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Paradigm
A world view that is used and defended by the prevailing power structure right up until a new technological complex produces a new, parallel power structure with a new metaphysics that is experienced as more relevant for the new, burgeoning elite and therefore compels a paradigm shift. According to the philosopher Thomas Kuhn, a paradigm is patched up and defended until it becomes untenable and a new paradigm appears, which is why the paradigm shifts through history tend to occur suddenly, dramatically and often tend to be bloody.
With the Cartesian revolution in the 17th century, the metaphysics of individualism arrived on the scene, with Man gradually replacing God as the theological foundation, even if this revolutionary change was kept hidden as far as possible in order to avoid outbursts of ecclesiastical rage. God is thus not dead to start with; God has only gone to bed and fallen asleep. But ultimately, what role does His potential presence play when His creation is perfect anyway? The main thing for the individualists is that God has become superfluous, which enables the individual to slowly but surely take His place. It soon became evident that humanism fitted perfectly as the religion for the new capitalist and industrialist paradigm, and society clung to humanism and its individualist and atomist ideal right up until the late 20th century, when the network society emerged with full force and the idea of the network as the new metaphysical foundation caught on. Syntheism is the metaphysics of the Internet age. A shift is necessary because the philosophy of every paradigm must have its own blind but nonetheless relevant faith as a basic axiom. The masters of informationalism – the netocrats – quite simply perceive the network as the most striking metaphor for the necessary metaphysical foundation of the paradigm.
Beyond the ongoing paradigm shift from capitalism to informationalism (see The Netocrats) we need a new metaphysics, a new religion, a new common arena for collective spirituality in the Internet age. Without a credible metaphysics – no philosophy and no meaning either. Man is the meaning-generating animal constantly scanning his environment for patterns that indicate and keep confirming various causative links that engender a feeling of security. And if we do not find any such patterns, we don’t hesitate to quite simply invent them. With a utopia on the horizon, we give our lives a direction and a context. God is another name for utopia, and utopia is another name for God.
Thus, Descartes considers himself to have established an original subject, to which he connects a corresponding object. With this as an indisputable axiom, he reckons that he can quickly think into existence more and create more subjects and objects. However, a faith – a faith by its nature is subjective as well as arbitrary and transient – is not the same thing as a truth. A truth is assumed, by definition, to be objectively verifiable, proven by examination and valid for all time. What we are forced to accept, whether we like it or not, is that the foundation of ideas of both the self and the world is always a more or less cohesive faith and never pure knowledge. We believe ourselves to be practising science when the subject observes the Universe. We know that we are practising religion when the subject experiences that the Universe is peering back at the subject. But actually, neither the inner subjects nor the outer objects that we believe that we are perceiving, and which we use as building blocks when constructing our image of the world – our paradigm – exist.
History shows that people cannot live without metaphysical explanatory models. Therefore, human history is predominantly a history of metaphysics. The existential experience is in itself metaphysical. At the same time as we experience ourselves as something emergent, something more than the molecules in our bodies; as something inside, over and above, or beyond the physical body; we have removed ourselves and our experience as subjects from the world of physiology to the world of metaphysics. All human beings and societies constantly produce enormous amounts of metaphysics. The question is not whether metaphysics has any place in our lives or not, but rather whether the metaphysics in question is relevant or irrelevant for the conditions that prevail in the society in question. There is every reason to fear a considerable lag, particularly when the rapid development of technology is driving social change at a hectic pace. And so the question is: Is the generally embraced metaphysics capable of reflecting the current paradigm? Does it provide people with the requisite instruments to take charge of their own lives, or does it leave people helpless by rendering them incapable of creating comprehensible causative links and credible meaning?
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.
Because of this dramatic efficacy, metaphysical storytelling is not random, but of the highest priority for those in power. It can only be consigned to the person who is best suited to be the truth producer of the prevailing paradigm and who thereby also has the strongest incentive to preserve the status quo. Responsibility for metaphysics falls to either an already powerful institution in the society, such as the Church in relation to the monarchy and the aristocracy under feudalism. Otherwise a new institutional elite is constructed to formulate the new, emerging paradigm’s conception of the world – naturally at the expense of the old paradigm – such as when the universities expanded and acquired enormous power under capitalism, because the university formulated the individualism and the atomism that the bourgeoisie used in order to sweep away the Churches’ monotheist explanatory models and to take power from the aristocracy. Without popes we would never have seen any kings, and without university professors the world would never have beheld any industrialists either. The cardinals dined on pheasant with the nobility, and the academics eat steak with the entrepreneurs for good reason. They divide up and balance the power in the prevailing paradigm between themselves.
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.
The problem with humanism is that it is basically Christianity without Christ. Humanism is an attempt to keep Christian moralism alive, while it pretends that there is no need for Christ in order to maintain this desired conception of the world. Simply put, the humanist tries to keep the illusion of the individual – there are only human bodies, there are no individuals other than in the humanist’s fantasies – alive in the same way that the Church tried to keep the illusion of God alive during the previous paradigm shift. This is never clearer than within Communism with its atheist Christianity, with its blind faith in the human being’s own mystically predetermined realisation of the Christian paradise. Without underlying religious conviction, a theological foundation, Communism is an impossibility; it lacks the engine that can engage the activists. Therefore it continually decays into corruption and hypocritical dreams of a capitalist feast of consumption.
Since it is Kant’s philosophical contributions that pave the way for the death of humanism and the individual, it is scarcely wrong to regard Kant as the last humanist. When Hegel and Nietzsche arrived on the scene in the 19th century, the anti-humanist revolution was already in full swing. With Nietzsche and his concept of The Death of God – which Michel Foucault half a century later finally accomplishes by also proclaiming The Death of Man – nothing whatsoever remains any longer of the humanist paradigm. Hegel’s religiosity is found in Atheos while we place Nietzsche’s spirituality with Entheos in the syntheological pyramid.
The question is what is possible. Lacan makes a distinction between alienation and separation. Alienation is the experience of a dramatic distance between ourselves and the society in which we live. The society is no longer experienced as our own. We do not belong in our own time. Separation means that the crisis is deepened further: now there is not just a dramatic distance between ourselves and our contemporary society, but society itself has cracked open, it no longer appears cohesive, not even to itself. When separation gets the upper hand, the paradigm crumbles. We must withdraw in order to try to construe a new paradigm. First and foremost we must create a world view that is cohesive in a credible manner. The separation that has occurred opens the way for the possibility of attacking the preceding alienation: Why should we settle for piecing together a new world view when we have the chance of placing ourselves and the class we belong to at the centre of the new world view, now that we are initiating the revolution that is changing the world view by questioning and shifting its very foundations anyway?
