# Tribopoiesis -- Everything begins and ends with The Sociont
The ground moves beneath our feet; existence and our society now changes
so rapidly that even those who try to stay away and hide eventually are
compelled to step out into a world which in essential respects is
completely new. The three major megatrends that more than anything else
shape the shift to informationalism are *digitalization*, [[Nodalization]]
and *globalization.* This entire complex, cohesive process is a result
of the interactive revolution (see [[The Global Empire]]). In important
aspects this process entails a return to age-old patterns, albeit --
needles to say -- in a powerfully updated version. Digitalization
reawakens the sociobiologically preprogrammed [[The Sociont|sociont]] within Man and
leads, on the collective level, to what we call *psychological
tribalism*. The ensuing nodalization reawakens a passion for the common
language and the common history, which in turn constitute the
prerequisites for an old-school *sociological nationalism*. This
development occurs simultaneously and in parallel with the technological
revolution -- which is completely indifferent to every type of national
border -- blasting off in the direction of a rapidly stepped-up
globalization. World society got what we must regard as a global
constitution with the breakthrough of informationalism as early as in
the 1980s in the form of *the Internet Protocol,* and the entire
phenomenon that we refer to as *technological imperialism*.
One could also view this from a different angle: The information society
is characterized by a *technoimperialism* at the global level, by a
*socionationalism* at the regional level, and by a *psychotribalism* at
the local level. And the class structure of the emerging society is
quickly shaped according to a corresponding pattern: we can discern a
structure with the global netocracy and its *anywheres* atop (see David
Goodhart's influential book *The Road to Somewhere*), the regional
consumtariat in the middle, and the local consumtariat and its
*somewheres* at the bottom. While technology pushes for increased
globalization, large population groups -- primarily the old upper class
and the new underclass -- understandably react with vociferous demands
for intensified isolation and a tougher drawing of boundaries. This is a
recurring and wholly logical phenomenon in revolutionary times which is
called *impansionism* and in summary it means that every group
identifies its interests and makes an effort to promote these with all
available means. At the same time as we further ahead see a netocratic
elite emerge that need not care about physical geography at all; in the
horizon we witness a paradigmatic exodus consisting of *everywheres*.
The study of the human original tribe, *the sociont,* a phase of
civilization that lasted for at least 60,000 years -- and during which
almost all our species-distinguishing genes were shaped -- is called
[[Sociontology]]. If the Planck length, named after German physicist Max
Planck, is used as the smallest meaningful unit of length within the
natural sciences, the same goes for *Dunbar's number*, named after
British sociologist Roger Dunbar, within sociontology. This Dunbar's
number is usually estimated at 150 -- it simply estimates how many
people with whom one single person can maintain lasting social
relationships -- although it actually displays a remarkable flexibility
in the interval between 100 and 250. And this plasticity is needed for
us to be able to explain the differences in terms of the need and
capacity to handle strangers within the tribe's inner circuit, its outer
circuit, and within the shamanic caste. Within sociontology, social
units that comprise a number of people corresponding to Dunbar's number
are customarily called *clans*. Several clans then join to form
*tribes*, which makes sociontology a theory and study of *tribalism*.
The original sociont balances between clan and tribe in size, depending
on needs and purposes. It is a question of the number of fellow humans
in the social arena that we have the mental equipment to handle in a
functional way. Which means that it also is a question of our ability
for collective interplay, which in turn means that the individualism
that eventually emerges in the wake of humanism should be regarded as
nothing but the sociont's neurotic perversion. Rather it is when we
humans have no other social archetype to fall back on to structure our
collective interaction, it is the sociont and only the sociont that has
any relevance whatsoever.
Sociontology's development as a computer science entails a radical
reckoning with liberalism's [[Individualism]] and socialism's
*collectivism*, both of which collapse under pressure from the
increasingly expanding digital subcultures. It is rather the case that
neither the individual nor the collective has any anchoring whatsoever
in the sociobiology that was formed during the sociont's extended
existence. Quite the contrary. The sociont shaped Man to a fundamentally
tribal creature, where the dividual person and the group in question are
the same sort of dividuals, albeit that they appear in different guises
and also at different stages of emergence. Thus human existence is most
deeply viewed dividualist and tribalist. There really is no further need
for the individuals or collectives that the capitalist epoch required
and therefore also conjured up from fantasy as part of its ambitious
ideology production. What we instead observe is how society goes through
an enormous *retribalization* during informationalism. The strongest
membrane can once again be found around the sociont itself, what Arabian
renaissance philosopher Ibn Khaldun calls *asabiyya*, the internal
loyalty within the sociont that defeats all other values. Ibn Khaldun
even claims that *asabiyya* generates an even stronger loyalty among the
priests within the sociont, not just *vis-à-vis* the sociont itself, but
also as the recurring ambition to keep the deepest secret under the lock
and the key that is called [[The Barred Absolute]]. This insight explains
why even a crass realist such as Niccolò Machiavelli in renaissance
Italy, inspired by Khaldun, despite everything prefers the republic to
the despot, quite simply because the republic's socioemotional ties are
stronger. A system that prioritizes the privileges of old elites above
authentic innovation quickly moves toward its demise -- this is only
natural.
There has long been a tendency among European thinkers such as Slavoj
Žižek and Alain Badiou to get mired in the individualist paradigm that
arises with humanism, a paradigm where the subject lives in the
emptiness that arises after the subject has killed God and instead longs
for a party or a political movement to come and fill the void, which
never happens. We call this strained predicament *liberal castration*.
However there are other ways of orienting oneself in a landscape without
God. In his mammoth trilogy *Spheres*, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk
builds a spatial rather than a temporal metaphysics, based on the
isolated units that Man uses to make existence comprehensible.
Sloterdijk converts Man's phenomenological fixations from bubbles via
globes to fluffy foam. The fundamental nomadology, the story of Man as a
creature in constant motion, greatly concerns these spheres, their
relations to each other, and above all how these must be set in motion
to remain alive.
## So how do the immune systems of the spheres work; how do they protect themselves and how do they grow strong, in part when they are stationary, in part when they accelerate anew and move through the topography that is at hand?
## How do the spheres react when an external phallus cracks the codes with which they protect themselves against the surrounding world and penetrates through the enclosing membrane?
## And how does this very reaction determine which of all the spheres dominate exactly which paradigm and under which circumstances this can occur?
## What, for instance, causes the powerful historical swings between on the one hand the sphere of the individual and on the other hand the sphere of the collective?
The study of the nature of these spheres and their
development is called *membranics,* while the study of the shifting life
conditions of these spheres is called [[Paradigmatics]]. Or to give
Sloterdijk, a sincere Kantian if ever there was one, the sort of
Hegelian constructive criticism his stylish *sphereology* deserves: What
is interesting in an age obsessed with network dynamics and
relationalism is not the spheres in themselves, but the relations within
and between them. This is why Hegelian membranics with its studies of
the general boundary rules within and between the spheres is so much
more interesting than a Kantian sphereology. While time indefatigably
grinds on outside and between the spheres, which means that when time
collides with the spheres, each of these receives their own
paradigmatics, without any other laws than contingence itself prevailing
between the paradigmatically controlled spheres.
