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Theological anarchism
The conviction that the Internet society offers a unique historical opportunity to realise the anarchist utopia and thereby the power of the collective libido unleash fully. The concept is synonymous with the British philosopher Simon Critchley’s ideal mystical anarchism.
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.
Theological anarchism is described exhaustively by the British philosopher Simon Critchley in his book The Faith of The Faithless, and it is of course completely synonymous with syntheism. And syntheism maintains that, precisely because everything of value is transient, unique, finite and mortal, it seeks existentiality and intensity. Thus, syntheism is the religion of immanence and multiple finitudes, and the radical opposite of the Abrahamic religions’ worship – contemptuous of reality – of another transcendental world and singular eternity. For how could anything at all enjoy its existence and be maximised in its existence, if it were not simultaneously aware of its own finality and limitation in the physical realm?
The syntheist utopia therefore entails a longing for a society where the law is no longer recognised and allowed to exercise its libidinal power. It is a society where religion has replaced alienation. In the syntheist utopia, bodies identify with their desires and libidinal drives and nothing else. Today’s politics might just as well be liberal-minded pragmatist, with its sights set constructively on the syntheist utopia by opening up to religion’s potential to counteract alienation. Because after all, politics is intimately intertwined with contemporary society and its citizens and material conditions. But the syntheist utopia is a completely different phenomenon than liberal-minded pragmatism – to begin with it can, of course, unabashedly take the immensity of the future as its point of departure, instead of, like pragmatism, being forced to stay within the narrow confines of the present – and therefore professes theological anarchism and nothing else.
Syntheos is driven by the desire for meaningful fellowship and an idea of the perfection of history. If the Father died with the Word, and if the Son died on the Cross, Syntheos is what is left of Christianity after its ideological collapse. Syntheos is the divinity of theological anarchism, a kind of independent Holy Ghost without either the Father or the Son. Syntheos is introduced historically, of course, by the syntheists themselves and is celebrated at the autumn equinox. The autumn equinox is the celebration of the community as the manifestation of the divine. The autumn equinox is also the celebration of the return of everything to its origin, of how creativity and destructiveness are two sides of the one coin, of the perfection of all circles, of death on the horizon as the creator of meaning for every living thing, and is followed by the Synthea quarter.
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.
Political ideology in the Internet age has two metaphysical starting points. First of all, there is the enormous expansion of the Internet and takeover of power that opens the arena for an antagonism between the rising netocracy – which with the aid of its ever-more powerful networks wants to liberate information flows – and the marginalised bourgeoisie, which with its nation states and major corporations wants to fence in and control information flows. And, secondly, there is the approaching ecological apocalypse, which absolutely must be averted if humanity is to survive at all. The syntheist politician is therefore first and foremost an environmentalist netocrat. But in order for syntheism to succeed in realising its ambition of opening the door to theological anarchism, it is being forced to take on the conflict with the old capitalist power structure, which consists of the nation states and the big global corporations.
This means that syntheism is capitalism’s antithesis. It is not superficially and merely formally anti-capitalist, such as the capitalist ideologies socialism and conservatism with their saccharine dreams of a controlled, top-down market – as though a pragmatic domestication of capital really would be able to affect alienation; rather, historical experience says that it is the other way around. No, syntheist anti-capitalism is deeply and genuinely radical on account of its being seated in theological anarchism. The syntheist reply to capitalism’s pillaging is not to start an anti-capitalist, bloody revolution with dramatic riots on the streets – after which the system would in any case soon re-emerge, insignificantly modified, since it de facto emanates in an emergent way from our age’s specific information technology structure. Such an ambition is indefensibly naive and belongs more in the Enlightenment’s patriarchal rationalism than in syntheism’s relationalist renaissance. The logically consequential, syntheist response to late capitalism and its hyperalienation is – as the syntheist philosopher Simon Critchley writes in The Faith of The Faithless – not the pretentious revolution, but instead the discrete subtraction.
Meillassoux’s British colleague Simon Critchley defines the syntheist faith as a pure faith in his syntheist epic The Faith of The Faithless. Critchley argues that it is faith per se and not its object that is utopianism’s innermost essence. He calls his conviction mystical anarchism, and this is of course identical with the theological anarchism that we formulate in this work. From this position, there is then nothing that stops us from taking one further step; from the pure faith of mystical anarchism to syntheism’s pure religion, a spirituality in which the religious practice in itself is the innermost essence of the religion. In the spirit of Critchley, the pure religion’s basic faith is in the idea that faith itself is necessary in order to make the impossible possible. Creativity runs from Atheos via Pantheos to Entheos, and the name of the enabled impossibility is of course Syntheos. Pure faith in a practised form is thus syntheism, the pure religion. As pure religion, religion is alienation’s complete opposite and the only available weapon against the cynical isolationism in our contemporary world. Critchley’s answer to the question of what must be done in our time is identical with syntheism’s subtraction and its ensuing monastisation; he has had enough of the classical Left’s bloody cultural revolutions – led by malicious and irresponsible tyrants and fanned by pompous and adventure-loving philosophers – who quite apart from wreaking great havoc and destruction, sooner or later are always absorbed by precisely the power structures that they purport to attack, and thereby in the long run actually strengthening rather than weakening them. This occurs since this sort of revolutionary, just like the quantum physics researcher, is internal and not external in relation to the relationalist society within which she acts. Subtraction must therefore always precede the revolution as truth as an act.
