and is dominated by the conflict between the new classes, the small but wholly dominant netocracy and the considerably larger but in every respect subordinate consumtariat.

If we have learnt anything from history, there is no reason to believe that the academic world will be relevant as a producer of truth in the developing network society to any greater extent than the clergy of the monotheistic religions were as producers of truth for the industrial society. Which is another way of saying that universities are a thing of the past in all other respects than when it comes to pure networking: at best, one learns to run projects and come into contact with attentionally valuable people during one’s student years. On the other hand, truth production is automated, and itself becomes a network effect. Under informationalism, it is quite sufficient to use collectively generated and freely available sources of knowledge on the web (such as Wikipedia) in order not to have to consult academic experts if one wishes to formulate a socially acceptable truth. Nowadays, it is the Internet that is the arbiter (for better or worse). The universities’ power over truth production peaked as early as the mid-20th century in the same way that the power of the Church over truth production peaked as early as the 15th century. With the advent of informationalism, newer and more creative institutions take over. Through the increasingly marked independence of physical geography, the syntheistic monastery can act as the central agent for truth production in the Internet society in both the physical and the virtual world.

According to the information technology writing of history, the capitalist and industrialist paradigm was enabled by the arrival of the printing press in the mid-15th century. The publication of books and newspapers in Europe gradually increases and at an ever-increasing pace, an increasing number of readers entail an increasing number of authors, and vice versa; and from the 17th century onwards the banknote presses also start running. The new paradigm then becomes widely accepted during the 18th century, which is clearly manifested by the French Revolution, for example, which was initiated by the storming of the Bastille in 1789. The streets of Paris filled with the burgeoning bourgeois class, which was united in its newly-acquired literacy, its books, newspapers and banknote presses, and in its hatred of the old feudal paradigm’s aristocratic superiority. An entirely new power structure – consisting of the politicians, the bourgeoisie and the universities – emerged and took over, while the old power troika – consisting of the monarchy, the aristocracy and the Church – was caught off guard to the extent that it never succeeded in recovering again. The social conditions that had brought the old troika to power quite simply no longer prevailed, and consequently monarchy, aristocracy and Church were reduced to museum exhibits: curiosities from a nostalgically glowing past, robbed of all power and all influence and relegated to a growing capitalist tourist industry, which exploits them with considerable success.

The capitalist and industrialist paradigm was taken to a whole new level when Napoleon’s army tore across Europe in the early 19th century. No one personifies the World Spirit (in German: der Weltgeist) – which Hegel seeks in his magnum opus Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) – with the same force and clarity as the ruthless Napoleon, who the year before had plundered and ravaged Hegel’s own home town of Jena in eastern Germany. Napoleon’s army becomes the emblem of the literally murderously effective and finely honed organisations constructed by the literate masses – compartmentalised into productive hierarchies, where both responsibility and authority are extremely clearly defined – with the capacity to receive and pass on written instructions on an industrial scale and over distances that had previously been overwhelming. Soldiers and factory workers who can read and write are quite simply dramatically much more effective at carrying out their orders than illiterates. Not just because they can assimilate and relay information and knowledge in a totally new way, but also because they can express and clarify their own situations and teach it to others much better within the system at hand. This escalates the accumulation of information and knowledge dramatically.

By building a maximally functional hierarchy of literate soldiers – even the cannon-fodder at the front lines were educated before waging war in Napoleon’s army – with himself in the function as God’s all-seeing eye at the very top of the hierarchy, Napoleon created a fascinating killing machine of a kind never beheld before. Subsequently, all the institutions of industrialism were built in the 19th century with Napoleon’s army as a shining example: the nation state and all its bureaucrats, the company and its factories, the police, the prison, the school, the hospital, the colony on the other side of the ocean: organisationally they are all direct copies of Napoleon’s feared and admired army. According to Isaac Newton, the father of classical physics, history is a kind of perfect machine that grinds away in a completely deterministic manner without the smallest departure from preordained laws and rules. Newton’s idea of the Universe as a (by God) wound-up clock that ticks on forever inspired both Napoleon’s organisational architecture and Hegel’s historicism.