The single sphere that by far is of greatest importance to Man is his
own sociont. And the sociont has its own [[Archetypology]] which is
developed during a process that goes under the designation *tribal
mapping* (see *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the Network
Society*). The inner circuit is the matriarchy. The outer circuit is the
patriarchy. [[The Androgynous Caste]] constitutes the sociont's internal
intermediaries, a personification of the membranics of the sexes. *The
shamanic caste* however lives in the borderland or gray zone between the
various tribes, where the belonging to any of them is never one hundred
percent. The shamanic caste thus functions as the sociont's external
intermediaries, a personification of the sociont's own membranics. We
speak of these odd relatives within the sociont as *the shamanoid
archetypes*. There is always an *intra muros*, a world inside the walls,
that is characterized by intratribalism. However the shamanoid minority
moves unconcernedly on both sides of the walls, which thus are permeable
to these exceptional people that are difficult to place and who since
birth live in an intertribalist world -- for them the walls are only
furnished with diplomatic membranes. And since the shamanoids have
received the tribe's assignment to manage *the horizontal diplomacy
vis-à-vis* the other socionts, they might just as well enjoy a monopoly
on *the vertical diplomacy* with the gods and the spirit world too.
Strangers are after all just strangers.
Thus it is best to allow all sensitive and potentially violent goings-on
to occur outside the walls. We call these external border areas *the
shamanic colonies,* and it is there and nowhere else that Man has taken
the decisive civilizational steps that it entails to erect temples and
set up trading posts. It is perfectly possible to apply this figure of
thought to modern history; an illuminating example is historian Thaddeus
Russell's important book *A Renegade History of The United States*,
where the author convincingly revises American history in its entirety
from the perspective of the shamanoids. A more solid *exodological*
platform for an America heading into the Internet Age is hard to
imagine. Here once again it is inculcated that the shamanoid characters
really are *outcasts* in the literal sense of the word; whenever the
surrounding world appears menacing and hostile, pattern interpretation
and explanation is requested, the shamanic caste is called in to
interpret the intentions of gods, demons and strangers alike *vis-à-vis*
the sociont. But when the intratribal tensions grow in strength and the
lynch mobs are stomping down streets or raging in media channels, then
it is the blood of the shamanoids one is after, then these outcasts are
the ones who are sacrificed as witches and sorcerers at the heretics'
stake. Suddenly all the external contacts, just recently exemplarily
beneficial, appear basically suspect and turn these notorious outcasts
into perfect scapegoats. The one who has sold his own soul to the Devil
and has become an *informer* can hardly believe that there are any
innocent worshippers left. We express this apocalyptic state as the
anojective drenching the hyperjective in the crowd.
Life within the sociont does of course largely hinge on people's ability
to find their way around the archetypal categories to thereby enable
themselves to become the *erchtype* that mimics the corresponding
archetype. Philosopher and anthropologist René Girard terms this
extensive imitation that arises within the sociont *mimesis*. And this
*mimesis* is without a doubt fundamental both for the human drive system
and for the entire social theater that arises around it. Man is a
mimetic herd animal. Testimony to this is the persistent search for *the
lesser gods* -- that is: the erchtypal mimicking of these icons and
idols, a conduct that is connected to an intense yearning for the
merciful attention and confirmation from these -- with numbing emphasis.
It is not even possible to make the conventional division into masters
and slaves without first taking the constant mimicry into consideration.
Humans imitate each other absolutely all the time, and with good reason:
functional behaviors work, and to deviate from the crowd is frightening
and can lead to sundry forms of ejection and isolation. Only he who, in
this context, can be labeled heroic can create something novel, and if
so, it only occurs as an exception. To create something new is fraught
with risk and moreover difficult. The slave therefore does nothing but
imitate his environment, which is what makes him precisely a slave. And
he moreover does so without caring or understanding why. To
unreflectively repeat is what appears natural and anything else would
therefore be unthinkable. The slave is stuck in this forced repetition;
the direct mimicking thus becomes a kind of curse of one's short-term
memory. It lacks both history and future, intelligence and
transcendence, which is what the hero strives for and attains in his
blessed moments. This is also why mimicking eventually becomes a
mimicking of desire in itself, what Girard calls *mimetic desire*. And
when mimetic desire is stepped up, there is but one exit remaining: the
Cybelian lynch mob and its liberating sacrifice of the more or less
arbitrarily chosen scapegoat.
It is important in this context to understand that all human societies
at many different levels -- clans, tribes, nations and empires --
fundamentally are constructed as antagonisms between the inner life of
the sociont and its shamanoid *outcasts*. This is the cohesive force,
and Girard demonstrates in his work how the process consists of a
regularly recurring *abjectification* of the shamanic caste in the
outskirts of society. The internal dynamics in society, both within the
inner and outer circuits, is created through mimicry and rivalry. But
the mimicry and rivalry in turn create enormous and hard-to-manage
tensions over time, tensions that ultimately must be channeled and find
an outlet through some suitable victim being selected, that this victim
is ripped out of the anonymous mass and appointed scapegoat, to then be
slaughtered ritually. After this ritual slaughter the victim is
transformed and incorporated with the lesser gods that are
iconologically available for the herd members' own worship. No victims
then work as well as, or are closer at hand than, the shamanoids who
happen to find themselves within the sociont's borders. Thus the
abjectification of the shamanic caste serves no less than three
different purposes simultaneously. First it separates the shamanoids and
keeps these at a considerable distance from both the emotionally driven
intrigues of the inner circuit and the methodical strategies of the
outer circuit. Secondly the abjectification generates a reassuringly
strong cohesion and identity within the entire sociont, whose extension
and borders become clear only when it defines itself *vis-à-vis* what
lies outside and cannot quite be trusted. And thirdly it offers a
liberating outlet for the growing pressure that arises within the
sociont through mimicry and rivalry, wherefore society -- if only
temporarily -- can heave a sigh of relief and recreate the illusion of
stability and social normalcy. Albeit soon enough it is time to repeat
the same process anew.
During the European Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries,
individualism and collectivism turned out to be the pair of opposites
whose antagonism could develop the energy that supported capitalism.