Subversive mysticism injects yet another threat, since its practitioners are not perceived as difficult to control in the same way as the sexually experimenting. Rather – which is even worse – they are experienced as if in some obscure manner they actually control the suspicious one himself. Therefore throughout history, this eucharistiphobia repeatedly expresses itself either through sexuality being made taboo if entheogens are tolerated in any way, or that entheogens are banned if liberated sexuality happens to be tolerated. Most paradigms and societies hate and attempt to minimise and if possible exterminate these two phenomena. The esoteric is equated with the satanic. Only in the syntheist utopia with its theological anarchism can the dream of liberated sexuality be found side by side with the dream of a free usage of entheogens – with the express ambition of realising the enormous potential for humanity of both of these dreams. For what is the anarchist society if not the very community where human pleasure is no longer restricted? And from the reverse perspective, what is thought control in its deepest sense, if not in fact a quest to control sex and drugs? Or to express the matter as a popular, countercultural t-shirt slogan: Drug control is thought control.
The distinction between escapist and inscapist religion becomes all the more important when the Internetified world – where all nations and cities of the world become intimately dependent on and entangled with each other – transitions from the patchwork of industrialism’s sovereign nation states to the global empire of informationalism. It is important here to understand that the global empire is not some frictionless, synchronised, centralised millennial kingdom, but rather a fragmented and highly decentralised mishmash of social nodes. This mishmash is in turn subordinate to uncontrollable and ruthless flows of capital and information criss-crossing the old national borders, rather than being subordinate to some symbolically masterful central power with tangible or even discernible reach. Out of these flows, a decisive conflict emerges between on the one hand the capitalist power structure of nation states and the giant corporations – organisations that will do everything they can to halt, limit and above all attempt to domesticate the Internet’s development and potential to their own advantage – and on the other hand the attentionalist power structure, created and celebrated by netocrats who are fighting for a free and open Internet in order to take over and control the world, driven by their vision of theological anarchism.
In its capacity as theological anarchism par excellence, syntheism is the netocracy’s own built-in metaphysics. But the battle against the statist-corporativist establishment is neither simple nor has it any preordained result in a contingent and indeterminist world. At least not in the short term. There are trends and there are counter-trends. What many people forget is that nation states, which have long appeared to be so “natural” and God-given, actually were the result of never-ending bloody and hard-fought wars of religion in the old Europe. Consequently, the choice of strategy is entirely decisive for the outcome of this struggle. The global empire will borrow many features from, for example, Ancient Rome and Medieval Europe. The first Christian congregations, the Mithraic orders, the Masonic lodges, the cathedrals and monasteries that were built during the Middle Ages are therefore all excellent sources of inspiration for a rising elite who believe in the need for, and want to engage in the building of, syntheist temples and monasteries in the global empire.
Since syntheism is the religion of the Internet age, syntheist temples and monasteries are both physical and virtual. In its capacity as a potential manifestation of Syntheos, the Internet is an excellent environment for spiritual work. When the temporary experiments are transformed into permanent autonomous zones, they will emerge as finished temples and monasteries. In relation to the alienated, chaotic surrounding world, these oases of authentic living and sustainability will shine with the power of attraction. But they will also demand from new members an honest distancing of themselves from capitalism’s short-term and tempting superficial rewards; a distancing from bourgeois individualism and its fixation on exploitation in favour of netocratic dividualism and its quest for imploitation. This spiritual work must be carried out without the slightest instrumentality in human relations, without the least ulterior motive of any dividual gain for any single syntheist agent. Unlike the individual, the dividual is not the centre of existence, but subordinated to the network as the fundamental metaphysical idea. Dedication to the syntheist congregation is the bond to theological anarchism’s practical execution, without beating about the bush or any caveats. This dedication is confirmed before the community as a truth as an act, for example, in the syntheist act of baptism: the infinite now.
Here we see three clear movements: constructivism generates liberal democracy, transcendentalism generates totalitarian dictatorships and genericism generates theological anarchism. Constructivism uses people’s differences as axiomatic and assumes that these differences create the necessary hierarchies. It regards universality as an illusion that appears in the form of an illusory antagonism every time it is time to hold democratic elections. Transcendentalism takes the hierarchisation one step further and launches and develops this axiom which says that when the authoritarian leader personifies the universality, when the leader and the party in some mysterious way become one and the party and the people become one, society is transcendentalised and history is realised. Genericism, however, sees history as an eternal repetition of the same with extremely minor variations for every loop, where people’s similarity moves down to the dividual level: already from the start, all people are to be regarded as an expression of one and the same substance – the universality is already there.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58