# Boy-pharaohs, pillar-saints and the Gnostic delusion As Eurasian civilization reaches a period, relatively speaking characterized by peace and growing prosperity, called *the Axial Age* -- a concept which philosopher Karl Jaspers launches in the book *The Origin and Goal of History* (1949) -- that is: from around 900 BC and onward, there is suddenly an abundance of philosophers, artists and founders of religion who have tired of waiting for the heavens to achieve a miracle, and instead seek and proclaim the fastest shortcuts to rewards of every conceivable kind. For those who listen, the distance shrinks drastically from the little boy filled with dreams, via priests and respected elders, parents and other adults, to God. Both *logos* and *pathos* cannot remain intact if we are to regard *mythos* as the deepest truth about existence and our conceptions of it. Which brings us close to an ideal that hard-to-handle Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau formulates around the middle of the 18th century. The thought is as follows: nature is good and civilization is one big process of decay whereby Man and his existence are corrupted. Ever since the dawn of time -- possibly with the one exception of the Christian savior's birth in the manger in the stables, meaning *the boy-pharaoh par excellence* has arrived -- everything has just gone downhill. Which in turn means that the pristine and ignorant virgin by definition is preferable to any enlightened and (possibly) cynical life experience. What is practical here is that the person who is best suited to escort this beautiful and innocent mindset naturally must be just as touchingly innocent himself. ## And who might then be better suited for this, than the self-appointed *pillar-saint* who bears the name Jean-Jacques Rousseau? Rousseau simply appears as the perfect adversary of the barred absolute and as the most eloquent propagandist for *innate wisdom* as an ideology. ## So why not simplify things by elevating the virginal child to an omnipotent decision-maker? ## Why not institutionalize a constantly ongoing cultural revolution while you're at it? ## And why not rewrite the history about the most elevated god, who henceforth acts as the virginal child? The problem is that this daring maneuver requires a revolutionary change of society's entire self-comprehension, given that one suddenly and forcefully separates religion from sexuality -- two disciplines that during the nomadological period most definitely were one and the same thing. The small child may, as Sigmund Freud argues, be enveloped in sexuality, but this is nothing that it believes itself to master or know anything about. Gods do not have the least idea what virginity is; it is but a toy among countless others for them. The only common denominator that unites the child and the god is then the narcissism that excludes adult men and women who take social responsibility. A society that excludes or marginalizes the adults, or even worse propels a collective infantilization, is a society colored by a comprehensive [[Internarcissism]] (see *Syntheism -- Creating God in the Internet Age*). The boy-pharaoh dreams of the uncompromising phallus without limitation. The pillar-saint on his part dreams of the uncompromising consciousness without limitation. The boy-pharaoh starts as the body that hates its soul. The pillar-saint starts in the opposite way as the soul that hates its body. But since it is the pillar-saint who just like the priest writes the narrative, Gnosticism always boils down to an idea of the perfect spirit that must liberate itself from the imperfect body, which is connected to the low drives and all manner of moral filth. That is: as a narrative which the boy-pharaoh mimics and quite simply steals from the pillar-saint in the form of a personification of the only remaining god as a human. But above all the boy-pharaoh and the pillar-saint cultivate envy toward, rather than admiration of, another man's body and/or soul. And in this hatred and contempt *vis-à-vis the other* within themselves, both of them are rapidly infantilized. The humor, that previously was seen as sacred within religion, is replaced by the programmatic *humorlessness* typical for dictatorships and their dogmatisms. Prophets and tricksters are murdered before they have the opportunity to speak, and nor is truth the great transition's first victim, but it is free speech, which is abolished long before the question of what is true or not can even be posed. What is decisive is what is suitable. And with the disappearance of free speech [[The Barred Absolute]] too ceases to exist. Dictatorship and dogmatism want complete insight into, and thereby also control of the barred absolute, which therefore no longer can continue being barred and which therefore no longer can continue existing in any meaningful form. Truth in itself goes from being a [[Processuality]] -- truth must not only constantly be redefined via mutable paradigmatics, but that which truth deals with also constantly changes, since everything in existence is and remains impermanent processes -- to being presumed *a fixation for all eternity* (naturally established by the Gnostic himself in accordance with his timeless and unrivaled *gnosis*). For the same reason humor -- transparency's superior ideal -- is rejected by Axial Age ideologues, who consequently celebrate anyone who, in the name of stability, exercises total control, while at the same time attacking and discrediting anyone who uses irony and exposes the public lie. In this manner, as early as during the Axial Age, the attacks on the extremely functional [[The Silk Road Triad|Silk Road triad]] in the East (Persian *Zoroastrianism*, Indian *Buddhism* and Chinese *Taoism*) begins, although the triad handles the dialectics of nomadology and eventology with outstanding success. Instead the foundation is laid out for its radical opposite, which we can refer to as [[The Disney World Triad]] -- that is: the Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormonism and Scientology -- which grows particularly popular in North America in the late 20th century, as it realizes the total commercialization and individualization of religion as a narcissistic sacrificial cult, without even a simulated connection to a genuine search for the objective and procedural truth about existence. Hidden within this development lies what Swedish-American philosopher Benedict Beckeld refers to as *oikophobia*, the exoticization of the alien and near-unattainable ideal, ill-concealed beneath the contempt toward one's own home and/or one's own tribe. Oikophobia is thus a destructive luxury that humanity repeatedly is afflicted by when prosperity reaches the level where the sociont drags around boy-pharaohs and pillar-saints that it lacks enough sense to rid itself of. Like the grand old Zoroastrian high priest and master strategist Kartir icily remarks in the Sassanid Empire in the 3rd century AD: The culture that does not get rid of its self-appointed boy-pharaohs and pillar-saints will soon be dragged down into hell by these death worshippers, full of hatred toward their own sociont but prepared to give their all for another world that does not exist. Kartir's prophetic warning (then directed toward Persian Gnostics like Mani, and later Mazdak) greatly concerns the oikophobia of our age, the anti-phallic cultivation of a hatred toward one's own culture as the ultimate expression of decadence. It makes perfect sense to speak of Gnosticism