However this was, and is, a purely intellectual construction; Man is
neither individualist nor collectivist. At least not more than he is
fundamentally neurotic or psychotic -- the two extreme states that Man
tries to balance *vis-à-vis* each other to reach a measure of
constructive and creative equilibrium. Both liberalism and socialism
thus are built on ideologically colored wishful thinking. Man is
fundamentally tribal. His world consists of a safe, intratribal sphere
that is built around an *axis mundi*, the axis that unites phallic
heaven and matrichal earth. Life within the sociont constantly wrestles
with issues of independence, cohesion and hierarchy. In the book *The
Righteous Mind* (2012), American psychologist Jonathan Haidt divides
these three categories into six subcategories. *Care* (and its opposite
harm) corresponds to intimate independence. *Freedom* (and its opposite
oppression) corresponds to distanced independence. *Justice* (and its
opposite cheating) corresponds to intimate cohesion. *Loyalty* (and its
opposite betrayal) corresponds to distanced cohesion. *Authority* (and
its opposite subversion) corresponds to intimate hierarchy. While
*Sacredness* (and its opposite humiliation) corresponds to distanced
hierarchy. But this relatively idyllic world exists in relation to a
challenging and often threatening, external, intertribal world.
The six subcategories work because they presume a unifying threat
outside the membrane. Inside the membrane the subject flourishes,
outside the membrane the abject threatens. Within [[Intratribalism]] Man
is safe and secure, within [[Intertribalism]] Man is constantly challenged
and threatened (see *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the
Network Society*). This means that the intellectual challenge that
constituted a real threat to the capitalist paradigm was not as widely
assumed *the death of God* -- which on the contrary constituted a
prerequisite for and cornerstone of the entire project -- but instead
*the death of The World*. The solid, cohesive world had been under
attack since the Axial Age, with its torrent of self-absorbed gurus and
self-help teachers who constantly oppose an understanding of the world
as a whole and instead fill all the gaps that emerge with their own
narcissistic delusions. Ever since the printing press had its
breakthrough in the form of newspapers, books and pamphlets, the
pressure against this entire cohesive conceptual world had been
overwhelming. Individualism was realized in North America after the
Europeans had been ejected and independence had been declared. Cartesian
individualism thus became the cohesive American state religion. If
Christianity once largely was an imitation of Judaism, in the same way
that Judaism can be said to have been an imitation of Zoroastrianism,
then American individualism developed into one big imitation of
Christianity and its ideals. Unsurprisingly all the three American
religious movements that have arisen since -- Jehovah's Witnesses, the
Mormons and Scientology -- are nothing else but hysterical pathologies
that profit from Christianity's built-in self-contradictions.
Comparing with the theologically extremely more sophisticated *Silk Road
Triad* that arose along the trade routes in Eurasia, we simply refer to
these three exclusively American religions as *the Disney World Triad,*
and the entire short but intense American history of ideas can be read
into these three bizarre iconologies.
## So how do these new religions handle the American landscape that they just have conquered through extensive genocide and wars of extermination?
Well, Jehovah's Witnesses constitute the fundamentalist, fully logical interpretation of
Christianity's many shortcomings, that is: as *text*. Unsurprisingly,
Jehovah's Witnesses get stuck geographically right in the city where the
colonists disembark, New York. The Mormons are then the fundamentalist,
mythical interpretation of Christianity's shortcomings, that is: as
*land*. Therefore the Mormons geographically seek out the most isolated
part of the American Midwest to build an American Israel in the area
around Salt Lake in Utah. The Disney World Triad is then rounded off
with Scientology, as the fundamentalist pathical interpretation of
Christianity's shortcomings, that is: as *media*. From now on religion
is exclusively about the unabashedly, laceratingly commercialized
postmodern market forces' completion of the Christian project. Naturally
the Scientologists promise prefabricated paradises that lie on empty,
frozen, inhospitable planets and moons far out in space, perfectly in
line with the U S Space Program, which confers honor on the relatively
young nation and entails an apparent and eager imitation of how Columbus
once conquered America. Therefore the space program is allowed to cost
astronomical sums, while the genocides on the continent itself are
silenced and the entire process of conquest is systematically euphemized
in the most vulgar fashion imaginable.
As for Scientology it is now no longer even a question of appeasing an
autocratic God and milking him for resources to ensure good harvests or
prosperity increases in general. No, now the ambition is instead to tame
religion as such in order *to milk religion in itself for its
resources*. Without the least excuse or further ado. It is therefore
perhaps not surprising to anyone that Scientology picks up considerable
pace precisely among Hollywood movie stars in California, where one
awaits salvation from outer space and where *those who pay the most*
constitute *the chosen ones*, a status that continually is confirmed
through maximal medial exposure. Scientology is quite simply Cartesian
individualism as a cornerstone in the capitalist religion in a surreally
caricatured version. The practitioners no longer even pretend to have
any genuine relations with each other, or with the Universe, unless
these relations first are formulated in financial terms. First there is
gobbling (*das Freßen*), as Bertolt Brecht poetically wrote, and only
thereafter come morals.
## So what is it that America ultimately perfects if not Christianity's dream of *the transparent society*, where *the barred absolute* has been eliminated for good?
All curtains and barriers are removed, there is no longer anything that blocks the believer's
direct connection with God! America is the laboratory where European
capitalism has succeeded in developing the most vulgar nonsense
imaginable into pseudospiritual ecstasy. The religions within the Disney
World Triad are rather touchingly illustrative textbook examples of
*vulgar eventology* as theological concept.
But whatever one thinks of the spiritual ambition, at least one cannot
deny the medial creativity, nor the ideological stringency, that
expresses itself in some quarters of the United States. It is the
Indians and the Americans who on their respective home turfs and
continents are the main standard bearers of iconology during
informationalism, and make it useful as the people's own religion. In
precisely this respect the eventological capitals Persepolis, Jerusalem
and Rome do not have much to offer against the nomadological capitals
Bollywood and Hollywood (which also receive a measure of fire support
from Nigerian Nollywood). At least not when it comes to peddling as many
knick-knacks with connection to the lesser gods as possible. Jehovah's
Witnesses are the neurotics, the Mormons are the psychotics, and the
Scientologists are the perverts in the United States' religious
madhouse. But it is undeniable that all three religions hold onto the
heritage from Cartesian Gnosticism with an admirably powerful grip. The
problem is just that informationalist attentionalism finds no fertile
ground in this religious madhouse, wherefore yet another exodus is to be
expected. This time it is about leaving what long was the shimmering
paradise at the horizon for all migrants: postcapitalist United States.
When vertical thinking's cult of innovation is replaced by horizontal
thinking's decoration worship, phallus is castrated even in America and
progress simply moves somewhere else, as it must. It is toward the
phallic heaven and not toward the matrichal earth that we must direct
our spiritual energy if we want innovation to pick up pace anew.
In a series of books, Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han
thoroughly analyzes how Cartesian individualism during late capitalism
is developed into an out-and-out, isolationist [[Hypernarcissism]]. This
no longer even concerns a creature having been made invisible at the
bottom of the societal hierarchy à la the Italian Giorgio Agamben's
concept *Homo sacer*, but instead a liberated, atomized and
efficiency-optimized *Homo liber* obsessed with [[Autoexploitation]]. We
have, as French philosopher Bernhard Stiegler observes, gone from the
*biopolitics* of the disciplinary society to the *psychopolitics* of the
achievement society. And we have, as Moroccan sociologist Eva Illouz so
unerringly expresses the prevailing condition, landed in the midst of
*emotional capitalism*. Nowhere is Byung-Chul Han's *Homo liber* more
prominent than in the Californian obsession with *flow* and *healing* to
optimize the quantitatively measurable in life and a vapid conception of
good health before a true quality of life and depth of thought. American
cyberneticist Curtis Yarvin even advocates an American dictatorship
built solely on a state-directed optimization of the health of the
populace as the solution to all of the network society's strenuous
internal conflicts.
