Back to index
Ideology
A set of conscious or even more often subconscious memes that together generate a sense of context and mutual dependence on each other, regardless of whether this really is the case or not. An ideology thus does not need to be the least bit coherent; all human thinking stems from one or more ideological platforms, symbolised through fictions consisting of fictives and in the final analysis attributable to a prevailing metaphysics within the current information-technology paradigm.
To a considerable extent, metaphysics is in fact the story of power and of who is to exercise it. We can see how this fact applies to the troika of the monarch, the aristocrat and the priest under the feudal paradigm, and it is repeated in the same way for the troika of the politician, the entrepreneur and the university professor under the capitalist paradigm. When all is said and done, metaphysics will always be about power, and it will always use the prevailing symbolic, economic and truth-producing power in these three main roles in the paradigm’s narratives. Because the storytellers work in the service of the prevailing holders of power, their prime task is to depict the prevailing holders of power in a glorified light, to incorporate them into a tailor-made story and thus treat the prevailing power structure as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The storytellers incorporate all of this adeptly, at every possible turn, into the collective subconscious for the greatest possible effect. There is a considerable measure of circular argumentation in this scheme of things, but this only makes it even more impenetrable. Only the most eccentric deviants doubt the latent ideology of a social order, which by definition is inaccessible to rational criticism since it is built into the very perspective through which a society contemplates its history and development.
Without utopias, idea-wise we can cling to all and sundry types of cynical and/or pragmatic ideologies, from socialism on the left via liberalism in the middle to conservatism on the right. But when the syntheist utopia emerges as the new metaphysical axiom, all the ideological work must be redone from scratch. With the theologisation of the Internet follows a necessary repudiation of all other previous political ideologies with direct links to the abandoned paradigm, in favour of theological anarchism. First of all, this is the only ideology that is compatible with the belief that another better world can be born of itself, appearing as a suddenly emergent phenomenon in history. It is moreover the only ideology that can accumulate a creative resistance vis-à-vis a society so complex that no one can take it all in any longer. This is because theological anarchism does not require the omnipotent overview nor the political and moral control of human expression that all other ideologies have had as a fundamental condition. It is the syntheist utopia’s predecessor in the present and is driven by enjoyment of the multiplicity of expression.
The burgeoning netocracy, the elite that is succeeding the bourgeoisie in the new paradigm being driven by digitisation and interactivity, obviously represented a special interest group when it initially marketed the anarcho-libertarian ideology as the metaphysics of the Internet age. If truth is an act, and if truth will set us free, it follows that if the Internet is allowed to be free, it will also set us free. There is here of course an ill-concealed intention to use noble motives as a pretext for the seizure of power. The netocracy is thus acting in exactly the same way that the feudal aristocracy did when it embraced monotheism, and in the same way as the capitalist bourgeoisie did when it embraced humanism. These specific metaphysics developed as the dominant stories – and they worked! – during their respective paradigms, for the very reason that they appointed the emerging social classes as the social theatre’s new protagonists.
The French philosopher Alain Badiou divides metaphysics into four disciplines, from which the human being produces the meaning of her existence. These four activities are politics, love, science and art. Metaphysics binds these four disciplines together into a cohesive conception of the world. From the point of view of syntheology, religion then emerges as metaphysics in practice and is therefore reflected in the prevailing ideals of the four activities. Religion is thus the execution of the paradigm’s metaphysical truth, and syntheology is constructed in an intimate interaction with religious practice as the theoretical foundation for other types of ideology production. According to Badiou, it is symptomatic of our meaning-depleted, hyperindividualist existence that precisely the timeless ideals that ought to represent the four disciplines have been set aside by the collective drive.html">death drive, which is riding us humans in an evermore hysterical hunt for absolutely nothing.
Badiou maintains for example that politics should be driven by revolution as an ideal, but instead it is driven nowadays by a kind of administrative micromanagement; politics has become entirely a matter of management. Love should be driven by passion as an ideal, but is instead driven by sexuality. Science ought to be driven by invention as an ideal, but is instead driven by technology. Art ought to be driven by creation as an ideal, but is instead driven by culture. All of these dislocations expose the hypercynical Zeitgeist, which moreover has the ironic audacity to dress itself up as non-ideological. The only way to expose this dense, destructive ideology-building and to overcome its concomitant hypercynicism is to patiently offer a new syntheological metaphysics which can be the inspiration for a new syntheist religion. There are no other credible ways out of our cultural deadlock.
