# The two-headed phallus and the dialectics of will-to-transcendence and will-to-intelligence
We always work on the basis of two time dimensions. On the one hand we
have the priestly duration and subphysics, on the other hand we have the
royal time and physics. Eventology is the dynamic interplay between
them. Or if we start from Roman philosopher Seneca's idea that religion
is what people believe to be true, what the wise know is false, and what
the leaders find useful, nomadology is what people believe to be true,
while eventology is what the priests and chieftains must agree on, after
every paradigm shift, as the theoretical and practical implication
respectively of the common worldview. Within the Zoroastrian tradition
the priestly duration and subphysics has its own religion in the form of
*Zurvanism*, and the same is true for the royal time and physics, whose
religion is *Mithraism*. The starting point in the former case is our
instinctive unwillingness to determine our own date of death in advance.
The necessary submission occurs when Zurvan intervenes and kills the
priest, as the formal opposite of when Mithras defeats and kills the
bull. Zoroastrianism is then the aggregate nomadology that harbors both
these phallic religions and arranges an encounter with the third,
matrichal religion, which goes under the name of *communism* and which
makes use of a polytheist *iconology*. The imperialist religion is only
complete as three religions under one and the same umbrella, as three
different metanarratives under one [[Narratology]].
Each of these different power centers within nomadology also has its own
shadow. Every center, every religious story, does by virtue of this
shadow represent its own expression of violence within the pathical
narrative. *Open aggression*, which is represented by the chieftain, we
call *violence of the first order*. *Virtual aggression,* which is
represented by the priest, we call *violence of the second order*. And
*passive aggression,* which is represented by the matriarch, we call
*violence of the third order*. Together, layered on top of each other,
these three different levels of violence constitute the basis for the
exercise of power in any given society. In modern society it is the
military that exercises violence of the first order, while it is the
police that exercises violence of the second order. The judicial system
-- as a paradigmatic substitute for the original, pagan lynch mob --
then exercises violence of the third order. In each of the three cases,
just as is naturally the case for the aggregate, sanctioned exercise of
violence, the state claims a monopoly on violence. This is how the state
safeguards power over a society. At the same time it is the libidinal
aggressiveness at the dividual citizen level that underpins necessary
creativity. The chieftain is, for instance, ultimately a warrior who is,
or at least is expected to be, prepared to sacrifice his own life
(Zoroastrianism's *haurvatat*) for the sociont's survival
(Zoroastrianism's *ameretat*). A situation where this comes to a head
contains enormous amounts of open aggression. The chieftain as a warrior
therefore personifies *nomadology at war*.
However the war comes and goes, and is periodically replaced by a more
or less sustainable peace during which a society can build prosperity
and prepare for an uncertain future. Then the chieftain's archetype is
transformed from the warrior to the hunter, which thereby is the ideal
for *nomadology at peace*. When Man later leaves nomadic life for
permanent settlement, open aggression is reshaped, which means that the
chieftain's archetype for *eventology at war* is transformed to the
military as the ideal, while the chieftain's archetype for *eventology
at peace* is transformed to the engineer as the ideal. What then happens
when humanity gets used to permanent settlement, is that the same open
aggression receives a new function and meaning in a new context;
gradually the chieftain's archetype for *eventology at war* is
transformed to the military as the ideal and for *eventology at peace*
to the engineer as the ideal. Consequently the chieftain of the open
aggression is eventually appointed king of the nation and emperor of the
empire. It is the hero of open aggression who possesses the decisive
leadership quality that sociologist Max Weber calls *charisma*.
The world consists namely of spheres -- as German philosopher Peter
Sloterdijk describes existence in his ambitious trilogy *Spheres* -- and
these spheres are delimited by *membranes*. Within and between the
spheres there is an intense traffic of flows that are slowed down,
controlled and channeled onward in accordance with the system's
regulatory framework of membrane sentries. These memory functions of
these membrane sentries are what underpin what we call *intelligence*,
and we call the study of these functions [[Membranics]].
## Nourishment must be added and excrement must be displaced, so what is nourishment and what is excrement for the sphere in question?
## And how is such knowledge programmed or built up by evolution over time?
When this vigorous intelligence then is accumulated to a certain critical level,
*will*-*to-transcendence* is activated. This phenomenon,
will-to-transcendence, must thereafter be channeled. Further, it is
necessary to tame and nurture it, to cultivate will-to-transcendence
until it is developed to some sort of territorial or ideological vector.
Throughout history this has occurred in the form of various phallic
projects, for instance hunting, war, trade and technological innovation.
Will-to-transcendence, which is called *eros* among the ancient Greeks
and *ahura* among the ancient Persians, is expressed as the pathical
[[Truth-As-An-Act]]. It is summed up on the drawing board as *the vision*.
In his classical treatise *The Art of War* Chinese military strategist
Sun Tzu expresses this will-to-transcendence as the formal leadership
for an army. Will-to-intelligence, what is called *thumos* among the
ancient Greeks and *mazda* among the ancient Persians, is expressed as
the logical *truth-as-a-fact*. It is summed up on the drawing board as
*the strategy*. Sun Tzu quite simply sums up will-to-intelligence as the
real leadership for an army. The relation between these two wills to
power receives an elegant twist at the very event. Truth-as-an-act
generates *the implicate self,* the subject that leads history up to the
event. Truth-as-a-fact generates *the explicate ego,* the subject that
ties history together and creates narratological continuity after the
event.
According to an accepted and deeply rooted view in a Western discourse
that prefers to gaze into its own Western navel, it is Greek philosopher
Parmenides who first of all splits *The One* and distinguishes between
being on the one hand, and thought on the other hand. Which is to
distort history substantially. It is a delusion to think that it could
be as simple as a diffusely defined Eastern discourse continuing to
entertain a nomadological worldview, while an equally diffusely defined
Western discourse would develop a new eventological worldview after
Parmenides had arrived at his unique and revolutionary insight. What
anyone who is broad-minded and unprejudiced instead can observe, is that
this break-up occurs much earlier, in conjunction with the cultural
settlement between the Persians and the Indians. It is Persian reformer
Zoroaster who tidies up among the concepts and loosens the ties between
the different phallic components in the Indo-Iranian triad -- *trika* in
Sanskrit -- which was comprised of *iccha* for desire, *jnana* for
knowledge and *kriya* for the act. The eventological remark Zoroaster
makes is that desire in itself is an act in the form of a
will-to-transcendence, in the same way as knowledge in itself is an act
in the form of a will-to-intelligence. Thereby the concept of *kriya* is
depleted of all real meaning and no longer fills any function within
*trika*. Fundamentally everything in a Zoroastrian or Nietzschean
worldview is permeated by a single will to activity -- quite simply a
will to power -- what Zoroaster calls *asha vahishta*, which can be
translated as [[Libido]] in Latin.