## Could the emptiness of Gnosticism possibly become any more obvious than this?
It is clear that the development upward and forward ever since the
Bronze Age has been technological, while the development within religion
only has plunged deeper and deeper down into a massive vulgar popular
culture. Man's imitation of technology itself has created the illusion
of a religious and spiritual development, when the only thing that has
happened is that religion *de facto* has been vulgarized in its quest to
make itself popular, and that it has lost every shred of sophistication.
If religion once was about the long and difficult path to wisdom, it has
with the aid of the increasingly quick and cheap media instead been
turned into an easily sold packet of *quick fixes* and *shortcuts*. This
is proven by the journey from sophisticated Zoroastrianism in ancient
Persia to vulgar-commercial Scientology in the postmodern United States.
The difference could not be more glaring. Once a career used to be based
on a lifetime of learning, while it is now expected to occur through a
moment of magical transformation. Religion about the object has
fortunately gone from magic to technology, but this has been carried out
at the cost of the religious subject having sped in the opposite
direction, from a technology one must deserve through hard work to false
promises of easily attained salvation. A development that was launched
back in the days of the Manichaean shift from Judaism to Christianity
and with the Mazdakian shift from Zoroastrianism to Islam in the Middle
East of late antiquity.
A major problem confronting this drastic vulgarization of religion is
that the world is monist -- not dualist. Everything is dependent upon
and interconnected with everything else. This is not a metaphysical
assumption, but an observable fact. What exists, exists, and what does
not exist, does not exist. There is no in between, and if there were,
there would of course be an in between, which would bring us back to
strict monism. Our planet is fully conquered, there are no white spots
left on the map, at least none of real interest, and outside the planet
there is nothing of value to add. Thus humanity approaches a kind of
existential claustrophobia, which afflicts us since the horizon has come
so close to us. *What you see is what you get*. The infinite world
furnished with infinite resources turns out to be an illusion. The world
is finite, the boundaries cannot be manipulated. Which at the same time
makes the world coherent and internally interconnected. This makes
planet Earth a global empire requiring a structured and advanced
collaboration between strangers in different places for the empire to
even survive, since it faces various threats of devastation. That is:
the planet itself will of course survive, it is we humans who along with
most animal species risk being wiped out when or if our living
conditions become too poor. This being the case is not conditioned by
humans having striven or voted for the global empire, but is merely in
accordance with technology's own agenda. It is quite simply what is in
the cards.
## Then the question is: who has best succeeded in handling the conflict between the coherence of The World and the psychological fragmentation of Man?
## What actually made the original sociont function, when both the capitalism and communism that are built around the false pair of opposites the individual and the collective have failed so spectacularly in handling humanity's basic survival issues?
The problem is not primarily, as Sigmund Freud claims, that Man is discontent in culture
because it alienates him from his Dionysian drive system, but rather,
and at least to a greater extent, that religion has decayed so much that
it no longer serves as a compass for those who wish to orient themselves
through an increasingly unfathomable existence. There quite simply is no
functioning instrument left with which Man can tame himself and the rest
of nature to create a culture that gets the job done. We are discontent
to no use at all.
Thus it is the lack of *authentic religion*, and not some excess
production of culture in the form of a civilizational straitjacket,
which is humanity's great dilemma when entering informationalism. It is
not sufficient, as does Michel Foucault, to advocate that life should be
lived as an individual work of art. In an interactive age where Man's
dominant state is an aesthetic pathos, life must rather be lived as if
*the sociont sees itself as a tribal work of art*. We call this
spontaneous expression *tribopoiesis,* and its pathos [[Protopianism]].
Individualism versus collectivism was never more than the false
dichotomy of the capitalist paradigm. The individual and the collective
are actually completely dependent on each other as concepts, two sides
of the same capitalist coin, and none of them -- and certainly no
artificial antagonism either -- reflects Man and his prerequisites. What
does reflect Man, however, is the concept tribopoiesis and the idea of
the tribal singularity as Man's origin and only reasonable identity. We
were never either individuals or a collective, we were always tribal and
only tribal creatures. And everything we need, as single dividuals, is
an archetypology that tells us where on the tribal map each of us
belong. What we need is a proper and complete *archetypography*.
Freud himself would reasonably agree that a [[Socioanalysis]] is necessary
before we can devote ourselves to any meaningful form of
*psychoanalysis*. Before we can reform the subject and its struggle in
part with itself, in part with its surrounding world, we first must
comprehend the surrounding world itself as though it were a world ready
to face the psyche. Karl Marx invented the concept *symptomatology*
ahead of Freud and his successor Jacques Lacan. But it is Freud and
Lacan (and between them the German-Jewish Frankfurt School, which builds
on and further develops both Marx and Freud) who from the 1930s and
onward excel precisely as symptomatologists. The search for pioneering
events within eventology and the search for pathological traumas within
traumatology merge in the search for comprehensive and extensive
patterns in society as social symptomatology. Psychoanalysis is thereby
converted to socioanalysis. And this is where the 21st century Hegelian
renaissance comes in. G W F Hegel himself, the predecessor of the
Marxist symptomatologist and the Freudian socioanalyst, is the gestalt
that personifies the Hegelian *Zeitgeist* of informationalism.
Hegel views the insight into the altered state of affairs as a platform
for [[Event|the event]], that is: as the foundation on which the trustee of *der
Zeitgeist* steps forward and leads the exodus toward the new paradigm or
the promised land (both of them work equally well). When Hegel describes
Napoleon as he who embodies the *Zeitgeist* in his own age, he finds it
hard to rein in his enthusiasm. This is the priest's worship of the
chieftain in its most pristine form. It is then Marx with his
symptomatology and Freud with his socioanalysis who attempt to repeat
the Hegelian turn. Marx does this by searching for early signs of the
beloved *proletariat* as a kind of postcapitalist Hebrews who are to
leave the factories in odious Egypt, while Freud does it through
searching for early signs that the enlightened *analysand* shall rise up
from the therapy couch. And it is, interestingly enough, the extrovert
Marx who becomes the utopian and the (comparatively) reserved Freud who
becomes the dystopian of the twain. The Frankfurt School can, in the
crack between the two of them, not really settle as anything else but
*critical theory* without any possible intellectual exit, other than
through a renaissance for Hegelian dialectics. It is in the encounter
between the dialectical deadlock between Marxist utopianism
(collectivism) and Freudian dystopianism (individualism) on the one
hand, and the digital age's energetic arrival on the other hand, that
the Messianic hope of *netocratic protopianism* forges ahead. And this
Hegelian concretion is wholly based upon the return of the sociont in
the history of ideas.
