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Event
A spectacular occurrence with dramatic consequences for a particular phenomenon or a specific region of the Universe. See, by way of comparison, singularity.
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(In »Everything is religion«)
“What happens in Russia in 1917 and the following years when the people of Europe make their way home from the war are only outwardly Russian events,” writes Furet. “What counts is that the Bolsheviks proclaim the universal revolution. Out of a successful coup in Europe’s most backward country carried out by a Communist sect headed by an audacious leader, the political situation creates an exemplary event that will steer the course of history in the same way as France of 1789 did in its time. As a consequence of the general war-weariness and rage of the vanquished people, the illusion that Lenin created out of his own theses and actions came to be shared by millions of people.” The revolution constitutes a promise of a future kingdom of good fortune for the new human being. Inconvenient facts melt away in the brutal heat generated by the radical rhetoric. This incompletely secularised salvation doctrine means that politics takes over religion’s claim to totality. “Revolutionary fervour wants everything to be politics,” writes Furet. Politics produces its own clergy as well as its heretics, and it thereby becomes impossible to separate it from religion, in terms of both expression and content. It is not enough that religion cunningly takes on another guise and meaning when necessary; it can also change name and label itself something completely different. Not infrequently politics, for example. Or just anything.
Our subconscious is constantly driven by the idea that there is someone else out there in an inaccessible dimension outside our physical universe who sees and knows all and senses the meaning of all the toil and pain we go through in our short lives. This also applies to the most entrenched atheists. Even if the atheist’s consciousness does not believe in the great Other, his or her subconscious refuses to accept that this great Other does not exist. Even in the most die-hard atheist, little thoughts and behaviours constantly float up to a conscious level in daily life; thoughts and behaviours that remind us that the real, the subconscious depth under the conscious surface, will never accept the absence of the great Other. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls all of these sudden, revealing outbursts sinthomes. The sinthome is quite simply the event or behaviour that does not fit with the individual’s current fantasy of his or her ideas of self and the world. Thus, the sinthome is also the event or the behaviour around which the human being is forced to construct new, altered ideas of self and the world when the old fantasies collapse. The sinthome is the deepest truth about oneself that a human being can be aware of.
According to Critchley, mystical anarchism is the true engine starter for the genuinely revolutionary project. Critchley’s mystical anarchism is of course synonymous with the syntheism we are talking about and advocating in this book. The already established syntheist Meillassoux sees in his distinction between the potential and the virtual the possibility for an event where God suddenly appears in history as the metaphysical justice, where justice arrives with the same importance as existence, life and thought, the previous virtualities that have been shockingly and dramatically realised through history. Meillassoux argues that God as justice is the missing fourth virtuality that is now waiting to be realised. Syntheologically we express this as a focus on the oscillating axis between Entheos and Syntheos in the syntheological pyramid.
The dependence of bodies on each other is real. We know that dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin hold people together in a collective that accords pleasure to those in the group, and in this pleasure a meaning arises, produced by and for ourselves. Therefore we have arrived at the historical juncture when theism and atheism must be consummated as dialectical opposites, not through some kind of hybrid, but through us seeing and accepting their historically consummated interconnection as a unit and being able to push this unit aside and go forth in history, into syntheism. Today’s fusion between our historical understanding of the fact that when all is said and done our cohesiveness is what is most holy to us, and the exploding, genuinely new virtual connection between people thanks to the arrival of the Internet, interacts with and is creating the foundation for the new era’s syntheist metaphysics. God (theism) and Man (atheism) are quite simply followed by the network (syntheism) as the fundamental event of metaphysics.
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 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).
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.
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 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.).
However, no such legal object exists in nature. Minerals, plants and animals are, for example, completely unable to assimilate a text which is read to them, just as they lack the wherewithal to allow themselves to be entranced libidinally by the existence of a set of rules. There are quite simply no laws in nature. There are only fields, forces and relationships. When and if an event seems to repeat itself in nature before the human observer’s attentive gaze, it is merely because the conditions in terms of the forces and relationships in two or more different situations have been equivalent. Therefore, the law is an extremely clumsy and basically misleading metaphor for how nature works. Its popularity as a metaphor is entirely related to the human being’s internarcissism; it has no connection with any sort of science. Anthropocentrism, as we know, continually throws a spanner in the works for mankind’s understanding of the world around him. We believe that we are observing the world, but we are in fact looking into a mirror manufactured by ourselves, produced out of our self-centred ideas and delusions.
It is Atheos who drops the event as a bombshell into the metauniverse that beforehand appeared to be balanced. The Universe arises as a minimal but decisive quantum deviation in a metauniverse where something is less than nothing. It should be pointed out in this context that the void is never empty. A nothing in the classical sense does not exist in physics. In its apparent emptiness, a void is also full of pure activity and, as long as the total energy amount is zero, is capable of producing and maintaining any amount of quantitative substance. Existence, life, and consciousness are all examples of magical, incomprehensible, unpredictable emergences that Atheos drops into history. Every event of every kind in the Universe is of course actually incredibly unlikely on closer inspection, but occurs nonetheless only according to the principle that something happens because something must happen sooner or later. Atheos is the engine in syntheism’s Pantheos. What separates Man from other animals is not just that Man is endowed with a consciousness, but that he also has a subconscious. It is the subconscious that spurs mankind on in her quest for the truth event. The quest for the truth event is the focus of the drive.html">death drive. Or as the a-theist Hegel would express the matter: Atheos is constantly on the lookout for itself.