as a curse within political ideology. History demonstrates several examples of false phalluses, where Hitler and Stalin in this context appear as the 20th century's *boy-pharaohs par excellence*. Whenever reality departs from one's wishful thinking, it is reality that either must be remedied or repressed. What is primary is always to safeguard the dictator's narcissistic little ego that stumbles around in its own pathological darkness. This is the Gnostic delusion, which constantly haunts humanity and causes one catastrophe after another. The roots are to be sought within the Christianity and Islam that incinerate the barred absolute during the Axial Age. Fascism and communism were never anything other than vulgar and futile attempts to recreate Abrahamic heaven on Earth. And unfortunately the breakthrough of digital culture entails that Gnosticism returns. The world is once again thrust into a period filled with crazy cults and hysterical sects that thrive within growing, but essentially closed, filter bubbles. Astrology and similar superstition poisons the inner circuit, while sundry variants of paranoid conspiracy theories erode intelligence in the outer circuit. ## And what figures are those that appear in the vanguard of these cults and sects, if not boy-pharaohs and pillar-saints who believe themselves to be able to exorcise the world with what can only be described as voodoo? The truth is of course that only a person who deep down accepts and genuinely loves both their body and what we call our soul can be true and authentic. At the leadership level there is always a need for both the chieftain and the priest, even if these two functions must be kept separate. This is Zoroastrianism's great and profound insight. The authentic duality generates *the dialectics of will-to-transcendence and will-to-intelligence* -- the dynamic chieftain and the enlightened priest. At the same time as the Gnostic delusion generates the false dialectics of body and soul as the mortidinal *will-to-destruction*, the boyish longing for perfection, infinity and immortality. When the boundary-setting phallic gaze is lacking, this boyishness detests every form of antagonic challenge. The yearning for perfection, infinity and immortality is of course nothing other than infantile hatred that is directed toward all forms of developing obstacles. We get the boy with the mother, but without the father, a boy who therefore dreams completely unrealistic dreams of what it means to be a man, a boy who claims that he already is a man despite only being a boy, and who never has his megalomanic statements scrutinized. During the Axial Age this obsession explodes in the form of sundry sects and cults, built around various pillar-saints who in different ways regard themselves as dispatched by both higher and lower gods to bring justice on Earth. The result was imbecile world religions that erased the powerful engineers of the Bronze Age from the history books in order to celebrate the Gnostic quackery of the Axial Age instead. The ideological minefield we have as a result has scarcely begun to clear yet, but a good start would be to once again bring attention to the real origins of Western culture in the Persian-Jewish axis and its applications of *empire* and *nation*. In this narrative there is namely no tolerance whatsoever for Gnostic fairytales and princelings. Problems do of course arise immediately in a society populated by people who are obsessed with mimicking each other, but where one has done away with everything by way of accumulated wisdom and even the insights that are part of the adult world. Here internarcissism is fortified as in a turbo engine when the various actors uncritically mimic each other in one large loop of collective, repetitive, obsessive, compulsive behavior. And the superego has never before enjoyed its bizarre ideological monopoly this much. ## For who aside from the superego is designed to play dictator when Man finds himself in a constant civil war with himself? ## But how could the lazy wishful thinking that virginity equals wisdom result in anything else? The law that so far has operated with great success overreaches, and in its greedy eagerness it fails to comprise also what it lacks influence over. The rise of civilization is thereby followed -- by virtue of the structural pattern that operates at the metalevel -- by the fall of civilization. The history of ideas contains many examples of attempts to come to terms with this fateful dilemma: caste systems, reincarnation, myths of alternative worlds that exist in parallel with our own, astrology and conspiracy theories, as well as radically redistributed societal resources carried out through instruments of power. All of these are examples of more or less desperate attempts at handling the unrelentingly growing chasm that arises between the law as protection for equal opportunities and the law as a tool for actual leveling of the outcome in all sorts of processes. The neurotic and ascetic pillar-saints soon find psychotic and hedonist boy-pharaohs, where the boy-pharaohs with great eagerness do everything they can to carry out the pillar-saints' fanatic visions of *the good society*. Two well-known examples are the self-appointed prophets and founders of religion Mani and Mazdak during the golden age of Zoroastrianism in the Persian Sassanid Empire, where Mani paves the way for the Gnostic sect that later is developed into Christianity, while Mazdak paves the way for the Gnostic sect that later is developed into Islam. And then it is of course only natural that these religions adopt all sorts of harrowing ideas, such as the priests being -- and having to be -- divinely perfect and inhumanly unassailable in every respect, and that salvation aims at making all believers godlike copies of these figures of light. In accordance with the prevailing logic the priests who cannot live up to these arbitrarily chosen and completely unrealistic ideals must be beset by Satanic temptations, wherefore they must be purged and executed by genuinely perfect pillar-saints. The next stage of the same reasoning arises during recurring cultural revolutions and involves the adherents of the movement, the faithful, who do not practice their submission with requisite perfection, having to be dishonored publicly and preferably also locked up in concentration camps. Or quite simply just be executed. This is the banal evil, or evil as a banal moralism that poisons the entire political discourse in society. More often than seldom maintained by an attack on humanity's very tribal foundations: child versus adult, woman versus man, dark-skinned versus light-skinned, et cetera. In true Hegelian spirit eventology's arrival leads to a radical reassessment of the underlying nomadology before it becomes possible to maintain it in the form of an encapsulated embryo that constitutes a harbinger and predecessor. The Zoroastrians in antiquity's upland Persia stubbornly champion the thesis -- this in contrast to Indian and Chinese lowland neighbors -- that the ontoepistemological pair of opposites *wisdom* versus *energy* is more fundamental and illustrative than the sexual pair of opposites *yang* versus *yin*. First the external, contingent chaos must be arranged with the aid of fictive freezing before the internal, organized ritual can take place. *Yang* must in itself acquire two poles, the two poles that the Zoroastrians call *Ahura* and *Mazda*, before yang is ready to meet and interact with *yin*. This adjustment