With this maneuver, and the void that arises within *trika*, there is
space for Zoroaster to develop a third position which causes the triad
to stand strong. And this third position is death as the defining event
that separates the perfect life, or *haurvatat,* from the life that
transcends life itself, or *ameretat*. This most ultimate of all events
Zoroaster terms *chinavat*. With this concept existence for the first
time in history becomes mortal, and with this concept Man is removed
from the eternal recurrence of the same, or *reincarnation*. When
Siddhartha Gautama later develops *nirvana* as the desirable ideal
within his persistently nomadological Buddhism, this is, in other words,
nothing more nor less than an individualization of the tribal event that
*chinavat* already is within eventological Zoroastrianism. The wheel is
thereby invented once again, but is used in a different way. It is
admittedly true that precisely you are extinguished at the moment of
death, but the sociont, or *anjuman,* survives you. The Zoroastrian
point is that it is your death that, *vis-à-vis* the *anjuman,* affords
life both a purpose, a meaning, as well as hope. Death is quite simply
*the event par excellence* in Zoroastrian eventology, the hub around
which the entire existence revolves. An idea that is only fully
developed in Western philosophy with Hegel and Nietzsche in 19th century
Germany. Which is precisely what we mean when we say that narratology,
with its logos and pathos, replaces the old mythos of reincarnation with
the new mythos of the event.
What Buddhism can offer is one long struggle, replete with denial and
deprivation, only to ultimately attain the extinction of the dividual
subject as the most anti-climatic non-event conceivable, a quest whose
only transcendental endpoint is that the Buddha himself, like a shaman
who is long lost in the wilderness, finally must return to the sociont
to proclaim his unique wisdom of denial and deprivation, since
everything else would transform the entire project into one big
pretentious ego-trip. In this manner Buddhism also receives a community.
Zoroastrianism's cherished *anjuman* becomes Buddhism's cherished
*sangha*. The difference is that the *anjuman* harbors an eventological
culture built on a dialectics of negation and oscillation, while the
*sangha* harbors a nomadological culture built solely on negation. It is
perhaps not surprising that these two religions were able to live in
peace as spiritual neighbours along the Asian trade routes and
cross-fertilize each other. Tibetan Buddhism under the heading
*vajrayana* is a perfect hybrid.
Zoroaster's reversal of the relation between the two wills has dramatic
consequences. He places the *yang* and och *yin* of Taoism and the
*Shiva* and *Shakti* of Hinduism furthest back in the theological
sequence -- where the sexual dichotomy reasonably belongs -- subordinate
to the sociont's overarching interests and not culled from the interests
of the anjuman. This means that the prerequisites for the Hindu dance
that is carried out by the god *Shiva* as consciousness and the goddess
*Shakti* as energy, are not at hand. Instead it will be within Shiva
himself that the first dichotomy arises, when the divine consciousness
is split and becomes the two-headed phallus. Consciousness can only be
manifested as the collaboration between priestly wisdom and royal
energy. This lays the ground for the necessary phallic dichotomies, in
part between intelligence and transcendence, in part -- and later --
between war and hunting. This in turn entails that female primordial
power is manifested by the matriarch who organizes the sexual ritual,
and not by the virgin who has been trained by the matriarch to become
the chieftain's energetic mistress. Nomadological reincarnation is of
course no longer included in the equation. Archetypology is subordinated
to the event rather than to the process.
The matriarch is thus the mother who once bestowed life, who controls
reproduction and who ultimately returns as the mortidinal mother who
reclaims life. The matriarch is the judge, *chinavat*, and it is only
after having obtained her approval that Shiva can have his Shakti as a
reward for having killed the dragon. And precisely this is the whole
point, since there neither exists a *chinavat*, a *haurvatat*, or even
an ecstatic *ameretat* without the matriarch who in the guise of the
mortidinal mother reclaims what in any case always had been on loan,
since this of course actually is hers and the sociont's property. Thus
*chinavat,* as well as the ensuing *polgazar* -- becomes the ritual
celebration of the memory of the dead person -- exactly the events where
an aged generation dies and makes room for a new, younger generation to
which it passes the torch. This means that the actual power ultimately
lies not with the two-headed phallus, but with fate itself, with the
matriarch who constitutes the final institution before which war,
hunting, and eventually life in its entirety is tried.
## Then the question is: Who has the ultimate power over the ritual which marks that Shiva, in the capacity of the figure -- phallus -- that unites the king and the priest, finally will get to meet the energy-bestowing, virginal Shakti, as the matrix, if not *Zurvan*, the sexless primordial god, who of course *de facto* is time itself?
It is hard to even conceive of anything more matrichal than this
Zoroastrianism's genuinely fundamental construction. It is thus no
coincidence that the massively erudite Nietzsche chooses the historical
Zoroaster -- the beginning and end of morality, according to Nietzsche
himself in *Ecce Homo* -- as the main character in his masterpiece *Thus
Spoke Zarathustra*. He does this by accompanying the truth-seeking
Zarathustra with *the camel* as logos, *the lion* as pathos, and *the
child* as mythos. The camel personifies priestly will-to-intelligence,
the lion personifies royal will-to-transcendence, while the child
personifies matrichal *will-to-reproduction*. Please note that there
never exists any possibility whatsoever of narratological release via
logos or pathos but only via mythos. It is only via the child's innocent
mimicry (*ameretat*) of the preceding generation's behavior
(*haurvatat*) that a new narratology becomes possible.
This is because the child always tells its story as an attempt to copy
the preceding story, what Nietzsche calls *the eternal recurrence of the
same*, but with a minimal, decisive deviation. And it is thanks to this
deviation, enabled by the impossibility of exact repetition -- via for
instance a new medial expression, as Marshall McLuhan remarks -- that
the event, according to Nietzsche, becomes possible in contrast to the
otherwise monumental process. Hegel agrees as he also maintains that
neither *logic* nor *emotion* can generate the releasing narratology, it
can only be conveyed by *the spirit*, which produces a temporary release
before the entire dialectics is repeated. In his constantly rewritten
lifework *Science of Logic*, Hegel expresses this as the subject being a
necessary surface *vis-à-vis* the substance that is a contingent depth,
and then gives the relation between them the name *the throne of God*.
The necessary surface is logos, the contingent depth is pathos, together
they form the Hegelian two-headed phallus, and then rule the world from
this throne of God, as history's own mythos. Where Hegel's (in)famous
a*bsolute knowledge* is the insight that this always is and always has
been the case, and that this paradoxical relation (see *The Global
Empire*) never reaches any end. The narratology eventually becomes
conscious of itself as narratology in itself, and this is the absolute
knowledge.
The historical Zoroaster gives the two-headed phallus the name *Ahura
Mazda* (or *Mazda Ahura,* depending on preference), where *Ahura*
represents "being" and *Mazda* represents "mind" within *The One*.
Process and event -- the only meta-ideas worthy of the name -- are
united in one and the same theology. Ahura is the reification of the
material world or *getig*. Mazda is the reification of the mental world
or *menog*. Following this move Zoroaster creates the first
philosophical religion without any supernatural elements whatsoever, by
consciously choosing a ranking where Mazda precedes Ahura. He chooses
what the anthropologist Erich Neumann calls *the higher phallus* or
Mazda before *the lower phallus* or Ahura. There and then dialectics is
born with the separation and merging of *getig* and *menog* as a
continuous process, a becoming in being, in a joint world. *Mazdayasna*
means precisely "love of wisdom", the concept that the Greeks a
millennium later translate to *philosophia*. Parmenides was thus not the
first. The Greeks' greatest invention was rather the development of the
matrichal *drama* as will-to-reproduction *vis-à-vis* the Persians'
two-headed phallus.