A prerequisite for this necessary reconnection with Hegel is an even
more comprehensive and profound reconnection with Zoroaster. This
entails that it becomes necessary to revise the Western self-image by
returning to -- and settling the account with the entire tenacious myth
of -- the so fervently cherished period that Karl Jaspers has labeled
*the Axial Age*. It is true that the Eurasian landmass entered a new
era, colored by new forms of communication (software) in interplay with
new metals (hardware) around 800 BC, and it is true that this new era
was characterized by unusually long periods of peace, robust economic
surpluses, and a dramatic population increase, and that this applies
from Europe and North Africa in the West to China and Japan in the East.
Naturally a result of this was also extensive production of both art and
ideas, which overall entailed a veritable golden age for a flourishing,
expansive culture. The quantitative increase is remarkable and
indisputable; it is however by no means clarified that this culture also
would be qualitatively superior to earlier periods in history. The major
theories for how empires and nations shall be conducted had already been
developed and practiced in Asia and the Middle East. So that this
culture also would be qualitatively superior to earlier periods in
history is extremely doubtful. Rather, the Axial Age merely contributed
with increasingly self-absorbed navel-gazing and decadence, and hampered
the priestly work of creating peace, trade and prosperity.
Balance is always desirable. Just as an overview and afterthought,
strategy and purposefulness. One-sidedness, extremism and wishful
thinking are, on the other hand, detrimental. Which is only natural. But
in a situation where society has everything to gain by stimulating the
outer circuit to contribute maximally to the progress of the entire
sociont, the intellectual arena has been captured by a bizarre set of
Gnostic and unworldly theories that mindlessly identify with the woman,
the child and above all the narcissistic pillar-saint. Matrichal myths
such as pacifism, vegetarianism and reincarnation have gradually become
all the rage. The alpha males can supposedly to some extent still mate
-- it is only possible to violate biology to a certain extent -- but
otherwise one would rather put them in the doghouse than use them for
what they are really good at: expanding a society's resources and
defending it against external threats. The inner circuit despises the
outer circuit and speaks of "toxic masculinity" instead of devoting much
thought to future deliveries of protection and provision. This really
does not bode well. What is important to understand is that Buddhism,
Taoism, Christianity and Platonism all are products of the Axial Age. In
varying degrees -- and for better or worse -- they place the woman, the
child and the pillar-saint at the center of things. The problem is that
the authentic phallus is lacking in all such models, wherefore it all
tends to develop into a Gnosticism that becomes entrenched in the
presexual or the asexual. It is about a figure of thought that
aggressively opposes phallus itself, which in turn leads to ideologies
that consistently are driven by [[The Peter Pan Syndrome]], the eagerness
to acquire all the advantages of the adult phallus, without having to
affirm the phallic energy and ambition.
Buddhism rejects the libido and desire itself; it creates ideology out
of contempt and denial. One strives to abandon nomadological
circularity, which only the self-glorifying pillar-saint can manage,
wherefore the pillar-saint's virtues are highlighted and praised. The
idealization of the extinguished libido made mortido so strong that
Buddhism irremediably was split into two different branches: the
Hinayana Buddhists' obstinate embrace of the Buddha's refusal to
compromise as regards the extinguished desire, which leads to an
indifference at Man's actual suffering in existence, compelled an exodus
to Mahayana Buddhism, which enabled one to accept and even welcome
warmth and compassion within religion. Thereby one could at least
complement the ascetic pillar-saint with a nurturing mother figure.
Christianity follows precisely the same track by explicitly rejecting
sexuality and anything at all that is associated with the corporeal,
which expresses itself in a constant willingness to try to sweep
sexuality's enormous power under the rug by paying tribute to the savior
who dies on the cross precisely for the sake of our sins, and who
himself is the eternal virgin and the only scapegoat that ever will be
needed. It is in no way a coincidence that a sorry multitude of the
saints that the Catholic Church initially produces are more or less
psychotic young women with severe eating disorders as they are imbued
with a glowing hatred of their own bodies.
Taoism makes the same phallus-dodging maneuver by describing existence
as a constant dance between phallus and matrix, but without concerning
itself with the bothersome discordant exception that sexuality
constitutes and that the priest personifies by being he who separates
phallus and matrix. Sexuality is of course no idyllic picnic and the
idea of a harmonious paradise existence during earthly life is a prime
example of existential illusion being manufactured. The dialectics
between logos and mythos is constantly disturbed by a third narrative in
the form of *pathos*, which of course makes its presence felt precisely
when *yang* and *yin* seem to interact optimally. Platonism refuses to
recognize the split phallus at all and instead separates reason from the
body with the purpose of placing the former above the latter, which
naturally makes all the world's Gnostic pillar-saints cheer and spurs
them on to compete to death in asceticism. This entire figure of thought
is basically hostile to life. A society really has no reason to
celebrate that the asexual pillar-saint is allowed to believe himself to
be a more elevated creature than all the warriors and hunters that have
protected and provided for the sociont over the course of history, and
who therefore also have taken center stage over millennia of
nomadological rituals.
It is only a society that has attained significant material prosperity
and that has had the luxury of avoiding war over a longer period of time
that even can indulge in playing with this sort of infantile fantasies,
which of course always idealize the immature boy on the pillar, an actor
who intoxicates himself on his own vainglory but who cannot manage
either the chieftain's or the priest's ungrateful toil in the outer
circuit's patriarchy. It is thus a case of a psychosocial luxury disease
that no society can afford when survival is at stake, a kind of
occupational therapy for inadequately stimulated chatterboxes without
burdensome knowledge in either history or psychology. Or religion! It
is, moreover, always time to be vigilant whenever pacifism and
vegetarianism are trending on the opinion stock market. This does of
course not entail that violence and war are bad habits that are about to
be eradicated, but it means that violence and war are eliminated from
religion and placed far below religion as if it were a case of some sort
of waste products from toxic masculinity. In fact, war is of course, as
Carl von Clausewitz observes, "merely a continuation of politics by
other means". And indeed: eventually they sit there, the fancy
pillar-saints, spread out across deserts and in the wilderness, warring
with each other via armies of ideological *know-it-alls*. In this way
Gnosticism acquires its most powerful expression when the Mazdakites,
whom the monist Zoroastrians frenetically fight within the confines of
the Persian Sassanid Empire, return in Arabic form under an Islamic
banner in the early 7th century.
## For what is Islam if not a bunch of pillar-saints spread out across deserts and mountainous regions who whack soldiers on the head with decrees and proceed to bait them against each other in a single long *jihad* without any end in sight?
