Back to index
Alienation
The systematic separation of people with the purpose of exercising power, partly as external alienation that isolates people from each other, partly as internal alienation that divides the dividual agency and generates self-contempt and narcissism as a result. See, by way of comparison, its opposite religion.
1:47
(In »Everything is religion«)
This productive coherence exercises a powerful allure for reasons that we need not address further. We humans are social creatures who experience well-being by doing things together with others, and its contrast – alienation and isolation – is not something on which one can build dynamic and prosperous societies. This in turn means, as Haidt points out, that in the sense of being modern people, enlightened and rational, we can choose to reject organised religion, but even if we do so, we cannot emancipate ourselves just like that from the basic religious psychology that we are concerned with here. However, we can, as stated, always manipulate the terminology and imagine that religion is something other than religion, because we have decided to call it something else, if this makes us feel modern and clear-thinking.
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.
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.
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?
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.
If it is the role of religion to have a literally making-whole, a healing, effect on people and societies, to create a functioning unit that is greater than the sum of its constituent parts, then alienation is its opposite – an alienation that separates people both from the world around them, from each other, and ultimately even from themselves. The syntheological connection is evident: McGilchrist’s holistic right hemisphere is home to religion, while his separatist left hemisphere, consequently, is home to alienation. McGilchrist even goes so far as to claim that various epochs in the history of ideas can be connected without further ado to a kind of hemispherical dialectic: the Renaissance and Romanticism give priority to the right hemisphere and heighten religion rather than alienation, while the Enlightenment and Modernism give priority to the left hemisphere and engender alienation rather than religion. Seen from this perspective, it is with the Renaissance and Romanticism that syntheism – as a dialectical reaction to Modernism – finds its allies and precursors in the history of ideas.
Evolution is quite simply such a strong and captivating metaphor for many of the 19th century’s intellectuals that they very much want to make it the fundamental ethical principle, as if it were the task of the righteous in some bizarre way to speed up a history whose development is of course anyway preordained according to their own determinist conviction. For Marx, the Communist revolution of the proletariat, for example, is a deed that he must command his readers and disciples to carry out, in spite of the fact that, according to his own view, it will take place anyway because of the historical necessity that he himself and Friedrich Engels describe in their writings. In a similar manner, Comte regards his social evolutionism as so perfect that strangely enough he wants to turn it into a secular religion. Social evolutionary ideas continue to thrive in Europe up until the mass murders of Nazism and Stalinism around the mid-20th century. Then, if not before, the danger of arguing for a militant ethics based on a vulgar natural determinism and driven by alienation’s ressentiment rather than by religion’s search for benevolent dialogue with one’s fellow man, becomes manifest. In this way the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century are the dark flip side of the Enlightenment. Rationalism without consciousness of its own fundamental blind faith is, as Habermas’ gurus Horkheimer and Adorno show in Dialectic of Enlightenment, literally lethal for humanity.
Syntheism is the exact opposite of Comte’s sociology as religion. In syntheism it is science that gives birth to philosophy and philosophy that gives birth to syntheology. Religion is dependent on and builds on science, not the other way around. But then syntheism is also, if we borrow McGilchrist’s metaphors for a while yet, the result of the right cerebral hemisphere’s constant search for an applicable holism. It is only through setting these eternalisations in motion and in relation to each other, through remobilising and thereby making her existence sacred, that mankind produces and experiences meaning in life and is able to alleviate alienation. It is only when the human being becomes an agent that her life gets a meaning. Adding a holistic perspective to life thus in itself constitutes making the world religious: recreating (an idea of) a context, a (basis for) fellowship. Regarding everything that exists as an endless multitude of expressions of and for one and the same substance, the One, is syntheism’s innermost core.