receives comprehensive, ideological, long-term consequences. It is the Persians who create the concept *empire via power-sharing,* while the Chinese in a Confucian manner to this day continue to build and fortify *empire via dictatorship*. The Taoists sexualize will-to-power in the field of tension between *yang* and *yin* as a cosmological principle, while the Zoroastrians instead prioritize *the two-headed phallus,* within which the royal will-to-transcendence is separated from the priestly will-to-intelligence through power in itself being ruled out without separation and collaboration. At the same time as both sexual and spiritual attraction are saved via separation, without having to sacrifice either the one or the other -- a dualist competition between body and mind which the Zoroastrians refuse to support during the coming Axial Age. The underlying circular time entails that the Persians are referred to a lower iconological category, at the same time as nomadology without eventology continues to dominate in the form of Taoism in China and as Buddhism in India, traditions which develop into Eastern Gnosticism during the following Axial Age. It is thus in the Middle East, and only in the Middle East, that eventology is developed, first within Zoroastrianism as a world in parallel with iconology, then within the Abrahamic religions with their stubborn attempts to disconnect eventology from nomadology, spurred on by *the Gnostic delusion* among the boy-pharaohs and the pillar-saints in accordance with which *pathos* and *logos* must operate disengaged from each other. As though the mythical narrative that keeps the sociont intact no longer would be required. This explains why the Gnostic delusion in the Middle East expresses itself in the form of the Gnostic religions -- first as Manichaeism and Mazdakism, then in more easily digestible and popular variants as Christianity and Islam (with their obsession with liberating the good soul from the evil body), while the Gnostic delusion in China and India expresses itself as an equally self-righteous yearning to step off the supreme circular time altogether, that is: as an extinction (*moksha*), a cessation of the cursed reincarnation. At any rate, this is a case of an individual revolt against the sociont and its phallic order, exactly the dissolution that Zoroaster cautions against in *Gathas* a millennium before the Axial Age. The shamanoid uprising against the tribal hierarchy within the tribe will in due time plunge the entire community into the abyss. The Gnostic project, that thus arises during the Axial Age, is the schizophrenic celebration of *either* asceticism *or* hedonism. Thus only *logos* or *pathos* in their absolute forms, as either pure body or pure soul, as separate spheres without any kind of connection with each other. This explains why *Gnostic dualism* is dualism *par excellence* -- a kind of vulgarized eventology that imagines that it can liberate itself from nomadology through avoiding the fully developed sexuality that the adults share with the gods. The boy-pharaoh does of course hate all forms of *logos* since logos reveals his childishness. The pillar-saint does of course hate all forms of *pathos* since pathos reveals his childishness. If the two princes thereby both fear sexuality's enormous power *vis-à-vis* the woman as an idea, they are at the same time united ideologically in their hatred of the adult libido. While they have no problem whatsoever in turning sexuality into blind and unbridled violence if it were to serve their interests, wholly in accordance with *the principle of the pathical constant*, that is: the principle that says that violence and sexuality are given quantities (and communicating vessels) in all societies and only can diminish or increase in a direct, opposing relation to each other. A pacifist society becomes oversexualized, in an asexual society violence is ramped up, and the only possible, long-term management of these forces is to strive for a pragmatic equilibrium for the pathical constant. The princes soon start to dream of separating the chieftain from the priest, so that the chieftain can be replaced by the boy-pharaoh while the priest is replaced by the pillar-saint. This however requires that both of them must avoid the adult and dialectical phallus, as well as all unpleasant exposure to an adult stance on the whole. And this happens through Gnostic dualism being realized in the opposite sex as well. Refusing to allow the two boys to grow up to adult men, entails that one also runs the woman within the same sphere through the desexualized log splitter that only offers two pure and polarized stereotypes, namely the mother and the little girl. When the wholly overarching objective is to repress unmanageable sexuality -- which of course is connected with the hated adult world -- one also moves the mother as well as the girl to a world of perfection, infinity and -- above all -- immortality. The phallus that represents mortality, and all the projects one can and want to realize within the confines of this mortality, are ruthlessly assassinated, which means that the boy never ever needs to tear himself away from either the mother's warm and safely enfolding [[Matrix]] or her nourishing and consoling [[Mamilla]]. We must then at any cost avert the adultification and repress the frightening sexuality. The objective becomes to keep the mother *happy* where she floats around on an ocean of unconditional love instead of making her *satisfied* in a phallically sexualized world where desire constantly insists on her attention. Thus the little boy can undisturbedly continue fantasizing about eternally remaining the worshipped mother's *axis mundi* in a fairytale world where peace always prevails, where nothing ever changes, where nothing ends, where no single person ever becomes adult and therefore never can die. This through sexuality being killed when phallus is castrated. In accordance with the principle of the pathical constant -- which says that the aggregate amount of sex and violence in a society always is the same; the sex and violence that is not visible has always been swept under the rug and is hiding somewhere else -- the fairytale of a peaceful and desexualized world must be defended with unrestrained violence. It is thus not a question of a conflict between the Apollonian hierarchy and the Dionysian swarm, the default narrative that Nietzsche constantly revisits, but what is at stake is instead *the Cybelian lynch mob* which now makes its entrance in history. This mob is named after the Greek goddess Cybele, who falls in love with her castrated grandson Attis, whereupon she is forced to roam the world with an army of embittered, sexless eunuchs in tow, as a kind of apocalyptic zombies of antiquity. The Cybelian lynch mob's arrival is quite simply the price we humans pay for long periods of peace, stability and growing surpluses. Sexuality and violence return with a vengence in increasingly perverted forms. What was once dominated by *mutual admiration* is now instead driven by *envy*. What becomes primary for the Gnostic in this situation that has arisen, is then not *whether* he chooses *either* soul *or* body in the arranged conflict between these two quantities (where the former is purely imaginary, see [[The Body Machines]]), but instead whether he actually chooses *only* the one or the other of the alternatives that are presented. By making this choice and ruling out any dynamic coexistence, the prerequisites for