This is a conscious choice for the Persians, a transcendental
[[Truth-As-An-Act]] in itself. Man designates logos or the higher phallus
as primary *vis-à-vis* pathos or the lower phallus. This constitutes the
very definition of culture's victory over nature, even if culture
naturally is directly connected with and dependent on nature (the
Zoroastrian symbol for the cultural connection with history is called
*barsom*). The Persians could also have chosen to follow the path of
least resistance and just continued favoring nomadology at the expense
of eventology; they could have continued being *ahurayasna* instead of
*mazdayasna*, they could have made a permanent self-image that focused
on the love of being rather than on the love of wisdom. They could have
continued to dedicate their prayers to the Universe in itself, instead
of developing the libidinal activity within this universe. But then no
change would ever have occurred, something of that nature would not even
have been conceivable, all of humanity would have remained in the
nomadological primordial religion over an obscurely long period, and the
project called civilization would have been postponed for a highly
indeterminate future. The lower phallus would also in the future be the
sole and one-headed phallus. *Shiva* as well as *Shakti* would remain as
miserably lonely. But most important by far is that society now is led
by the two-headed phallus. The alternative would be nomadological
demise, at the same time as eventology is and remains an impossibility.
Or as British general Charles Gordon so unerringly expresses the matter
in his memoirs from the late 19th century: "The society that separates
its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards
and its fighting done by fools".
Interestingly, Hinduism retained the nomadological orientation by
continuing to preach reincarnation and the recurring separation of the
rain-god Shiva from the sun-god Vishnu. Which can be compared with
Italian Renaissance philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli's insightful
recommendation for all the world's princes to always keep a naysaying
*devil's advocate* at hand, armed with complete freedom *vis-à-vis* the
prince's court with all its conflicts and intrigues. Shiva and Vishnu
shall not just be kept separate -- they are subjects to a myriad of
their own archetypal cults within the colorful Hindu caste system --
moreover they shall finally be united anew, but now as separate
institutions. This is an expression of the principle of *the two-headed
phallus par excellence.* It is not about avoiding the god or the prince
becoming angry, it is about avoiding the god or the prince becoming
stupid. Which is much worse, of course. At the same time as
Zoroastrianism during the Axial Age developed via Gnostic mimicry into
Christianity and Islam, Hinduism developed during the Axial Age via
Gnostic mimicry into Buddhism and Jainism, the ingratiating and
therefore popular religions of the pillar-saints, which in their
orthodox forms tended to implode. This is the same Gnostic mistake that
later is repeated within the political ideologies that propagate either
just liberalism, or also just socialism, during industrialism.
Without the two-headed phallus [[The Barred Absolute]] disappears, and
thereby the difference between the sacred and the profane also
disappears. In such a society the priest is at best replaced by the
Machine, which mass produces intelligence, but without any ability
whatsoever to produce transcendence.
## What remains then is but a caustic soup of cynical nihilism. But what else could be expected?
Intelligence without transcendence can of course never be anything over and above the
mimicking craft. American philosopher Forrest Landry takes this
necessity to a head in his work *Immanent Metaphysics*. His argument is
brilliant in all its simplicity: Complexity cannot *per se* be handled
with even more complexity. Believing such a thing is rather to repeat a
mistake that constantly recurs throughout history. Rather complexity is
what will-to-intelligence handles on its own. Thus an ingenious
simplicity, a decisive principle, *a decisive existential choice* rather
than an expression of any free will, must break through the intelligence
as a radical will-to-transcendence to thus enable the decentralized
diversity that is necessary for humanity's and civilization's survival.
Landry achieves this splitting of phallus through starting from matrix
as a cultural rather than a natural phenomenon. The real hides in the
culture that Landry calls *immanence*. The symbolic hides in the
strategy that Landry calls *omniscience*. And the imaginary hides in the
vision that Landry calls [[Transcendence]]. Where no matter how much
strategy, nothing can ever function unless there first is a single
clear, cohesive vision that runs the entire process -- the philosophical
Messianic project *par excellence*. Landry even uses mathematical
formulae to prove this in his work.
The exodological ground rule is that the pathical narrative must lead
the logical narrative and not the other way around. Similarly, authentic
art always requires a will-to-transcendence that is built on a
foundation of optimal intelligence. Or to express the matter in a
Zoroastrian manner: there is no Zoroaster without a Vishtaspa. Or to put
it in Jewish terms: there is no Moses without an Aaron. The art that
aims higher and deeper than something purely decorative, must take an
eventological worldview as its point of departure and a conception of
genuine change, transformation. Thereby the *museification* of late
capitalist society should be regarded as a nostalgic retreat to the
nomadological stage and thus also as a portent of *the death of Art*.
The projectivity of Art is to constantly strive for and constantly fail
in externalizing the unwieldy oscillation of existence, but not to
museify the already fixed approximations. In authentic eventology the
two heads of the phallus meet in mutual admiration behind the barred
absolute. There and only there can Parmenides' cherished *The One* be
found. Pathos and logos are united into mythos. If it is
will-to-intelligence that freezes the world in order to be able to tame
and comprehend it, it is will-to-transcendence that then sets the world
in motion anew, in order to thus be able to widen it and conquer a piece
of new territory.
Will-to-intelligence is called *the-root-of-the-phallus*,
will-to-transcendence is called [[Phallus|the phallus]]. These two wills meet and
collaborate during war and during hunting. The pathical activism during
war and hunting is synonymous with will-to-transcendence. The logical
activism during war and hunting is synonymous with will-to-intelligence.
## The body and the mind interact with each other; the mind is also body --what else could it be?
Another way of saying this is that biology and
psychology interact intensely and intimately and ultimately are
different aspects of the same thing. The purpose of all these processes
is to produce optimal protection (war) and optimal provision (hunting).
We call these phallic battlefields and trading posts *the outer
circuit*. The outer circuit then generates *phallic membranics,* behind
which the inner circuit arises. Here the objective and significance of
transcendence, which constitutes the outer circuit's future beyond one's
own death, is placed. The woman with the child, who survives the man;
the man's heritage, protected and controlled by the matriarch, the inner
circuit's undisputed leader.
## The borderland between the outer and inner circuits is called *sexuality*, an area that religion regulates through *the sexual ritual* as the reward that is granted after successful hunting, war and reproduction, about which the matriarch always has the final word. How could it be otherwise?
The sociont's welfare stands and
falls with protection and resources being delivered to her. Without that
delivery, all dreams perish of any heritage whatsoever that can be
passed on after a man's long life. This is the core of religion.
The warriors of the outer circuit (the Indian caste system's
*kshatriya*) conquer and defend a territory on behalf of the entire
inner circuit as *protection*. We call this *will-to-expansion,*
something that at a later stage in history generates *urban
industrialism*. The hunters of the outer circuit (the Indian caste
system's *vaishya*) take down their prey and deliver this to the inner
circuit as *provision*. We call this *will-to-accumulation,* something
that later in history generates *rural agriculture*. When permanent
settlement is established, society's warriors are tamed and re-schooled
to the engineers that lead society's artisans and create civilization's
infrastructure. As part of the same process society's hunters are tamed
and re-schooled to the instructors that supervise society's agricultural
laborers. None of this occurs without friction. The envy that arises
toward what is perceived as undue privileges, results in a by-product by
way of an attack on phallus as such in the form of ideologies critical
of civilization, such as pacifism (directed against the warrior) and
vegetarianism (directed against the hunter).
The problem is that every time anti-phallic ideologies of this kind take
root throughout history, the outer circuit is drastically weakened.