What happens, historically speaking – if we continue to borrow McGilchrist’s cerebral hemisphere metaphors for a little while longer – is that the Enlightenment and the capitalist-industrialist society that it results in, constantly give priority to the left hemisphere over the right one in its increasingly marked and extreme mathematisation of existence. By initially delimiting, then separating and measuring everything in the name of science, mankind also subsequently starts to objectify, instrumentalise, conquer, colonise, plunder and consume every thinkable resource in her environment, including himself and her fellow humans. But the mathematisation of existence not only leads to a ruthless and ultimately also self-destructive exploitation of the Earth’s finite resources. The exploited identity also generates a particularly trenchant alienation, and with it the lack of a context-creating religion. The right cerebral hemisphere, which experiences wholeness and builds meaning, remained, according to the view that McGilchrist puts forward, underdeveloped for several centuries, which had considerable consequences at all levels in society.
If religion has functioned as a cohesive force within both man and society, the history of alienation is a converse but closely related history of how man and society are divided over the course of history. Most metaphysical systems are based on the premise that there is an original paradisiacal state and that alienation arises through a dramatic event, for example as a consequence of the Fall of Man (according to the Abrahamic religions), or through the deleterious effects of capital (according to Marxism). The mission of the faithful is therefore – with or without the help of God or history – to restore the original, paradisiacal state. But the problem is then that these ideologies of the Fall from grace are considerably more focused on alienation than on the alleviating utopia, which remains a diffuse mirage on the horizon. It is not what was once good that comes into focus – if anything it is left completely outside the writing of history – but rather the narratives are obsessed with one thing and one thing alone, namely that which has corrupted and devastated all of existence (sin in Christianity, capital in Marxism, environmental devastation in environmentalism, etc.).
It is thus the dystopia, not the utopia, which acts as a narrative engine in the ideologies of the Fall from grace. This explains why alienation must be subconsciously stimulated rather than rectified in order for the ideology to be kept alive. Reading between the lines, the sinner must be tacitly stimulated into continuing to sin, capitalism must be spurred on to continue claiming victims with its customary ruthlessness, or else the ideology’s very raison d’etre will evaporate. The Fall from grace determines the ideology, which without the Fall is pointless. Therefore the ideologies of the Fall from grace constantly produce new moral decrees which thereby keep them alive. For example, Christianity has grown strongest and exercised the most power when it is has preached most aggressively against sin and the sinners, and moreover eagerly added new thoughts and acts to the growing list of sinful crimes. There is, in other words, good reason for the aggressive Church having been the expansive version, rather than the diplomatic version having been so. The aggressive Church is strongly focused on reproducing and promoting the deviations of immorality that legitimise and necessitate the Church in itself as well as its aggressiveness. It is like an old marriage.
Syntheism lacks all forms of nostalgic philosophical theory of a lost paradise and prehistoric world worthy of idealising and bemoaning in general, and it thereby has no reason to stimulate alienation by enticing us with any amount of libidinal transgression. Which is quite simply due to the fact that no such original paradise has, nor ever needs to have, existed. Within syntheism, alienation is instead a contingent fact, produced by highly tangible and comprehensible material circumstances, such as the exploding abstraction in increasingly extensive and complex inter-human relations throughout history. This state of affairs is then heightened by internarcissistic thinkers – ruled by their left cerebral hemispheres according to McGilchrist’s view – equipped with megaphones that the prevailing power structures officiously supply; thinkers who are enamoured of their own grandiose protagonist roles in totalist ideologies. We must therefore study the history of alienation more closely in order to be able to determine where, in the informationalist society, it actually abides and how syntheism can confront and neutralise it.
