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Internarcissism
A displacement of the narcissistic pathology where two or more narcissists consciously or subconsciously act obsessively with each other instead of with themselves in order to thereby conceal the probably even stronger narcissism that de facto is active beneath the surface. Since narcissism is fundamentally a form of repressed self-contempt, the internarcissistic society is extremely alienating in nature.
We humans are not only powerfully attracted to anthropocentrism: a slightly grotesque tendency to constantly exaggerate our own position, power and importance in the Universe; a grandiose overestimation of ourselves that we have grappled with, without respite, throughout history. Unfortunately, the problem is even more serious than this. Our personal individuation – as individuals, our demarcation from the social flock – is namely actually dependent on a process that we term internarcissism: it is through constantly seeking validation of our own identity with other people, other beings of our own species – who accordingly find themselves in exactly the same existential dilemma as ourselves – that for a fleeting moment we can experience ourselves as happily liberated from our narcissistic prison, the pathological self-centeredness that is our constant companion.
This incessantly and obsessively repetitive self-validation process is mostly an empty ritual and really only hides our narcissism behind a kind of collective Potemkin village of no real substance. We simply replace conscious narcissism with an every bit as unfounded, subconscious internarcissism. Simply put: two people who no longer have the energy to worship themselves, instead worship each other for each other through mutual, pathological back-scratching. This means that, subconsciously rather than consciously, we are still as frustrated as before. This situation engenders a constantly growing inability to see things clearly – “Why does everything just get and feel worse even though I’m doing everything right?” – which leads to a burdensome, stupefying alienation. And there we are. What the contemporary secularised person finds it hard to see for obvious reasons is that religion, according to its syntheological definition, is the effective and necessary remedy for this alienation. Only through religion can we undergo a dividuation and acquire a liberating dividual rather than an imprisoned individual identity. A human being is not a solid indivisible entity. A human being is many divisible entities collaborating with each other.
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.
When hypernarcissism becomes socially burdensome, the result is yet another subject that can act as an agent of transfer, another subject with which the hypernarcissistic subject establishes an apparent trade, a kind of psychological “if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”. When the compensatory self-worship becomes psycho-socially unbearable, it also becomes the object of a transferring exchange between the subjects. One subject worships another subject in exchange for the corresponding worship in return, as if to conceal that the original compensatory act is banal narcissism in itself. Thus hypernarcissism transitions into internarcissism, precisely the state that completely dominates the late capitalist social arena. Syntheism however offers a possible way out of the internarcissistic cul-de-sac. By confronting the trauma from the fantasy of the world without the subject and through seeing the living religion as the way out of murderous alienation, the subject can at last be liberated into something greater than its limited, incarcerated self and become incorporated into the syntheist community, the manifestation of Syntheos!
We are forced to abandon the old Cartesian internarcissism in order to construct a universocentric interdependism instead. And based on a universocentric interdependism, society or the social must be a primary emergence, that is, we apply the One in a Spinozist sense to the social under the name Syntheos, in the same way that we already apply the One to the universal under the name Pantheos. What is essential here is that the social as a whole thereby precedes the Kantian relation between the subject and the object instead of the other way around, just as the Universe on the whole precedes all kinds of atomist constructions within physics. In addition, interdependism must be relationalist and not relativist; the mutual dependence of the agents applies at all levels in the hierarchy, and thus also within the phenomena themselves.
This means that syntheism liberates Man from anthropocentrism and internarcissism. That the individual human being is freed from the responsibility of being an individual and instead is being encouraged to be a dividual is something that syntheism regards as a kind of existential salvation. Dividualism colours every fibre of the syntheist agent. Man is not the centre of existence any more than the ego could be the centre of Man (since it does not exist – see The Body Machines). Obviously, humanity and its attributes have no primary status in the Universe. Civilisations have arisen as an emergent phenomenon on a planet after aeons of history without any people at all. They have also perished without the Universe taking the slightest bit of notice. Humanity is a phenomenon that has sprung from other intra-acting phenomena. Nor is any human being created by other humans. Biological parents do not create their offspring – despite the fact that they would like to believe that this is the case – but are rather tools for the Universe’s constant production of new organisms furnished with bodies, language, ideas, consciousnesses and subconsciousnesses.
The subconscious thus not only includes the unconscious in Sigmund Freud’s classical sense, but also the information that consciousness half-consciously, half-unconsciously uses in its intuitive speculation. Neither the externally observed brain, nor the internally experienced mind uses any red or green lights in order to direct incoming information flows. The brain is not a computer. The information is not transported around within the brain in tiny, fixed, compact packages. The brain is namely analogue rather than digital, it is influenced and changes continuously. The human mind is very much a relationalist phenomenon, and the really remarkable aspect of this lies not in its unique position in existence, but rather in its typical materiality in fact. It is matter that is much more complex, active and, if one so wishes, spiritual than we have previously believed. The brain and its by-product the mind should therefore be regarded as typical rather than special material phenomena, even if this insight disturbs our internarcissism.