Since information technology is the most important instrument of power in existence, it is both productive and in every respect correct – particularly in connection with the transition to an informationalist paradigm – to divide the history of humanity into four, distinct information technology paradigms. So forget the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age and the other mythological constructions of industrialism, produced for precisely the purpose of writing history so that it culminates in the smoking factories of industrialism. Let us instead regard all societies in all forms and stages of development as various kinds of information societies, and let us view history as a story of the battle for power over the means of communication. Because whoever controls the channels for communicating truth and ideas also can be said to own and dictate the truth and the ideas.
The pattern which emerges in the information technology writing of history tells how spoken language, written language, the printing press, and the Internet have each created the foundations for their paradigm, and that these technologies, once they have had time to have an impact and play all their cards, have formed social structures that differ in important respects from what the world has shown before (see The Netocrats). We distinguish the four paradigms from each other by the sudden, revolutionary shifts between the different systems for information processing and different forms of communication that have occurred throughout history, and which have resulted every time in dramatically altered living conditions, power structures, social models, world views and what constitutes the human ideal.
For reasons that we have detailed extensively in The Netocrats, these four information technology paradigm shifts should be regarded as the genuine revolutions that have driven history; created by the radically increasing amount of information available and the unique impact of their accompanying metaphors. The seemingly dramatic events that follow on from these paradigm shifts ought rather to be viewed as symptoms of the underlying, genuine revolution, which has its basis in radically changed material conditions and thereby also dramatically changed power structures. For what would capitalism be, for example, without the printing press as a metatechnology and without the watch (timepiece) as a metaphor? It is impossible to imagine the factories of industrialism and all the other capitalist institutions that emerged during the powerful expansion of capitalism in the 19th century without their armies of literate office workers and without the clock on the factory wall and the fob watches in the factory managers’ waistcoat pockets that divided the working day up into clearly delimited and measurable units.
Paradigm shifts entail dramatic conflicts, since for obvious reasons the prevailing power structure strives to preserve the status quo at any price for the purpose of defending its own privileges against the new, burgeoning elite. Therefore, with both violence and moralising nostalgia, the old power structure tries to keep the society fixed in the old paradigm for as long as humanly possible. That somebody voluntarily gives up the advantages bestowed on them by virtue of their class is a rare occurrence indeed. But the ice floe in the rapids on which civilisation to date has been standing eventually becomes so small that civilisation must migrate to another ice floe. With this sooner or later inevitable jump, the power structure and its writing of history changes radically, because everything must be hastily adapted to the new conditions for survival that are linked to and built into the new ice floe. Therefore it is always the new and not the old rulers – those who have most to gain and absolutely nothing to lose from the altered prioritisations within the new metaphysics – who are the fastest to change ice floes and adapt to the new rules for survival. The new metaphysics forces the pace, and the leap between the ice floes thus accelerates the rate of the shift of power between the elites of the two paradigms.
Every paradigm is accompanied by its own narrative, its own production of truth, circling around an essential starting point for its metaphysics. Each and every one of these narratives in turn contains three components: a cosmology, a romance and a linear history of the formative events in the past of the new paradigm, determined after the fact. As Hegel points out, these components are characterised throughout metahistory by an underlying requirement of necessity. What is metahistorically radically new in the case of syntheism – the metaphysics of the Internet age – is that it is based on contingency rather than necessity as its principle. Syntheism is indeterministic, not deterministic.
The information technology metahistory began with the tribe’s oral camp fire stories about itself in the spoken word society (mythos). Thereafter followed the painstakingly documented story of God’s fate and adventures in the written word society (logos), which in turn was followed by the printed story of the idolised human being in the mass media society (ethos). The corresponding transition in our time means that we now gather around the narrative – spread at lightning speed – of the holy network in the Internet society (pathos). The paradigm shifts are supremely material; the suddenly increased quantities of available information enable a powerful expansion of complexity and specialisation in human relations. Simultaneously, the new forms and extent of communication in our society are dictating a radical qualitative change in the conditions of the cultural ecosystem. This results in the older paradigm collapsing, and with it also its outmoded narrative and power structure. The old story must be replaced by a new, more credible metanarrative, which contains and popularises the allegories and metaphors that are relevant for the new paradigm. Above all, the new history must reflect the new power structure and its assumptions, or else it will not achieve acceptance or be spread.
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).
Primitivism is the first paradigm; it is based on the revolutionising emergence of spoken language and is characterised by nomadism, hunting, fishing and gathering. Primitivist metaphysics is based on reverence for one’s ancestors and respect for the tribe’s oldest members, since these are the collective’s most reliable and resource-rich knowledge bank, and thus also the key to survival, the engine of primitivist metaphysics. The narrative of nomadism revolves around the concept of history as circular with the regular return of the seasons as its dominant symbol. Existence is not linear, has no direction, time instead runs in recurring cycles; there is no development, everything is instead repeated ad infinitum. To be a human being is to be a member of a tribe, and within the limits of the tribe’s structures, to take responsibility for ensuring that this perpetual repetition is maintained. Strangers constitute competitors for the tribe’s resources, wherefore one either flees from them or beats them to death when one happens upon them. The human being who does not belong to the tribe is therefore not a human being at all, but an animal that can basically be treated as nonchalantly or brutally as one pleases.
Feudalism is the second paradigm, which starts from the emergence of written language and is characterised by permanent settlements, land ownership, agriculture and the domestication of livestock. Society’s focus lies on the domestication of animals and plants and a low-intensity class struggle between the aristocrats and the peasants. Written language was invented and started to develop as early as more than 5,000 years ago by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, after which it arose in three other places (Egypt, the Indus Valley and China) roughly simultaneously and independently of each another. But it exploded in use over the entire Eurasian landmass during the period that the German philosopher Karl Jaspers calls the Axial Age (Achsenzeit in German) between 800 and 200 B.C. The Chinese, Indian, Iranian, Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Greek cultures flourished during the Axial Age, since for the first time it became possible to build empires (an order from the administrative centre of the empire could be expected to arrive un-garbled and be implemented as intended out in the provinces), and it was at this time the world was also blessed with the first formalised world religions – for example Zoroastrianism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism and Judaism – and the first documented philosophy. It might be added that additional advanced civilisations in for example Italy, Ethiopia and Peru developed soon thereafter.