By adhering to a correlationist narrative around the subject’s and the object’s absolute isolation and delimitation, both from each other and from the surrounding world, the bourgeoisie succeeds in building an attractive identification with the subject, and the fantasy connected thereto of the conquest of the object as the perfection of history. Note that the subject is an individual and that the object is an atom: which are isolated, delimited, indivisible entities. Thus is individualism born, and with it also capitalist patriarchy. The individualist and atomist ideology is on fertile ground among the new elite, which it validates, and it rapidly becomes axiomatic and remains so right up until the arrival of the Internet age in the late 20th century. This is because individualism and its running-mate atomism are both tailor-made to promote the burgeoning bourgeoisie’s interests and hegemonic aspirations.
Kant is unarguably the prophet of individualism par excellence. His individual is a tragic solipsist who – precisely because of her solipsism – is free to act as a ruthless egoist. Kant’s radical subjectivism – with its emphasis on free will, dominance, abstract inner experiences and strict, soldier ethics – is built around the subject’s transcendental separation from the object, which means that the object can be deified undisturbed, to be later conquered, colonised and plundered. Individualism is a master ideology. The individual has taken over God’s place as the only thing that is certain in life according to Descartes’ basic tenet I think, therefore I am, which Kant later develops to perfection. Humanism and representationalism grow rapidly out of and presuppose individualism and atomism as metaphysical axioms. Through its prioritisation of the representation over the represented, representationalism suits exploding capitalism right down to the ground. With its actively observing subject and passively observed object – this object merely exists because the subject must have something to relate to – representationalism is a sublime expression of capitalist ideology. Society is based on strong, active, expanding subjects. Around them flock weak, passive, delimited objects, pining for the subject’s gaze and attention. These objects are to be hunted, conquered, tamed, exploited and finally discarded before the entire process is repeated with ever-new objects as targets.
If history is viewed as a Hegelian dialectics, we see a clear pattern: monotheism is the thesis, individualism is the antithesis and syntheism is the synthesis. That syntheism is the synthesis in this dialectical process is a consequence of the fact that theism and atheism can never meet; they are fundamentally and definitionally incompatible. Syntheism should absolutely not be understood as a compromise between theism and atheism – in Hegelian dialectics, a synthesis is something considerably more sophisticated than just a banal coalescence of thesis and antithesis – rather, it is a necessary continuation of theism’s and atheism’s combined dichotomy, the only possible way out of the paralysing deadlock that arises when theism and atheism are pitted against each other. As the logical synthesis of this pair of opposites (theism versus atheism), syntheism offers a possibility for the atheist to go further and uncompromisingly deepen atheism. Thus, in a historical sense syntheism is a radicalised atheist ideology. It is even atheism’s logical deepening and elaboration.
The Zoroastrian revolution is clearly seen in ancient Iranian architecture. Both sacrificial alters and burial sites disappear when Zoroaster’s theological broom sweeps clean across the Central Asian highlands. Because there are no longer any tyrannical gods to placate, and bodies no longer need to be embalmed or in any other way prepared for the afterlife in eternity, but are instead recycled in a natural way, for example, as food for vultures. The Zoroastrians build ascetically bare temples, painted in white, where the community gather around the atash bahram, the eternally burning flame in the centre of the temple, the symbol of the infinite expansion and ecstatic intensity of the cosmos. That Zoroastrianism as early as 3,700 years ago was practising such seemingly modern ideas as ecological sustainability, radical gender equality, collective ownership of resources and tolerance of deviant human character traits, is quite consistent if one takes Zoroaster’s ideology as a starting point.
However, the problem with this very thing is that Plato’s world view is based on an entirely idiosyncratic and untenable premise. His own autistic neurosis when faced with the shapeless multiplicity of life forces him to devote himself to beautiful reveries of a make-believe world where everything is perfectly ordered (which is easy to effect, since it is only make-believe). But as it turns out, there are plenty of evangelists in the growing feudalist society that are of the same temperament as Plato and who eagerly want to spread his hierarchical ideology. His message is received with joy and appreciation by the Greek and later the Roman aristocracy. By accepting Platonism’s false premise and furthermore emphasising the strict logic that later ensues from his imaginary premise, this doctrine is spread with devastating efficiency. Platonism also attracts the great masses with its promise of the perfect paradise that one ought to be able to attain if one only thinks and acts correctly, and it is so incredibly practically arranged that by definition it is out of reach of every form of empirical study.