Under these new prerequisites the inner circuit can at an initial stage
cash in a higher status and exercise greater influence, only to then
discover that it is without protection against external attacks and that
it is afflicted with an alarming resource shortage as a consequence of
the outer circuit's sudden weakness. *The utopian project* sports a
splendid, self-aggrandizing rhetoric but leaves the inner circuit
without a necessary, protective membrane. The anarchic state that then
arises is *the apocalypse,* a prelude that signals the onset of an
empire's or a paradigm's collapse. The recently cheering inner circuit
suddenly realizes that it is exposed to the uninhibited ravages of alien
powers. During the apocalypse the primary line of defense is destroyed
first, in the form of chieftains and priests. Thereafter the secondary
line of defense is destroyed, consisting of warriors and hunters. What
then remains is the third line of defense -- ordinary men and women,
defenseless against the rage of the gods, the forces of nature, and the
hostile powers. The entire pathical energy is transformed from violence
to a sexuality that rapidly is brutalized (see *Digital Libido -- Sex,
Power and Violence in the Network Society*).
For lack of battlefields and trading posts, libido's entire phallic
energy is channeled through the sexual expression, which then is the
only outlet that remains. It is above all this that characterizes the
apocalyptic state: the phallic causality chain is broken. The first two
stations -- the battlefield and the trading post -- are wiped out and
sexuality, which has been moved furthest ahead, now becomes the
objective and meaning of everything. A consequence of this is that the
non-sexually mature children are sexualized, which is because the
children no longer can/may spend their childish years of growing-up
slowly learning to create an adult stance to mind and body, nor to war
and hunting. Instead they are directly forced, wholly unprepared, into
the complicated dichotomy between phallus and matrix. The shamanic
activities that adults also carefully avoid taking part in without due
preparation, suddenly become available to all, including the very young.
Sex and drugs become hobbies that occupy children that are so small that
they have attained neither the biological nor the psychological maturity
that is necessary in order to be able to handle such forces. Which
perhaps they may never be able to do. If phallus is abjectified and
rejected, this is exactly what one can and should expect. Precisely
everything falls prey to nihilistic hedonism. Which is the kiss of death
for civilization's own libido, which in turn opens the door to a sphere
entirely ruled by mortido. This is precisely how Friedrich Nietzsche
imagines what he calls *the death of God*. In the attentionalist network
society with its obsession with exhibitionism and voyeurism, we
straightforwardly call this phenomenon *the absence of the phallic gaze*
(see *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the Network
Society*).
Before the barred absolute the perspectives are rapidly diminished from
the divine to the human (all too human). For lack of the rejected
testosterone, what once was strategy slackens to instead appear as
*intrigue*, and intrigue is driven by the banal *truth-as-gossip*. The
ability for systematization that was favored before the apocalypse is
now completely superseded, requested by no one, and replaced by a
constant demand for empathy. Everyone feels sorry for themselves and
insist on sympathy from the surrounding world. Everyone suffers from
mental illness and wants attention both for this and for having the
courage to publicly admit how they are suffering. The formal ambition is
to break what is called "a culture of silence", which leads to no one
being silent any longer, which in turn means that no one is listening
since everyone is screaming at each other. One has to be empathetic with
oneself, to the extent this is possible. What used to be visions for a
future disappears with the phallic energy; what remains is pure survival
and the marking of the same in the form of fashions, labels and various
other banal status markers. This condition without phallic presence,
drained of the substance of authentic truth, is what we call
*decorationism* (exhaustively treated in *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power
and Violence in the Network Society*). And decorationism explodes
precisely during the pre-apocalyptic state, when the [[Saoshyant]] is
lacking the most.
The apparently paradoxical but fully logical consequence is that war,
hunting and not least sex become the subject of general contempt. One
loses all discernment and cannot separate the potentially destructive
but in regulated forms nonetheless functioning sexuality, on the one
hand, and the lamentable abuse on the other, rather one is mistaken for
the other and soon enough they are treated as one and the same thing.
Apparently this even becomes a position on which one can build an entire
academic career. In the void that arises then, various expressions of
decadence thrive, such as pacifism, vegetarianism and asexuality (which
naturally is nothing other than an expression of a desperate denial).
Such a state can only prevail over a limited period, namely until the
pathos returns with full force in the form of *the real* and thus
corrects people's sense of reality and reminds us that there actually is
both an inner and an outer reality to relate to. Imaginary as well as
symbolic fantasies will only take us thus far, sooner or later the
proper work of relating to reality has to be undertaken anyway.
The two-headed phallus is built on *the dialectics of eternalism and
mobilism* (see *The Global Empire*). But before we in this way split
Nietzsche's will-to-power into in part will-to-intelligence, and in part
will-to-transcendence, it is necessary to first in the same manner
expose his predecessor Kant's phenomenology. Because we do have a
problem with Kantian phenomenology: it cannot be used as a universal
model that applies for all relations between subject and object, where
the subject always creates a phenomenon that starts from the relation to
a noumenon that by definition is inaccessible. Several philosophers
attack Kant precisely for this [[Correlationism]] -- for instance French
syntheologist Quentin Meillassoux, who advocates a speculative realism
in his work *Après La Finitude* from 2006. But it is hardly
correlationism as such that is the problem here. What is problematic,
however, is the lack of imagination that is expressed in the repeated
quest to, at any cost, cling to Kantian phenomenology, as though it were
universally valid for all subject/object-relations. Kant successfully
negates the passive monism in Spinoza, but as with Taoism he eventually
settles for a kind of mortidinal correlationism that does not harbor any
explanation for the energy that monism actually develops.
## So what then propels the relation between subject and object?
## And if indeed there is a drive beneath that relation, why would it, in that case, allow itself to be confined to Kant's metaphysical prison where everything is preordained?
In that case it would not be of much value.
And as so often, it is within sexuality we are shown how much the
accepted dialectics underestimates the power in the dynamics that are at
stake. When it comes to sexuality, and above all our Freudian relations
to the three different sex organs, [[Matrix]], [[Mamilla]] and [[Phallus]]
(see *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the Network
Society*), it is precisely the relation to these organs that is the
noumenal and not the phenomenal. This means we must replace a Kantian
phenomenology with an interactive *phenomenoumenology* in order to be
able to detach ourselves from Kant and move on to Hegel, which is the
same as detaching ourselves from passive dualism in order to transition
to active monism, which entails a considerable leap in Western thinking.
Consequently it is the matrix out of which we are born -- and which a
large part of us constantly longs back to -- which is the noumenon, not
the phenomenon; in the same way as it is the mamilla -- that feeds us
and which we suck with heart and soul from birth until *the phallic
intrusion* -- which is the noumenon and not the phenomenon, just as the
phallus that robs us of the mamilla's illusorily promising security --
only to eject us into a chaotic and contingent world through which we
make our arduous journey toward adult maturity -- which also is the
noumenon and not the phenomenon. Kantian dualism is a dead end and the
instinctual archetypology leads us out of it, since it does not provide
us with any guidance regarding life's most intense moments.
A phenomenological reduction of these quantities to simply three banal
sex organs is something that occurs later in life and which therefore is
secondary in the phenomenology that thereby becomes inverted. This means
that Kantian correlationism as such admittedly is correct, but if the
very correlation shall be possible to take seriously we must reformulate
the complex in the form of a relationalist phenomenoumenology. Here the
logical phenomenology is the engine that powers the priestly
will-to-intelligence, while the pathical *noumenology* is the engine
that powers the royal will-to-transcendence. Together both these figures
of thought constitute the foundations for an understanding of the world
that lies beyond the Kantian reactionary worldview and that is aligned
with the Zoroastrian actionary worldview. *The logical truth-as-a-fact*
can be complemented with *the pathical truth-as-an-act* the very moment
Kantian correlationism is completed by being transformed into an
interactive phenomenoumenology.