What is brilliant about the law is that it is based on a clear representation of the divine. Although it pays homage to God – to pay homage to someone who anyway never interferes with anything costs nothing, and it is therefore also the oldest metaphysical trick in the book – but what is important is to whom the law pays homage, but that it is based on something physically absent so that, with the homage as camouflage, it can furtively hand over the actual power to the (self-appointed) representative of the object of homage. The monarch who is present therefore becomes the representative on Earth of the absent god (with ancient Egypt’s pharaoh as the most flagrant example). To obey the monarch is thus in practice to obey God, which must be seen as a powerful incentive. Power thereby ends up with the monarch and his allies, the landed aristocracy and their common truth producer, the monotheistic religion. The feudal paradigm’s triangle of power is thus complete. The monarch, the aristocrat and the High Priest can sit down to an expensive and well-prepared dinner in peace and quiet together and in complete understanding share the power and the glory between themselves.
Capitalism is the third paradigm in the information technology writing of history. It emanates from the multifarious offshoot effects of the printing press and is characterised by the mass media, urbanisation, capital accumulation, mass education, industrialisation, globalisation and a class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the workers. The Reformation expresses the definitive deification of the printed word. With this deification, monotheism’s blind faith in the possibilities of the manifestation is replaced by individualism’s blind faith in the potential of the proclamation. Capitalism is the golden age of the printed and mass-distributed ideologies. And since new proclamations can be constructed on top of old proclamations – when yesterday’s objectives in the factory have been attained, they are replaced by today’s new and loftier objectives for tomorrow –a metaphysics evolves out of the magic of the proclamation around progress as an idea. Similar to the way in which eternity is portrayed in monotheistic metaphysics, progress is portrayed in individualist metaphysics – regardless of whether it concerns liberalism’s evolving, individual person, or socialism’s five-year plan, collective society – as the manifestation of the indivisible, as something external and eternal in relation to all of life’s obvious transience.
This blind faith becomes irresistible when the capitalist paradigm’s eponymous engine, that is, capital, is set in motion after the breakthrough of the banknote press in the 17th century. With the arrival of capital, for the first time in history the symbol becomes even more important than what it claims to represent. And with this representationalism, this worship of the symbol, follows social homogeneity as the norm. It is a fact that the search for homogeneity dominates the entire capitalist paradigm. An example of this is that it becomes near-impossible to maintain neurodiversity – the rich flora of various personality types developed under millions of years of nomadic tribal life that de facto distinguishes humanity biologically – as an ideal once capitalism becomes generally accepted. From the late 18th century, neurodiversity is scorned by all available means, and instead a steady stream of pathological diagnoses is produced, based solely on suddenly realised, presumed dysfunctional relationships to capitalism’s constantly shifting production ideal.
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.
According to the information technology writing of history, the capitalist and industrialist paradigm was enabled by the arrival of the printing press in the mid-15th century. The publication of books and newspapers in Europe gradually increases and at an ever-increasing pace, an increasing number of readers entail an increasing number of authors, and vice versa; and from the 17th century onwards the banknote presses also start running. The new paradigm then becomes widely accepted during the 18th century, which is clearly manifested by the French Revolution, for example, which was initiated by the storming of the Bastille in 1789. The streets of Paris filled with the burgeoning bourgeois class, which was united in its newly-acquired literacy, its books, newspapers and banknote presses, and in its hatred of the old feudal paradigm’s aristocratic superiority. An entirely new power structure – consisting of the politicians, the bourgeoisie and the universities – emerged and took over, while the old power troika – consisting of the monarchy, the aristocracy and the Church – was caught off guard to the extent that it never succeeded in recovering again. The social conditions that had brought the old troika to power quite simply no longer prevailed, and consequently monarchy, aristocracy and Church were reduced to museum exhibits: curiosities from a nostalgically glowing past, robbed of all power and all influence and relegated to a growing capitalist tourist industry, which exploits them with considerable success.
The capitalist and industrialist paradigm was taken to a whole new level when Napoleon’s army tore across Europe in the early 19th century. No one personifies the World Spirit (in German: der Weltgeist) – which Hegel seeks in his magnum opus Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) – with the same force and clarity as the ruthless Napoleon, who the year before had plundered and ravaged Hegel’s own home town of Jena in eastern Germany. Napoleon’s army becomes the emblem of the literally murderously effective and finely honed organisations constructed by the literate masses – compartmentalised into productive hierarchies, where both responsibility and authority are extremely clearly defined – with the capacity to receive and pass on written instructions on an industrial scale and over distances that had previously been overwhelming. Soldiers and factory workers who can read and write are quite simply dramatically much more effective at carrying out their orders than illiterates. Not just because they can assimilate and relay information and knowledge in a totally new way, but also because they can express and clarify their own situations and teach it to others much better within the system at hand. This escalates the accumulation of information and knowledge dramatically.
There is, however, an object that the patriarchal gaze can never get enough of; an object that constantly evades the observer’s vain attempts at conquest, colonisation and plundering, and that is the object which finally gives its name to the entire paradigm in question, namely capital. Since capital constantly shuns patriarchal lust – no individual can ever be rich enough; somewhere there is always more money to be made, bigger profits to extract, increased growth to produce for anyone who simply gets a grip and refuses to be idle – individualism is strengthened by a tremendously potent metaphysical engine: progress.
The university is individualism’s truth producer and this institution’s most important role is to moderate enjoyment among citizens. However, it continuously fails in its task, since enjoyment is only maximised in transgression, and transgression presupposes a host of prohibitions against crossing the boundaries for the taboos that the Church was much more adept at producing than the university. In this context, the university is reduced to the paltry imperative of identifying and subsequently maximising the individual’s enjoyment. Therefore, individualism’s complicated relationship with enjoyment is characterised by a fundamental envy of religion. In the 20th century, individualism was developed by the universities into cultural relativism, Kantianism’s ideological waste dump and its logical endpoint, where all that remains are unfounded solipsistic credos, the quality of which, because of a growing political hypersensitivity, it is forbidden to compare. This qualifies cultural relativism as syntheism’s ideological arch-enemy at the paradigm shift from capitalism to informationalism.
Informationalism’s view of mankind can crassly be described as a mobile phone surrounded by fat and muscle. The paradigm shift is rapid; as early as December 2012 traffic on Google’s search engine to the attentionalist left-hand column – which one cannot buy into but instead must deserve one’s prominent placement in by maximizing one’s attention, that is, making oneself interesting and attractive to the Internet’s users – passed 99% for the first time, while traffic to the capitalist right-hand column dipped below 1%. This fact confirms that traditional marketing is an impossibility on the Internet; there is quite simply no such thing as functional online marketing. Increasingly desperate mass media marketing is pitted against increasingly smarter online communication, which understands and uses the new participatory dynamics evolving on the Web.