Quantum physics thereby opens the way for a whole new metaphysics, a radical monism connected to an irreducible multiplicity. Kant’s humanist phenomenology no longer has any validity. Starting with Hegel, the way is instead opened for a new phenomenology where the observer always must be included as an actor in every event-constellation, in every individual, fundamental phenomenon. After Hegel’s phenomenological revolution, the Hegelian view of the observer in relation to the observed is fundamental to the field of philosophy.html">process philosophy. Thus, Kantian representationalism and its naive atheism are gradually wiped out in three steps: in the first step by Hegel, in the second step by Nietzsche and in the third step by Bohr. It is with Bohr and his relationalism that we land at the arrival of the Internet age. Ontology, epistemology and even phenomenology are merged into a common relationalist complex. We see how syntheist metaphysics is solidly founded in contemporary physics.
But it is not just Foucault and his successors that inspire Barad. From another of her predecessors, Donna Haraway, she borrows the idea that the diffraction of wave motions is a better metaphor for thinking than reflection. Ontology, epistemology, phenomenology and ethics are all influenced radically and fundamentally by the new universocentric perspective. They all interact in the new onto-epistemology around agential realism. Quantum physics radically breaks away space–time from Newtonian determinism. With this shift it is also necessary to abandon the idea of geometry giving us an authentic picture of reality. It is with the aid of topology rather than through geometry that we can do syntheist metaphysics justice, Barad argues. Neither time nor space exist a priori as transcendental, determined givens, before or outside any phenomena, which is of course what Kant imagines. Time is not a thread of patiently lined-up and evenly dispersed intervals, and space is not an empty container in which matter can be gathered. The role of the engine of metaphysics is shouldered by non-linear network dynamics, which drives the equally non-linear event, rather than the old linear history, which is supposed to drive the equally linear progress. Entheist duration is thus also a dynamic, not a linear, phenomenon.
Secondly, Brassier confuses quantity with quality. Even if quantitatively speaking pain were more prevalent than pleasure in existence – which definitely can be questioned: pain and pleasure are, to start with, often each other’s complements in various multidimensional experiences rather than each other’s opposites – it does not mean that the pain is qualitatively more important and thereby more identity-generating than pleasure. Here syntheism contributes something that Brassier overlooks in his philosophy, namely the spiritual experience. What characterises the spiritual experience is above all its production of infinity in the present, which means that it transcends the quantitative, places quality before quantity, and thereby enables the existential and thereby ethical prioritisation of life and pleasure over death and pain. The infinite now defeats drawn-out and maybe even life-long suffering, not just in the moment when it is experienced concretely, but even more as the identity-producing memory which generates ethical substance; something that arises only afterwards in the processing and integration of the event into the life fantasy, where it lives on as a constantly identity-generating abstraction.
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.
There are of course no de facto predetermined sets of rules whatsoever in the Universe that precede the phenomena which they, if that were the case, would be designed to regulate, that is, if they existed (which they do not, for in that case their existence would precede existence itself). What in hindsight we may apprehend as laws of nature are nothing but analogous repetitions within one and the same system, given the temporarily prevailing, constantly slightly varying circumstances within the complex in question. Admittedly, there is a universal metalaw which says that there is always an explanation for every given event – an ontological prerequisite that mobilists from the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the 17th century to the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce in the 19th century investigate thoroughly – but no eternal laws per se are required in order for any of the virtualities within the phenomenon to be actualised. Like so many times before in the history of science, nature does not care about our human, all too human, metaphors. Physics quite simply does not obey laws in the way that the slave is expected to obey the rules his master dictates.
Physical presentism, however, is a phenomenological eternalism placed within the mobilist conception of reality; a transrationalist eternalism with factually motivated limitations. It is based on the conviction that the past is fixed, while the future is open and nebulous, and only the present is ontologically real. But the presentist position is only correct with the caveat that the present must be regarded as an eternalisation of an ontic flow which thereby is not an abstract thing but rather a concrete field. For example, the present as an event is already shifted to the past, as a fictive, in every contemplative moment. Phenomenological eternalism is merely an ontological, perceptional necessity, but not an ontic, physical truth about existence outside the mind. This applies to presentism just as much as to physical eternalism. The present is real, but it is only real as a relationalist phenomenal field rather than as a relativist noumenal thing. Just like the experience of the object’s exactitude as a substantial particle, the experience of the present’s exactitude as an infinitesimal moment is nothing other than an eternalist illusion. The experience in itself does not constitute ontological proof of anything at all. Thus, the correct transrationalist presentism should not be confused with the incorrect classical presentism.
The active attitude produces a steady stream of identities, it seeks creative novelty in an active engagement with its environment, it builds an emergent event emanating from the oscillating phenomenon that includes the syntheist agent. On the other hand, the reactive attitude thrives on maintaining distance, through a narcissism turned away from reality, where the energy is used to stimulate ressentiment for the purpose of repudiating the surrounding world, so that the subject can cultivate the belief in itself as an abandoned and isolated object, floating in a state of permanent masochistic enjoyment. Since the slave mentality – dissected by Nietzsche – constantly seeks a minimisation of its own living throughout life in order to be as close to extinction as possible (what Freud calls the drive.html">death drive), it also seeks submission in relation to other agents, because it flees from authentic intimacy for fear of losing the masochistic enjoyment where it has found its existential sense of security. The slave mentality prefers safe totalist suffering over unsafe mobilist pleasure.