the entire phallic dialectics are eliminated. This is *the Gnostic transfixation* -- diversity must be swept away and replaced by narrow-mindedness. Which is what happens when one discards a functioning monism in favor of a thoroughly artificial dualism. The Gnostic wants to possess the mamilla at any cost, and if the Gnostic cannot do this, nor must anyone else. Thus the Gnostic worldview is dualist, divided. This regrettable division is the result of a *fall* that the world has gone through, a drastic process of decay where *The One* of the sociont is exchanged for a hopelessly antagonistic dichotomy. The only salvation a Gnostic sees for his part is to be absorbed into *gnosis*. The necessary phallic division between on the one hand the priest's wisdom and on the other hand the chieftain's energy, does from a Gnostic perspective appear an unpleasant repetition of the trauma that the child's painful separation from mamilla entails. Therefore one has the two-headed phallus put to death in a blinded eagerness to be able to play alone, as a despotic pseudophallus with only a single head. ## What use are two heads when one's mother of course provides daily assurance that one already is perfect with just that one head? Then there is no reason for history to go through yet another nomadological repetition of the same; for it has of course already *de facto* attained its completion in that the Gnostic himself, who personifies the eternally immutable, has arrived in the world. Then there is no need for cumbersome power-sharing, the simplest pyramid-shaped power structure is perfectly sufficient. At the apex there is then either the perfect chieftain who has no need for a priest at his side but rules autocratically by virtue of an intoxicating *hedonism*, or else the perfect priest who has no need for a chieftain at his side but rules by virtue of what in its own way is an equally intoxicating *asceticism*. In other words: we get either a boy-pharaoh or a pillar-saint who demands *submission*. The boy-pharaoh leads his subjects into a political dictatorship, while the pillar-saint leads his subjects into religious fanaticism. None of them allow any form of opposition or questioning. This authoritarianism can to begin with dazzle the audience by simulating phallic power, but soon enough it becomes clear that it is a case of a false phallus that never can generate both intelligence and transcendence at the same time. And thereby nor any phallic dialectics between them. This false phallus lacks either the power of *vision* or the incisiveness of *strategy*, which means that in practice it lacks both. The boy-pharaoh is a false chieftain since he in his infantility lacks the priest. The pillar-saint is a false priest since he in his infantility lacks the chieftain. However, what is lacking in the form of talent and genuine understanding of the historical situation, the false phallus replaces with an irrepressible narcissism. This compulsive egomania renders the false phallus unable to distinguish between war on the one hand and hunting on the other. This in turn makes both the boy-pharaoh and the pillar-saint useless as role-models. To mimic a false phallus can possibly favor one's own career for a warrior or a hunter, but then that is all. What remains to look forward to, besides various banal forms of architecture and an economy that is smashed to pieces, are meaningless bloodbaths and brutal inquisitions. It is important in this context to understand that Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Christianity and Platonism all are products of the Axial Age. In varying degrees they all elevate the pure woman, the innocent child and the Platonist philosopher-king. Which is the perfect recipe for a society that wants to remain in eternal childhood. When the authentic phallus is conspicuous by its absence, the arisen void is filled by a Gnostic who refuses to leave the presexual or asexual stage and is engaged in aggressive resistance against everything pertaining to adult sexuality. Under every such ideology [[The Peter Pan Syndrome]] lies concealed, that is: the dream of being able to enjoy all of the advantages of phallus without for that matter having to worry about taking responsibility as an adult agent in the world and without accepting mutability, finitude and mortality. Buddhism strives in the same direction through despising libido and attempting to extinguish desire. The objective is therefore to break with nomadological circularity, and the figure who is designated by history for that feat is the pillar-saint who has elevated himself and has succeeded in duping sufficiently many others to retain his leading position. Christianity essentially makes the same maneuver through propagating fear of sexuality and persistently trying to sweep sexuality's enormous power under all rugs in existence through celebrating the event when the religion's founder and chief commander dies on the cross for the sins of us all with his own virginity intact, which makes him the only scapegoat that we will ever have to sacrifice (which the Jews with unparalleled stubbornness of course refuse to accept, which means that nor do they receive any forgiveness and have consequently been forced to endure 2,000 years of Christian pogroms). Unsurprisingly, these joint fundamentals entail that the Gnostic religions can be exchanged for other, similar religions, with minimal alterations. Which is precisely what happens during late capitalism when Christianity takes up the fight with Buddhism for the position as the leading matrichal religion in East Asia, while Buddhism simultaneously has conquered traditionally Christian terrain in both Europe and the Americas. The seemingly different doctrines overlap and replace each other without anything fundamental essentially changing. However the suppression of sexuality does not occur without consequences; the connection between pedophilia and Catholicism is reasonably not altogether random. A religion that worships the child as a God and celebrates its icon's innocent childishness -- while simultaneously excluding the adult man and his sexuality from the community -- cannot very well channel the sexual energy in any other way than to sexualize the worshipped child. The church literally becomes one big adult day care center where pacifism and vegetarianism become the new norms that clearly signal contempt for phallic warfare and hunting. He who like Friedrich Nietzsche seeks the origin of the death of God in culture, will reasonably start where God ceased being the most adult of all adults to instead become the most childish of all children -- a train of thought that is brilliantly depicted in William Golding's classic novel *Lord of the Flies*. But for the presence of adults, the children's world would be anything but happy and playful, it is instead quickly developed into a burning inferno of confused evil. The similarities with both Muhammad's and Adolf Hitler's bloody crusades are striking. Any resistance is immediately met with icy excessive violence of near-pathetic dimensions, in exactly the same way as an offended child without any distance would react. During the Maoist Cultural Revolution in China it was even the adults themselves who became the victims of their own offended and insufficiently distanced children's bloody anger. Taoism carries out the same phallus-avoiding maneuver through describing existence as a constantly ongoing dance between the poles phallus and matrix, but without saying a word