Syntheism can be described as one long showdown with all the ideologies that are based on the historical case. Religion and metaphysics were developed under feudalism from being a cohesive and community-generating world view into becoming a well-honed tool for power and control. The monotheistic religions demand submission; the word is suddenly an order rather than a promise. Sin is basically a revolt against God, a questioning of the divine arbitrariness that is the very foundation of the Abrahamic religions. In practice, the Asian religions accomplish the same thing through making sinful behaviour function as the driver for desperate reincarnation rather than invoking hellish damnation. However syntheism in no way entails a return to paganism, but instead a dialectical further development. The real return to paganism at the paradigm shift from capitalism to informationalism is instead the bewildering hodgepodge of naive ideas and quasi-religious nonsense that go under the label New Age, the phenomenon that, not without reason, syntheologians dismiss as theological cultural relativism.
Just like all epoch-making ideas, syntheism arrives in history right when philosophy has run aground between a traditionalism (in this case theism) and a cynicism (in this case atheism). Only through perfecting the individualist paradigm can mankind grasp its terrible consequences, and then, and only then, the door to the syntheist possibility swings open. It is only syntheism that can liberate atheism from its logical curse: its inheritance from theism’s negative attitude towards immanent life. Only by going from atheism to syntheism can we open the way for a genuinely sensual and thereby also spiritual understanding of the immanence. Atheism robs the human being of her access to the holy and the divine by first sharing theism’s conviction that the holy and the divine must be synonymous with the transcendental, and then murdering the transcendental and thus reducing the human being to a cold and indifferent immanence, which is axiomatic for atheism. What syntheism does is that it picks up mankind in precisely the immanence where atheism has abandoned him and makes him apprehend the immanent as the truly holy and divine without any nostalgic longing for transcendentalism at all. Through syntheism’s deepening of the very premises of atheism, atheist cynicism becomes syntheist affirmation.
Syntheism is the Hegelian synthesis of the deadlocked dichotomy between theism and atheism. When we left theism for atheism, we threw the baby out with the bathwater. We became anti-religion rather than anti-theism. But having lived through the atheist paradigm and having come out on the other side, we are ready for the syntheist paradigm with its grasp of the human being’s constant and basic need for a functional metaphysics. Syntheism stands out as the only credible metaphysical system for the intellectual human being of the third millennium. Which means that the only alternative to syntheism is to settle for a subconscious and tacit metaphysics, and such a metaphysics can of course be as ill-considered and destructive as anything, since by definition it is not conscious and thus hardly very sensible either. And how intelligent does this alternative, on closer inspection, appear to be?
Badiou however argues that mathematics modifies Habermas’ premises; with the aid of mathematics, we can go beyond intersubjectivity and achieve an objectivity that Kant does not understand. The wide acceptance of the quantum physics paradigm within the sciences – and its subsequent dramatic effects on philosophy, for example through the effect that Niels Bohr’s ideas have on Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy.html">process philosophy, and vice versa – in spite of its initially highly counter-intuitive claims, proves that this is the case. Badiou argues that thanks to the progress of mathematics, ontology can at last leave representationalism, correlationalism and even relativism behind, only to thereafter take the decisive leap over to relationalism. The Kantian paradigm would thus be passé and objectivity would again be possible.
So where in the child’s development should one place this onto-phenomenological moment? The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan maintains that it occurs in connection with what he calls the mirror stage. The body develops an imaginary ability to regard fragmented reality as in fact a cohesive reality; perception converts the noumenal chaos into a phenomenal world. The subject then emerges in relation to this surmised and self-produced entirety: the human being’s self-image is always a mirror image of her world view. Thus, it is not about the moment when the child literally sees her body in a mirror for the first time – not until the 19th century did the classic mirror on the wall become a common item of interior decoration – but rather a first reflection of the self in the world. This in turn explains why an altered world view, a new paradigm, always is followed by a correlated change in the human ideal and self-image. The latter goes hand in hand with the former.
The reflection of the self in the world is, however, in no way harmonious, observes Lacan, but rather extremely frustrating for the subject, tending to breed aggression. In order to try to resolve the tension in its relationship with the chaotic environment, the subject starts to identify with the image in the mirror. This leads to an imaginary feeling of overview and control: the subject apprehends itself as the centre and master of existence. The result is that the subject deifies itself, in particular precisely that within itself that it cannot master, that which Lacan calls the other. And the other of psychoanalysis is of course just another name for theology’s God. Since syntheism is the doctrine of how and where we find a pedestal for the other within our own paradigm, it can be viewed as a Lacanian theology. The question is not whether we need a Lacanian theology for the Internet age – we will end up constructing such a theology subconsciously and thoughtlessly unless we have first done so consciously and carefully – but rather exactly which Lacanian theology is relevant and credible for the dynamic environment which frames and determines our current existence.
The relationalist philosophers Karen Barad, Ray Brassier and Quentin Meillassoux push through and past relativism when, at the start of the 3rd millennium – inspired by pioneers such as the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and the physicist Niels Bohr – they construct a speculative materialism that attacks the entire correlationalist paradigm and its fixation with an original subject that correlates with an original object as its ontological foundation. They are quite simply searching for a deeper foundation beyond this premise, which has dominated phenomenology ever since Kant’s heyday. While relativism settles for stating that the relations between the fixed objects are relative – what we call an interactive ontology – the relationalist philosophers maintain that the relations within the phenomena are also mobile in relation to each other – that is, they advocate an intra-acting ontology. There are no discrete objects whatsoever in the Universe. Not even at the minutest micro level. Thus, nor are there any Kantian objects in physical reality, not even any noumenal such; what really exists is merely pure relata, or relations without their own inner substance between and within abstract fields of irreducible multiplicities.
The decisive break with Kantian correlationism comes with relationalism in Niels Bohr’s physics and philosophy of science in the 1930s. Relationalist ontology is in fact not just interactive, like relativism, but definitely also intra-acting. According to relationalism, every phenomenon in the Universe is unique, since both its external and its internal coordinates are completely unique for every position in space–time. Symmetries exist only in mathematical models, never in physical reality. This means, among other things, that no scientific experiments can ever be repeated in exactly the same way twice. It is hardly surprising that in the 1930s old friends Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein engage in a correspondence that is often frustrating on both sides. Their letters attest to the dramatic scientific paradigm shift from Einsteinian relativism to Bohrian relationalism.