But in the 5th century B.C. totalism arrives and with it also alienation across a broad front in the history of ideas. It is ideas about reality and not physical reality in itself which are the focus for the totalists. The belief in the unlimited possibilities of rationality is proclaimed by Socrates and relayed by his disciple Plato, diligently noting it all down. Deductively reasoning science is everything, and art is worthless or something even worse and must, according to Plato, be expunged from society. Physics is subordinated to mathematics. Pre-Socratic monism ends up under attack. The totalists instead construct a strictly dualist world view. The eternal soul is separated from the corruptible body. The left hemisphere overshadows and dominates the right one, if we once again see the development from McGilchrist’s perspective. The human being is no longer associated with either her body or her environment. A human being who has been alienated from the image of her incarnate self, who sees herself as a constantly inflamed, internal hotbed of conflict instead of as a harmonious whole, is easily reshaped from the tribe’s incarnation of its members into an isolated peasant slave in the fields and in the pastures of the cattle herds, constantly on the lookout for some kind of abstract healing through hard work. It is important to understand that alienation serves a purpose and that it produces an identity that generates an extensive enjoyment without pleasure.
The law-abiding subject loves to hate itself and longs passionately for its own domestication, its own castration and finally also its own extinction – all under the idealised law which is exalted above all else. Desire no longer oscillates with the drive, but is instead placed above and pitted against it. The good, self-sacrificing soul is separated from the evil, self-absorbed body. Thereby dualist totalism is complete. It promises a future where once and for all man is separated from his filthy desires and drives and with a kind of smug indifference is merged into the law. Therefore its reward in the form of life after death is in essence life in death. With its cultivation and praise of alienation, dualist totalism is a form of death worship.
The lawless society is presented as a complete nightmare. In the Old Testament, the lawless society – a world where people actually give vent to their desires and drives – goes under the names Sodom and Gomorrah. The citizen in the lawless society is the evil one or the sinner. To sin is not just to break the law; at a deeper level it is about questioning its authority and thereby undermining the entire good world order. A person who just breaks the law and later confesses, thereby submitting to its authority, can be punished and forgiven after having shown sufficient contrition in word and deed. But the person who cultivates a rebellious attitude vis-à-vis the law, who refuses to accept its imposed alienation, becomes the arch-enemy of the entire order. The Abrahamic religions call this figure Lucifer, the angel of light, the figure who ignores the eternal law and uncompromisingly follows his desires and drives, as a temporal and finite being.
The syntheist utopia therefore entails a longing for a society where the law is no longer recognised and allowed to exercise its libidinal power. It is a society where religion has replaced alienation. In the syntheist utopia, bodies identify with their desires and libidinal drives and nothing else. Today’s politics might just as well be liberal-minded pragmatist, with its sights set constructively on the syntheist utopia by opening up to religion’s potential to counteract alienation. Because after all, politics is intimately intertwined with contemporary society and its citizens and material conditions. But the syntheist utopia is a completely different phenomenon than liberal-minded pragmatism – to begin with it can, of course, unabashedly take the immensity of the future as its point of departure, instead of, like pragmatism, being forced to stay within the narrow confines of the present – and therefore professes theological anarchism and nothing else.
Before the arrival of totalism, man apprehends himself as a cohesive whole. There is no need to separate an eternal soul from a corruptible body. Although he is mortal, man is part of a natural cycle where life and death are both natural and necessary, regularly recurring fixed points. Above all, everything hangs together with everything else in a monist universe. Totalism destroys this harmony between mankind and her environment. In conjunction with the mobilist Heraclitus being overshadowed by the totalist Plato as an influential thinker in ancient Greece in the 4th century B.C., we can easily note totalism’s ideological victory, at least temporarily, and from this follows also alienation’s invasion – as rapid as it is destructive – of man’s conception of himself and the world.
Narcissism is alienation’s clearest symptom. Narcissism is a compensatory phenomenon, it originates in its own radical opposite: the fantasy of the world without the subject. The subject must choose to manage the fantasy of the world outside itself in one of two possible ways. Either all production of value and identity is shifted back to the world – for example by creating and worshipping a god – or else the shock of the insight into the subject’s fundamental emptiness is internalised by turning this emptiness dialectically into its radical opposite: the castrated subject is transformed into the omnipotent centre of existence. The fantasy of the world without the subject is so hard to grasp that the simplest way to manage it – if no divinities are invoked – is to place the subject in the driving seat of existence. But if the subject ends up in the driving seat – where it does not reasonably belong, almost everything that happens to us within our lifetime is really out of our control, even if we believe in the illusion that the subject has the possibility to influence its environment – this immediately triggers a whole series of reactions that only can be described as powerful compensatory behaviour, which results in the narcissist condition. Thus the Cartesian fantasy of the subject as the only unerring fixed point in existence and thereby also its centre, becomes a reality.