If the phenomenal is a direct experience, and if the noumenal is an
indirect and so to speak editorially processed experience, they are
still only the explicate and implicate versions respectively of one and
the same phenomenoumenological relation. The correlation must be
operational and cannot be substantial, since it is only through the very
operation that the unit in question receives its relationalist
substance. This is exactly what Hegel emphatically maintains when he
criticizes both Spinoza and Schelling for solely relying on *Verstand*
(Hegel's expression for logos) but not, however, on *Vernunft* (Hegel's
expression for pathos). It is thus the lack of *pathos* in both Spinoza
and Schelling that causes the necessary shift from logos via pathos to
mythos not to take place, nor being able to take place within the
confines of their philosophical systems. They never succeed in scaling
or circumventing the Platonist wall that Kant has built around his
autistic worldview. Spinoza and Schelling simply do not understand the
enormous power of sexuality. This is a mystery that is overlooked in
silence. Instead these gentlemen stroll happy-go-luckily through life in
a kind of romantic haze, hand-in-hand with the mother figure that never
leaves their side. They rather absentmindedly and in a distanced manner
observe various objects around them, objects that they are far too
afraid of to engage with for real. A perverse stance is admittedly the
best suited for the philosopher. But it is, *nota bene*, a stance that
he or she has attained after having been engaged in sexuality and fully
has understood the enormous power of the libido -- definitely not by
fearfully choosing to view the world through the presexual eyes of an
inhibited teenager.
It is thus Hegel who launches [[The Two-Headed Phallus]] in Western
philosophy. This is the concept that Hegel calls *the divided One*.
Will-to-intelligence is *the Hegelian subject* as *Verstand*, as logos,
but will-to-transcendence is *the Hegelian project* as *Vernunft,* as
pathos. Elsewhere the religious mythologies constantly return, before
Christianity's division between on the one hand the father, and on the
other hand the son, to the two twins that are born out of the original
matrix. This is all about the phallic dialectics of the visionary
chieftain with his *project* and the strategic priest with his *system*
within the patriarchy. The project is carried out while affected systems
are upheld. It is about the pathical myths of *the dragon* and *the
tower*, with the dragon as a symbol of sexuality and the tower as a
symbol of religion. The dragon must be defeated for the tower to be
erected, and the tower is then adorned by the door to the barred
absolute. Will-to-power rules within all of nature. It drives forth the
twins' very existence. But will-to-power is split between
will-to-transcendence and will-to-intelligence within culture. The
chieftain and the priest together personify will-to-power, which the
patriarchy have made sure to tame through the conversion from nature to
culture. The chieftain personifies *the explicate phallus* through his
physical presence, while the priest personifies *the implicate phallus*
through his virtual potentiality.
Martin Heidegger identifies these two perspectives as *the
ready-to-hand* and *the present-at-hand* in the object, and these stand
in a dialectical relation to each other. Will-to-transcendence is to
apply the present-at-hand to the ready-to-hand, precisely as the
chieftain does in and through his activities. It is this application
that is called *vision*. Will-to-intelligence is conversely to apply the
ready-to-hand to the present-at-hand precisely as the priest does in his
activities. It is this application that is called strategy.
Will-to-transcendence is the eventological form of will-to-power
(Taoism's *yang* and Zoroastrianism's *ahura*) that is exercised by the
phallic chieftain; will-to-intelligence is the nomadological form of
will-to-power (Taoism's *yin* and Zoroastrianism's *mazda*) that is
exercised by the pseudo-androgynous priest. Will-to-transcendence is
driven by libido as a protest against mortido -- for libido is precisely
the will that stubbornly attempts to transcend life itself, as a kind of
life's overwhelming surplus. Mortido, however, expresses itself as
will-to-intelligence through binding itself in a nomadological manner to
life's circularity. But mortido's collection and processing of data
would never occur if will-to-transcendence did not inspire and lead
mortido in the Taoist tango they are dancing together. Or if we use the
Hegelian conceptual apparatus: Libido is best described as a single
isolated point called *the subject* in an ocean of mortido called *the
substance*. It is thus the subject that is the event and the substance
that is the process in Hegel, and the subject is always transcendental
in the sense that it attempts to defeat and conquer the substance to
avoid being drowned by it. This is will-to-power in its deepest and most
dialectical form.
The priest represents the sun-god and being, and is called *Majestes*,
while the chieftain represents the rain-god and becoming, and is called
*Tremendum*. Majestes impresses through the accumulated knowledge,
Tremendum impresses through the optimized capacity to act. Together
Majestes as *logos* and Tremendum as *pathos* form the optimized
will-to-power, whose *mythos* is called *Imperium*. The priest then has
an advantage over the chieftain, which is that the priest can handle the
hormonal shrinkage of the priestly strategy to *the matrichal intrigue*.
No corresponding shrinkage of the royal vision exists. The vision is
either libidinal and functioning, or else it is mortidinal, which leads
to its collapse. However, the strategy can readily shrink to an intrigue
-- in principle this is the difference between injecting either
testosterone or estrogen into the process -- just as well as the
intrigue can be widened to a strategy. Exactly this art of scaling is
the central task of the priestly archetype. Classic stories by authors
such as Shakespeare and Dostoevsky are largely built on those dynamics,
and pronounced priestly figures such as Machiavelli and Richelieu have
masterfully developed their ability to manipulate with the aid of these
differences for the purpose of running a sophisticated power play. It is
the priest and no one else who smoothly moves from the military
battlefield to the royal court, and back again, by virtue of his
shamanoid talent for crossing boundaries.
This has dramatic consequences for the large majority of men who are
sociobiologically subordinate to the chieftain. They comprehend the
vertical hierarchy which is a prerequisite for giving orders, and they
comprehend the horizontal exercise of power that is a prerequisite for
successfully executed teamwork. What they however do not understand at
all is the feminine hierarchization that enables a diagonal contact and
giving orders between different levels in the social rank, that is: from
a given higher position without either a formal or informal
responsibility for the lower position obliquely beneath. This is the
blind spot for a large majority of men, quite simply because it is
pointless during both war and hunting since unambiguousness and clarity
is then of the greatest importance. However this is a hierarchy that
exists in every nightclub queue and at the door to every VIP lounge in
the world, and it is handled nonchalantly as a matter of course more or
less solely by women with elevated status and by members of the
boundary-crossing shamanic and androgynous castes. The condescending
authoritarian gaze obliquely downward from above is, thus, the
heterosexual man's blind spot in the urban, digital society, something
that is exploited maximally by women *vis-à-vis* both men and other
women in the form of various modern variants of classic *shit testing*:
different kinds of gambits to put the other to the test through crassly
assessing the reaction. It is the attention and sensitivity to all these
minor, symbolic details that makes the outer circuit strongly dependent
on the priest and his powerfully carried out will-to-intelligence. There
is no [[Phallus]] to access for the man or for anyone at all unless there
is first a robustly anchored *root-of-the phallus*.