about the troubling discordant exception that sexuality is, and that the priest in the capacity of he who separates phallus from matrix nevertheless represents. Sexuality is no game for the faint-hearted, and harmony in existence is a pious pipe dream without grounding in reality. Platonism refuses to recognize the two-headed phallus in any way whatsoever, and instead separates the mind from the body with the purpose of elevating the mind and powerfully degrading the body -- something that all the world's Gnostic pillar-saints obviously love. At last they can regard themselves, in the capacity of asexual desperadoes, as more elevated beings than all the hunters and warriors that over millennia have been at the center of the religious rituals. Only a society that has attained considerable prosperity and long periods of peace can even start to cultivate that sort of infantile fantasies. These are fantasies that always strive to make the boy on the pillar the loftiest ideal, an actor who only produces texts about his own excellence but who neither manages the chieftain's nor the priest's toil in the patriarchy of the outer circuit. Confucianism is then nothing but the pragmatically required counterweight to Taoism in East Asian culture. This of course does not entail that violence and war disappear. Not at all. However, it does mean that violence and war are placed outside religion and above all beneath religion. Soon the self-appointed saints occupy their respective pillars, spread out in the forests while dispatching armies at each other. Gnosticism thus receives its most powerful expression when Mazdakism -- which the Zoroastrians did fight hard, with some success, in the Persian Sassanid Empire -- returns in Arab form under the Islamic flag in the early 7th century. ## For what is Islam, if not pillar-saints spread out in deserts and mountain areas that bash soldiers on the head with decrees, in order to then send these soldiers against each other in one long *jihad*? Where the one remaining distinction between *Sunni* and *Shia* is that the former school requires that the soldiers shall understand the Quran in the same way as the boy-pharaoh from Mecca himself -- where understanding is the warlord Muhammad's central contribution; this early predecessor of *Mao's Little Red Book* was namely written by Persian rather than Arab authors, for a largely illiterate Arab audience -- while the latter school requires that the soldiers submit to the local pillar-saint's locally tinged and private interpretation of the Quran instead. The rest of the world has been lucky that it has proven impossible to unite Islam under a single papal pillar-saint. Allah must under such conditions appear a very domineering child. It is not as within Christianity, where God has gradually been reduced to a child, but in Islam God has never been anything but precisely a wayward child. However, because of Islam's great geographical dissemination and its built-in decentralization, it has proven very difficult to correctly interpret this child. So opinions differ. Thankfully. The four religions from the Middle East must thus be understood in the following way: Since Zoroastrianism worships the military phallus, Islam can never be anything other than an *imitation of the worshiping of the military phallus*. And since Judaism worships the priestly phallus, Christianity can never be anything other than an *imitation of the worshiping of the priestly phallus*. If we agree this far, it appears only logical 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. All this becomes possible through the Gnostic maneuver that consists of blowing up the door to the barred absolute in order to then tame the military's and the clergy's barred religions and convert these to factories for a simplified production of platitudes that appeal to the masses. It is thus this tragic maneuver that must be reversed if the eventological Protopia shall be afforded a new possibility to establish itself. ## So then the question is: Where and when does the playground for Man's fantasy change and above all shrink? A clear departure occurs with the *desexualization* that is imposed upon Man when he becomes settled. The outer circuit within the sociont is pushed into the inner circuit. Logos, mythos and pathos are blended in a kind of tribal pressure cooker. Sex, violence and shamanic rites are stigmatized. Art loses its pathical strength, is infantilized, and reduced to *decorationism*. The phallic gaze is shifted from the primordial fathers, the chieftain and the priest, to the primordial mother, the matriarch and the child. And with this displacement, logos for lack of pathos wastes away and is replaced by a universal mythos, a pipe dream of eternal peace and eternal happiness, based on the infantile fantasy of the eternal child with a soul with some sort of separate existence *vis-à-vis* the hated body that is connected with adultification, violence and -- not least -- sexuality. Logos is, as philosopher Karl Popper observes, the story of *the falsifiable*. That which is not falsifiable falls between mythos and pathos, but without for that matter belonging to logos. This explains why a logos without pathos, or a pathos without logos, leads straight to *the* *Gnostic delusion* of the child's impulsive fantasies being better suited to rule the world than the laboriously acquired life experiences of the adult. Gnosticism attempts to solve this dilemma through elevating *gnosis* to the highest ideal -- that is: the Gnostic puts knowledge via direct experience before knowledge via indirect theory -- as though the entire body/soul-problem quite simply can be conjured away through pure wishful thinking, and as though there were a higher, intuitive knowledge that is available only for a boy-pharaoh or a pillar-saint. It is this epistemological delusion that psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan rejects when he says that *there is no metalanguage*. And it is this idea that Hegel speaks sarcastically of in his portrait of what he calls *the beautiful soul* with all its pathetic pretensions. There is namely no knowledge above logos, let alone any higher knowledge that in some mysterious way would be directly accessible to certain spoiled narcissists. There are only pathical experiences and mythical stories as *horizontal parallaxes next to logos*. Which is clearly evident every time logos and pathos are to be united and communicated as an interacting whole; then *mythos* is the only functional alternative that is at hand. Gnostic delusion is exactly this, a delusion that arises out of pure hubris. What we can play around with is our experiences, our more or less strong and accurate memories of these experiences, an *archetype* that experiences in part these experiences, in part these memories, via its own evolutionarily developed and adapted filters, a [[Membranics]] within which the archetype in question acts, and a [[Paradigmatics]] within which membranics operates. But there is no beautiful *gnosis* for any beautiful souls to attain other than the narratological triad logos-mythos-pathos. Believing something else signals human delusions of grandeur -- the worst example of pathetic hubris in the history of civilization. The dualism that Gnosticism launches is thus nothing other than a symptom of the unprocessed trauma that arises at the separations from matrix and mamilla. But a reasonable response to these inevitable breakups is of course not to long back in order to undo them, but