Even though Bentham himself does not even seem capable of understanding that his bizarre ultrautilitarianism is a physical impossibility – what can never be formulated in advance, for example human utility, can of course never be measured in advance either – the Panopticon is an exceptionally interesting metaphor for Bentham’s own and his many followers’ autistic fantasies about their own castrated and isolated subjects as the self-evident centre of the Universe. It is hard to imagine a clearer example of how the psychotic reversal from impotence to autocracy constitutes the necessary dialectics for generating the Cartesian fantasy. What we see is a battle over who is the most autistic out of the two most autistic thinkers in the history of philosophy. Through his utilitarianism, if possible Bentham makes himself even more Cartesian than René Descartes himself. But thereby also even more alienated and alienating. The Panopticon exposes utilitarianism’s view of humanity, the concept reflects Bentham’s total lack of trust in his fellow humans and also in himself. The legacy from Bentham has given us what is possibly alienation’s clearest contemporary symbol, the paranoid surveillance camera.
It is thus also fully logical that the fundamentalists refuse to listen to and reason with their opponents, but would sooner murder them at the first opportunity. It must be extremely taxing to refute intellectual attacks on a divinity which one does not believe in oneself. Least of all if one has lost all faith in the potential of religion and sees the elevation of alienation to a religious foundation as the only possible way out. For it is precisely when one reaches the point where alienation replaces religion that one starts to execute those who do not agree with, or who quite simply just deviate from, the pattern of one’s own fantasies – without remorse. Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union functioned according to these same mechanisms. The actor knows that he is lying, but tries to convince himself that everyone else also must be lying, as if this mutual lying and a contest in murdering each another was the only reasonable response to hyperalienation. But as it happens, syntheists refuse to participate in this lying. Their reply to the dead religion of the fundamentalists is the living religion.
The living religion that moves away from alienation and towards the resumption of community is the opposite of monotheistic fundamentalism, which moves in the opposite direction and makes alienation its religion. For the living religion is, like art, implicit rather than explicit, admits several interpretations rather than being simple-minded, is reasonable rather than rational, open to contingencies and emergences rather than fixed in space-time; and above all, it is always embodied. Even before fundamentalism surrenders itself to a near-autistic denial of the fact that the meaning of the words which it professes devotion to are in a constant state of flux, this fundamentalism is tripped up by another and more fundamental premise: since fundamentalism always puts the word before God, it reveals that it uses the word to protect itself against the subconscious realisation that whispers that God in truth is already dead. If the law is the only thing left when God has disappeared from the equation, the law must be regarded as God. But a living god does not need the word as protection. A living god stands without any irresolute tottering or any ulterior motives in front of the word instead of anxiously hiding behind it. A living god exists based on the premise that an overwhelmingly large part of all communication between people is non-verbal. Already the well-known words of the Gospel of John “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” reveal a religion which has lost faith in God’s existence. The only thing left even at this early stage is just the empty incantation as God’s proxy.