Please note that the sociont collapses the moment the priestly
will-to-intelligence stands alone without the royal
will-to-transcendence, and vice versa. The dynamics between the two of
them are necessary for the sociont's survival and development. When for
instance Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani convincingly argues for a
*philosophy that advocates intelligence* rather than a *philosophy that
advocates mind* in light of Man's historic encounter with the Machine,
he overlooks that intelligence without transcendence is lost in a kind
of eternal Platonist sterile loop. His Swedish colleague Nick Bostrom
makes the same Platonist error in his book *Superintelligence*. They
arrive where they arrive because intelligence in itself neither has any
will nor any movement. It is not heading anywhere at all. We are left
powerless with a root-of-the-phallus without phallus, a logos without
pathos, an engine without fuel, a kind of Kantian power without any
Hegelian movement, or for that matter any Nietzschean will. What we
really need, to a greater extent than ever, is will-to-transcendence,
this because history should not throw itself -- and us -- out and down
into the abyss of crippling nihilism. What originally was the
nomadological will to get up in the morning and journey on toward
greener pastures on the horizon, is transformed during the development
of civilization to the eventological will to move on to new, more
creative and innovative platforms to henceforth operate from these. It
is this force that is called *pathos,* and it is this symbol that is
called [[Phallus]]. Without these we are lost in an ocean of possibilities
that cannot be valued or compared with each other.
The eventological knowledge transfer occurs via *the principle of
mimesis with the phallic exception*, which is generally contained within
the outer circuit. Everything is mimicry except *authentic novelty as an
event*. The phallic exception recurs behind a concept that philosopher
Carl Schmitt in the early 20th century terms *the sovereign*. Thus the
sovereign is simply the leader in political theology who is so
exceptional that he can lead by virtue of the exception that dissolves
other laws. *The exceptional* thinks past and runs over *the general*
with intense passion, according to Schmitt. Ultimately power is a
question of *pathos* as the exceptional defeating *logos* as the
general. It is the chieftain with his exceptional will-to-transcendence,
and not the priest with his general will-to-intelligence, who achieves
the phallic leadership that extraordinary times require. The priest
personifies the library, the chieftain personifies the body mass and
blood circulation. Together they represent the dynamic societal body.
The priest is driven by a sense of *reality* and provides *legitimacy*
to phallus as a representative of and expert on history.
Will-to-intelligence starts from the-root-of-the-phallus and collates
the profound history of the sociont in particular and humanity in
general. The chieftain is driven by a sense of *life* and provides
*justification* to phallus as a representative of and expert on the
future. Will-to-transcendence starts from the utopian ideal and collates
the long-term strategy for the sociont in particular and humanity in
general. Will-to-intelligence is *the father* from history and
will-to-transcendence is *the son* from the future; both meet in the
present as *the holy spirit* and deliver the priestly vision, as the
eventological architecture, and the royal vision, as the nomadological
engineering science, to the matriarch, so that the sociont can be
divinized in the form of the sacred family.
Please note that *forgiveness* as an ethical principle only occurs in
eventological religions. Since nomadological religions only preach the
eternal recurrence of the same, the act as such also recurs and can
therefore only result in a pagan *karma*. You are sentenced for your
actions, and punishment is meted out as in *Dante's Inferno*, forever.
This explains why pagan lynch mobs constantly exact eternal punishment
and endless compensation (for themselves) for alleged injustices.
Eventology is of course revolutionary inasmuch as it enables a future
that is more or less radically different from the past. Thus eventology
permits one making mistakes as long as one learns something from these
mistakes, so that the next time one carries out an act, one has modified
one's course of action and hopes for a more favorable outcome. And
should it once again become evident that one has made a mistake, it is
important that it is another mistake and not the same, and then one has
to return to the drawing board yet again. This is absolutely central to
the transition from *nomadological moralism* to *eventological ethics*.
One mistake is anything but an unreasonable consequence of new
circumstances, not a sign of stupidity, which is why one simply just
gets up and tries anew. This means that the nomadological fixation with
*the act* is replaced by the eventological fixation with *the
intention*. Thus the prerequisites disappear for every conception of
*karma*, and also, as Zoroaster understands at an early stage, all need
for reincarnation and resurrection from the dead as exits from the
pagan, closed loop. After Zoroaster it is but the odd boy-pharaoh and
pillar-saint who invokes nomadological moralism as a principle, in the
form of shaming and accusing people of sin in order to compel them to
submit to their infantile doctrines. The construction of civilization as
such continues unabated, but with ethics proper and without banal
moralism.
What the civilization process ultimately is about is how to continually
transform what was yesterday's magic into tomorrow's technology. The
creating god with his magic has to give way to the created god that
comes with technology. What is fundamental is then precisely the
principle of the great forgiveness -- you make an attempt, and you make
a new one, again and again, and as long as you make new attempts and
learn from the mistakes you are doing the right thing. Which of course
also applies to the development of religion itself (there are no
religions, there is just religion as such, and religion must like
everything else be paradigmatically adjusted and reformed). This is
*phallic forgiveness*, one of eventology's most essential and most
valuable contributions to humanity. And this forgiveness is both
imperial and infinite when it arises from the priest's
will-to-intelligence, since it then is the priest's forgiveness of the
chieftain's incessant shortcomings. Which does not prevent that phallic
forgiveness at the same time is national and finite when it arises out
of the chieftain's will-to-transcendence, since it then becomes the
chieftain's forgiveness of the priest's incessant shortcomings.
This is how one builds something enduring, and it is these theories and
this activism of forgiveness that nationalists and imperialists alike
devote so much effort to with the purpose of, in similarity with the
alchemists, sifting out the exceptional gold that trumps the general,
which customarily otherwise settles for clans, tribes and regional
subcultures. Carl Schmitt is clear on the world being monist and not
dualist, which means that *there cannot be any division between religion
and politics*. Religion is political in the same way that politics is
religious. All of this is included in the same memeplex. Schmitt uses
the concept of political theology, and therein includes all of Man's
thoughts and activities. This view is what we emphasize when we say that
"everything is religion" (see *Syntheism -- Creating God in the Internet
Age*). Nonetheless, the history of ideas is one big graveyard filled
with misdirected and false dualism, where the most striking example of
all is the Western division between church and state, which arises in
the 5th century AD. The explanation is a repeatedly unsuccessful mimicry
of the first and inevitable duality, namely the organizational division
between the chieftain on the one hand and the priest on the other, the
construction that we call [[The Two-Headed Phallus]].
While the Zoroastrian Persians developed the two-headed phallus as the
principle for the exercise of power, the Egyptians tried to dream
themselves past the necessary division between an embodiment of in part
body, in part mind in the Persian landscape of four twin rivers, of not
just one but two Mesopotamias. Instead the Egyptians extended the monist
autocracy in their *Monopotamia*, a project that was realized by the
Atenists under the pharaoh Akhnaten in the 14th century BC. The result
was pure hell. One placed all energy and all resources in Atenist Egypt
on the pharaoh's own worship of the sun disc, while the subjects were
ordered to worship their pharaoh as the only one with legitimacy to
worship this worship-worthy sun disc. All other activities in Egyptian
society ground to a halt. Neither defense nor food production functioned
any longer. The connections with Nazi gas chambers and the Chinese
culture revolution are evident. This is the authentic dictatorship under
the false phallus, while of course phallic authenticity requires a
two-headed phallus, a condition that quite simply is ignored. It is
precisely through this stubborn avoidance of the phallus' necessary
power-sharing that history fills up with boy-pharaohs and pillar-saints,
figures that act predecessors to the pathetic individualists of late
capitalism, narcissists and eventually autists, locked into their
pompous, atomist fantasies of their own awesomeness.