instead to affirm freedom via these fundamental separations in order to then be able to enter new, adult and forward-looking covenants -- first between the chieftain and the priest, then between the warrior and the hunter, and last but not least between the man and the woman. It is thus and only thus that the sociont can be prepared for the authentic exodus. Gnosticism is the infantile fantasy of being able to go from child to God without having to pass through adult life in general and sexuality in particular -- an eternally frozen childhood with a shimmer of nostalgic magic about it. We call this state the [[The Peter Pan Syndrome|Peter Pan syndrome]] in a contemporary context. This dream of perfection, infinity and immortality -- and thereby also of immutability -- is never dreamed by an adult male, but only by a little boy who frenetically clings to his childhood and refuses to grow up, and who therefore dreams of a life without the adult body with its demanding forces and equally demanding responsibility. Above all the separation between religion and sexuality leads to metaphysical dualism. Thanks to the genesis of written language, soul and body can be described in text and be perceived as two different and wholly irreconcilable substances that one without difficulties can delimit and treat separately. Which one moreover advantageously can and should pit against each other -- as each other's opposites. The soul and the asceticism, that one quite arbitrarily chooses to connect with this, is pitted against -- and prioritized above -- the body that one chooses to associate with vice and shameful pleasure. This at the same time as the body is prioritized above the soul and its asceticism. This logical somersault is what we call *Gnostic dualism*. This is the clearest example of what Lacan calls the enjoyment (French *jouissance*), in contrast to the pleasure (French *plaisir*), of the compulsion to repeat. A narrative about Man's place in existence that lacks a theory of sexuality's central role, entails a repression that leads to history's greatest catastrophes. There is thus a more or less pronounced wish to crush the world in the Gnostic's apocalyptic fantasies. Out of the ruins from the collapsing civilization the Gnostic himself then steps forward as *the highest spirit* who harnesses the world's threatening and amoral chaos with simple wizardry and cheap incantations. At last the hierarchy appears that places the self-aggrandizing pillar-saint at the apex of the sociont's power structure. Please note the pillar-saint's close kinship with the classic tyrant in that he acts alone, without companions. The position atop the pillar harbors but one agent, and this must be the Gnostic himself in his capacity of the highest spirit. And as he is alone at the very top, the Gnostic is also solely the first and closest of all; he is first and closest to *the divine mamilla*, first and closest to perfection, first and closest to infinity, and first and closest to immortality. The latter is the most important of all. ## How would the world and humanity endure with their continued existence if the pillar-saint no longer was there and kept a watchful eye on everything? The problem in this context is just that the pillar-saint in his elevated superiority cannot do anything as vulgar as to procreate and thus bestow a necessary successor upon the helpless world. In the home-made mythology of the Gnostic himself, this existentialist contradiction leads to the Gnostic willingly allowing himself to be sacrificed as the sociont's cohesive scapegoat, this in exchange for the achieved status of sacrificial victim leading to the pillar-saint being elevated further to become the ultimate horizon for everything and everyone for all eternity. The Gnostic thus intoxicates himself on the thought of being transformed into *the personification of the event par excellence*. And that figure we all know from history as *the martyr*. Whether this then is expressed as a meditation that dissolves reincarnation or as a crucifixion that terminates the lynch mobs' reign of terror, matters less. For the pillar-saint himself it is *martyrdom* that leads to immortality. It is thus and thus alone that a narcissist even can apprehend the Gnostic alternative. The Gnostic flees from the detestable death through leaving earthly life. Or rather: the Gnostic leaves a darkened world of *logos* in order to ascend to an enlightened world of *gnosis*. But what is actually happening is nothing but an unabashed rivalry for the attention of the mamilla and an intense mimicking of the priest's actions before the barred absolute. The pillar-saint is thus the perfect example of a figure who confuses his own barred subjectivity with the barred absolute in itself. And as such the pillar-saint is the Axial Age's tragic predecessor of capitalism's isolated Cartesian individual, with his desperate, narcissistic struggle with everything and everyone for the favor of a mamilla that never shows up. Which is exactly what Lacan describes as the incessant quest for *objet petit a*. The consequence of this is that the battlefield is ejected from the ritual and is replaced by the childish fairytale. The priests cease to be voyeurs and instead become castrates. The mythologies devour the entire narratological horizon and *pacifism* becomes the new, false religion, which constantly, by pure necessity, must be excused for incessant outbreaks of violence, sex and ritual ecstasy. One can literally praise the Devil for the Abrahamic religions constantly considering themselves obliged to blame all manner of human behavior on the rebellious Satan. The correspondence within Cartesian dualism is of course the inner struggle between the superego and the subego, where the ascetic superego ultimately always is proven right, at the same time as the constant failure to actually satisfy this superego becomes the Cartesian enjoyment. Kantian individualism is the subject's enjoyment of submission *vis-à-vis* the eternally dissatisfied superego. This occurs at the same time as the Devil once again is consigned to the lower region that is the individual rather than to the social body in the form of *the id* (Sigmund Freud's concept). The Gnostic fantasy kills the libido that lives in the religious ritual. This is clear when the pornography and psychedelics which dominated the pagan ritual are ejected, abjectified and replaced by a sexless, castrated and empty liturgy that lacks a footing both in the physical body in particular and in the biological world in general. The orgy is replaced by the perky sing-a-long. Ecstasy is replaced by the tinkering with the rosary. The children are admitted to the congregation and the adult experiment is thus replaced by the childish game. It is the child and not the adult who dreams of immortality. The boy's dreams are expressed (and considerable resources squandered) in the building of *the pyramid*, the very symbol of misguided manhood. The girl's dream is expressed in *reincarnation*, the subjectification of the eternal recurrence of the same, which is the symbol of misguided womanhood. Individualism's misguided history starts and ends with Gnosticism's dualist separation of soul and body, which is converted to the dividual's atomized separation from the sociont, which results in *the alienated individual*. Gnosticism offers no tools to handle the child's separation from mamilla. Therefore the child compulsively repeats this trauma through insisting on the separation between the soul