Barad dismantles and disposes of Kant’s noumenon, and thereby she also extremely effectively puts an end to the correlationist paradigm. Her Bohrian phenomenology, based on relations on top of relations and probabilities on top of probabilities, with varying intensities rather than essences at the centre and without fixed physical boundaries, has no need whatsoever of any Kantian noumenon. Barad comes from the world of quantum physics, which of course is governed by concepts such as complementarity, entanglement, chance and non-locality. The principle of precedence disposes of all ideas of eternally valid laws that precede physical reality. Barad’s phenomenon is therefore instead the phenomenon per se described based on physics’ own conditions, rather than from Kant’s blind faith in rationality’s conception of reality being sufficiently exhaustive. And it is precisely therefore that her universocentric rather than anthropocentric ontology is a realism. Every Baradian phenomenon, every assemblage of intensities, has its own genetics and its own memetics as her predecessor Gilles Deleuze would express the matter. It is the current set of genes and memes that we familiarise ourselves with when we get to know the phenomenon. The world cannot be more real than it is with Barad.
However, it is exactly the other way around: However counter-intuitive quantum physics may appear at first glance, it is de facto real reality, or more correctly, as close as we can ever get to a scientifically verified as well as perceptionally accessible reality. Quantum physics even opens the way to ontological realism – both the agential and the model-dependent – that is, precisely the onto-epistemological accessibility to the surrounding world that Kant believes that he dismisses once and for all through his almost autistic separation of the subject and the object. In fact, reality is the subject and the object entangled into one indivisible phenomenon, without any real separation. Whoever most smoothly manages to upgrade their world view by calibrating their intuition in accordance with this insight also has the most to gain in conjunction with the paradigm shift in question from correlationism to relationalism. And this applies of course to a high degree in the areas of metaphysics and religion.
This in turn means that we need a new, informationalist explanatory model for how words, thoughts and ideas arise and are formed, and above all for how they are interpreted and altered over time; how communication between bodies and media occur and above all what consequences this process has for our new, dividual identity. Precisely such a de-personified explanatory model has also emerged in parallel with digital technology, which is the foundation of the ongoing paradigm shift, and it is called memetics. We have already written extensively about this research field numerous times from many different angles (see The Futurica Trilogy). Memetic theory – which explains how words, thoughts, ideas and cultural components of various kinds multiply and are modified according to the same Darwinian selection principles that also regulate how genes multiply and are modified within biological systems – was launched in an essay by Ted Cloak in 1975 and popularised in exhaustive detail by Richard Dawkins in the book The Selfish Gene one year later. It was also Dawkins who coined the term meme for this replicator which is active within the sociocultural biotope and which is selfish in the same sense that the selfish gene is selfish, that is, its primary interest, if we allow ourselves to reason with the aid of an anthropomorphic image, is to multiply itself through dissemination to the greatest possible extent. It wants to infect the world.
Semiotics is primarily pragmatic rather than syntactic, not least since Peirce is a relativist and not yet a relationalist. Thus it is still in the individualist paradigm. Semiotics is namely focused on what the sign is presumed to represent – according to Peirce the sign would not be a sign if it did not correspond to and translate some external object into language – while memetics chooses to act regardless of typically Kantian concerns, such as whether external, objective or intersubjective truths really exist, and if so in what way. This means that semiotics presumes that the interpretation of signs in a prevailing society – the discipline that is called hermeneutics within philosophy and exegesis within theology – can be carried out by an independent, external observer: the hermeneuticist. But nothing could be further from the truth. The hermeneuticist is of course also steeped in the prevailing paradigm, and therefore must be primarily regarded as a technological as well as ideological by-product of the same, and not, in some exceedingly diffuse and mysterious way, as its neutral and distanced interpreter. There are indeed no neutral and distanced interpreters, either within physics or sociology; such a position is quite simply both physically and socially impossible.
A meme survives and multiplies by making copies of itself, and thanks to its ability to blend in and appear useful or entertaining for a certain subject in a given situation at a certain point in time. Once again: it has nothing to do with what is true or false. This distinguishes the meme from the sign as a concept. Memetics quite simply constitutes a relationalist radicalisation of semiotics in the same way that Whitehead’s philosophy.html">process philosophy is a relationalist radicalisation of Peirce’s and William James’ relativist pragmatism. Through memetics – in particular through the introduction of emergent memeplexes – we shift towards a network-dynamics understanding of culture’s relationship to nature. The individual is no longer needed and has no function in this analysis. The dividual of network dynamics (see The Netocrats) takes over, and as a result of this paradigm shift, Man is taken from the centre of science to a peripheral seat in the grandstand, where he must be content with acting as the passive spectator and at the same time being seized as a storage and transportation vessel subservient to the extremely dynamic evolution of memes. All the work is done by the memes. The anthropocentric impulse and Man’s pride thus gets yet another flick on the nose, which in turn opens the way for universocentric interdependence, which is attendant on network dynamics.
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.
From this insight concerning the logical terms and creative possibilities of the metalevel, we can formulate syntheism’s revolutionary ambition – its sabre thrust straight into the solar plexus of the old individualism – with the battle cry that is devastating for capitalism: Ideas want to be free, ideas cannot be owned! In fact, ideas do not belong to any of us; it is we who belong to them, and we cannot do anything other than obey them. Without owning one’s ideas, which never even belonged to the individual except in her own imagination – which was not either the individual’s own to command, in accordance with the free will that she has never owned either – the individual is completely castrated. And it is precisely in this manner that the netocratic dividual wants to regard the bourgeois individual. Therefore the question of who owns the ideas – not to mention the question of who, practically speaking, can own them – is the greatest, most important and controversial question of the current, burgeoning paradigm shift. Power’s memeplex has been set in motion and the world is trembling. Welcome to the informationalist class struggle!
But since syntheism, when it investigates the world, finds neither individuals nor atoms, it becomes necessary to break with the individualist-atomist paradigm in order to connect instead to the metaphysical alternative that actually has support in the sciences’ observations of the world, that is, network dynamics and its attendant relationalism.html">social relationalism. Just like in relationalist physics, there are only relations on top of other relations and probabilities on top of other probabilities even within psychology and sociology, and these relations and probabilities do not stop at the externally interactive: they are very much also internally intra-acting. First there is the network, then there is the node and only thereafter does the subjective experience arise. What applies here is thus an inverted procedure compared to Descartes’ and Kant’s narcissistic fantasy of the genesis of the subject and its position in the Universe: “I am, therefore I think.” Man himself is a phenomenon of network dynamics, localised within other network-dynamical phenomena. But when she also becomes conscious of this, he can start to act as something far more than merely a relationalist subject, namely as the syntheist agent, syntheism’s ethical human ideal.