It does not take long before the history of humanity is rewritten. If the purpose of being human is to one day build a factory full of obedient worker soldiers, history must be the story of a long line of increasingly sophisticated domestications of various physical (and initially unwieldy) materials. Consequently the concepts – with time highly successful – of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age are invented once industrialism becomes widely accepted in the 19th century. These are manufactured by historians financed by the industrialists, that is, precisely the gentlemen who have created and assumed the leading positions within the new era’s nation states and big corporations. Thus, the old feudalist writing of history, from Adam’s and Eve’s trouble with the talkative serpent in Paradise and onwards, can be tossed onto the mythological rubbish heap. The Abrahamic religions are reduced from highly esteemed knowledge to an entertaining fairy tale for the not so bright and for young children.

René Descartes opened the way to individualism by penning the 17th century’s most famous tweet: I think, therefore I am. But what consummates individualism’s metaphysics is Immanuel Kant’s transcendentalism a century later. By isolating the subject from the object, Kant makes it possible for the subject to both deify the object and simultaneously plan for its material and sexualised seduction, conquest and colonisation. History repeats itself: God created the world in order to be able to deify and then seduce, conquer and colonise it. Now it is the 18th century’s growing bourgeois middle class of patriarchal Enlightenment philosophers, scientists, industrialists, capitalists and colonists that see and grab the opportunity when the new individualist and atomist metaphysics lends support to their ambitions. Bourgeois ambitions are quite crassly transformed into the individualist ideal.

By adhering to a correlationist narrative around the subject’s and the object’s absolute isolation and delimitation, both from each other and from the surrounding world, the bourgeoisie succeeds in building an attractive identification with the subject, and the fantasy connected thereto of the conquest of the object as the perfection of history. Note that the subject is an individual and that the object is an atom: which are isolated, delimited, indivisible entities. Thus is individualism born, and with it also capitalist patriarchy. The individualist and atomist ideology is on fertile ground among the new elite, which it validates, and it rapidly becomes axiomatic and remains so right up until the arrival of the Internet age in the late 20th century. This is because individualism and its running-mate atomism are both tailor-made to promote the burgeoning bourgeoisie’s interests and hegemonic aspirations.

Kant is unarguably the prophet of individualism par excellence. His individual is a tragic solipsist who – precisely because of her solipsism – is free to act as a ruthless egoist. Kant’s radical subjectivism – with its emphasis on free will, dominance, abstract inner experiences and strict, soldier ethics – is built around the subject’s transcendental separation from the object, which means that the object can be deified undisturbed, to be later conquered, colonised and plundered. Individualism is a master ideology. The individual has taken over God’s place as the only thing that is certain in life according to Descartes’ basic tenet I think, therefore I am, which Kant later develops to perfection. Humanism and representationalism grow rapidly out of and presuppose individualism and atomism as metaphysical axioms. Through its prioritisation of the representation over the represented, representationalism suits exploding capitalism right down to the ground. With its actively observing subject and passively observed object – this object merely exists because the subject must have something to relate to – representationalism is a sublime expression of capitalist ideology. Society is based on strong, active, expanding subjects. Around them flock weak, passive, delimited objects, pining for the subject’s gaze and attention. These objects are to be hunted, conquered, tamed, exploited and finally discarded before the entire process is repeated with ever-new objects as targets.

Representationalism is not just the perfect narrative for colonialism, slavery and the rampant, ruthless exploitation of natural resources; it also comprises the necessary foundation for the narrative of patriarchal sexuality with the man as the active subject and the woman as the passive object. That women in this narrative are put on a par with exploited mines and colonised continents should therefore come as no surprise. Nor is it particularly surprising either that representationalism limits human sexuality to a power-hungry and validation-thirsty man hunting for a passive female body, who in turn longs for and is begging for the man’s gaze, and who demands nothing more than to submit to the man and please him. The racist perspective from Europe vis-à-vis the aboriginal peoples of Asia, Africa, the Americas and Australia functions according to precisely the same pattern. Consequently, 19th century public discourse is permeated by a set of bizarre axioms that can claim things like Africans cannot learn to read and write and women lack a sex drive; these delusions and propaganda lies are all consequences of the same twisted, ideological basic premise. This representationalism finally becomes an aggressive hyper-condition in the form of the 20th century’s fascism with the worship of the one leader as the perfect individual (Benito Mussolini as Il Duce, Adolf Hitler as Der Führer, and so on).