and the body throughout life, throughout history, all the way into eternity. This allows itself to be done since a society that grows in size becomes increasingly complex and specialized, at the same time as the connection between the priest's wisdom and the chieftain's energy gradually disappears. Death as Man's ultimate horizon -- as the negation or the non-event that precedes and enables the event; the old must die and disappear to be able to give way to the new -- is tenaciously buried beneath massive amounts of pyramid concrete. The false exodus, the dream of the return to mamilla, is constantly postponed to the next, and the next, and the next life. It is then no longer even a case of creating a purposive mythos, but it is about logos and pathos having lost their functions *vis-à-vis* each other and that the mythos that exodology requires has become an impossibility, as Freud strikingly describes the situation when he explains *why we are discontent in civilization* (see *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the Network Society*). The Gnostics have kidnapped the event and disconnected it from the tribal process, something that has fateful consequences. The priest and the chieftain now become competing and infantilized poles instead of complementing, coordinating functions. The rift that arises eventually cuts through the human dividual as well. The ascetic superego terrorizes the hedonist self, which manifests itself in the form of various kinds of moralism, which can be directed toward how you express yourself or how you look. There arises a social insecurity that results in an overgrown flora of etiquette regulations. In step with increasing and denser population in the wake of urbanization, religion becomes increasingly vulgar and decays into cheap populism in the form of simple doctrines of salvation that hide behind banal propaganda promising easily acquired profits. The greater the mass to win over quickly, the more banal and the more mendacious the message. Superficial slogans replace a deeper analysis. Soon enough the political ideologies stroll down the same path. Where the priest (and wisdom) vanishes, the chieftain (and the energy) also soon disappears. ## How then do we in retrospect understand the Axial Age's three dominating pillar-saints in light of the argument above? Siddhartha Gautama leads the Gnostic movement in South Asia. The Freudian self that is foisted upon the project to carry out its own extinction is nevertheless a self, even in the Buddha himself. For this reason Siddhartha Gautama separates the so-to-speak spiritual and mortidinal self from the bodily and libidinal self, which means that Buddhist dualism is in full swing. This is a case of a submission *vis-à-vis* nomadology that is called *samsara*, where the only possible exit is extinction, or *nirvana,* as a kind of pseudophallic protest against nomadology's eternal recurrence of the same. Or to express Buddhist transcendental desire in psychoanalytical form: If Man in his adultification process gets caught between love-hate to the mamilla that he must leave behind and love-hate to the phallus that he must attain, Siddhartha Gautama advocates a strategic retreat instead of the thrust that the Zoroastrians urge. The objective is to obliterate libidinous desire in itself. Siddharta Gautama thus seeks a phase that lies before mamilla, while the Zoroastrians strive beyond phallus. What Siddhartha Gautama finds when he undertakes this retreat, is the matrix and the dissolution of the Universe, without any possibility for rebirth. Siddhartha Gautama calls this state *nirvana* in contrast to Hinduism's *moksha* in order to underline his conviction that he has attained the existential absolute. There is just one problem with the Buddhist fantasy, which also reveals its Gnostic blind spot, and it is that history moves forward and not backward -- both as hypertemporal circularity and as spatiotemporal linearity. Mamilla and phallus quite simply have different roles during an adultification process and are not equivalent combatants. As the Zoroastrians observe in their criticism of Buddhism: The return to matrix awaits after the completed revolt against phallus, and not behind mamilla. It is called death or *chinavat*. However, prior to this event a new generation has been born in order to take over civilization (*ameretat*). Therefore the dividual subject actually can die for real and in peace and quiet after having had the good fortune to have lived a rich and full life (*haurvatat*), therefore even its day of death can over the proceeding 70 years be celebrated (*polgazar*). It is nature itself that rules out the Buddhist fantasy of the Gnostic extinction before the adult phallus appears and besets Siddhartha Gautama with the pathic desires and drives of war, hunting, and sexuality. Plato stages the Gnostic project in the Greek world of thought. Christ borrows freely from the Zoroastrian religion east of his homeland of Palestine, but thanks to Paul's Platonist and Augustine's Manichean circumlocution of the Christian religion, Christianity also gets caught as in a vice in the Gnostic delusion. The journey from Christmas as an event with the child Jesus in the manger, to Easter as an event with the scapegoat Christ on the cross, is a completely desexualized and thereby strictly mythical narrative, where the self-appointed savior never leaves the sacred mother's magic mamilla. It is anything but surprising that Rousseau's bitterness toward the absent, phallic gaze emanates from a post-Christian, individualist culture. And if there is any detail that Nietzsche overlooks when he proclaims *the death of God* in 19th-century Germany, it is that Western culture rather suffers from precisely *the absence of the phallic gaze*, an absence that generates exactly the *ressentiment vis-à-vis* existence that Nietzsche saw it as his task to fight. The greatest and proudest achievements of Western culture occur in spite of Christianity, not thanks to it. It is only after a millennium of compact Christian darkness that the Western world establishes its two other, far more important, and also highly Jewish religions, namely *nationalism* and [[Capitalism]]. All these three Gnostic movements perform the same loop of thinking, making the escape from the phallic power's requirement of a sexualized adulthood their highest priority. Public self-mortification, naive pacifism, pretentious vegetarianism, and all manner of other spiritual self-absorption are allowed to dominate the agenda. Everything else is said to exude "toxic masculinity". Buddhism's variant is to celebrate the Gnostic distancing of the clever princeling from the adult phallus' every temptation, giving him a gold medal from the matriarch for indefatigably meditating himself to death and obliteration. It is however merely a matter of shifting from a yearning forward (to phallus) to a yearning backward (to matrix). Requiring the extinction of desire is unfortunately a desire as well -- as Hegel and Lacan would quickly remark -- but a desire that is directed away from the future demands of existence, back to the total permissiveness of non-existence. Christianity conducts the corresponding maneuver by crucifying the clever princeling before he has time to get a taste for the adult phallus's every temptation, awarding him a gold medal from the matriarch (literally the sacred mother in this case) for sacrificing himself and embracing his own death. That his divine father compensates his masochistic