The ethical consequence of the Nietzschean revolution is that the subject – which hovers in the minimal space between the current event and the next thought – must contemplate the ongoing identity-producing cycle, which de facto is the subject’s engine, in order to be able to shape the next thought as a free choice, a choice whose freedom means that the accomplishment of the intention rewards the subject with ethical substance. Nietzsche’s ethics is thus founded on a syntheist contemplation, which is followed by concrete action that is consistent with the contemplation. It is precisely this human being, she who consistently completes the necessary cycle of ethics to its inexorable end, that Nietzsche terms the übermensch, and it in on her that he pins his hopes when it comes to culture. It is hard to get further away from Kant’s morality robot paralysed in value philosophy than this.
Statism, faith in the nation state’s necessary supremacy and monopoly on violence, is capitalism’s political supra-ideology. Under statism’s banner, conservatism emerges as a protector of the establishment and its interests; liberalism constitutes a faith in the individual as a rational accumulator of resources in a market governed by a mystical hand which is invisible to the naked eye; while socialism is a blind faith in the political party as a substitute for God. Obviously, the advent of informationalism puts all these ideologies into deep crisis, since it attacks the very foundation for statism by undermining the drawing of borders in an increasingly irrelevant geography, which makes accessible alternative and infinitely much more tempting possibilities in terms of identity creation. In this process, not only is meliorism exposed as a banal myth, it also loses all its power of attraction; the netocratic dividual would much rather experience herself as a constantly ongoing and dynamic event throughout life than as a representative of any kind of slowly developed and predetermined progress. The old ideologies are quite simply plagued by statism’s deterministic view of history, which no longer has any credibility in an indeterministic universe. Therefore the ideological work must be done anew, and in that case all the way up from the theological foundation.
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.
The most intimate of relations remind us that everything essential in life starts with two and not one. One is nothing: the attraction always starts with two. And as the definitive truth event, attraction is in focus for mysticism. Zoroaster already understood and talked of this already with his concept asha in ancient Iran, followed by Heraclitus, who consummates the idea with his concept anchibasie in ancient Greece. Interestingly enough, both concepts are ambiguous: they can be translated as both to be present and to be close to being (not to be confused with late capitalism’s obsession with all kinds of pseudo-Buddhist mindfulness). Because two is the minimum in syntheist ontology – nothing can ever be just a one, other than the One, the Universe as a whole itself – a closer association with the object cannot either be a point of departure for the ontology. Instead this must be based on the actual relation between at least two, from the existential being in the division between them. Thereby asha and anchibasie, brilliantly, have not just ontological and epistemological but also ethical consequences. To live, understand and act correctly is to constantly remain as close to the states asha or anchibasie as possible.
We arrive at asha and anchibasie at the same moment that we let their meaning pass from being-external observing to being-internal participation. From this point of departure in syntheist mysticism, of necessity we land in fact in relationalist ethics. No other philosopher either before or after Heraclitus – with the possible exception of its predecessor and source of inspiration Zoroaster – has been so close to defining metaphysical truth with such precision. For it is precisely in its intense closeness to the truth event – rather than in some kind of absorption into the event – that the metaphysical truth is manifested, in its constantly failing yet necessary attempt to unite the at least two at the core of the ontology. We express this by saying that through all the thousands and thousands of truths we constantly produce, we find the primordial eternalisation as the defining truth as an act for our existential substance, as the primal act for us as creative truth machines.
Syntheism embraces an ethics of survival as a counterweight to immortality’s moralism, which is characteristic of the dualist philosophies’ outlooks on life. The Platonist obsession with immortality and perfection attests to its hostility vis-à-vis existence and life, a phobia of change that at its deepest level is a death worship. From syntheism’s Nietzschean perspective, Plato and his dualist heirs therefore stand out as the prophets of the death wish. Syntheism instead celebrates the eternalisation of the decisive moment, the manifestation of the One in the irreducible multiplicity, as the infinite now. All values and valuations must then be based on the infinite now as the event horizon. Eternity in time and infinity in space are not extensions of some kind in Platonist space–time of some kind, but poetically titled compact concentrations of passionate presence, as Heideggerian-inspired nodes in Corrington’s ecstatic naturalism. Eternity in time and infinity in space can only meet in the infinite now, in temporality’s minimised freezing, rather than in some kind of maximised extension. We are thus not eternal creatures because we are immortal, but because we can think and experience eternity as a logical as well as an emotional representation of the infinite, focused to the current moment. Which in turn means that the syntheist transcendence is localised inside rather than outside the immanence.
In relationalist physics emergences play a central role. Emergences appear when a more simple system for some reason or other attains a higher degree of complexity to such a great extent that it changes shape and transforms into a completely new phenomenon with completely new properties. An example might be that biology is regarded as an emergent phenomenon in relation to chemistry, in the same way that chemistry in turn is an emergent phenomenon in relation to physics. And if emergences play a central role within the sciences, there is no fundamental reason to exclude the possibility that the metaphysical equivalent to these emergences could play as important a role in social theories. There is thus good reason to regard the metaphysical event as the social equivalent to the physical emergence.