There is, however, an object that the patriarchal gaze can never get enough of; an object that constantly evades the observer’s vain attempts at conquest, colonisation and plundering, and that is the object which finally gives its name to the entire paradigm in question, namely capital. Since capital constantly shuns patriarchal lust – no individual can ever be rich enough; somewhere there is always more money to be made, bigger profits to extract, increased growth to produce for anyone who simply gets a grip and refuses to be idle – individualism is strengthened by a tremendously potent metaphysical engine: progress.

Through the essential but subtle shift from the Cartesian subject focus to the Newtonian object fixation in Kant’s transcendentalism, individualism is extended into capitalism. And with the march of capitalism across the world, there also followed the markedly superstitious belief in the invisible hand as an eternal guarantor of never-ending growth. Exactly how naive this notion really is has now dawned on thinking people across the world as the crises-ridden nation states, one after another, drift away towards the precipice while impotent politicians and bureaucrats sit in fruitless meetings dreaming of a dramatic increase in growth that never eventuates. The Western welfare state, which is based on precisely such institutionalised wishful thinking about strong and continuous growth, is looking more and more like a cynical pyramid scheme. Future generations are welcomed with gigantic debts and badly eroded benefits. Not to mention the escalating environmental problems that arise as a result of capitalism’s intemperate, ruthless exploitation of the planet.

Capitalism’s genius lies primarily in its constant postponement of the reward, not just for the bourgeoisie’s sadistic patriarchy, but also for the working class’s masochistic submission. Progress promises reward for today’s toil only for future generations. Your children will be better off than you are. But it is also in the nature of capitalism to constantly borrow from the future only to subsequently destroy the real value behind the capital in conjunction with the repeated and dramatic crises that are unavoidable; crises that capitalism’s supporters constantly, and without any provision for doing so whatsoever, promise to cure as soon as the business cycle starts to soar again towards the heavens, something which one deludes oneself is fated to be. The system offers hopes that cannot be fulfilled, and if, contrary to expectations these are fulfilled, the reward must be packaged as pure luck. This desire-driven fantasy keeps the big capitalist middle class firmly in place. The perfect example is of course the American dream; the fantasy of being richly rewarded through obedience and industry with living the care-free middle class life that you can see on television, which is cultivated by and thrives among the potentially socially mobile everywhere capitalism has penetrated.

The university is individualism’s truth producer and this institution’s most important role is to moderate enjoyment among citizens. However, it continuously fails in its task, since enjoyment is only maximised in transgression, and transgression presupposes a host of prohibitions against crossing the boundaries for the taboos that the Church was much more adept at producing than the university. In this context, the university is reduced to the paltry imperative of identifying and subsequently maximising the individual’s enjoyment. Therefore, individualism’s complicated relationship with enjoyment is characterised by a fundamental envy of religion. In the 20th century, individualism was developed by the universities into cultural relativism, Kantianism’s ideological waste dump and its logical endpoint, where all that remains are unfounded solipsistic credos, the quality of which, because of a growing political hypersensitivity, it is forbidden to compare. This qualifies cultural relativism as syntheism’s ideological arch-enemy at the paradigm shift from capitalism to informationalism.

With the advent of informationalism, a freedom arises to organise the rapidly-growing, expanding social networks in accordance with the long-neglected desires of our genes. The optimal size of a tribe of nomads or the newly-established, permanent settlement of around 150 adult members as a genetically determined ideal resurfaces constantly as the ideal size for these virtual networks. When this ideal can be reproduced without costly opposition over and over again from the advent of the network society and onwards, what musician Brian Eno calls technological primitivism arises, a kind of high-tech return to the primitivist tribe community. The virtual subcultures on the Internet replace the Church’s and nation’s identity-bearing functions from the previous paradigms (see The Netocrats). The Internet is a digital jungle filled with dividual-driven subcultures in vast quantities.