The hypercynical state is namely due to the fact that the prevailing ideological paradigm is no longer in step with its surrounding material reality. Rather, the lack of utopianism and the abundance of dystopianism is the final proof of the prevailing paradigm having reached the end of the road and lost all remaining remnants of relevance. The central dilemma is quite simply not the surrounding material reality – even if it constantly produces a never-ending stream of problems to manage – but the prevailing ideological drought. What is needed is a new metaphysical story that is more relevant for the new age than the old one, where the dystopia is replaced by a credible utopia that includes the prevention of the dystopia becoming a reality. It is in fact not enough to just paint a picture of a powerful dystopia and moralise about all who are making it real with their opinions and behaviours. Because in the subconscious, the human being is ultimately driven by the drive.html">death drive and the masochistic enjoyment of arranging one’s own extinction. According to this logic, eco-moralism is accelerating and affirming the ecological dystopia rather than preventing or mitigating against it, which eco-moralism believes and claims that it wants to do. The dystopia must instead be used as a lever in order to achieve an open and contingent landscape of creativity and intensity, directed towards the future and the syntheist utopia.
All political ideologies under the capitalist paradigm are fundamentally individualistic. Conservatism maintains that the authentic individual has existed, but that she has unfortunately been lost and must be restored by a return to the past. Anarchism maintains that the individual is the purpose and meaning of existence and that the influence of politics must be minimised in order to liberate the individual’s spontaneous and innate capacity for self-realisation. Liberalism is anarchism’s older and more pragmatic relative, and it differs from anarchism by maintaining that the individual’s self-realisation is metaphysically connected to ownership of the Kantian object. The liberal fantasy thus distinguishes itself from the anarchist fantasy through its special fixation on requiring that all assets must be owned by one or a few specific individuals in order to be ennobled into ever-more complex atoms and reduce liberalism’s metaphysical reward, growth. Therefore, in contrast to the anarchist, the liberal maintains that the law and the State are needed in order to protect all the belongings that are the object of individuals’ fetishism. Socialism also claims to fight for the individual’s self-realisation, but it sees the conservative class system as the obstacle to this utopia, where the upper class’s control over society’s most important resources and its refusal to share power and wealth must be rectified. What distinguishes democratic socialism from the revolutionary variety is how one answers the question of what is the most efficient and at the same time most ethically correct route to the common objective: that the working class lay their hands on the abundance of the upper class, which in turn means that one achieves the classless society. This is the objective that socialists of all stripes share: the individual’s self-realisation and liberation from the shackles of the class system through the ultimate triumph of communism.
Outside the temporary utopia, however, we live in an age where the collective world view is crumbling due to the sheer infirmity of old age. History is beyond our control. The only thing that remains when plurarchy becomes widely accepted is the virtual subculture’s fractionalised planet. Human life on the planet can only be saved by an initial, and subsequently gradually increasing, physical monastisation. Therefore a specific subculture is required that sees saving the planet as a whole for human life as its mission, and which realises that this work, in order to have a chance of succeeding, must start with a radical distancing from the individualist paradigm and its programmatic atomism, capitalism and expansionism. Out of this necessary negation rises the utopian idea of theological anarchism: the dream of a sustainable society beyond the nation state and capitalist expansionism. However, in the same way that Karl Marx defines socialism as the necessary path to communism, we must assume that there is an experimental practice, oriented towards utopia on the road to theological anarchism. As a spontaneously arisen movement from spontaneously arisen needs in the shadow of spontaneously arisen technological complexes, syntheism is precisely such a practice. Suddenly the movement is simply there: as the emergent answer to the new era’s strongest human needs it is realised through an innovative use of new, disruptive technologies. All that is needed is that the syntheist memeplex, in as refined a form as possible, drops into the new communication-technology reality and spreads itself.
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.
However, the first relationalist attack on the individualist paradigm comes from environmentalism in the form of its aggressive demands that capitalism’s environmental destruction and ruthless plundering of resources must cease. Environmentalism is clearly based on a network dynamics theory without any focus whatsoever on isolated individuals or atoms. Here, the planet is regarded as a more or less closed system, which must be treated as just such a system, since all individual agents and nodes are completely subservient to the overarching network. Therefore environmentalism gives priority to the network over the individual; for the first time in these contexts Man is reduced from an individual to a dividual. And thereby clear ethical boundaries are set for what the human being can and cannot do in relation to the dynamic network’s interests. Environmentalism is a globalism, since a national environmental policy is in principle meaningless, and it must by necessity fight for the global solidarity which, in a network-dynamics theory, includes not just people but also plants, animals and natural diversity in itself. Quite logically, environmentalism begins to replace socialism as the seat of radicalism.
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.
The dystopia concerns itself with the finite, utopianism focuses on the infinite. Accordingly, the fight for the free and open Internet is the answer to what must be done; it is the engine that drives the new utopia rather than the brake that hinders the old dystopia. What we are talking about here is far more than just parallel phenomena in the market for the shaping public opinion: syntheism is de facto the name of the digital integrity movement’s underlying metaphysics. This explains why the fight for the free and open Internet is the central political struggle in the 21st century. All other important political conflicts that play out during, and contribute to giving colour to, informationalism’s growth, are completely dependent on how this conflict unfolds. It concerns far more than the growing netocracy’s striving to ignore the ruling bourgeoisie, which has controlled the world since the paradigm of the printing press gained broad acceptance. Beyond the fight for the free and open Internet, the approaching ecological apocalypse is rearing its ugly head: a potential catastrophe that capitalism is responsible for and at the same time evidently lacks the ability to prevent.
Among other things this is why the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama shoots himself in the foot when, with a great hullabaloo, he proclaims the death of history in the early 1990s. It is namely not history as such that has died – not even in some kind of metaphorical sense of any interest whatsoever: it is merely a kind of writing of history that has reached its conclusion, namely Fukuyama’s personal favourite narrative of the individual and the atom in liberal democracy’s linear history. However, metahistory, the history of the writing of history per se, teaches us that when a certain narrative has reached the end of the road, this immediately opens the door to a completely new kind of narrative. This applies in particular at a paradigm shift, when one type of writing of history loses its social relevance only to be immediately replaced by another. Metahistory is quite simply a relay race that never ends.
History starts anew so to speak, and with this manoeuvre, even the past receives a new interior design that conveys completely new meanings. Since all identity is founded in an understanding of history – a subject always sees itself as a conceived history from an original birth onwards to the current moment – the growth of a new and dominant social identity requires a rewriting of all of history. This is necessary because the new writing of history obviously has the ambition of – and can only serve its clearly formulated purpose in the new paradigm through – depicting entirely different metaphysically driven prioritisations than what the old narrative did in the abandoned paradigm. We know today, for example, that concepts such as the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age were created in Europe during the 19th century for a highly specialised purpose, namely to serve capitalism’s need for a writing of history that is fixated on the industrial domestication of physical materials, one after the other. Therefore history is written as a long series of incremental and purposeful shifts in a direction towards the consummation of this history: the modernist factory.