The reasonable response to this Messiah complex pandemic is of course a
resounding renaissance for the Nietzschean reading of Zoroaster and
Heraclitus: "There is nothing less than two". Syntheistically we express
this as though the only unit that is just one is the Universe itself,
and its name is [[Pantheos]]. The concealed predecessor to the Universe,
the empty virtuality without actuality, is called [[Atheos]] and it is
Atheos who rules out that anything other than Pantheos can be less than
two in number. Instead the inner god inside Pantheos, that is to say
[[Entheos]], is the god of multiplicity. And the first instance of Entheos
is the two-headed phallus, where the one phallic head is the priest, who
is anchored in Pantheos in the form of will-to-intelligence, while the
other phallic head is the chieftain who is anchored in Syntheos in the
form of will-to-transcendence. Entheos is thus the name of the place
where the priest and the chieftain meet. The sociont and its history is
the entire eventological movement that stretches from Atheos to
Pantheos, and via Entheos further to Syntheos (see *Syntheism --
Creating God in the Internet Age*).
If the woman lives on in the nomadological realm and furthermore
represents biological reproduction, the man lives in the eventological
realm and represents technological development. The woman bears the
child, which is human nature, while the man builds the god which is
human culture. This means that without the two-headed phallus humanity
soon loses its way. Instead of complementing logical dualities,
boy-pharaohs and pillar-saints start dividing existence into moral
dualisms. When the sun is pitted against the rain, it is the rain that
must be sacrificed, otherwise it is no longer possible for the hedonist
boy-pharaoh to be eternalized in the sunlight. When the soul is pitted
against the body, it is the body that must be sacrificed, otherwise the
ascetic pillar-saint cannot pride himself with having liberated himself
from the desires of the flesh. But these antagonisms are not genuine but
just as falsely constructed as they are destructive. The combination of
power and infantility requires that the fantasy about the child-god
and/or god-child is maintained. And this is possible only if one ignores
-- or rather annihilates -- the link between the child and the god, that
is: the adult world in all its brutal monism.
Heidegger is fully aware of what order is at hand when he claims that
*logos* must start from *pathos* in order to become the Nietzschean
will-to-power. This also applies to the philosopher himself, since
*philosophy is the translation of pathos to logos*, if we transfer
Heidegger's priorities to our own vocabulary. But when Heidegger regards
violence (that is *pathos*) as a necessary engine of living thought
(that is *logos*), which is reasonable, Heidegger makes the mistake to
try to read the nuances into the concept logos as a Greek logos à la
Heraclitus, which he praises as commendably civilizational, and pits
this against a Jewish logos à la the Gospel of John, which he rejects as
primitive. It is actually within Heidegger's own protestant Christianity
that logos and pathos are mixed up and become impossible to separate.
They appear here either as submission *vis-à-vis* a logos without pathos
within *Protestantism,* or else as submission *vis-à-vis* a pathos
without logos within *fascism*. Unsurprisingly Heidegger joins the
German Nazi Party, and thus willingly submits to an Adolf Hitler who of
course is the boy-pharaoh *par excellence*, while it is protestant
priests, for instance Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who actually sacrifice their
own lives in protest against Hitler and the Nazi mass murders.
The dynamics between logos and pathos is complex -- they act as two
different components in a future *mythos*, something that both the
Persians and the Jews as well as the pre-Socratic Greeks were fully
aware of, before Plato began promoting the pillar-saint's delusory dream
of a logos that precedes and is primary *vis-à-vis* pathos, that is: a
mathematical universe of ideas of which our reality only is an imperfect
copy. Out of this delusion follow Plato's political ideas of the
philosopher as dictator. Without the phallic dialectics this is of
course where the patriarchy must arrive, with the philosopher-king
realized as Adolf Hitler. The priest may not become the chieftain and
the chieftain may not become the priest. *Mazda* and *Ahura* must always
be kept separate to be able to complement each other and keep each other
in check. Or to view it from a different angle: the quality of the
information that is conveyed upward in a hierarchy, and thereby also the
quality of the basis for the decision-making that is at hand, drops
dramatically when it is a dictator to whom one reports. A dictator lacks
legitimacy and rather goes about strengthening his own position than the
quality of decision-making in other respects. Bearers of bad news tend
not to be so long-lived. The information flow is developed toward
*convergence* and away from *divergence*.
In the world of bodies, it is will-to-transcendence that is the
substance, while will-to-intelligence is the subjectivity, this is the
case since it is subjectivity that rides the body mass as its substance.
The first subject is always *the priest*, who stands alone in the
wilderness and observes the world and the sociont at a distance. This is
abundantly clear when Zoroaster in the capacity of priest and founder of
religion is superordinate to the chieftain Vishtaspa within
Zoroastrianism. This is also clear when Moses as priest and legislator
is superordinate to Aaron as chieftain and warlord within Judaism.
However, in the sensual world, these roles shift with
will-to-intelligence as substance and will-to-transcendence as
subjectivity, this since it is subjectivity that rides the sensual
fantasy as its substance. In both these situations will-as-substance is
much more powerful and comprehensive than subjectivity. The subject in
this context, is only the less important rider who is located atop the
enormous beast that is called will-topower. Not infrequently, the
explosive will-to-power dislodges the subject who sits anything but
firmly in the saddle. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls this event *the
intrusion of the real.* Libido is a force of nature, literally, which
the subject in vain strives to harness.
In Lacan's own works it is Hegel who represents the priestly office as
*knowledge* in the form of will-to-intelligence (truth-as-a-fact), while
Marx represents the royal office as *truth* in the form of
will-to-transcendence (truth-as-an-act). Lacan thus handles the pressure
from the real with the aid of a symbolic order à la Hegel and an
imaginary order à la Marx. The real remains seemingly tamed like a
slumbering volcano until the next eruption no longer can be avoided. One
can thus say that Lacan confirms Zoroaster's prophecy that the history
of philosophy ultimately only can be understood as a love affair between
these two phallic poles. What Lacan contributes is that the matrichal --
or chaos -- causally always precedes the phallic -- or order. First
there is the chaos goddess in the form of the real, blowing up Man's
dreamy fantasies. Only thereafter can the priest with the aid of
knowledge restore the symbolic order (Hegel) including anointing the
chieftain, while the chieftain with the aid of truth can recreate the
imaginary order (Marx). The priest and the chieftain at the apex of the
Mithraic hierarchy must time after time slay the libidinal bull with
joint efforts. The priest with the knowledge-based strategy and the
chieftain with the truth-based vision. Where the matrix at hand moves
from the old to the new paradigm, or from the old to the new territory.
The phallic dialectics of will-to-transcendence and will-to-intelligence
is one axis in a diagram where the phenomenological dialectics of
eternalism and mobilism constitutes the other axis. These wills must be
seen in relation to the general drive system that Man is subject to. In
the book *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the Network
Society* we give an account of four such drives. The first of these is
[[Instinct]], which Man shares with animals and which we therefore also
call *animalistic drive*. Instinct operates through direct contact with
and within the body and in accordance with pre-learned or biologically
programmed patterns. Thereafter comes pure [[Drive]] in itself, which
appears fixed and machine-like for Man and which therefore also is
called *mechanical drive*. When Man seeks security and safety in the
familiar, and stubbornly returns to the same repetitive compulsive
behavior, it is pure drive that affects our senses and our
decision-making. But also direct, insistent needs with an origin in the
body such as hunger, thirst, weariness and sexual excitement belong to
the domains of drive.
After pure drive there is [[Desire]], which is driven by language and by
illusion, according to which what is named actually corresponds to what
the drive system seeks; desire is therefore also called *human drive*.