Informationalism’s view of mankind can crassly be described as a mobile phone surrounded by fat and muscle. The paradigm shift is rapid; as early as December 2012 traffic on Google’s search engine to the attentionalist left-hand column – which one cannot buy into but instead must deserve one’s prominent placement in by maximizing one’s attention, that is, making oneself interesting and attractive to the Internet’s users – passed 99% for the first time, while traffic to the capitalist right-hand column dipped below 1%. This fact confirms that traditional marketing is an impossibility on the Internet; there is quite simply no such thing as functional online marketing. Increasingly desperate mass media marketing is pitted against increasingly smarter online communication, which understands and uses the new participatory dynamics evolving on the Web.

Syntheism can be described as one long showdown with all the ideologies that are based on the historical case. Religion and metaphysics were developed under feudalism from being a cohesive and community-generating world view into becoming a well-honed tool for power and control. The monotheistic religions demand submission; the word is suddenly an order rather than a promise. Sin is basically a revolt against God, a questioning of the divine arbitrariness that is the very foundation of the Abrahamic religions. In practice, the Asian religions accomplish the same thing through making sinful behaviour function as the driver for desperate reincarnation rather than invoking hellish damnation. However syntheism in no way entails a return to paganism, but instead a dialectical further development. The real return to paganism at the paradigm shift from capitalism to informationalism is instead the bewildering hodgepodge of naive ideas and quasi-religious nonsense that go under the label New Age, the phenomenon that, not without reason, syntheologians dismiss as theological cultural relativism.

Syntheism however makes use of paganism’s community-building properties and its pantheistic search for an existentially transcendental experience. It forms an emotionally engaged relationship with the Universe. Syntheism ought to be compared to art instead, which under late capitalism – after previously having investigated everything else in life – was partly reduced to an investigation of itself, a metaphenomenon. Ultimately, art is merely about pure reflexivity. Likewise, syntheism is the end of religion’s historical voyage where, after having investigated everything else in life and having sought the sacred everywhere except in itself, religion finally finds its home. Syntheism, too, is also an expression of a pure reflexivity. Syntheism is the metareligion, the religion of the philosophers, the religion about and of religion per se.

Syntheos is the personification of the world, which gives it its value. Through this value, the dividual and the interactive subcultures get their values. Without a value for the world, the dividual and the interactive subcultures cannot have any values either. Syntheism borrows its fundamental value from the fact that there is something rather than nothing, as Martin Heidegger expresses it, and that this something rather than nothing is the basis of life. Syntheism is based on maintaining and maximising the dynamics of existence. The place in time–space where dynamics is maximised is called the event, and this event is syntheism’s metaphysical engine. It takes place all the time and at all levels in the syntheist, indeterminist world view. Every moment in time and every point in space accommodates an enormous number of potential events. Indeterminism also means that no effect is reducible solely to the causes that engender it; the effect might very well be a uniquely situation-dependent excess in relation to its causes. We express this as the Universe generating a steady stream of emergences.

If history is viewed as a Hegelian dialectics, we see a clear pattern: monotheism is the thesis, individualism is the antithesis and syntheism is the synthesis. That syntheism is the synthesis in this dialectical process is a consequence of the fact that theism and atheism can never meet; they are fundamentally and definitionally incompatible. Syntheism should absolutely not be understood as a compromise between theism and atheism – in Hegelian dialectics, a synthesis is something considerably more sophisticated than just a banal coalescence of thesis and antithesis – rather, it is a necessary continuation of theism’s and atheism’s combined dichotomy, the only possible way out of the paralysing deadlock that arises when theism and atheism are pitted against each other. As the logical synthesis of this pair of opposites (theism versus atheism), syntheism offers a possibility for the atheist to go further and uncompromisingly deepen atheism. Thus, in a historical sense syntheism is a radicalised atheist ideology. It is even atheism’s logical deepening and elaboration.