An authentic attraction must be about loving the radically other passionately without hopes of any love whatsoever in return. Otherwise it is not a case of authentic attraction, but merely a case of hypocritical and banal bartering which we call internarcissism. This explains why Spinoza argues that amor dei intellectualis must come first, before agape, philia and eros, quite simply so that authentic love can gain a foothold at all in the Greek inclined triangle. Syntheologically, Spinoza’s idea of the fundamental value of intellectual love has the consequence that neither the empty subject (Atheos) nor existence on the whole (Pantheos) leaves room for any emotional opinion of them; instead these are to be loved without reservation, since they can neither be added nor dropped. All of life’s other experiences are then based on Atheos and Pantheos, including everything else that is loved, hated or in any way at all related to emotionally. Amor dei intellectualis is this dutiful, logically cogent and fundamental attraction. An authentic agape, an authentic eros and an authentic philia with their strong emotions can only arise as a consequence of amor dei intellectualis first offering a necessary platform. Syntheologically, we express this as we must first submit to Atheos, in order to subsequently be able to abandon ourselves to Pantheos and Entheos on the way to the ethical objective, the authentic love of the radically other, where Syntheos arises.
Convention says that death frightens us with all the pain, sorrow, loneliness, powerlessness and mystery with which it is associated. But even if the pain, sorrow and loneliness are factored out, the fascination still remains the same. Thus the powerlessness and mystery remain. In other words, death frightens us by how it reveals our powerlessness and lack of knowledge. It humiliates us all, not least those of us who have had power and social status during our lifetimes. It strips us of anthropocentric internarcissism. But death also reveals our existential banality, our entirely non-existent significance for the Universe. And what frightens us most of all is how death reveals our own lack of significance for the divine, that is, for Pantheos. At the deepest level, the Christian lie is that each and every one of us means something to God, that we are actually a desirable lot and cherished jewels for a god who thus has nothing better to do than to sit and coddle us and the likes of us (literally) in all eternity, like a dead robot god surrounded by dead rag dolls.
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 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.
However impressive, such a flow of specialism cannot however hide the glaring absence of a penetrating and visionary generalism. A multitude of loud-mouthed, self-satisfied voices – who have absolutely no consideration for nor show any understanding of multiplicity as the One – cannot of course produce any more meaningful narrative than the tragic internarcissism which is hypercapitalism’s response to all issues in contemporary society. The result of this process of decline is the self-absorbed game by analytical philosophy of a kind of ‘pick-up sticks’ with the terms, and postmodernism’s endless dissecting of the older generations’ narratives about mankind and the world. The very attempt to create a new, cohesive metanarrative is branded as a mortal sin within philosophical discourse. Instead, everything is reduced to a regression of sign interpretation without end: philosophy is finally completely paralysed and is thrust into the hyperhermeneutical state. For this reason, syntheism’s serious attempt to create a new, credible metanarrative for the Internet age is a highly conscious, logical negation of the entire academic-philosophy paradigm. Philosophy returns to the essentials in the form of syntheology, instructed by independent, critical thinkers based on the interests of the burgeoning netocracy, where the logical follow-up question is what political expressions will grow out of the syntheological discourse.
From a theological perspective, the syntheist fall occurs when self-love turns into narcissism. Therefore it is necessary for syntheism to steadfastly fight internarcissism. Narcissism is just as present in the self-appointed victim as in the person in power. The syntheist hero instead surrenders herself, unreservedly and anonymously, in a brotherly/sisterly communion with the syntheist community. Beyond this communion, ethics is born in the making of agency: as an agent, within and together with the syntheist congregation, the dividual seeks a strong ethical identity, an existential substance, which is realised when a promise becomes action. According to the amoral but incorruptibly ethical Zoroaster, ethics is a perpetually recurring feedback loop: You are what you think, what you think affects what you say; you are what you say, what you say affects what you do; you are what you do, what you do affects how you think, and so on. Only through identifying himself as a syntheist agent can the dividual enter into and complete the Zoroastrian ethical circle as an intra-acting phenomenon within the syntheist community.
Note that outside the anthropocentric fantasy, this entire mythological construction is in a worthless limbo. It is only within the capitalist fantasy, which revolves around the centrality of the individual and the substantiality of the atom and the insurmountable gap between them, that these mythological assertions can be distorted into categorical axioms. The sacralisations of life, the body and consciousness are by-products of the massive internarcissism; the collective self-glorification, which in turn is a consequence of fully implemented alienation. The truth is, however, that life, the body and consciousness are emergent phenomena in an open and contingent universe; phenomena that are characterised by constantly higher degrees of complexity, rather than by any form of sacredness. That which one can relate to in a deeper sense is not these three anthropocentric projections in themselves, but the common underlying variable; the constantly higher intensities of the current emergences. To a syntheist, concepts such as life, body or consciousness are not fundamental; rather, these must be regarded as secondary and precisely as anthropocentric projections onto the rich, creative ability of the Universe to produce hosts of different intensities. And it is the intensity that is sacred. The name of the intensity is Entheos.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58