Since relationalism drives the new physics, it is hardly surprising that the metaphysics of the Internet age – from Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze via Alain Badiou to Slavoj Zizek – revolves around and is driven by the notion of the emergent event. Interactivity produces a class structure with the netocracy as the upper class and the consumtariat as the lower class. While the consumtariat is relatively uniform – consumtarians are of course defined by what they are not rather than what they actually are – the netocracy can be divided into three distinct categories. The first of these is the netocratic pioneers; the second category is the netocratic aspirationists who copy the pioneers at an early stage and successfully, and if possible milk an even greater surplus value out of their creativity than the pioneers do: imitation is the mother of survival. The third category of netocrats is the experimentalists, who, while they initially fail in copying the pioneers and who are rather too late to copy the aspirationists, for precisely this reason they are forced to and subsequently succeed in inventing their own original solutions, which motivate their position within the netocracy. The consumtarians meanwhile have their plate full passively chewing the nonsensical content, the calming and soporific entertainment that is produced in various trashy networks with no status whatsoever.
But when the individual no longer functions in a society built on networks, the Internet age’s netocracy seeks a new human ideal. One does this while the consumtariat also desperately seeks a new potential identity other than the tragic state of being the last individual. The new, attentionalist human ideal that appears is the dividual, the divisible rather than indivisible Man (see The Body Machines), a body experiencing pleasure, involved in constant networking with all interesting humans and machines in its surroundings. The dividual is a protean creature, powerfully coloured by schizoid creativity. If we study the netocratic categories more closely, we see how the concepts dividual and event interact in a clear quest to capture and strengthen the new attentionalist human ideal.
The netocratic pioneers build and lead the netocratic networks. In contrast to capitalist leadership, they lead from below and not from above. This means that they work purposefully with liberating the joy and creativity of other netocrats, and when this happens the event arises as confirmation and reward, for and within the network. The copying aspirationists follow the pioneers’ templates and set up the networks that in turn raise the status of the pioneers’ networks in the network pyramid as a whole. The Internetified physical world is already full of these obvious spinoffs, from the TEDx conferences (small-scale versions of the TED conferences in California and Canada) to regional burns (small-scale versions of the participatory Burning Man festival in Nevada), and then these various examples are nothing at all in comparison with the powerful network pyramids that are growing online with the Syntheist Movement – who are already practising what we are building a theory about in this book – as a striking example.
An event is a spectacular occurrence, a revolution is a spectacular event, and a singularity is a spectacular revolution. Events of various importance take place several times per year, genuine revolutions only once or twice per millennium. Singularities are easily counted, from an anthropocentric perspective we can only be said to have gone through three singularities: the commencement of the Universe, the genesis of life and the birth of consciousness. The question is whether we can imagine such a fourth singularity. For syntheism however the answer is clear. The fourth singularity must be God’s entry into history. For whatever it is that would be able to match the weight of the emergent genesis of existence, of life and of consciousness earlier in history, for the people of today it must have the same weight as if God suddenly appeared. Whatever it is that is hiding beyond the fourth dimension, its right and only name is God. Thereby the interesting question is what the arrival of God might be and what forms it might assume.
The French philosopher Alain Badiou, one of Jacques Lacan’s most well-known successors, starting with his work Being and Event, constructs a complete philosophical system based on the informationalist event as the deepest truth about Man’s existence. The biological, mental, and social structures that characterise Man are empirically verifiable generalities, and as such are of course contingent. The truths we produce and know of are dependent on this contingency, which summarises them all. Being is not everything to Man, as the totalist philosophers imagine. Thinking can very well be constructed with its starting point in ontology’s constant inconsistency instead of using the fictive being as the basis. However, Badiou argues that the universal is independent on the contingency. Every singularity in itself consists of an infinitely internal chaos, but through the singularity’s internalisation of this chaos, a kind of encircling stability is created around the chaos which makes the universal’s identity possible. From a geometric perspective, we can express this by saying that it is the stable ring around what is transient and chaotic that is the actual singularity; a stable universe around chaotic matter, a stable life around a chaotic biology, a stable consciousness around a chaotic hodgepodge of thoughts, followed by God as a kind of stable ring around a chaotic future.
Badiou assumes that thinking is universality’s true element. In the same way that the event arises as a result of the circumstances that prevail where it materialises – not in the capacity of the event per se – the universal stands above and free from the chaotic contingency. A truth is derived from the set of circumstances under which it is produced – regardless of whether these circumstances are social, psychological, or cognitive – but only the truth that satisfies Badiou’s specific criteria for an authentic truth can be regarded as a universal. It is here that Badiou uses the concept singularity. The authentic truth is characterised by the fact that it is in fact a singularity; it cannot in itself be subordinated to any particular previous particularity, group or identity. And it arises through an act, through an intervention, which establishes a subject/object relation within a specific, larger phenomenon. Waves become particles, chaos becomes cosmos, mobility is eternalised, and so on. Thereby a genuine truth can be established, after which there is no way back whatsoever.
According to Badiou every universal is born in an event, an event that is impossible to predict in advance, and which therefore first of all occurs in the subconscious. Furthermore, a universal is characterised by being based on a sudden decision, where it gives value to something that was worthless before the decision. The universal creates meaning; it implies an ethical approach, and thereby also a specific course of action from all those who are involved in its genesis. The universal can, at least initially, only have one meaning for those most closely involved. The universal is a univocality. It gets its value from an unswerving loyalty to the consequences of its truth – not through long, drawn-out interpretation of its meaning. This means that Badiou is strongly critical of post-structuralism’s obsession with interpretation, which has received enthusiastic support within the academic world. He despises the postmodern paralysation, which he traces to what we call the hyperhermeneutic condition.