Just like all epoch-making ideas, syntheism arrives in history right when philosophy has run aground between a traditionalism (in this case theism) and a cynicism (in this case atheism). Only through perfecting the individualist paradigm can mankind grasp its terrible consequences, and then, and only then, the door to the syntheist possibility swings open. It is only syntheism that can liberate atheism from its logical curse: its inheritance from theism’s negative attitude towards immanent life. Only by going from atheism to syntheism can we open the way for a genuinely sensual and thereby also spiritual understanding of the immanence. Atheism robs the human being of her access to the holy and the divine by first sharing theism’s conviction that the holy and the divine must be synonymous with the transcendental, and then murdering the transcendental and thus reducing the human being to a cold and indifferent immanence, which is axiomatic for atheism. What syntheism does is that it picks up mankind in precisely the immanence where atheism has abandoned him and makes him apprehend the immanent as the truly holy and divine without any nostalgic longing for transcendentalism at all. Through syntheism’s deepening of the very premises of atheism, atheist cynicism becomes syntheist affirmation.

French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux analyses classical atheism’s dilemma in his book Après la finitude. According to Meillassoux, atheism’s problem is that it inherits the tragic remains that are the leftovers from Abrahamic religion when it retires, but does not succeed in building any independent platform of its own. That is, classical atheism retains the Abrahamic idea of the world as destroyed and lost, but without preserving Abrahamism’s faith and hope in the possibility and reality of the utopia. It is literally just an a-theism, a negation without any own content of its own. Classical atheism quite simply bases its world view on a false premise, namely the idea that existence without God must be mere chance, when life is in fact a necessity if we fully think through physics’ basic concept of contingency.

Meillassoux argues that the only possible way out of classical atheism’s deadlock is to embrace syntheism’s idea of a philosophical and immanent divinity rather than a theological and transcendental one in the traditional sense. He advocates the thesis that the constant contingency that characterises existence must be regarded as the logical opening for a possible future God based on the idea of justice instead of the idea of amorality. Meillassoux’s syntheist divinity – he calls his philosophy a divinology rather than a theology – lacks the Abrahamic God’s bond to the amoral chaos that the logic of moralism demands. Meillassoux thus treats traditional religion’s passions in a way that radically differs from classical atheism: it is the utopia and not the fall of Man in classical religion that must be won back. And winning back the utopia and turning it into an immanent divinity is, with contemporary physics’ revolutionary advances, quite plausible. Meillassoux’s God, as a synonym for the utopia, is of course syntheism’s Syntheos.

By thinking of God as something created rather than something creating, and thereby as something that only shows itself in the future rather then something that precedes and brings forth existence – that is, Syntheos, the created God – for the first time God can be regarded as internal and not external in relation to the utopia, that is, as the utopia personified. This is in contrast to traditional theism’s creating God, where everything in the world that is created by Him comes down to an indifferent arbitrariness that is perfect for Him, and which therefore cannot have any personal connection whatsoever to the utopia as the dream of another world unless the illogical fall of Man is introduced through the back door. For example, Christianity must not just kill the Son within the Trinity; it must also sooner or later kill the Father in order to rescue its credibility concerning the utopia. Thereby, the God of Christianity is incompatible with the possibility of the utopia. The God of Christianity must die completely for the utopia to be possible.

Meillassoux constructs an alternative that the failed, atheist project in itself cannot produce: existence is eternally contingent and thereby full of potential hope. Classic atheism is namely based on the faulty assumption that existence is controlled by chance when in actual fact it is controlled by contingency. It is contingency which, through the advances of contemporary physics – in its capacity as the metaphysical constant of physics – unites philosophy and religion in a new holy conjunction beyond the narrow horizon of deadlocked atheism. By deepening atheism and developing it to its logical conclusion, we implement the dialectical shift over to syntheism. Syntheism is atheism.html">radical atheism.