A clear example of an ideology where the left hemisphere runs amok at the expense of the right hemisphere is Auguste Comte’s positivist nightmare from the mid-19th century. Comte highly arbitrarily divides the history of ideas into three stages: the theological, the metaphysical and the scientific phases. With each stage, the human being becomes increasingly ennobled and perfect, and once she knows how matters actually stand, when she is completely scientific and thus also all-knowing – that is, when the human being becomes Comte himself – it is precisely then that history will be complete. Similar to thinkers such as Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, Comte adheres to the scientistic conviction, the blind faith in the unlimited potential of not only rationality but also science.
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.
According to Plato, the soul is allied with the higher world of ideas, while the body must be content with being connected to the lower-tier, corruptible material world. The soul never changes; it is the constant which stands firm at the centre of the body’s capricious emotional turbulence. From this dualism, all of human existence is then divided up into the categories eternal ideas and corruptible matter. This dualist escapism is a perfect fit as the ideology of patriarchy: the man is calm, balanced and constant, just like the soul, while the woman is reduced to an irrational and volatile emotional tempest, just like the body. Power must therefore fall to the man who, by definition, is of course of a higher standing, and the woman must be subordinated to him in order for society not to collapse under the pressure of internal instability, all in accordance with dualism’s self-perpetuating, circular reasoning.
Just like syntheism, as a whole transrationalism and its basic condition can be viewed as both a logical deduction and a historical conclusion. There is no rational foundation per se for naturally limited human rationality to ever have the capacity to comprehend everything in a constantly expanding universe. Plato’s and Kant’s variants of rationality get caught in their own trap; they are both per se founded on a blind faith and not on any kind of rationality. Humanity has repeatedly surrendered itself to rationalism as a social ideology, but the results are frightening. Sooner or later, rationalism – in spite of considerable achievements in civilisation – invariably degenerates into totalitarian utilitarianism. Therefore Plato is quite correct in claiming that a consistently practised rationalism must develop into a dictatorship. Anything else is impossible.
A flagrant example of such a compensatory narcissist ideology is the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian vision of a future prison, erected according to the architectural Panopticon model, a complete institution built in pie wedges around a single human, all-seeing eye at its centre. Bentham imagines a prison built from a central viewpoint from which a sole actor constantly surveys all other activities within the construction. The panopticon is of course nothing other than a material reflection of Bentham’s own self-image and world view, his attempt at a Napoleonisation of bureaucratic architecture. The panopticon is quite simply the dark flip side of Bentham’s utilitarianism, his runaway fantasy of a hyperrationalist ethics, which can calculate every individual’s wishes in advance, put a price on and determine the value of all people’s wishes vis-à-vis each other and then compile how one might be able to maximise these wishes into empirically measurable, maximised total utility.
If we conceive of a relationalist version of semiotics and memetics, in the same way as a relationalist version of the natural sciences, it must be based on a deep understanding of the largest unit and then build downwards towards the smallest, instead of the classical reductionist obsession of semiotics and memetics with the little sign or the little meme, which is presumed to explain everything that goes on higher up in the hierarchy. According to the writing of the history from the point of view of information technology, the necessary point of departure is that Man is the constant and technology is the variable. For Man, this means that technology drives a paradigm (see The Futurica Trilogy), a plane that sooner or later has its structure studied and explained by a metaphysics that is already initially logically built-in but tacit, and is only formulated and engineered after the fact. Metaphysics then shapes the conditions for the ideology that is tied to the paradigm, the sign-interpreting narrative that prepares you for choosing, the narrative about why things necessarily are the way they are. The ideology in turn consists of large, sluggish blocks called fictions – consciously created narratives about current people and their relationships to the world around them, in contrast to the necessarily subconscious ideology – where the nimble and smallest components of fictions are called fictives (see The Global Empire), a kind of network-dynamics cousin to the signs of semiotics and the memes of memetics, and accordingly also the fundamental component in the paradigm hierarchy.