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.
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.
Attention has of course in reality few or no links at all to capital, aside from the fact that they have both been power-generating during different historical epochs. Attention is, for example, not a structural lubricant, even if it both creates and changes power structures to a dramatic extent. Its power instead arises as a response to the Internet’s enormous information offering and the plurarchical chaos which this abundance creates. The need for curatorship, qualified information processing, is growing explosively, and the sorting of information is much more important and more valuable than the production of the same. At the very moment that information sorting becomes more important than information production, power over the society shifts from the producers of goods and services, the capitalists, to information sorting and its practitioners, the netocratic curators. We go through the paradigm shift from capitalism to attentionalism. With the advent of attentionalism, the focus of ethics shifts over from the individual’s self-realisation, the capitalist ideal, to the network-dynamical utopia, or what is termed the ethics of interactivity. What is important in existence are the nodes in the network and how these nodes can be merged as often and as much as possible in order to maximise agential existence. The power in this hectic network-building ends up with those who succeed in combining plausibility and attention in the virtual world. And even if this attention can be measured – according to the brilliantly simple but correct formula credibility multiplied by awareness yields attention – it cannot be substituted or in any other way used in transactions in the same way as capital and capitalism’s other valuable assets.
Syntheism is radical and evolved atheism, a philosophical concept that captures the inexhaustible and unattainable in existence that philosophy and theology sooner or later must confront. Not least theology, since traditionally utopianism belongs in the world of theology rather than philosophy. More often than not it has been a matter of a longed-for reconstruction of a lost paradise. Syntheology thus takes theology back from its dull life among the traditional religions and gives it a renewed relevance historically. By leaving its traditional hermeneutic search for a meaning that is externally produced in advance, theology instead gains the central role as the intellectual engine for Man’s internal production of credible and functional utopias. For it can no longer pretend to be occupied with silent and inaccessible gods that do not exist. But theology can aid in building longed-for and credible gods centred in, for example, physics, psychoanalysis and utopianism. Syntheology forces theology to give up its historical fondness for transcendence to instead give structure to the new and growing religious immanence. Classical theology shifts over to syntheology, and when all is said and done, syntheology is a utopology. The question of whether any particular god exists or not syntheologically speaking is completely irrelevant. Such a question of course assumes that we are intimately acquainted with some kind of god who does not exist anyway nor has ever existed, and beforehand at that. The correctly posed syntheological question is instead which god might come to exist, and the answer to this question is always synonymous with the core of the vision that is driving the paradigm in question. The syntheological response runs as follows: Tell me your utopia, and I will tell you what god you are seeking and following.
Rational thinking perceives intuition as magic. That which seemingly functions intuitively is regarded by rationality as something magical and fundamentally incomprehensible. Since religion respects and is partly based on intuition, religion cannot either be regarded as anything other than magic by narrowly limited rationality. Rationalism’s standard accusation against transrationalism is therefore to dismiss it as a bag of magical tricks – or quite simply as pure superstition. But what was magic yesterday is technological reality today. It is sufficient to study the four epoch-making information-technology paradigm shifts in history in order to conclude that this is the case. So while it is cynical to wish, on the other hand longing is a utopian act. And seen historically, longing for the utopia that today appears magically unrealistic is more of an expression of highly sensible forward planning.
Relativist metaphysics attacks the classical idea of truth. There is nothing strange about that. Throughout history we see time after time how yesterday’s established truth is phased out to be replaced by a new and soon equally established, alternative truth. The intensity in this process increases when the new elite takes over a society in conjunction with a paradigm shift and prioritises completely different ideals from those of the displaced elite. Relativist philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Michael Foucault confront these historical shifts with a pragmatist attitude to truth production: truths are produced first and foremost by the prevailing power structure for the purpose of confirming and consolidating the power of the powerful. Nor is there anything strange in that; the opposite would be extremely remarkable. A truth can only become and remain a truth as long as it stays within the sociocultural paradigm that is embraced by society, which means that various and conflicting truths are pitted against each other during every transitional phase. The truths are therefore always relative. They should and must be able to endure constant criticism. When they no longer hold their own against this criticism in the light of new information, they must be phased out and replaced.
However, we pose the question of whether the syntheist community shares Meillassoux’s dream of the resurrection of the dead before a suddenly existing god whose essence is called justice really is the God that we long for, and which thereby can act as a utopian engine for us in our time. Do we ever actually desire something that actually later occurs? Is it not the case that both emergent and contingent phenomena occur only of their own accord – as both Hegel and Nietzsche maintain – and that we only afterwards place them in our value hierarchies? It appears undeniably as considerably more reasonable to speak of the growth of the Internet in the late 20th century as the genesis of a – if only afterwards – desired god, rather than as any form of justice as a god located in the distant future at the end of a road which in any case is filled with thousands and thousands of other paradigm-shifting events. Meillassoux’s future is quite simply neither consistent with his radical contingency, nor sufficiently open to the future to be able to act as an engine for syntheist activism. However, it is unarguably a formidable foundation on which to build potential utopias.
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.
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!
From once having been an obscure philosophical idea, emergence with time has become a central concept within the sciences. The idea is that a specific system can change so dramatically in conjunction with a small shift in its degree of complexity – at a tipping point – that the system as a whole is transformed from one kind of phenomenon into something completely different, where the new emergent phenomenon appears with entirely new properties and qualities that entail that it must be classified as something entirely new in relation to the original system. According to relationalist physics, an emergence moreover means that nature as a whole goes through a change. The emergence has such a decisive ontological significance that a return from the new to the old paradigm is impossible after the emergence. Between different emergent phenomena with, in principle, the same component parts, there is a hierarchy. Every emergent transition forms a new level in the hierarchy. But because every suddenly arisen emergence has its own just as suddenly arisen laws and rules – this is quite possible as long as the newly created laws and rules do not threaten the existence of the actual hierarchy – it also changes nature as a whole for all time in a relationalist universe.
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.
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.