The syntheist ambition can hardly be formulated more clearly. In the conflict between the traditional roles of the philosopher and the priest – where Meillassoux of course takes the philosopher’s side – the atheist is reduced to little more than a deeply irritating, passive observer. Where the atheist lets the priest keep religion as his monopoly, Meillassoux responds with the words: God is much too serious a subject to be left to the priests. Transcendentalism must be rejected quite unsentimentally in order to leave room for a religion that loves, worships and believes in the immanence and its enormous potential. Only philosophy can carry out this necessary action. For Meillassoux, the demystification of existence, the striving for deconstruction – classical atheism’s big project – has namely reached the end of the road. Deconstruction appears to be only paralysing for mankind, making him incapable of conceiving of the utopia, and thereby also incapable of formulating the vision, and in this way cultivating hope for the future. Meillassoux turns this upside down and argues that the real blasphemy and idolatry must be to insist on a transcendental god in the contemporary world. According to Meillassoux, God is to be placed in the future and be completely immanent. Like all utopias, Meillassoux’s God is virtual rather than potential; neither possible nor impossible, but contingent and thereby beyond any kind of probability calculation.

Here syntheist thinking refers back to Zoroaster’s philosophical revolution in the Iranian highlands 3,700 years ago. Meillassoux gets inspiration from Gilles Deleuze, while Deleuze gets inspiration from Henri Bergson. Bergson in turn takes his inspiration from Baruch Spinoza, and Spinoza, for his part, was educated by Moroccan Sufis, who in turn relayed the legacy of Zoroaster’s immanent philosophy – the pantheistic branch of Sufism should be regarded as Zoroastrian philosophy hidden under the Islamic flag – the original divinology if any. Zoroaster’s concept of a coming Saoshyant denotes a utopian character created by mankind or rather by the future itself, that is, something quite different from Judaism’s and Christianity’s Messiah as a saviour sent by a god who has failed to complete his own creation in a satisfactory way. Since syntheism takes its starting point in Zoroaster, this means that in relation to its precedent Christianity, syntheism must be seen as historically and logically consummated Christianity, a kind of monistic and immanent Christianity that accepts both the Father’s and the Son’s death and which welcomes the divine manifestation through the Holy Ghost as their replacement. God springs from the meeting between the faithful and nowhere else. The Holy Ghost, without the Father and the Son, thus becomes merely the name for syntheism’s Syntheos.

The Abrahamic God is by necessity split. The Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek bases his critique of Christianity on this logical necessity: If God really knew everything about us and was never in a state of ignorance at all concerning our thinking and our actions, both we and God would plunge straight down into psychosis. The splitting of God’s being is necessary for the cohesiveness of the world view. Without the split between the all-knowing and the naively ignorant, neither God nor the faithful can have any experience of being subjects. This split God is however not the God that appears when the spiritual syntheist bears witness to her religious experience. Here, the Universe as God differs radically from the Abrahamic God. The Universe really knows – and can tell whoever is willing to listen – everything about the past, but it knows absolutely nothing of its unknown future. And nor does anyone else either.

Nevertheless, the Universe remains totally indifferent to our story. And it is this very indifference that keeps the psychosis at bay. The only thing that would be even worse than the Universe – as is now the case – being all-knowing and at the same time indifferent, would be if the Universe were all-knowing and actually had an opinion and an intention. What happens instead in the syntheistic religious experience is that the necessary split does not happen within God, as is the case within Abrahamism and atheist humanism, but rather the necessary split arises between the Universe and one’s fellow man, who subsequently take care of their respective metaphysical protagonist roles. While Pantheos is manifested in the Universe, Syntheos is manifested in one’s fellow man. Syntheism is therefore not just something more than atheism as deepened or atheism.html">radical atheism, it is also something more than pantheism as deepened or radical pantheism.

In practice, the overwhelmingly enormous Universe cannot form the divine for us – the Universe is divine for us merely through its enormous size, power and stupendous incomprehensibility; the Universe forces us into submission – but it is rather the consoling, empathic fellow man, that is, the Zoroastrian Saoshyant, who gives God a face and a consciousness. Pantheism is thus just an incomplete form of syntheism. This indisputable fact drives syntheology from pantheism’s incomplete utopia Pantheos to syntheism’s consummate utopia Syntheos. Both Zoroaster and Meillassoux thus maintain that the advent of Syntheos is a necessity for the consummation of the utopia and of history. On its own, Pantheism is insufficient foundation for a religion for human beings.