The more acute the alienation, the more powerful the narcissism becomes. In late capitalist society with its hyperalienation, the Cartesian fantasy transitions into a hypernarcissism, a state characterised by a complete distrust in all intersubjective intentions other than the purely instrumental. Hypernarcissism is internalised as the subject’s own instrumentality world view, where other people are reduced to isolated bodies, monitored and controlled by an authority with a far-reaching mandate and with the aid of game theory calculations. This is a subject whose libido is obsessed with strategic planning, conquest, colonisation, plundering and displacement. When the libido tries to adapt itself to hypernarcissism’s instrumentality view of humanity, the result is not only a consistent sexualisation of all intimate relationships, but also a powerful fetishisation of sexuality per se. The hypernarcissist – whose own sexual activity ironically can be both manic and minimal, often oscillating violently between extremes – sees reproductive organs everywhere and in nearly everything. Culture is filled with them to the extent that it almost becomes parodical. In this paralysed libidinal state, no living fellow humans remain, but only dying bodies drenched in disdain for their lack of Platonic perfection. The alienation is complete, and the living religion is conspicuous by its tangible absence.
When hypernarcissism becomes socially burdensome, the result is yet another subject that can act as an agent of transfer, another subject with which the hypernarcissistic subject establishes an apparent trade, a kind of psychological “if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”. When the compensatory self-worship becomes psycho-socially unbearable, it also becomes the object of a transferring exchange between the subjects. One subject worships another subject in exchange for the corresponding worship in return, as if to conceal that the original compensatory act is banal narcissism in itself. Thus hypernarcissism transitions into internarcissism, precisely the state that completely dominates the late capitalist social arena. Syntheism however offers a possible way out of the internarcissistic cul-de-sac. By confronting the trauma from the fantasy of the world without the subject and through seeing the living religion as the way out of murderous alienation, the subject can at last be liberated into something greater than its limited, incarcerated self and become incorporated into the syntheist community, the manifestation of Syntheos!
Brassier calls this repetitive complexity machine an organon of extinction. However, the advent of syntheism means that the role of the victim in culture fades away. To begin with, syntheists try not to appease any gods in order to keep them at distance. On the contrary, syntheists create the new gods for a new era and above all for the future. And they seek contact with the gods, see their genesis as the realisations of humanity’s dreams and utopias. Thus, there is no need for sacrifice in syntheism, what is demanded is rather the direct opposite of sacrifice: the syntheist rituals about coalescence and entanglement; partly between people, partly between the human being and her environment. The worship of the network as an event naturally also relates to the realisation of the network as an event, that is, absorption into the holy intimacy as the happy ending to the tragic history of alienation.
When the banknote establishes itself as the dominant form of communication between people and societies in the 17th century, it generates an accelerating technological development and increased prosperity to an extent that the world has never seen before. It is easy to be blinded by this efficiency and progress; liberalism is a particularly popular ideology, entirely based on this blindness, spurred on by capital’s formidable historical successes. But capital liberates all this human creativity and makes possible all this specialisation at a very high cost. Within the capitalist system the good, the service and the banknote are namely all disconnected from their interacting agents, which results in these agents being cynically isolated from and insensitive to each other. Both capital’s own isolation of its interacting entities – you have no idea who owned your banknote before you, and you have no idea of where it will end up after it has left you – and its accelerating production of new human pathologies – a constant stream of new shortcomings in relation to a projected normality and an ever-increasing number of frustrations to be compensated for by a constant stream of new goods and services – makes capital the strongest alienation generator in all of human history.
Capitalism, on the other hand, drives Man away from religion and straight into the arms of alienation. The dislocation occurs even within the hypercapitalist religious sects that are rapidly expanding in the confused beginning of the Internet age. This means religions arranged like department stores and entertainment arenas, philosophies of life built on progress mythologies, but without any annoying religiosity whatsoever. Typical examples are the hyperindividualist self-help theologies in primarily the United States, such as Charismatic Christianity, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientology, New Age and Californian Zen, as well as their various branches and equivalents in Asia, South America and Eastern Europe. Here there is a lack that capitalism creates in order to subsequently and fundamentally worsen it, a lack that it never deals with, since a rectification would kill capitalism itself. We are talking about the gradually increasing acute lack of empathy. Capitalism strives to minimise empathy in order to thus be able to maximise alienation, which increases emotionally compensating consumption and thereby also even production additionally – as we know, capitalism is driven by the growth maximisation principle – while syntheism conversely strives to maximise empathy, and in order to do this it must fight alienation through actively minimising the influence of capital inside the syntheist temporary utopia.