Where the only remaining difference between Sunni Islam and Shia Islam is that Sunni Islam demands that the soldiers shall read the Quran and submit to the scripture in the same way that the pillar-saint does, while Shia Islam demands the the
soldiers shall submit to the pillar-saint's own private interpretation
of the Quran -- a variant of the same conflict (that is no less bloody)
as that between Catholicism and Protestantism. It has been fortunate for
the rest of the world that it is fundamentally impossible for Islam to
unite under one single pillar-saint. Allah can never be anything other
than vague in his leadership under such conditions. The illiterate
Muhammad may be his only prophet and mouthpiece, but the pillar-saints
are many and in deep disagreement. Admittedly Islam, in contrast to
Christianity, does not sweep the violence and sex under the rug with
dogmatic brooms; Islam does of course have a totalitarian ambition whose
aim is to color every fiber in society and control both politics and
markets as well as private life in minute detail. But since Islam
proclaims an aggressively Gnostic view of violence and sex, Islamic
culture becomes strongest and most vital exactly when the religion's
total grip on culture and society is weakened. When the Quran embraces
all of society with an iron fist, all oxygen quickly disappears; the
level of enculturation drops and there is a general dumbing down of
discussions.
The four important religions from the Middle East must be understood in
the following way: Since Zoroastrianism worships the military phallus,
Islam can never be anything other than *the imitation of the worshipping
of the military phallus*. And since Judaism worships the priestly
phallus, Christianity can never be anything other than *the imitation of
the worshipping of the priestly phallus*. Thus it appears wholly
reasonable that Islam is founded by and constantly refers back to a
military by the name of Muhammad, while Christianity is founded by and
constantly refers back to a priest by the name of Peter. This becomes
possible through the Gnostic maneuver to blow up the door to the barred
absolute and reshape the barred religions of the militaries and the
priests to more easily digestible messages tailored to the masses.
It is precisely this maneuver that must be reversed for eventological
religion to deserve a new historical opportunity. What is needed is a
new worldview: that we understand *the West* as the territory west of
the Gobi Desert and the Hindu Kush where the hope of the phallic event
was developed -- Europe is merely a recent phenomenon propelled by
printing presses and gunboats in the northwestern corner of the Western
world -- a development which radically breaks with the nomadology that
was dominant in the East. And from this perspective, the Persian-Jewish
renaissance is completely decisive. Zoroastrianism and Judaism were
after all built as religions for *the adults of God*, while Christianity
and Islam attract *the children of God* with free access to God, who in
this context is reduced to one big [[Mamilla]]. At the same time as the
East's obsession with *samsara* -- the only thing that exists is the
eternal recurrence of the same -- only can end with the yearning for
*mahamudra* -- the return to matrix, the fusion of all divisions in
history, and thus the annihilation of everything -- where death and only
death is the single and closing event. Because if phallus never arrives,
culture is invariably turned inward against itself and its own demise.
What happens during the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age
is that the old social ties within the sociont are torn apart. Sedentary
life has now established such a high degree of social complexity that
old nomadological structures such as clans and tribes do not suffice to
keep a territorially and population-wise constantly expanding society
together. The new eventological narratives speak of greater social
units, and dreams of empires and nations are stirred to life. This is
very clear from the Bronze Age's two best-known narratives, imperialist
Zoroastrianism and nationalist Judaism. However this expansion also
entails that [[The Shamanic Caste]] is pushed out and away and ends up at
an increasing distance from the center of society. The shamanoids leave
the densely populated river valleys and seek out desolate mountainous
areas where they soon establish what the ancient Persians call *castag*
-- a phenomenon explored in detail by Panamanian anthropologist Pablo
Vazquez -- that is: monasteries, orders and other institutions for
precursors to later monks and nuns. The shamanoids also seek distance
from the densely populated river valleys to secluded oases, distant port
cities and other more or less insignificant places along the new,
expanding trade routes, both on land and at sea, where they soon operate
the local inns, public baths, night clubs and brothels.
Seeking out the shaman in the forest for spiritual or sexual adventures,
or seeking out the shaman in the forest for therapeutic contacts with
the gods in heaven and the underworld, or ritual contacts with the
strangers from the terrifying and partly unfamiliar surrounding world,
now acquires completely new meanings. But it is still a tribal map with
the same women from the inner circuit, the same men from the outer
circuit, and the same *outcasts* from the shamanic caste. The only
difference is that the map has grown considerably, in step with the
sociont having expanded from clans and tribes to empires and nations.
And thus the separation between on the one hand the two main circuits
that harbor the majority of the population and, on the other hand, the
shamanic caste outside and the minority that can be found there, becomes
dramatically magnified. The walls' smooth permeability is lost. The
monasteries in the mountains, the oases in the deserts, and the trading
cities at the river mouths take over the sociocultural role that the
cult sites and trading posts outside the walls, administered by the
shamanic caste, had served during the sociont's heyday.
That this is the case is evident for Zoroaster when he around 1700 BC in
his text *Gathas* formulates Zoroastrian eventology as a pervasive
reformation of the nomadology of the Indo-Iranian tribes. Zoroaster is
uncompromising in his criticism of the shamanoids, when they as early as
the Bronze Age venture so far away from the sociont that they lose the
sense of their vital role within the same, as the sociont's cohesive
outsiders, as the particular within the universal that *de facto* makes
the universal identity possible. This explains why Zoroastrianism to
this day does not recognize any monk or nun orders outside society's
internal order. But when the Iron Age commences, the boundaries are
widened to such a large extent that a panoply of doctrines of worlds
outside the world arise. The Eurasian landmass enters an era of
increasingly longer periods of peace and burgeoning prosperity. Around
the corner awaits the Axial Age. Soon societies from China in the East
to Rome in the West are filled with one new philosophy after the other.
Intellectual life enters a completely new phase. And what unites these
actually incompatible doctrines is the new, suddenly arisen interest in
precisely the shaman's separation from the sociont and all the new
existentialist fantasies that gain nourishment from this.
If there is anyone that deserves to be called an *individual,* if it
actually had been possible to imagine such a character, it is *the
shaman*. The shamans do of course *de facto* live in the outskirts of
the tightly cohesive sociont, they are excluded from many social
contexts, so view them from the outside, perhaps not always without a
certain yearning. But it is only if the sociont is afflicted with
loosening and dissolution tendencies and the social extremes are
emphasized as exemplary, that it is possible to peddle individualism as
some sort of universal religion. And precisely this happens in Europe,
where reading and writing proficiency starts to take effect broadly and
create pervasive societal changes during the 17th century. As the answer
to all the questions that arise in the field of tension between
Descartes' atomism, Spinoza's pantheism and Leibniz's relativism, the
Kantian subject, which quickly sets a precedent and acquires influence,
is launched. It is no coincidence or the result of some abstract
academic wars of words -- this subject is precisely what the new
nation-states with their institutions and military machines request.