According to syntheism and syntheist pantheism, there is no Universe to confess to – you cannot confess to a being, however enormous, if this being lacks both senses and interest – but it is rather the Saoshyant, the holy fellow human, who receives your liberating confession, who is converted into the divinity who does not already know. Even Zoroaster in his time understands this central distinction within the divine: he therefore makes a distinction between God-as-being or Ahura, and God-as-thinking-fellow-human or Mazda. Zoroaster himself almost always distinguishes between the concepts of Ahura and Mazda in his work Gathas. The umbrella term Ahura Mazda is only used when his theology for some reason needs a connecting core. And it is Mazda (the mind) and not Ahura (the cosmos) that is prioritised in Zoroastrian theology. This explains why Zoroaster names his remarkably prophetic religion Mazdayasna, love of wisdom – the same term as the Greeks 1,200 years later translate as philosophia – rather than Ahurayasna, love of being. Pantheos is Ahura, but Syntheos is Mazda, and a faithful Zoroastrian – and for that matter a faithful syntheist – is a Mazdayasni (a human being who is primarily faithful to the mind) rather than an Ahurayasni (a human being who is primarily faithful to being).

Zoroaster wants to see his followers as hedonists and self-affirming Mazdayasni with a deep ethics constructed on the basis of their intentions, instead of terrified and submissive Ahurayasni with their morality constructed on the basis of the consequences of their actions. Zoroaster thereby turns his back on primitivism’s consequentialism and instead develops the first intentionalism in the history of ideas; his religion is the first that happens inside the minds of people rather than out there in the endless cosmos. Ironically it is the Arabic neighbour Islam that later develops and consummates the opposite idea – of Ahurayasna as its own, radically moralist religion (the term Islam itself means submission in Arabic).

The difference between Zoroastrianism’s intentionalism and Islam’s consequentialism is clarified in the syncretistic meeting between them in the Sufi hybrid religion. Instead of a god that does not already know, the Sufi master must step in and assume the role as the one who does not already know and who nevertheless still decides everything after the disciple’s fetishistic submission. Islam is therefore most clearly and precisely described as the theory of blindly obeying the one who does not already know, if for no other reason than for the exemplary value that Islam attaches to submission itself. This makes Islam the perfect religion for feudalist society, and in this very capacity it is the fastest and most furiously expanding metaphysics thus far in history. This is not to say that Islam is logically coherent. Memetic success has of course nothing to do with either truth or logical coherence, at least not in any other sense than the strictly Darwinian. However, we understand why Sufism, in its capacity as a permanent state of armistice between intentionalism and consequentialism, developed into the ironic religion par excellence; a doctrine that can only be expressed through flowing paradoxical poetry but which never lends itself – to the great vexation of Islamist fundamentalists; they all hate Sufism – to any kind of solid dogmatic fundamentalism.

The mistake is to believe that it is Allah who must be obeyed. Rather, Islam has always understood that it is Islam’s interpreters who must be obeyed, which explains the history of Islam’s bitter battles over which interpreter is to be followed, over who represents the Islamic theocracy, since Allah can only have a voice through these pretentious spokespeople. The central aspect of the shift from Zoroastrianism’s Mazdayasna to Islam’s Ahurayasna is that submission is transformed from being the starting point for the religious experience into becoming the objective and meaning of the entire process. The reward for total submission, self-imposed slavery, is of course the fetishist’s manifest and immediate enjoyment of freedom from existential loneliness. Islam is the religion of libidinal enjoyment par excellence. Thus, Islam is also the shortest way to numerical success, as a religion without monks, nuns and monastery compounds, where the quest for truth is discarded entirely in favour of the negative desire for submission.

Note how Zoroaster’s divinity exists independently of the human being and that it does not need her in order to be supplied with its self-glorification. Zoroaster sees no point whatsoever in sitting and romancing narcissistic gods when existence in itself already offers the divine on a silver platter in the form of nature (Pantheos), only to then let the divine be manifested in one’s fellow man as the Saoshyant (Syntheos). As a consequence of his ambition to make the community the divine, Zoroaster even eschews the construction of reclusive and monastic cultures and other chosen alienation within Zoroastrianism. The community is sacred in its capacity as Mazda’s incarnation; according to Zoroaster all people must be accorded a place within the congregation. Zoroaster is quite simply the first thinker for whom fellowship between human beings is more important and above all more divine than the glorious power of the great Other, localised in a distant past or above the clouds. Or to take the word religion literally: Zoroaster not only invents the concept of philosophy (Mazdayasna) a millennium ahead of his most proximate followers Anaximander and Heraclitus in Greece; he also invents religion in its literal sense, as that which restores the intimate ties between people.