This means that syntheism is capitalism’s antithesis. It is not superficially and merely formally anti-capitalist, such as the capitalist ideologies socialism and conservatism with their saccharine dreams of a controlled, top-down market – as though a pragmatic domestication of capital really would be able to affect alienation; rather, historical experience says that it is the other way around. No, syntheist anti-capitalism is deeply and genuinely radical on account of its being seated in theological anarchism. The syntheist reply to capitalism’s pillaging is not to start an anti-capitalist, bloody revolution with dramatic riots on the streets – after which the system would in any case soon re-emerge, insignificantly modified, since it de facto emanates in an emergent way from our age’s specific information technology structure. Such an ambition is indefensibly naive and belongs more in the Enlightenment’s patriarchal rationalism than in syntheism’s relationalist renaissance. The logically consequential, syntheist response to late capitalism and its hyperalienation is – as the syntheist philosopher Simon Critchley writes in The Faith of The Faithless – not the pretentious revolution, but instead the discrete subtraction.
There is seldom or never any social change without articulation. Under capitalism, the new literate nation state replaces the old illiterate Church as the common arena, and the statist articulation says that society is a body. But the body metaphor – which statism obviously borrows from the ecclesiastical articulation that says that the congregation is a body – must be exposed. For society as a body never generates any narrative for increased cohesiveness, as Michel Foucault points out, but instead functions as a latent threat to the deviant person in the nation state. It is perfectly possible to be an individual, but it is only acceptable to be exactly the individual who maximises her own frustration, alienation and consumption, and who pays for all this by maximising her production for the capitalist power structure, moreover in the shadow of the prevailing phantasmic behavioural imperative: Whatever you do, blend in!
When nation states construct heavy barriers along their borders and waste enormous sums of money on gigantic, impregnable and corrupt intelligence bureaucracies – with the stated or implicit aim that the free and open Internet must be brought to nothing – this is done with the rationalist arguments and concomitant demands for silence and obedience of the Enlightenment and Modernism. But it is once again a logic grounded in a blind paranoia and not in any scientific approach (the logic is occasionally dazzling, it is just that the foundation poor). The similarity with the axiomatic self-glorification of the Enlightenment and Modernism is striking. The only decent reply is syntheism’s requirement of a global opening of borders and free communication without either state or corporatist control and supervision: the libertarian truth as an act par excellence. Not because this response is a logically rational reaction, but because it is in fact an intuitively Romantic action; it is the only possible way out of suffocating alienation to the living religion. The dialectical transition from paralysing atheism to revitalising syntheism of course runs in parallel with this phase shift. Atheism’s hopeless dilemma is that it is the child of the Enlightenment and Modernism and, just like its parents, unaware of its own built-in, paralysing limitations. Syntheism is a radical response that also resolves this dilemma.
Brassier does in fact understand the trauma of extinction, but he is evidently wrestling with the shock of affirmation which follows from the insight of one’s own mortality. Therefore Nihil Unbound gets stuck in the category protosyntheism. This otherwise so impressive philosophical work, this consummate atheology, remains at a standstill in one of the three bottom corners in the syntheological pyramid, unable to rise towards the top. Brassier claims, which is entirely reasonable, that Atheos is the Universe’s own formidable engine, but he has not started the engine himself nor allowed himself be carried away by the journey within the syntheological pyramid. And the explanation is, as is so often the case concerning philosophical fallacies, psychological. In his quest to stand outside the relationalist universe as a neutral observer, Brassier misses the point that such a psychological alienation for the philosopher is just as impossible as the corresponding physiological alienation for the physicist. Brassier’s inadequacy is that he lacks the oceanic feeling, which is the reward for a genuinely participatory philosophy. Consequently the spiritual work of syntheists strives to attain and then maintain this oceanity.