Note how the relationships between each step, just like when it comes to all forms of relationalist hierarchies, must be understood of course as emergent rather than reductionist. The fiction is not built into the fictives beforehand; it seems to always deliver something extra over and above the fictives in themselves. In the same way, the ideology is not built into the fictions in advance; it always appears as something more and extremely attractive over and above the fictions. And it is precisely these emergent qualities that keep us adamantly embedded in the ideological memeplex in question – every new level adds yet another layer of a kind of compact mysticism to the growing metanarrative, not least in the big step from the seemingly open and therefore creative fictions to the obviously concealed ideology, which brings us to a standstill – which explains why our relationship to the outermost framework of memeplexes, the metaphysical, can never be anything but humbly subservient. Even our relationship to a created syntheist god – a deliberately named projection surface vis-à-vis an indisputably real phenomenon in the surrounding world that we must relate to, that is, fiction par excellence – must subordinate itself to this premise. This is precisely because no memes exist outside memetics, just as no signs exist outside semiotics. Nor are there any fictives – and in turn fictions constructed from these, and in turn ideologies constructed from these – nor are there in turn any credible metaphysical systems deduced from these ideologies that stand outside the current information technology paradigm.
However counter-intuitive this may sound for the syntheist agent, she can only regard herself as a by-product of the ideology coming from the future, and in this Hegelian sense act in a revelatory role and as a supervisor vis-à-vis the now prevailing but rapidly eroding ideology. For it is only in the collision between the ideological paradigms – the history of ideas time after time shows how philosophy virtually explodes with creativity as a direct consequence of a socio-cultural paradigm shift, with Axial Age Greece and India and early Industrialism’s Western Europe and North America as illuminating examples – that speculative philosophy can see through and reveal the illusory qualities of the prevailing ideologies. And there we are at this moment, in informationalism’s infancy, in the midst of a cascade of information flows exploding in all directions, where syntheism is slowly but surely growing as the paradigm’s built-in and necessary metaphysical Higgs field.
Political ideology in the Internet age has two metaphysical starting points. First of all, there is the enormous expansion of the Internet and takeover of power that opens the arena for an antagonism between the rising netocracy – which with the aid of its ever-more powerful networks wants to liberate information flows – and the marginalised bourgeoisie, which with its nation states and major corporations wants to fence in and control information flows. And, secondly, there is the approaching ecological apocalypse, which absolutely must be averted if humanity is to survive at all. The syntheist politician is therefore first and foremost an environmentalist netocrat. But in order for syntheism to succeed in realising its ambition of opening the door to theological anarchism, it is being forced to take on the conflict with the old capitalist power structure, which consists of the nation states and the big global corporations.
From the 1960s onwards, individualism and its ally atomism are put under enormous pressure from a new supra-ideology: relationalism and its partner network dynamics. The capitalist patriarchy – from Napoleon onwards, probably the most evident individualist power structure – is attacked by feminism, which puts forth demands for equality between the sexes, and thereafter by the queer movement, with its requirements of equality between people of different sexual orientations and identities. The feminists represent female individuals’ interests, and the queer movement is fighting for sexually divergent individuals’ civil rights. This means, of course, that both these movements are still fundamentally individualist. The criticism against the patriarchy thus has come from inside the individualist paradigm. But the argumentation contains numerous network-dynamical arguments, for example that the woman’s freedom is also the man’s freedom from patriarchy, and that the liberation of homo- and transsexuals also entails the liberation of heterosexuals from narrow and repressive heteronormativity. The dividualist criticism thus begins from inside individualism – through informationalism liberating new desires and drives in the collective subconscious and thereby exposing the shortcomings of individualism – in order to slowly but surely establish a new, independent paradigm where the old individual is dead.
But if environmentalism is the most powerful reaction directed towards the old paradigm’s destructive drive.html">death drive, it is only with the fight for the free and open Internet that we observe the growth of a political ideology that is grounded in the new paradigm’s utopian possibilities rather than in the old paradigm’s dystopian variants. In its capacity as a negation of capitalism, environmentalism is a parallel to atheism in the history of metaphysics. The digital integrity movement on the other hand is a dialectic negation of the negation, and is thereby to be regarded as a parallel movement to syntheism. Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the Pirate Party and one of the digital integrity movement’s foremost pioneers, pinpoints the relationships of the movements to each other in his book Swarmwise. Environmentalism is driven by the conviction that nature’s resources are finite rather than inexhaustible, which capitalist mythology constantly assumes. At the same time, argues Falkvinge, the Pirate movement is based on the axiom that culture and knowledge that is shared without friction between people in a society where information sharing no longer incurs any surplus cost, is an infinite rather than a finite resource for the future.