This is the core of Zoroaster’s revolution within the history of ideas: the advent of Zoroastrianism sounds the death knell for religion’s primitivist role as a placating of narcissistic and psychopathic gods. For Zoroaster religion is instead a creative and existentialist attitude (Entheos) vis-à-vis fellow humans (Syntheos) and the cosmos (Pantheos), sprung from an existential decision about truth (Atheos) that Zoroaster calls asha. Following asha, the cornerstone of Zoroaster’s amoral ethics, is quite simply to make a pragmatic decision to live in harmony with and together with the surrounding world as it actually is. When Zoroaster shifts the focus of theology from Ahura to Mazda, the world stops being primarily threatening and instead becomes primarily engaging. Without the psychopathic gods, moralism’s pathological foundation perishes and the values become ethical, that is, grounded in their intentions to attain certain anticipated effects and nothing else.

The Zoroastrian revolution is clearly seen in ancient Iranian architecture. Both sacrificial alters and burial sites disappear when Zoroaster’s theological broom sweeps clean across the Central Asian highlands. Because there are no longer any tyrannical gods to placate, and bodies no longer need to be embalmed or in any other way prepared for the afterlife in eternity, but are instead recycled in a natural way, for example, as food for vultures. The Zoroastrians build ascetically bare temples, painted in white, where the community gather around the atash bahram, the eternally burning flame in the centre of the temple, the symbol of the infinite expansion and ecstatic intensity of the cosmos. That Zoroastrianism as early as 3,700 years ago was practising such seemingly modern ideas as ecological sustainability, radical gender equality, collective ownership of resources and tolerance of deviant human character traits, is quite consistent if one takes Zoroaster’s ideology as a starting point.

Obviously the Zoroastrian revolution is illustrated with perfect clarity in Jesus’s reformation of Judaism into that which later became Christianity, where the law is replaced by the intention as the driving force in the Judeo-Christian theology and the values shift from the moralising to the ethical perspective (notwithstanding that Paul later frantically tries to drive Christianity back to Judaic moralism.) Just as self-evidently, Paul and St Augustine import the concept of the Holy Ghost from Zoroastrianism in order to complete the Trinity of Christian metaphysics. Which in turn explains why the Holy Ghost is the only component of the Christian Trinity that survives within syntheology (where Syntheos is the Holy Ghost without the Father and the Son).

It is from Zoroastrianism that Kant gets the idea that existence is basically a correlation between thinking (Mazda) and being (Ahura), even if Kant sees Mazda and Ahura as eternalised constants instead of the intra-active variables that Zoroaster used in his proto-syntheology. If we use the network-dynamic terminology of the 2000s, we would express this as Kant opening the door to interactivity through his correlationalism, which Nietzsche later consummates through his relativism. But with Zoroaster there is not just one constantly moving activity between different phenomena, but rather the phenomena are also in constant motion around themselves. This is why we speak of Zoroaster’s building blocks as intra-acting variables in contrast to Kant’s and Nietzsche’s interactive constants. Intra-activity is the historical radicalisation of interactivity, and relationalism is correspondingly the historical radicalisation of relativism.

Syntheism is the Hegelian synthesis of the deadlocked dichotomy between theism and atheism. When we left theism for atheism, we threw the baby out with the bathwater. We became anti-religion rather than anti-theism. But having lived through the atheist paradigm and having come out on the other side, we are ready for the syntheist paradigm with its grasp of the human being’s constant and basic need for a functional metaphysics. Syntheism stands out as the only credible metaphysical system for the intellectual human being of the third millennium. Which means that the only alternative to syntheism is to settle for a subconscious and tacit metaphysics, and such a metaphysics can of course be as ill-considered and destructive as anything, since by definition it is not conscious and thus hardly very sensible either. And how intelligent does this alternative, on closer inspection, appear to be?

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