Badiou maintains that every universal singularly is open vis-à-vis the future and remains constantly unfinished. It is not concerned with our mortality or general fragility. He sums up universality as the faithful construction of an infinite, generic multiplicity where the multiplicity must be primary since the One is merely a verbal illusion (that is, the One is the eternalised fictive par excellence, if we use a syntheological vocabulary). Multiplicity is merely a linguistic singular; any singular outside the irreducible plurality does not exist. Every universality is exceptional, has its origin in a single emergence, is assembled step by step, is the consequence of an existential decision, generates an ethical subject and is based on a becoming in an active truth and not on any specific knowledge. Badiou argues that philosophy obviously comprises the art of analysing, but above all is the art of articulating universalities. The truth event arises, according to him, ex nihilio. To begin with, this event is invisible rather than obviously identifiable where and when it occurs. It is not possible to predict or trace based on the circumstances around the situation where it occurs. Instead the truth event gets its status from the faithful subsequently, and its general acceptance is determined by the strength and perseverance of the faithful, their loyalty. It is quite simply the faithful who must make the event true; it can only get its status as a singularity by means of an aesthetic retrospectivity.
The singularity is defined by the fact that it overthrows the prevailing rules of the game, it begins a new era, it sends out a powerful shock wave through the ethical subject, which is changed so radically that we must speak of a kind of rebirth. Note that the truth event is always internal, it occurs from the inside out rather than from the outside in. It can thus not be forced by some external power that invades the phenomenon in some mysterious way. This means that, for example, military interventions and incoming meteorites are never events in this specific sense. This is where Badiou’s ethical imperative breaks radically with Kant’s moral imperative. According to Kant, Man becomes an authentic individual by carrying out his duty. According to Badiou, it is instead a necessity to oppose the external norm, vis-à-vis the accepted duty. According to Badiou, it is this opposition to the norm and not the fulfilment of duty that is the condition for living subjectivity. The singularity is a cultural and not a natural phenomenon. Badiou’s ethical imperative entails that Man becomes an authentic dividual by opposing the prevailing norm and fighting for a new world order with an eye to the syntheist utopia.
If the truth is an act that generates an event, the genuine event creates a new truth. The truth event is followed by a decision that is followed by a loyalty vis-à-vis the decision about the truth. Aside from this there is no truth beyond the event. Here Badiou breaks radically with Karl Popper’s obsession with verification as the guarantor of truth. Badiou argues that verifications take decades to construct and that the proponents of truth wisely enough never wait for the verification before they act on the basis of the truth. He thus defends an active truth concept vis-à-vis Popper’s extremely reactive truth concept. He then divides up the development of the truth event into four phases which we go through, both as dividual truth actors and as an historical collective.
1. The revelation of the truth event.
2. The denial of the event as the truth.
3. The repression of the event as truth.
4. The resurrection the truth as the event.
But what happens to rationalism’s idea of truth as the correct assertion about existence? Like all other forms of transrationalism from Hegel onwards, syntheism does not deny that such a deepest truth about existence actually exists. But the enormous complexity in such a deepest truth, and the insufficiency of language and thought when it comes to even getting close to it, makes it unattainable. However not in the Kantian sense – where the noumenal object ends up outside our horizon because the phenomenal object gets in the way – but instead as a considerably more radical consequence of transfinite mathematics.
1. The revelation of the truth event.
2. The denial of the event as the truth.
3. The repression of the event as truth.
4. The resurrection the truth as the event.
But what happens to rationalism’s idea of truth as the correct assertion about existence? Like all other forms of transrationalism from Hegel onwards, syntheism does not deny that such a deepest truth about existence actually exists. But the enormous complexity in such a deepest truth, and the insufficiency of language and thought when it comes to even getting close to it, makes it unattainable. However not in the Kantian sense – where the noumenal object ends up outside our horizon because the phenomenal object gets in the way – but instead as a considerably more radical consequence of transfinite mathematics.
To philosophise is to metathink, and what Jacques Lacan calls the real and what Badiou calls the unnamable is philosophy’s eternal variability, its own built-in impossibility, its genesis that consistently avoids transitioning into a becoming. Here Badiou stubbornly opposes Gilles Deleuze’s process philosophical foundation: where Deleuze in following Spinoza states that multiplicity is identical with the One, that multiplicity is univocal, Badiou argues that multiplicity is undefinable. He accuses Deleuze of building a lovely constructivism that relies entirely on intuition, while he himself relies only on the stringency of mathematics. Against this Spinozist and Deleuzian multiplicity of the One (Entheos through Pantheos) he posits the multiplicity of emptiness (Entheos through Atheos), an emptiness that is a non non-being. Only in this ontological equation of multiplicity and emptiness does Badiou see the possibility of correctly reflecting the nature of multiplicity. It is only when somebody gets the energy from Atheos to formulate the truth that the truth becomes an event.