Liberal multiculturalism and religious fundamentalism are consistently described as being each other’s opposites. In reality, they are two sides of the same dysfunctional coin: cynical isolationism. At the same time, the lack of religiosity within liberal multiculturalism means that it is unable to understand and refute the onslaught of religious fundamentalism from inside its own ideology. In the eyes of the fundamentalist, liberalism is dead and only religion can offer a utopian hope. This means that only syntheism – or for that matter any other system of ideas with built-in room for transcendental ecstasy and the dissolution of the ego that is its desired effect – can refute fundamentalism and constitute a solid foundation for an alternative, genuinely emancipatory politics.
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.
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.
The current rewriting of history enables the individualist epoch to be viewed with new, more critical eyes. For example, capitalism is exposed as the tyranny of numerical slavery par excellence. The deeper we delve into its exploitative nature, both ideologically and historically, the more clearly capitalism’s obsessive fixation with finally being able to mathematise all human thoughts and activities into a sum of dollars, a number of votes or a series of orgasms, emerges. No one illustrates this better than the American economist and Nobel Prize Laureate Gary Becker, who in his work reduces all human activities to a kind of constantly ongoing rational calculation of utility. His work is about a consummate capitalist logic that takes Becker all the way into people’s bedrooms and places of worship – according to him, even an act of sexual intercourse is nothing other than a calculated, selfish utilitarian venture worked out in advance. What Becker thereby reveals about the seat of his own ideology is how rationalism, individualism, utilitarianism and – in all cases calculating and profit-maximising – capitalism really are one and the same ideology. Becker quite simply takes the Kantian paradigm and its isolated, compulsively colonising, patriarchal subject to the end of the road. And there he finds nothing other than an eternally empty calculator, grinding away.
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.
Syntheist subtractionism must be understood from the actual paradigm shift’s historical possibilities and impossibilities. Paradigm shifts always entail giving the production of the new metaphysics the highest priority, since the one who formulates the new metaphysics also becomes the new paradigm’s truth producer and thereby also one of its most important rulers (such as the clergy under feudalism and the university professors under capitalism). The great new religions and the metaphysical systems are always launched in the transition phases that arise at paradigm shifts. Political activism must therefore often wait for the right point in time in order to have any chance whatsoever of taking off. Critchley’s logic is based on the premise that theology precedes philosophy; it is primary where philosophy is secondary. And philosophy precedes politics; it is secondary and politics tertiary. Theology delves deeper than philosophy, since it engages Man more thoroughly than philosophy can ever do. And philosophy lies deeper than politics, since philosophy is the well from which political activism gets its nourishment. This means that however much we long for a new cohesive political ideology for the Internet age, the creation of the new theological metaphysics and its religious practice must precede the articulation of the corresponding political ideology and activism. Syntheism stands ready when the present system breaks down. But the only possible way forward is to first build a living religion, while waiting for the time to the right for being able to establish and launch the new political ideology.
Capitalism and its nation-state and corporativist bureaucracies optimise themselves, not by solving problems, but by creating more problems for themselves to solve, at the same time as more and more goods and services are demanded in order to satisfy a continuous stream of newly-produced needs. Therefore new laws are constantly being produced, new crime classifications, new pathologies, new defects, new failures to rectify, new problems to investigate, which one can later expand on even further, rather than rectify them. Postmodern society offers no catharsis and lacks a narrative of how the capitalist tragedy is to be brought to an end. Capitalism quite simply lacks an exit strategy. Liberal democracy’s dilemma is not primarily that it is based on obsolete individualism – liberalism is individualism’s political ideology par excellence – but rather that it is based on the myth of the invisible hand’s mystical self-regulation. But such a hand does not exist, an unregulated market always moves towards sundry variants of corrupt monopolies or oligopolies as their terminuses. The invisible hand cannot do anything itself to stop this; that can only be done by visible hands. Pragmatism defeats liberalism every day of the week in actual politics. Contingent disruptive technologies, when such emerge, and an innovative regulation of the market are, in the long term, much more important and healthier than any invisible hand.
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.
This ressentiment expresses itself as blind submission to and worship of various external phenomena. The reason for this is that worship is a form of passion that does not require any love whatsoever; worshipping is driven by impulsive ruthlessness while loving is driven by long-term benevolence. Passionate but ruthless fascism is the self-hate ideology par excellence. When it comes to emotions, ressentiment can be every bit as passionate as love. It can create a dependence on more and be experienced as every bit as existentially satisfying as love. The American shopaholic in the department store, as well as the unscrupulous Nazi camp commandant and the Islamic fundamentalist who detonates bombs among innocent civilians, are extremely passionate beings, but their glowing passions stem from self-hatred, not from self-love. These are passions that seek destruction and an intense enjoyment, rather than love’s search for playfulness and gratifying pleasure. It’s about a twisted hatred which, just like all other forms of hatred, stems from constitutional self-hatred.