Since desire really only strives to remain active, its obscure objective
constantly shifts and never allows itself to be conquered. That is:
desire is doomed to always be disappointed even with its most successful
conquests -- the object never corresponds to the unreasonably lofty
expectations -- wherefore the search always must start anew, again and
again, and continue forever. Eventually, when what is hopeless in the
project becomes painfully evident, the drive arrives that tempts Man
beyond life itself, a new phase in the quest for the new and higher,
[[Transcendence]], or as it is also called: *sacral drive*. If desire is a
byproduct of language and thinking, transcendence instead is a byproduct
of culture and Man's interaction with his fellow humans, within and
beyond the local sociont.
The libidinal will-to-transcendence and will-to-intelligence also have
their mortidinal equivalents. Will-to-transcendence corresponds to the
mortidinal *will-to-extinction*. Will-to-intelligence corresponds to the
mortidinal *will-to-arrogance*. At the same time will-to-power in itself
has a truly mortidinal engine that keeps the machinery running. It is,
as Slavoj Žižek observes -- with respect to Hegel's concept of *the
night of the world* as the subject's foundation -- the subject itself
that is exactly the catastrophe that it deep down fears and that it does
everything possible to try to avoid becoming. Will-to-transcendence and
will-to-intelligence thus operate as a thin film atop a powerful
mortidinal engine, which becomes obvious when these wills are threatened
by corruption or manipulation from the surrounding world. This becomes
particularly clear when we define these wills through *the phallic
gaze,* which they by definition themselves comprise. The chieftain's
phallic gaze is horizontal and internal. The priest's phallic gaze is
vertical and external. This creates the internal dynamics where people
see the chieftain, where the chieftain sees the priest, where the priest
sees the people, and where the people's role is personified by the
matriarch, who completes the nomadological power triad. Which is then
connected to people mimicking the matriarch's gaze, in order to identify
their desires with hers.
What is interesting is how the domestication of Man's animal nature in
three steps under a priestly subjectivity that Zoroaster advocates, has
such striking similarities with *the ethics of psychoanalysis* that
Lacan constructs in the 20th century. Zoroaster begins with identifying
a subjectivity in the imaginary that he calls *humata*. He then
continues by identifying a subjectivity in the symbolic that he calls
*hukhta*. And he completes the loop by identifying a subjectivity in the
factual, mimicking activity that he calls *huvarshta*. You are *humata*,
you are *hukhta* and you are *huvarshta*, and you cannot escape anywhere
else -- you are even in a Hegelian sense the conflict between the three
steps, since your subjectivity identifies with all three steps at once
as a loop -- but you are forced to wholly and fully identify yourself
with these experiences and activities. It is then and only then that you
deserve to be called an *ashavan*, a retainer of truth. Then and only
then do you deserve through your *navjote* to be a member of your
*anjuman* -- a state for which the correct contemplation, *tushna
maiti*, is excellent support. Unsurprisingly these three ethical steps
recur in tantric Buddhism, Zoroastrianism's sister religion. Within
Dzogchen Buddhism *humata* corresponds to *dharmakaya*, *hukhta*
corresponds to *sambhogakaya*, and *huvarshta* corresponds to
*nirmanakaya*. It is then only logical that neither Zoroastrianism nor
Buddhism contain any laws or moral rules that one must obey within the
congregation -- Zoroastrianism's *anjuman* or Buddhism's *sangha* --
since an insight into what the connection between *humata*, *hukhta* and
*huvarshta* actually means is all that is needed in order for one to be
able to create a complete ethics. It is fully possible for *the local
ashavan* to serve *the global Saoshyant* with a clean conscience, when
or if he arrives.
The imaginary and the symbolic recur as a kind of Hegelian fantasies in
Lacan, where the third step is *the real* that casts aside and crumbles
these fantasies, as a much-needed break in the production of fantasies
and symbols, something that throws Man back to the starting point of the
loop called subjectivity.
## Fantasies are thereafter built anew, they comprise to a certain extent the insights that followed after the real's intrusion into the previous activity. But what then is *the real*?
Well, it is absolutely not reality as such in any pre-Kantian sense, but the
real must rather be understood as a radically effective reminder that
there actually is an external reality beyond the representations on the
whole, a reality that does not allow itself to be controlled by the
dividual's or the sociont's increasingly self-absorbed fantasies about
their own significance. This means that the real by no means needs to
come from an external source, rather it is even more effective and more
tumultuous if it is an internal phenomenon that the subject completely
lacks control of. And Sigmund Freud had of course already solved that
issue for Lacan. The subject is, as we know, not master in its own house
and only controls part of its own activity. All that remains, the entire
dark, unexplored continent that the subject has no insight into, is *the
real par excellence*. The proper Freudian name for this phenomenon is
[[The Subconscious]].
## So how does Zoroaster's *huvarshta* relate to Lacan's *the real* and Freud's [[The Subconscious]] if all three still refer to one and the same existentialist ethics?
Here Belgian philosopher and mathematician Thomas
Hamelryck is of great interest, since he tends to connect anthropologist
René Girard's idea of universal mimicry and rivalry with both Buddhist
tantra and Lacanian psychoanalysis. For Zoroaster *huvarshta* first and
foremost is an act, the ultimate truth-as-an-act which it is possible to
uncompromisingly identify oneself with (see *Syntheism -- Creating God
in the Internet Age*). You become what you do, the act tells the truth.
And what you do further determines how you in the next step reflect on,
or rather fantasize about the world, if we return to Lacan. Thus far
Zoroaster and Lacan are in complete agreement.
However history does not end there. Girard argues that since Man's
behavior to 99 per cent is about the mimicking of superordinate
authorities and nothing else, identity can only be generated tribally
and precisely through repeated mimicking. However, Girard admits that
the mimicry is concealed to Man as precisely mimicry. Man experiences,
as Zoroaster observes, his actions as original and thereby
identity-generating. Which makes subjectivity one big existentialist
hoax, since truth-as-an-act ultimately just is *mimickingas-an-act*. And
this is most clearly seen in that the dividual not just mimics the
behaviors of others, but also fantasizes of the other's desire and then
mimics the other's desire. This generates an intense rivalry over the
same object of desire within the sociont, which leads to enormous
tensions that sooner or later must have an outlet. And this outlet is
the search for the [[Abject]], the arbitrarily selected scapegoat, whose
elimination recreates the illusion of unity and collaboration within the
sociont. At least until the entire process must be repeated again, which
occurs time after time.
The problem here is that it is impossible for us to see this chain of
events in ourselves. The difference between the original act and the act
of mimicking is every human's blind spot. And it is this blind spot
that, according to Hamelryck, is subjectivity in its purest form,
precisely because it is the difference between the hoax called
*consciousness* and the brutal and inconvenient truth about our
non-existence as terrified and unimaginative automatoms in a herd that
we are totally dependent on, even for the most simple needs that are
connected with our survival, called *subconsciousness*. Only the god can
carry out the genuinely original act, and only the priest can seem to be
doing the same in the capacity of he who mimics the god himself, a god
that fortunately is concealed to the rest of us behind the barred
absolute. For all that the rest of us do is to mimic our leaders and
role models, from the moment we are born until we die. Zoroaster's
ethical imperative thereby becomes even stronger and more relevant: You
are and can only be your actions, and your highly temporary fantasies of
these actions' significance for history. The name for this ethical
principle is the untranslatable *huvarshta*.