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Chemical liberation
The conviction that the extensive availability of chemical substances for radical alteration of the mind in turn fundamentally changes the idea of what it means to be a human being; partly through Man’s evident discovery of himself as a strictly chemical-hormonal phenomenon, partly through the division between the first subject that decides what chemicals should be added and when this should happen and the second subject which then experiences the radical alteration of the mind per se. The concept can be compared to sexual liberation and transhumanism.
It is important to have clear this fundamental understanding of the historical terms of the production of metaphysics when we are confronted by the fact that no less than three dramatic revolutions exploded concurrently at the start of the third millennium. These three interactive and synergistic revolutions are the Internetisation of planet Earth, the relationalist revolution that is moving from physics to philosophy, and the chemical liberation within physiology. Taken together, these three epoch-making developments laid the foundation for a new superparadigm in the history of humanity. Power structures, the world view and the view of humanity were radically and fundamentally changed all at once in one of the most dramatic social upheavals humanity has ever seen.
The sexual revolution under capitalism was followed by the chemical liberation during informationalism (see The Global Empire). The development of a post-atheist religiosity, which is built around the need for a new metaphysics, spurred on by globally collaborative, syncretist and religio-social practices, and not least by the exploding plethora of entheogenic substances, laid the foundation for a resolution of the conflict between theism and atheism which, in a Hegelian dialectics, has grown into syntheism as the metaphysics of the Internet age. This occurred at the same time as the sexual revolution was rejected when its unavoidable flip side, the hypersexualisation of the individual, was exposed as the underlying engine of capitalist consumption society; the sexual revolution ended up being a straitjacket of the superego where the chemical liberation offered a possible way out.
In an age obsessed with syntheist network dynamics, history cannot credibly strive for either feudalist eternities or capitalist progress. Above all, the human being has of course not changed much during the course of history, at least not into something objectively better than she has been previously. For example, we use a smaller part of our brain today than we did 10,000 years ago, mainly due to the fact that more and more of the calculations and considerations essential for our lives are today outsourced to external technology instead of being managed by the brain in-house. This fact kills meliorism. Syntheist utopianism instead focuses on planning for the definitive event, informationalism’s fundamental metaphysical idea. For this reason syntheists are fighting for both the free and open Internet with its anarchist information flows and against the ecological apocalypse in order to save the fundamental prerequisite for human survival, the planet itself. That in addition social policy must be pursued based on the principle of minimisation of harm – not with banal, knee-jerk moralism as its guiding light – is a foregone conclusion based on these two positions. The free and open Internet is also of course driving chemical liberation – one of our three dramatic revolutions at the start of the Internet age – and we cannot take care of our planet in a constructive way if we do not also take care of each other in a constructive and preferably also a loving way. Syntheism is the social theory of everything that merges these three ideological projects.
This means that capitalism must be organised in such a way that it constantly excludes the glaring void at its own centre, all in accordance with the principle that something must be subtracted from or added to perceived reality in order for it to be ideologised, where this hidden something returns as the ideology’s demonic universal. After capitalism’s tyrannical pillaging throughout all of society’s nooks and crannies – there is hardly anything left to exploit that has not yet been converted into an open market, just as there is hardly any human effort left to exercise that has not been converted into a taxed professional category – there remains only one single subject area where an opportunity to author an alternative, cohesive, universal story for humanity is still offered. To the disappointment of many philosophers this will not occur within art – even art has long ago been transformed into an entertaining and somewhat piquant euphemism for money, whatever art and its vociferous supporters may claim – but here we are talking about the underestimated theological arena. For it is in theology’s meeting with the revolutionary trio of interactivity, quantum physics and chemical liberation that there arises a genuine possibility of creating the necessary metanarrative of the Internet age: syntheology.
It seems, ironically enough, as though Badiou’s and Zizek’s nostalgic notion of revolution suffers from a glaring lack of, precisely, the revolutionarity. The syntheists, on the other hand, have their sights set on something much more radical. The singularity is the definitive event according to the criteria we use in this book. And there are already three parallel revolutions in progress – even if Badiou and Zizek with their conservative templates and blinkers appear unable to apprehend them – namely: The expansion of the Internet, the relationalist paradigm shift within both physics and sociology and last but not least the chemical liberation. The singularity that is our transition from humanity to transhumanity is one of the three revolutions’ merging supraevents in a not too distant future. The fourth singularity in history is already waiting in the wings. All we need to do is take Critchley’s advice which tells us to first build the syntheist temples and monasteries, where through our subtraction from the surrounding world we can enable the revolution as the truth as an act of our time. We are ourselves the fourth singularity!