We return to syntheism as the social theory of everything, and of course it accommodates both the Deleuzian and the Badiouian variants of pathos. Deleuze’s entheist multiplicity takes its point of departure in Pantheos, while Badiou’s entheist multiplicity takes its point of departure in Atheos. Deleuze is the pantheological prophet, Badiou is the prophet of atheology, and entheology is the oscillation between these two antipoles; a movement that is completed through the addition of Syntheos to the syntheological pyramid. In the midst of this earth-shattering oscillation, Deleuze and Badiou, the event’s two prophets above all others, are in agreement that what is most important for the syntheist is the decision to enter at least one of the temples that is devoted to either Pantheos or Atheos and engage in its activities, while the ethically reprehensible thing to do is to remain passively outside. Both these temples are needed as foundations. Both these temples fill us with wonder and produce spiritual truth. Deleuze’s pantheology moves in the direction of Entheos, Badiou’s atheology reaches out towards Syntheos. It is pantheology that makes us appreciate the existential intensity of existence, to further develop pantheism into entheism, while it is atheology that drives us to long for the fulfilment of the utopia and which makes us consummate atheism via its deepening in syntheism.
In the second part of the Futurica Trilogy, The Global Empire, we describe in detail how the perceptive eternalisation of the mobilist chaos of existence is necessary in order for us to be able to act, while mobilism is eternalism’s always present, demonic shadow. In that sense, ontology is the secondary eternalisation of the primary mobilism, the presentation of the unpresentable as a schematic model, the objectification of the emptiness of the void. This perception transforms the multiplicity into functional fictives; models that the mind must be allowed to tinker with in order to be able to mobilise an overview and organise a meaningful and relevant activity at all. Badiou puts the eternalisation of the phenomenon on an equal footing with the mathematisation of existence. Infinity takes precedence over finitude, ontology is the same thing as mathematics. He then continues to the need for the situation, Badiou’s concept for the structured presentation of the multiplicity, a kind of consolidating theatrical performance of sundry fictives. Only in the right situation is the truth event possible, argues Badiou. He is inspired here by both St Paul and Vladimir Lenin: for these thinkers, the timing is not just a matter of strategic necessity: it also has a significant ethical dimension. Waiting for the right moment for the action faithful to the truth is an important component in Badiou’s ethics: the timing is a central aspect of the loyalty itself.
So what then is the fundamental event – the event through which all other events are reflected – if not death? A longing for immortality – even if it is highly present in both Badiou and Meillassoux – is initially nothing other than a longing for death as death, in contrast to the will to survival as a longing for life as life. Only from its finality can anything at all gain a meaning, only through its transience can life be worth living. Without mortality, life and existence lose all intensity. The will to survival therefore oscillates between three poles: first a seeking of existential intensity, thereafter a desire for the prolongation of life in order to maximise this seeking. However, this seeking and this desire can only take place by virtue of the third pole’s guarantee of life’s indisputable finiteness. This guarantee of obliteration is thus in itself the third pole. In its full extent, eternity in the Abrahamic sense is namely an idea as unbearable as Hell itself, while life in its strongest intensity of the experience of here and now, seen against the backdrop of its transience as the infinite now – the syntheist event par excellence – is the holiest thing that exists. Thus consciousness always operates on the basis of death as the ultimate guarantor of the very will to life. To live is to die. But not at precisely this moment. Later.
Informationalism’s obsession with the event – that is, informationalism’s the event as the equivalent of monotheism’s eternity and individualism’s progress as the metaphysical engines that produce the dynamics within each of these paradigms – is driven by a greater fascination in the face of, and an obsession with, death than ever before in history. Regardless of whether we see Man’s deepest longing as a quest for survival (the driving force behind Pantheos) or as a quest for immortality (the driving force behind Atheos), we return to our obsession with death. Death as a concept thus operates constantly in the oscillation between Pantheos and Atheos. But what then does our obsession consist of? What is it that drives Badiou to turn all forms of meaning into a meaning based on a suddenly arisen truth event, which in turn reflects death?
What death then reveals is of course how little we mean, how little we will be missed after our decease, how simply and almost offensively painlessly life goes on without us. And what we feel guilty about at the deepest level is the lack of guilt when other people die and disappear for good from our own lives. Life goes on: what else should it do? It is precisely here that death constantly chafes against our existential experience. We can never motivate for ourselves precisely why we should be so interesting and important for Pantheos that Pantheos would need to maintain us after death for Pantheos’ own sake. It is not a desire for immortality that drives us; merely a banal fear of death as the definite singularity after which nothing is the same any more. The postponement of this event is the will to survival, and this will is formalised through all the other lesser events to which we ascribe a decisive importance during both our own history and the history of all of humanity.
Meillassoux is inspired by both Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, who also build utopian systems around the event, informationalism’s metaphysical centre. The event is a dramatically altering event that suddenly just happens and then changes the course of history in a decisive manner. Small events occur constantly in the dividual’s life or in the local social arena, but the real singularities affect the future of both humanity and the planet for good. Events such as the invention of spoken language, written language, the printing press and the Internet have even generated completely new historical paradigms with new power structures, followed by new metaphysicists who have taken over the world and defeated old paradigms and narratives. Consequently with the advent of informationalism, we are compelled to rewrite all of history into a history of events in order to make it comprehensible and relevant for ourselves and for future generations.
However much Meillassoux, Badiou and Zizek emphasise the immanent in their longed-for, utopian events, they all finally end up in a strong and culture-specific transcendentalisation of their imagined visions. In the spirit of Kant, the subject is still free from the object and tries to tame the object according to its own limited and above all closed fantasy in relation to the future. For Meillassoux, the utopia is the arrival of justice as a future divinity, but exactly what this justice consists of – and how it is related to Man’s, until now necessary, focus on survival within a decisive existential experience of finality – this Meillassoux never succeeds in answering. It is therefore sometimes tempting to call him our time’s version of the beautiful soul in Hegel’s sarcastic sense, since Meillassoux likes to use fancy concepts that however lack a clear anchoring in modern Man’s immanent reality. Meanwhile Badiou and Zizek mix the boys’ room’s fascination with war toys and violent video games with a romantic passion for macho tyrants and bloody revolutions, such as the 1960s’ student protests in Europe. From this nostalgically coloured hybrid, they squeeze out the event as yet another bloody revolution.