Meillassoux’s British colleague Simon Critchley defines the syntheist faith as a pure faith in his syntheist epic The Faith of The Faithless. Critchley argues that it is faith per se and not its object that is utopianism’s innermost essence. He calls his conviction mystical anarchism, and this is of course identical with the theological anarchism that we formulate in this work. From this position, there is then nothing that stops us from taking one further step; from the pure faith of mystical anarchism to syntheism’s pure religion, a spirituality in which the religious practice in itself is the innermost essence of the religion. In the spirit of Critchley, the pure religion’s basic faith is in the idea that faith itself is necessary in order to make the impossible possible. Creativity runs from Atheos via Pantheos to Entheos, and the name of the enabled impossibility is of course Syntheos. Pure faith in a practised form is thus syntheism, the pure religion. As pure religion, religion is alienation’s complete opposite and the only available weapon against the cynical isolationism in our contemporary world. Critchley’s answer to the question of what must be done in our time is identical with syntheism’s subtraction and its ensuing monastisation; he has had enough of the classical Left’s bloody cultural revolutions – led by malicious and irresponsible tyrants and fanned by pompous and adventure-loving philosophers – who quite apart from wreaking great havoc and destruction, sooner or later are always absorbed by precisely the power structures that they purport to attack, and thereby in the long run actually strengthening rather than weakening them. This occurs since this sort of revolutionary, just like the quantum physics researcher, is internal and not external in relation to the relationalist society within which she acts. Subtraction must therefore always precede the revolution as truth as an act.
However, no resonance exists in a void. Therefore the self-hating human being must constantly find something concrete within herself to hate. Something that is not a void for the subject. Therefore self-hatred constantly locates new attributes in the hated subject that it objectifies and reifies in order to recast into an object of passionate hatred. Self-hatred is therefore to be regarded as an orgy of finding, reifying and subsequently mocking the shortcomings of the subject – based on an unattainable external template concerning how the subject ought to be in order to pass muster as an object of worship. As if it would ever be possible to love anything just because it is good enough according to an externally established norm. It is as the existential philosopher Hannah Arendt says: “Evil is banal”. It quite simply gloats in its alienation vis-à-vis the world, in what antiquity’s Zoroaster, as early as around 3,700 years ago, calls druj, the passionate enjoyment of existential lying.
According to syntheism, self-love is truth as an act above all others. Love yourself, without involving any emotions whatsoever, because you have no choice. Just act. Out of this conscious and logically cogent self-love as truth as an act flows love to everything else that exists in an intensely pulsating, creative Universe. The opposite of alienation-enjoying self-hatred could hardly be clearer. But self-love stands firm only in this fundamental conviction: that in essence love is a constitutional act without emotions and from which all other love passions later emerge. And this act in its purest form is self-love; the love of the encounter between the self and the divine where integrity arises. The moment when one’s self-image and world view attain a harmonious reconciliation with each other is the event that the syntheists poetically call the infinite now or the immanent transcendence.
The step from love to art is short. In his book The Master and his Emissary, British philosopher Iain McGilchrist pins his hopes for humanity on art and religion. According to McGilchrist, art and religion are the human expressions that can be used effectively in order to confront the big threat – what McGilchrist calls the condition of anomie. As is well-known, the term anomie was coined by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim in the late 19th century. According to Durkheim, anomie starts with a total and irrevocable internal alienation and dissolution of values, which invokes an intense existential consciousness, which in turn generates a complete and devastating external paralysis. Durkheim expresses this by saying that the anomic human being can no longer see the world, but instead is staring back at existence; a blank stare that at once is both neurotically paralysing and psychotically megalomaniacal.