Soldiers and citizens alike must be able to read and write in order to
absorb the orders issued and the propaganda that drives and regulates
the entire machinery. Authorities and bureaucracies dictate existing
regulations in writing. The entire social inheritance from Napoleon is
based on the single individual that personally can be held responsible
for his or her actions. As an immediate collectivist reaction, there
ensues the unrealistic fantasy that wafted through Europe like a cursed
ghost: *communism*.
In this equally fictive and pointless dichotomy between individual and
collective much of the political discussion became mired, while the
really interesting issue in this context -- the dialectics of subject
and substance -- garnered no attention whatsoever and slowly dropped
beneath the horizon. But what is at issue is how the ego arises and
defines itself *vis-à-vis* the world as part of the world, where the
ego, as Johann Gottlieb Fichte points out, is limited while the world is
unlimited. We call this *the eternalist subject*. Please observe that
the subject apprehends itself as stable and immutable, while the
surrounding world appears chaotic and mutable. The neurotic illusion
that both subject and world can be eternal and immutable results in
unmanageable delusions of grandeur. The psychotic illusion that the
subject in no way takes root in, nor can establish a meaningful relation
with a chaotic and mutable world, is the other side of the same coin.
The psychosis thus creates a worldview where the subconscious devours
consciousness and the ego experience disappears in a chaotic collapse of
unsorted impressions without a mutual hierarchy. From this follows --
naturally -- that the eternalist subject by no means is tasked to
experience the world as it actually is, without culling and structuring,
arranging and prioritizing, so that the world opens up and becomes
navigable. It is no truth producer, but merely a hypothesis machine that
continually corrects itself when needed.
The eternalist subject invents and processes problems, creates and
solves riddles, by building value hierarchies. Subjectivity thus arises
in conjunction with the trade-off between various alternatives in a
choice situation. And subjectivity as such makes itself known and allows
itself to be experienced when a problem must be put aside and be saved
for future processing, quite simply because the perception apparatus and
the attached interpretation must be oriented toward something else, a
more important and/or more acute problem that has surfaced.
## The classical question of the possible existence of a *free will* is thus incorrectly posed and uninteresting (see [[The Body Machines]]) -- free in relation to what?
## And who or which agency would exercise this possible freedom now that the individual and the ego have proven to be fictions?
The interesting question one could pose instead is whether free choice,
without any speculations about who or what, if so, it is that chooses
the one or the other, exists.
## Does even the choice option, that is the foundational prerequisite for the eternalist subject, exist?
Here we can glimpse the distinction between Zoroastrian ethics and Abrahamic
moralism. Will is of course nothing other than a question of access to
libidinal energy.
## So is there a libidinal will at all that has access to several options, and where the chosen option (or the postponement of the same) entails a possibility of renewed and updated self-identification?
It is absolutely vital here to understand how self-awareness arises.
Self-awareness is in itself a consequence of shortcomings and
limitations, or it would not have arisen at all. Thinking is the
activation of the failure to intuitively understand and interact with
the surrounding world. No one understands or investigates this better
than Hegel, who builds his theory of the subject as a constant failure
on a constantly ongoing antagonism, which in turn drives all of the
arisen subject's dialectical reasoning. Here Hegel sides with
Zoroastrianism and Protestantism in contrast to Taoism and Catholicism.
There is no logical or mythical order and structure in this process that
instead is clearly pathical, disharmonious and unbalanced. Instability
is right from the start built into the Hegelian synthesis, and it is
then released in the form of internal antagonisms. And it is precisely
this which, according to Hegel, makes *the subject the strongest
expression of the substance*. Just as his predecessors David Hume and
Immanuel Kant, Hegel attacks the Cartesian subject that has been the
norm since the mid-17th century. However they handle the issue in
different ways and come to different conclusions. Hume settles for a
stable subject that tries to relate to a mobile world, Kant, on his
part, gets stuck with a mobile subject that is encapsulated in a fixed
world (which in theory it would be able to experience directly if it
were not for the subject's own limitations), while only Hegel succeeds
in handling constant movement at all levels of the complex. No person
and no thing is fixed. Both substance and subject are relations that
consist of other relations where relata only constitute temporarily
surfacing byproducts connected to the ongoing processes. The pathical
subject pulsates and vibrates ambivalently behind both logos and mythos.
Hegel's argument *vis-à-vis* Kant is that the latter demystifies the
subject in a way that nevertheless is fundamentally mystifying. Kant
works with a psychology for the soul, a cosmology for the world, and a
theology for God. Psychology for the soul is a Kantian pathos. Cosmology
for the world is a Kantian logos. And theology about God is a Kantian
mythos. All these three quantities are foregone conclusions in an
unclear manner, according to Kant. Hegel's revolt against Kant is a
battle for *a narratological liberation*. The Hegelian subject is namely
liberated from all forms of preordained psychologies, cosmologies and
theologies; it has to settle for its own internal dialectics. This
speculative [[Pandialecticism]] is *the Hegelian absolute*. All
metanarratives -- logos, mythos and pathos -- are fundamentally
dialectical, according to Hegel. It is not even possible to speak of a
psychology, cosmology or even a theology as something other than
dialectical phenomena in Hegel, and definitely not as any preordained
eternalizations, as in Kant. Thanks to Hegelian pandialecticism, which
affirms and handles movement in all of being's dimensions, it becomes
possible to take the path of thinking toward *radical relationalism*.
In Zoroastrian terms we would express this as though the *ameretat* our
generation longs for already lies inherent in our worldview and lies
ready to pathically explode as the next generation's *haurvatat*. Where
what is important is that the subject is *pathical* and neither logical
nor mythical. The dividual identity sprouts from the sociont and its
history as the barred absolute. In front of this barred absolute,
dividuality is awakened as the embodiment of an actual archetype in the
form of *the mimicking erchtype*. The subject's primary function is to
entwine [[The Great Trauma]] in the form of an abandonment of mamilla with
*the great event* in the form of the yearning for phallus. Mamilla is
the barred absolute from the past, phallus is the barred absolute in the
future. The path backward is however barred forever. The subject can
therefore only hope to become the agent who carries out his
[[Truth-As-An-Act]] by submitting to phallus. This irrefutable demand for
submission is the strength of phallus as *the concrete absolute*.
However monotheist phallus worship does not suffice. The sociont does
not merely need a vision and a direction, but moreover a strategy, and a
strategy one can only build on knowledge. Or to use a more solemn word:
wisdom. Therefore religion's origin is every bit as much an issue of
*mana* as an issue of [[Phallus]]. Romanian anthropologist Mircea Eliade
traces the *mana* to the theological shift from the ancestors to the
gods. At the same moment that the ancestors, in the capacity of the
symbolic vessels for and intermediaries of the transmitted wisdom within
the sociont, are depersonified and universalized -- that is: when it no
longer matters who within the sociont is offspring to which primordial
father or primordial mother, when the entire tribe has been accorded the
same common primordial father and primordial mother -- the ancestors are
converted into the lesser gods. It is this conversion that is called
*metaphysical reification,* and it can only be applied to the already
dead (there is always something vulgar and dubious about statues and
other memorials of people who are still alive). The function is the
*mana*, a kind of impersonal but constantly present force that humanity
must struggle with in all situations. It is thus on top of this *mana*
that the priest names the gods to concretize what sacrifices the gods
require from the faithful.