For Zizek, revolutionism is even necessary on an ontological level. Just like his role model Lenin, Zizek claims that revisionism – the step-by-step transition to the Communist society – is impossible, since every step in the revisionist process salvages too much of what is reprehensible in the pre-revolutionary society, things that only the revolution can wipe out. Therefore the revolution is both desirable and necessary, and therefore, according to Zizek, it is the only authentic event. A radically immanent interpretation of the concept of revolution would however reply that both the bloody demonstrations on the streets and the realisations of a far-off personified justice – to the extent that they take place at all – actually are only marginal expressions among many others of the real, underlying revolution. This revolution is instead always a long drawn-out process, precisely a step-by-step but at the same time non-linear revision which starts with a revolutionary change of the material conditions (for example the Internet’s emergence as the manifestation of Syntheos), followed by a revolutionary change in social practices (syntheism’s high-tech participatory culture), which in turn is followed by a revolutionary change in intersubjective metaphysics (syntheism’s subtraction, monastisation and psychedelic practices), which only thereafter can lead to the longed-for social event (the syntheist utopia, the syntheological pyramid’s completion), where the power structure hopefully can be adjusted, more or less dramatically, in order to liberate the new paradigm’s creative potential.
Badious’ and Zizek’s hero Hegel would be the first to criticise their bloody boys’ room dreams as typical examples of shallow internarcissism. For Hegel, history is merely a long metahistory of constant re-writings of history, where an obsessive narrative production is a consistently failing but nonetheless necessary adaptation to an uncontrollable immanent flow. The revolution and the event must therefore be separated from each other. The revolution occurs in secret and its radicalness can only be attributed to it retroactively. The event assumes its dramatic and transforming consequences only a long time afterwards. As an example we might mention that Johannes Gutenberg invents the printing press around 1450. But the French Revolution was not launched until 1789. So there is a gap of all of 339 years between the immanent and transcendent revolutions in this case. And which of these we build our metaphysics on unfortunately has a decisive significance for where we will later arrive.
The real revolution is of course sparked as early as via the emergent arrival of the printing press, and then goes on until and even past 1789, when it suddenly expresses itself as an event in the bloody uprisings that only later assume the name the French Revolution. While it was actually going on, none of the actors were aware that they were participating in the French Revolution; the mythology in question was created and projected onto the events only afterwards, not least by the Russian revolutionaries who needed an event in the past to reflect themselves in, and from which they could derive both splendour and legitimacy, precisely as Hegel claims is always the case. From the perspective of the history of ideas, the choice is here between prioritising either the immanent revolution 1450–1789 – let us say with an emphasis on an information-technology writing of history – or else the spectacular event in 1789, which only afterwards is reified into a transcendent event within the capitalist-industrialist discourse with the purpose of turning it into a metaphysical inspiration rather than an immanent, narrated event. Thus it is about a cult of mysticism that old revolutionary romantics such as Badiou and Zizek, along with postmodern French nationalists, are reluctant to abandon.
At any rate, what is essential is that the Parisian street riots would be unthinkable without the printing press that became fully and widely accepted in society only after several transforming centuries. It first changed Europe and then the rest of the world beyond recognition, and the French Revolution’s geographical domicile has much more to do with the fact that France was the first country where a majority of the population could read and write than them being extraordinarily innovative or clear-headed. For Badiou and Zizek, it appears necessary to first let the singularity take place, thereafter wait for it to generate a new power structure, only to then wait for a bloody conflict within the new power structure – where the otherwise obese and physically the worse for wear philosophers indeed promise to man the barricades themselves and throw Molotov cocktails at the authorities – only to thereafter be able to speak of a genuine revolution. Hegel would most likely not accept such a static and culture-specific idea of revolution. It was hardly the intention that Paris in 1789 would fix the meaning of the word revolution, which in fact is a metaconcept, for all eternity in the way that the essentially conservative revolutionary romantics Badiou and Zizek assume. That is, with the revolution as the consistently failing, tragic repetition of the event in Paris in 1789, moreover always carried out by angry young men with weapons in their hands and oppressed by an authoritarian tyrant whose boots they love to lick.
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!
A dynamic system is regarded as ergodic if its behavioural patterns on average over time concur with its behavioural patterns on average in space. Scientists are fond of ergodic systems since they are relatively simple to turn into mathematics – they are of course, seen as totalities, comfortable constants rather than messy variables – and thereby even relatively simple to use as building blocks. However we do not live in an ergodic universe, which reductionism persistently insists that we do. In fact, nothing occurs in the same way twice, every event is instead completely unique, every apparently identical repetition takes place in a completely new, specific context. Kauffman even claims that without the reductionist illusion, the metaphysical premise for classical atheism also falls down. The insight that we live in a non-ergodic universe must quite simply have dramatic consequences for metaphysics too. An anti-reductionist explanatory model is required that replaces the reductionist model. Existence is enormously much more complicated, the future is enormously much more open and harder to predict, and the Universe is enormously much more active than the reductionist illusion has led us to believe.