When the netocrat atheist of the 3rd millennium takes a seat in a classical temple and is astonished at its inspiring beauty, the question arises of how hypercapitalism has succeeded in pacifying her and her generation’s sisters and brothers to such a degree that they themselves have never realised any ideas of erecting equivalent buildings for spiritual purposes or even with a spiritual orientation. And in particular, not without some individual ulterior motives of some kind of capitalist gain in the long run. Through the historical extinction of religion, ideality has namely been lost and has been replaced by a blind and compact instrumentality in all relationships between human beings. All social activities and relationships in hypercapitalist society are assumed to revolve around value-destroying exploitation and never to be about value-creating imploitation (see The Netocrats). But the instrumentality view of one’s fellow human being is an existential prison – Platonist alienation in its most manifest form – and the only way out of this prison is to negate the entire capitalist paradigm. Suddenly and in a very timely way, the Internet arrives as a potential lever to achieve the ideality renaissance. The Internet not only makes this longed-for revolution possible. According to the information-technology writing of history, it is the Internet that de facto is this revolution itself.
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.
Philosophy does not live up at all to its enormous potential during the 20th century. The most important reason for this is its academic marginalisation. Philosophy ceases to be a living, all-encompassing art form that is carried out by independent, risk-taking free thinkers who scrutinise society from its undefined margins. It is instead turned into a self-perpetuating and self-referencing academic activity and a system-affirming meal ticket among numerous others, with long and footnote-heavy repetitions and backward-looking references as its main activity. Thus, philosophy is no longer in dialogue with either other disciplines or society outside of academia. Neither Georg Cantor’s new mathematics nor Niels Bohr’s new physics have any impact worth mentioning within philosophy until after informationalism becomes widely accepted at the turn of the millennium, despite these two revolutions materially shaking up the world view of thinking people in the 20th century and shifting the mainstays of both ontology and phenomenology. The new relationalist ideas do of course pull the rug out from under the entire correlationist paradigm which has been regarded as axiomatic and unassailable ever since Kant presented his texts. But embarrassingly enough, philosophers are the last ones to understand and analyse this earth-shattering paradigm shift.
Only in the 1990s does criticism begin to stir, and it is of course the rapid growth of the Internet and experimental metaphysics that open up the possibility of clearing a path out of postmodernist alienation. Historically and for obvious reasons, constructive criticism with the purpose of opening the way for expansive, creative thinking has always come from the outside. What academic philosophy has dismissed as an impossibility – the growth of a new metaphysics for the new Internet age, and thereby the construction of a new social theory of everything – is of course de facto made possible by the interactive conversations that are going on with frenetic intensity in extra-academic, virtual spaces. The netocrats are undermining the universities’ monopoly on metaphysical truth production in the same way that the universities once undermined and razed the Church’s monopoly on the same. The use of a constantly expanding Wikipedia is exploding while national encyclopaedias in fancy bindings are gathering an increasing amount of dust in bookshelves that nobody ever visits. History repeats itself when a new information-technology paradigm enables the growth of a new structure for truth production right under the very noses of the old, tired and corrupt elite, who are unable to intervene even if they had had the energy to do so, since the material conditions – and thereby the rules of the Darwinian punishment and reward system in the surrounding culture – have been fundamentally altered.
In spite of the fact that the Internet revolution is fundamentally and radically changing the conditions for human identity production and at the same time is directing a lethal attack on the capitalist power structure, initially it passed by relatively unnoticed: the capitalist entrepreneurs kept believing for a long time that the Internet revolution merely translated into an increased revenue flow which strengthened their position without resulting in any tangible problems. Because the philosophers are in fact still sitting in the academic chairs and are obediently serving the outgoing capitalist paradigm without any tangible desire or ability for radical questioning or ideological adventurousness. Giants such as Martin Heidegger have of course already established nostalgically that technology as such is evil. The striking parallel is naturally with how the clergy were left sitting inside church buildings vegetating in their internarcissistic, self-congratulatory homage to each other while the universities in the name of science expanded from the 17th century onwards, and in time took over truth production in society. Consequently, the philosophical innovative thinking that actually arises during the 20th century comes more or less entirely from alternative environments far out in the periphery in relation to academic philosophy, where Jacques Lacan’s pioneering psychoanalytical school, which arises in a medical research environment, stands out as the singular most significant philosophical contribution of the 20th century.
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.
If it was already built into the hyperhermeneutical state that it would come down to an intellectually sterilising banning of all metanarratives, how can syntheology respond to the glaring need for the return of utopianism? In order to understand at all how philosophical discourse is politicised, we must start by studying how political philosophy developed during the individualist and atomist paradigm. Capitalism is the constant carnival. The allure of the pay cheque is strictly limited, however. In his book Drive, Daniel Pink shows how an increased salary increases productivity only when it comes to boring, monotonous tasks similar to those that were carried out by industrial workers in the factories of the 19th century in Europe. However, productivity in late capitalism’s knowledge-intensive jobs has no positive correlation with increased salary; the case is rather the reverse. Autonomy, having a vision, professional pride and social identity are the most important factors for maintaining and preferably even elevating the motivation and productivity of workers – not a fat pay cheque.
Both nature and the creative arsenal of Man himself are full of these entheogens – the term was coined by the historian Carl Ruck, as a more factual replacement for the erroneous term hallucinogens, and it is of course derived from syntheism’s Entheos, the god within ourselves – which have always been used for spiritual purposes. This was the case despite many nation states, on the pretext of the most bizarre and prejudiced excuses, assiduously trying to stop the use of entheogens in what must be regarded as the current paradigm shift’s most obvious form of bourgeois religious persecution of the emerging netocracy’s metaphysical lifestyle choice. It is from this radical equality, in this literally syntheist procedure, that the ethics of interactivity is born and developed – not in Levinas’ sentimental and anti-Nietzschean self-sacrificing romanticism.
The strategic prophet of the previous paradigm shift, G W F Hegel, defines his philosophical project as the construction of a bridge between the sacred and the secular. He distinguishes between three different spirits with the following characteristics: the objective, the subjective and the absolute spirit. What is important in our turbulent age here and now is to take Hegel’s advice and set aside the objective and subjective spirits to instead assume the vantage point of the absolute; to first equip ourselves thoroughly for the coming struggle between the bourgeoisie and the netocracy and then position ourselves on the battlefield, conscious of and in accordance with the radical truth as an act in the new paradigm. The paradigm shift is namely occurring right under the very noses of the old power elite; it establishes a completely new power system in a completely different place than the previous one (see The Netocrats) and thereby offers historically unique possibilities for a radical and genuine change in society’s orientation and organisation. But the paradigm shift can only be apprehended in the necessary detail from a position permeated by subtraction. Therefore the syntheist temples and monasteries are far more than merely exotic oases for some kind of collective spiritual pleasure. They are, in fact, the necessary points of departure, the revolutionary cells, in the subversive utopian project that goes under the name of the Syntheist Movement. It is there that new thoughts are being thought.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58