Consequently art plays a central role within syntheism. Art seeks to move away from alienation towards religion, not least when it investigates alienation itself, as if it were the only theme that remains for art to process. Like syntheism in itself, art is implicit rather than explicit, ambiguous rather than monotonous, sensible rather than rational, and above all, always incarnated. Therefore, really interesting art has always been transrationalist. Rationalist art would be unbearably banal and meaningless. Rather, art must be truer to life than life itself. Through art, Man can regain his gaze and abandon staring, and with this living gazing on the world there follows a living relationship with the surrounding world. McGilchrist claims that the key to this deeper artistic understanding of the terms of existence is melancholy. This is related to the fact that melancholy is the emotional consequence of a joyous acceptance, followed by a glorification of the multiplicity of existence. Thereby melancholy is the complete opposite of the Platonist simplification. Which possibly explains why melancholy, according to McGilchrist, was idealised during the Renaissance but despised during the Enlightenment, even by protosyntheists such as Spinoza and Leibniz.
When the netocrat atheist of the 3rd millennium takes a seat in a classical temple and is astonished at its inspiring beauty, the question arises of how hypercapitalism has succeeded in pacifying her and her generation’s sisters and brothers to such a degree that they themselves have never realised any ideas of erecting equivalent buildings for spiritual purposes or even with a spiritual orientation. And in particular, not without some individual ulterior motives of some kind of capitalist gain in the long run. Through the historical extinction of religion, ideality has namely been lost and has been replaced by a blind and compact instrumentality in all relationships between human beings. All social activities and relationships in hypercapitalist society are assumed to revolve around value-destroying exploitation and never to be about value-creating imploitation (see The Netocrats). But the instrumentality view of one’s fellow human being is an existential prison – Platonist alienation in its most manifest form – and the only way out of this prison is to negate the entire capitalist paradigm. Suddenly and in a very timely way, the Internet arrives as a potential lever to achieve the ideality renaissance. The Internet not only makes this longed-for revolution possible. According to the information-technology writing of history, it is the Internet that de facto is this revolution itself.
Only in the 1990s does criticism begin to stir, and it is of course the rapid growth of the Internet and experimental metaphysics that open up the possibility of clearing a path out of postmodernist alienation. Historically and for obvious reasons, constructive criticism with the purpose of opening the way for expansive, creative thinking has always come from the outside. What academic philosophy has dismissed as an impossibility – the growth of a new metaphysics for the new Internet age, and thereby the construction of a new social theory of everything – is of course de facto made possible by the interactive conversations that are going on with frenetic intensity in extra-academic, virtual spaces. The netocrats are undermining the universities’ monopoly on metaphysical truth production in the same way that the universities once undermined and razed the Church’s monopoly on the same. The use of a constantly expanding Wikipedia is exploding while national encyclopaedias in fancy bindings are gathering an increasing amount of dust in bookshelves that nobody ever visits. History repeats itself when a new information-technology paradigm enables the growth of a new structure for truth production right under the very noses of the old, tired and corrupt elite, who are unable to intervene even if they had had the energy to do so, since the material conditions – and thereby the rules of the Darwinian punishment and reward system in the surrounding culture – have been fundamentally altered.
Note that outside the anthropocentric fantasy, this entire mythological construction is in a worthless limbo. It is only within the capitalist fantasy, which revolves around the centrality of the individual and the substantiality of the atom and the insurmountable gap between them, that these mythological assertions can be distorted into categorical axioms. The sacralisations of life, the body and consciousness are by-products of the massive internarcissism; the collective self-glorification, which in turn is a consequence of fully implemented alienation. The truth is, however, that life, the body and consciousness are emergent phenomena in an open and contingent universe; phenomena that are characterised by constantly higher degrees of complexity, rather than by any form of sacredness. That which one can relate to in a deeper sense is not these three anthropocentric projections in themselves, but the common underlying variable; the constantly higher intensities of the current emergences. To a syntheist, concepts such as life, body or consciousness are not fundamental; rather, these must be regarded as secondary and precisely as anthropocentric projections onto the rich, creative ability of the Universe to produce hosts of different intensities. And it is the intensity that is sacred. The name of the intensity is Entheos.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58