In accordance with the reasoning above, if we regard atheism as an emergent phenomenon in relation to theism, the fundamental dismissal of the concept of God no longer appears as such – that is, that which gives the position its name – as its most important theological achievement. No, atheism’s most substantial achievement is its summation of all sorts of theist positions as a uniform and cohesive alternative to repudiate, that is, atheism’s dialectical construction of theism as an idea. Seen as an emergent phenomenon in relation to atheism, as the historical and intellectual intensification of atheism, syntheism in turn is a metareligion, a faith that its practitioners unabashedly practice as a pure religion in itself. Thereby it also confirms and supports all other art forms’ freedom to act from the metaperspective: art as art for art’s sake, literature as literature for literature’s sake, philosophy as philosophy for philosophy’s sake, and so on. And therefore syntheism instinctively rejects all of individualism’s calculations of utility. What syntheism seeks instead are the place and the time for itself as an event. This event is manifested within love, art, science, politics and religion: syntheology’s five generic categories.
When it comes to the syntheist agent, it is important to distinguish between the concepts dividual and subject. Informationalist Man is a dividual, but syntheism’s ambition is, based on dividuality, to develop an authentic subjectivity. In order to go from the usual reactive dividuality to unique, active subjectivity, the dividual must be isolated from the surrounding world’s constant distortions – be separated in order to be liberated from the lingering individualist ideology – which is enabled through purposeful spiritual work within the syntheist congregation’s walls. In this isolated, conscious, enlightened environment, the dividual can develop genuinely critical thinking, understand and experience herself as the syntheist agent. Through the identification with herself as an eternalised truth event, the authentic syntheist subject appears. Syntheists call this state clarification, and fidelity to the clarification is manifested through the syntheist baptism which is called the infinite now. In this state, the mind focuses on a single point in space–time where there is serenity, where all existential tensions are finally released, where the subject creates a tranquillity which makes it possible to quite simply be.
The historical escalation from eternity via progress to the event as the metaphysical engine of the paradigm has put increasing pressure on the individual human being. The informationalist dividual hears a multitude of voices within herself – what Freud imagines as a solid unit that he calls the superego – which constantly calls for more, different and stronger efforts. But the dividual is also notoriously afraid of being disconnected from the reward system that is connected to these efforts, in particular the wordless meeting with the other and the other’s gaze. What does the other want from her? What can she do to satisfy the other’s desire? Even if only to avoid being confronted with her own desire and dependence on the other that the realisation of her desire threatens to entail.
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.
Thereby self-love, as truth as an act, is the obvious foundation for all syntheist rituals and ceremonies. It is the eternally recurring starting point for all spiritual work, whose ultimate purpose is to give the members of the congregation a strong and stable personal integrity without narcissistic elements. Since the self is in constant flux, and since all other emotions are dependent on the act of self-love, the act of self-love must be repeated time after time after time in the syntheist agent’s life. This repetition – this cycle of difference and repetition, as Gilles Deleuze would express the matter – constitutes the Nietzschean core in the syntheistic spiritual life. A look at one’s naked body in the mirror, followed by the decision to unconditionally accept this body as the current expression of Pantheos, as the Universe’s construction for housing the subject and its consciousness and passions, as an object to love merely by virtue of an existential decision, a personal primordial event. “This is what I am, this is the body that houses my many dividual identities and I love this body in order to be able to love myself, in order to thereby be able to love anything at all. Because I identify myself with the will to love.” Truth as an act cannot be expressed any more clearly.
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.
So if revolutions only occur of their own accord – whether they are emergent or contingent phenomena – how can syntheists steer the three dramatic and parallel revolutions of our time towards a single common event: the singularity? In the world of physics, a singularity is a state where temperature, pressure and curvature are infinite at the same time. In such a singularity a universe, for example, can expand ten million times in a single moment, which makes possible, for example, the cosmic inflation in conjunction with the birth of our own universe. The singularity is a possibility for a universe such as ours to arise spontaneously. Precisely because the universal expansion is an expansion within nothing, it may be inflationary, far beyond the speed of light (which is otherwise the greatest possible speed within this universe). So how does syntheism relate to the Universe? What characterises the relationship between Man and his feared superior – the Universe?
The building of syntheist temples and monasteries is preceded by the early 21st century’s experimentation with temporary autonomous zones. The nation state is eroding in conjunction with, and as a result of, this ongoing paradigm shift. Since the resources for maintaining law and order are always limited, the regulatory framework of the nation state cannot be upheld during and in particular after a revolution of the magnitude that we are talking about when we talk about the Internet. We must prioritise, to a great extent we must pretend that we are upholding the old law in every respect. The ensuing anarchy turns into a plurarchy – a democracy in a real sense has never existed – which consists of an infinite number of smaller, competing and above all chaotically overlapping centres of power. The response to the plurarchy, which also constitutes its inherent opportunity and promise, is the establishment of temporary autonomous zones. These consist of everything from eco villages that are developing models for sustainable lifestyles that can later be copied and disseminated; to participatory festivals where attention is maximised through a generous sharing of resources, while capitalism is banned within the confines of the event with the purpose of deinstrumentalising and enlivening the relationships between human beings. The syntheist mission is consequently to build temples as participatory art manifestations and monasteries as revolutionary cells in the midst of the global empire’s initial and most hectic chaos.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58