The sought-after sexual liberation under capitalism if anything gets its follow-up in the chemical liberation (for a more exhaustive treatment, see The Global Empire) under attentionalism. The development of a post-atheist religiosity founded on the need for a new metaphysics, spurred on by globally collaborating syncretistic, religio-social practices, and not least the explosive flora of entheogenic substances, lays the foundation for a dissolution of the conflict between theism and atheism; a conflict that, in a Hegelian dialectical process, transitions into a synthesis in the form of syntheism as the metaphysics of the Internet age. At the same time, sexual liberation is displaced when its underbelly, the hypersexualisation of the individual, is exposed as the capitalist consumption society’s underlying engine: sexualism ultimately became a straitjacket of the superego where chemical liberation offers the only possible way out. We do not lose liberated sexuality by returning to some kind of asceticism or abstinence with old-school religious overtones. We only gain access to means and ceremonies that finally enable us to start domesticating and mastering liberated sexuality to our long-term advantage. Indirect desire at last has the chance to balance the direct, vacuous, repetitive drive.
The myth of sobriety is crushed once and for all. Sobriety was invented in the newly-industrialised Europe in the 1830s with the purpose of keeping the factory workers in check. But of course no form of sobriety exists, and has never done so. The human brain is a battlefield for constant conflicts between lots of different hormones and chemicals. There is no sober ego: that we refrain from alcohol or other external stimulants, does not mean that a chemical equilibrium prevails in our brain, where all levels constantly vary wildly. Ask a woman who has been pregnant or a man who has lived with a pregnant woman. And we self-medicate all the time to the best of our abilities, carry out various actions in a more or less desperate hope that the brain’s reward system will make us happy with sundry chemical kicks. This becomes evident at the same moment that the agent is divided and appears as the first subject who determines the mood of the agent, and as the second subject that experiences the mood that the first subject has decided on and administered. Thereby, chemical liberation fans the growth of dividualism. And late capitalism’s bizarre, global quest for the enormously extensive, illegal drug trade appears to be the last exploding supernova in the tragicomic history of the myth of sobriety.
Syntheism is the home where psychedelic practices are carried out responsibly and with creativity with regard to what is best for the congregation and the participating agents. Where solid scientific facts meet reported spiritual experiences, a practice is constructed which is often carried out in defiance of prevailing norms and laws in the surrounding society. But psychedelic practice is an act of faith of the inquiring mind, a truth as an act, before which the syntheist never subordinates herself to the nation state and the narrow-minded and prejudiced norms of bourgeois society. This applies even if chemical liberation entails a syntheist martyrdom. The social arena is of course already filled with a host of different psychedelic practices. The Swedish historian Rasmus Fleischer also points to the fact that even pathologised psychological states such as eating disorders and other self-destructive behaviour must be regarded as psychedelic practices. Sexuality and entheogens are closely related to each other. This explains, for example, why it is extremely hard to be focused on both things at once. Both sexuality and entheogens are fundamentally a question of manifesting the drive, that is, to repeat what is meaningless ad infinitum. But through this meaningless repetition, meaning is created, where sexuality generates eros and the entheogens generate philia.
Revolutions are fundamentally material, not spiritual. Revolutions consist of new technological complexes, not of flocks of courageous heroes. The real revolution, as we said, is not the French Revolution in 1789, but the arrival of the printing press in the 1450s, without which what is called the French Revolution would have been an impossibility. The history of mankind is a dialectic between the constant the body and the variable technology. This dialectic was fundamentally changed with the genesis of 21st century human technologies, where even the body is technologised. This new human being, an android, a cyborg, is no longer human, but transhuman. The body is no longer a predetermined, fixed object to relate to, but an ongoing project that we ourselves are influencing and reshaping all the while, and in the long run also creating. Whether we want to or not, we have been cast into the transhumanist revolution, which is chemical liberation par excellence. But in order to place the transhumanist revolution in its correct context, we must define its relationship to the informationalist event.
During the 20th century, academic philosophy is instead reduced to a stuffy, self-referencing loop. Like an old castrated monster, it behaves as though interactivity, the new physics and chemical liberation do not exist, nor can exist either. So why has philosophy got stuck in the suffocating grip of hermeneutics? How did it come to be impacted by postmodern paralysis? The answer can, once again, be found in the academic marginalisation of philosophy that occurred during the 20th century. From having been a dialogue between independent agents, between politically and artistically driven activists, philosophy was transformed during the 20th century into a politically controlled and socially castrated activity. Philosophy became a business exclusively practised at universities and on academic terms, and thereby creativity was weakened within the discipline, with some extremely rare but consequently also so much more important exceptions, for example psychoanalysis and pragmatism, which in principle also evolved precisely because they had access to their very own institutions.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58