For the masculine subject, this displacement and radical
self-identification occurs through *the subject submitting to culture as
logos*. For the feminine subject, the same process occurs through *the
subject submitting to nature as mythos*. This means that *the law* is
introduced to organize the outer circuit, while the inner circuit is
free to act precisely as it wishes, since it still only can act within
the confines of the consequences of the law being upheld in the outer
circuit. This explains why all the world's prisons are full of
heterosexual men and a few lesbians, but not of heterosexual women or
homosexual men. *The law* is thus the name of the phallic religion that
makes it possible to expand the sizes of clans and tribes further toward
city states, nations and entire empires. And no religion carries this
out more naturally than Judaism, with its unique union between the
nation and religion under the same roof. Antisemitism is not just like
any racism, antisemitism is deep down [[Nation Envy]].
The balance between logos, mythos and pathos is maintained through the
narrative constantly reiterating the importance of Zoroastrian ethics
through [[The Phallic Principle of Tribal Contribution]]. The question of
what the tribe can do for you is the child's question, while the
question of what you can do for the tribe is the adult's question. Every
time someone demands a freedom or a right without conveying something of
value in return, we are in practice seeing a little child who
vociferously tries to cry its way to even more breast milk. And this, of
course, we would rather not have to see grown-up people do, just like
this applies to subservient beggars and infuriated demonstrators alike,
both of whom give rise to virtually the same unease. A proud adult who
takes responsibility for themselves and their own, who finds joy in
contributing to the common good, is however beautiful, not least in
their own eyes.
From The Frankfurt School to Betty Friedan in *The Feminine Mystique*:
the totalitarian Platonism of the Western left is underpinned by a total
ignorance of, or an equally total disinterest in Man's pathical
tribalism. One instead chooses to focus on a logical conflict between
individual and collective that then is attacked via Platonist theories
of *false consciousness*. Please note that the demand that is directed
from the subservient beggar or the infuriated demonstrator always is a
demand without discernible direction or final destination. There is no
point where the demand is satisfied and where the beggar or the
demonstrator is done demanding, has taken their responsibility as an
adult and fully-fledged member of the community by starting to do their
part for the common good. These are mouths that never become satiated.
The revenue from begging and the benefits one, if applicable, has
succeeded in hassling one's way to receiving, are usually spent in the
form of immediate consumption rather than as investments in a future
where the little child's dependence on an offering mamilla would be but
a memory.
The childishly demanding position is not conceived as a transitory
phase. The extended paper cup outside the supermarket entrance and the
indignant list of demands from the allegedly aggrieved group will never
disappear. It is a question of compensation for supposed injustices in
the past and certainly no help for self-help. The stern and
demand-ridden gaze of the self-pitying child will never be tempered. It
is no passing phase but a permanent scenario. What we are witnessing
here is the development of *the permanent dependence on mamilla*, a
dependence that is seen as a given by all the narcissists who by pure
principle refrain from growing up and taking their own responsibility.
In the postcapitalist society even the slaves are no longer working. The
workers have, in Jean Baudrillard's words, been turned into *work
mannequins*. Not because there necessarily is a lack of tasks, but
because these for various reasons can be claimed to be humiliating to
carry out. Hence all these reproachful gazes and angry accusations, all
these hungry mouths in all these rich societies, mouths that never can
be satiated, demands that never are met.
Whenever it is possible to score political points on claimed injustices,
the rulers get out their tax tables and start to outline changes that
are aimed at leveling. This is a principle that tends to dominate in
systems where politicians primarily strive to become re-elected and only
thereafter may consider achieving something of value. The money one
pulls in from working people as if by magic becomes common funds and the
state coffers become one big mamilla squirting out breast milk to all
who ask for it, and even to many others for the sake of re-electability.
One for instance doles out child allowance to everyone, as if the idea
that parents themselves should support their children were completely
absurd. In such a society matrichal magic knocks out phallic technology,
mythos is decoupled from logos, ideas of cause and effect are denied and
ridiculed. The entrepreneurs become fewer in step with bureaucrats
increasing their numbers, and the struggle for provision increasingly
turns into a struggle for privileges. One distributes a shrinking pie
instead of primarily ensuring that the overall pie is growing. When the
phallic principle of tribal contribution is weakened, society loses
momentum and prosperity-creating dynamics. Increasing numbers consider
themselves belonging to so-called weak groups to be propped up by a
dwindling few. With increased poverty comes increasing anarchy:
different factions that demand benefits from each other.
Furthermore the phallic principle of tribal contribution applies equally
for social groups relative to larger entities as it applies to the
single dividual. We can view two popular subcultures from late
capitalism that appear to survive and develop even in the Internet Age,
namely *feminism* and *androgynism*. Both these movements arose during
late capitalism as matrichal reactions to the catastrophes that
contributed to ending the golden age of the phalluses, with concrete
phallic failures such as Hitler and Stalin and abstract phallic threats
such as the atomic bomb and environmental pollution. Feminism further
harvested public opinion success when it proudly emphasized women's
shouldering responsibility for half of society and demanded matching
remuneration from the state and the market for this contribution.
Androgynism also succeeded when it proudly emphasized the androgynous
caste's contribution to society as a mediating vessel between the
male-dominated outer circuit and the female-dominated inner circuit in
society. The androgynous person does of course not become an adult by
developing from a boy to a man, or from a girl to a woman, but attains
their adulthood through blending a cocktail of both the man and the
woman. It is precisely in the role as the one who moves across
boundaries that the androgynous person discovers their adulthood,
precisely through personifying the phallic principle of tribal
contribution as the sociont's own internal *go-between*.
Thus far all this is excellent. A society that is not constantly
questioned stagnates, and sustainable ideas can withstand criticism. The
problem is that both feminism and androgynism developed diverse sects
and cults marked by infantile internarcissism. The principle of tribal
contribution that generates pride and strength was eventually replaced
by *the eternal accusation* that can only generate bitterness and greed.
When Western feminism and androgynism in practice had finished
triumphing and should have closed down their activism in the form of a
becoming matricide -- or perhaps better yet should have migrated to
other more needy parts of the world -- the movements were instead
usurped by state-financed funeral wailers who constantly hunt
increasingly absurd renderings of alleged crimes to keep alive the
eternal production of accusations that never can be compensated for. And
as long as there is no demand for a stated final destination from these
movements, they will gladly milk the phallus via the state apparatus for
a constantly snowballing compensation for old, increasingly fabricated
injustices. If there is a system to exploit, it will be exploited. That
is: until a Messianic project arrives that reinstates the sociont and
its integrity. For the phallic principle of tribal contribution will
return with full power the moment society is presented with a complete
and authentic archetypology for humanity. We are working on it.