A necessary component in hypercapitalism – and its infiltration and colonisation of the human, existential experience – is the hypersexualisation of the social arena. Capitalism must commodify even the most sensitive and most intimate of human experiences in order to consummate itself. And capitalism cannot get there without first being liberated from both responsibility and shame concerning its own ruthless exploitation. This freedom from responsibility occurs through the creation of the sexualist ideology, not to be confused with sexual liberation, which in its capacity as a cultural predecessor to informationalism’s relationalist view of humanity strives in the exact opposite direction. The problem is in fact that hypersexualisation requires a fundamental and deep-seated self-hatred, an all-encompassing conviction of inadequacy of the self, what Foucault calls “the internalised police”, a kind of turbo-driven superego that arises as a necessary by-product to hyper-Cartesian self-centredness.
The internalised police in turn generates the internarcissistic culture that drives late capitalism’s ultra-commercialised quest for identity and often expresses itself through an extremely tedious obsession with so-called self-fulfilment. The hypersexualised human being possesses and above all continuously changes more or less colourful shells, where weariness with the self and the presumed ability of these shells to attract booty in the form of high status, and affirmation in the form of a desired partner, determines the growing intensity in their constant changeovers. When we arrive at the historical tipping point where the dominant hyper-Cartesians are constantly chasing identities for their insatiable and immeasurable internarcissism, no obstacles remain for sexuality’s takeover of the public sphere. Under severe pressure from myths – concerning the metaphysical potential of sexual desire, and concerning the free market’s ability to satisfy eternally craving human desire – late capitalist society is hypersexualised. But it is precisely here, in exposing the sexualist ideology, that the door to syntheism and its genuine, and also sexual, liberation is opened.
Note that syntheism does not argue in favour of any form of abstinence or asceticism. Historical asceticism is an inheritance from the Platonist paradigm; it has no central place in a fundamentally monist and mobilist religion such as syntheism. Interestingly enough, Zoroastrianism is the only one of the classical world religions that lacks ascetic imperatives, and it is also the only monist and mobilist world religion before syntheism, seen as a whole. Thus there is not either any hostility to sex whatsoever within syntheism. There is nothing wrong with sex in itself – there is no kind of sex at all between consenting adults that is the least bit morally objectionable – it is just that sexualist ideology, and the hypersexualisation which is its consequence, has nothing to do with the sexual act itself. Its soul-poisoning individualist categorisations of people as interchangeable shells that constantly put off rather than realise sexual acts is, if anything, in fact hostile to sex rather than sex-affirming.
The original lie, the original crime, the phantasmic narratives that hold together the subject and the impossible gaze of the now: all this is part of syntheism’s political ideology. The law is the third person present in all relations between dividuals. But syntheism is something much greater: it is instead the step outside of the eternal cycle of mythology production and incessant disappointment. In its capacity as a genericism, the syntheist political project must have the universal singularity as its point of departure. As networking dividuals, we no longer produce things, we produce social life itself. The question is who can play the role as the universal singularity during the introductory phase of the Internet age. How will this social production influence the emerging classes in the cyber world: the netocrats and the consumtarians? Will they be lured by the same capitalist temptations that seduced their individualistic predecessors, or will they succeed in seeing through these illusions? Or will they instead fall prey to entirely new illusions?
Postmodernism is dominated by fear of conflict and its ideology, cultural relativism. In the furious animosity towards fixed values, cultural relativism still fixes a value in itself, namely the fixed value per se that all values are flexible. Thereby it immediately falls on its own sword (see The Body Machines). Cultural relativism is replaced in the information chaos of the Internet society by the search for qualitative intensities. All assertions are not as equally true or false. An assertion is strengthened intersubjectively and is accorded scientific credibility if it can be verified. It quite simply has a higher truth intensity than an unfounded fabrication. The energetic atheist Christopher Hitchens is quite right when he writes that what can be asserted without any evidence whatsoever also can be dismissed without evidence. The question is whether this truth intensity is a specific intensity (as though truth were a special spectrum within the intensity from the beginning), or a pure intensity (as though the intensity precedes the truth and the truth is derived temporarily from the intensity in its entirety as an ethical act). Is there any kind of objectively valid hierarchy between the various spectra within the intensity, or should the intensity be understood exactly as it is in its entirety?
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58