act with resurrection to a suprasensible illusory existence should in this context be regarded as rather scant consolation for he who has learnt to appreciate phallic temptations. Authentic dialectics, which is expressed in adult leadership and adult sexuality, is replaced by the false dialectics that revolves around the Gnostic delusion of perfection, infinity and immortality. If one stubbornly refuses to grow up, there is of course only one way out, and that is to deny the phallic libido and instead devotedly worship matrichal mortido. This is exactly what all of history's boy-pharaohs and pillar-saints are obsessed with doing. Desperately they seek the approval of the matrichal gaze through demonstrating false surpluses. This is what we call *the Gnostic delusion*: the stubborn boy's dream that through the spirit's victory over the body he can sneak past adulthood's finitude and be transformed into a god of perfection, infinity and immortality. It is when this Oedipus complex in reverse is set in motion, when this fear of phallus profoundly takes root, that the boy-pharaoh proclaims *a pathos free from logos* and the pillar-saint preaches *a logos free from pathos*, which become *the totalitarian mythos* that we have learnt to recognize as the boy-pharaoh's fundamentalist dictatorship or the pillar-saint's fundamentalist dogmatics -- a massive, infantile foolishness without any phallic dynamics directed forward. The sociont halts, with avarice as sole fuel, and slowly but surely starves to death. This means that the authentic dialectics between will-to-transcendence and will-to-intelligence, and thereby also the authentic dialectics between eventology and nomadology, in greater spheres and populations is replaced by a series of false dialectics that all are subsumed under the heading the Gnostic delusion. False dialectics is generated and maintained by a collective depression, which in turn is caused by mortido swooping in and filling ever more numerous and ever greater voids in the wake of the absent libido. This expresses itself as *false mimicry* of the handling of authentic dualities. Populations greater than clans or tribes are replete with this false dialectics, which under the boy-pharaoh in the guise of the lone pseudo-chieftain or the pillar-saint in the guise of the lone pseudo-priest leads to *totalitarianism* as the internarcissistic response to *mimetic depression*. This is what occurs with such frightening clarity when the empire or the nation cannot live up to the guarantees of safety, security and proximity that the clan or the tribe promises in accordance with our sociobiological preprogramming. Anarchy must always be avoided at any cost. The boy-pharaoh capitalizes on unreleased sociontology, the pillar-saint does the same with unreleased nomadology. The result is *the eventology of the false phallus,* implemented as fanatical *fundamentalism*. And then the question is how this narrative manifests itself in a population that is continuously forced to handle the dialectics of libido and mortido. The answer is, as so much else, twofold: either the mimicry in itself leads to *libidinal mimicking of desire,* which means that desire within the population is synchronized and homogenized, which in turn gives rise to rivalry and envy, destructive forces that only can be diverted with the aid of *the scapegoat mechanism,* as René Girard convincingly demonstrates. Thus the Cybelian lynch mob in this scenario must find a scapegoat that is forced to bear all the shortcomings and setbacks of the masses, and it is the narrative of this exceptionally popular diversionary maneuver that we call *mimetic fundamentalism.* It is, in all its simplicity, as seductive as it is functional; the mob cleanses itself through carrying out the liberating lynching. Thereby fundamentalism receives its distinct character of desperate compensation behavior. God himself is absent. The divine can therefore only take shape as a figure that steps out of the Cybelian lynch mob and who himself personifies and justifies the lynch mob's murder of the scapegoat, a figure that we call [[Anoject|the anoject]]. Mimetic fundamentalism is in this manner embodied and proclaimed by the personified anoject, *the tyrant*. Alternatively the mimicry in itself leads to *the mortidinal mimicking of the depression* within the populace, which generates a growing existential void that only can be diverted through collective suicide. The lynch mob then does not find a scapegoat on whom it can impose all the shortcomings and setbacks of the masses, which means that the narrative of this tragic diversionary maneuver constitutes *depressive fundamentalism*. Even this is, in all its simplicity, as seductive as it is functional; even in this scenario the mob cleanses itself, now through carrying out the collective suicide, which also gives fundamentalism a distinct character of desperate compensation behavior. The divine can only take shape as an anojective figure who steps out of the Cybelian lynch mob and himself personifies and justifies the collective suicide. Mimetic depression is therefore embodied by *the leader of the sect,* who with the approval of the masses leads *the cult of doom*. The Dionysian swarm is led by the libidinal [[Hyperject]], the authentic phallus, while the Cybelian lynch mob is conversely led by the mortidinal [[Anoject]], the false phallus. And the mortidinal lynch mob -- which is obsessed by isolation, dystopianism and self-abjectification -- turns on itself in its frustration and unformulated yearning for liberation. That is: If for instance the Nazis do not succeed in exterminating the Jews, they must eventually take their own lives instead. The self-appointed leadership turns away in disgust from its populace and soon there are echoes of gunshots from the bunker below. For lack of a scapegoat, mimetic desire is transformed into mimetic depression. And it is of course this threat scenario in the form of collective self-annihilation in [[The Collective Subconscious]] that drives the mimetic lynch mob toward finding the innocent scapegoat at any cost, which can make it possible to convert the Cybelian mortido to the Dionysian libido through lynching and executing the more or less arbitrarily chosen victim, in order to then return to circular nomadology as pagans always have done. This return to *business as usual* often occurs, as demonstrated by Girard, with the addition that one, cynically, elevates the scapegoat one recently has killed to a *martyr*, who through his conversion is promoted to a saint or possibly even a lesser god. This is how it always has been: the living can use the already dead any which way for any dubious purposes whatsoever. A pathos without logos always becomes a false mythos. A logos without a pathos also only becomes a false mythos. Only as collaboration can logos and pathos be realized and developed into a spiritual leadership that saves the sociont from demise. *The-shadow-of-the-phallus* is thus the threat of the undeveloped phallus. If phallus is not developed into the dynamic collaboration between the chieftain's pathical will-to-transcendence and the priest's logical will-to-intelligence that produces *the narrative of the authentic phallus* -- the sociont's story of its protopian future -- phallus will wither away to two driedup embryos whose lack of sex drive is compensated for by delusions of grandeur. The chieftain is never developed into a chieftain without the priest's admiration, but instead gets stuck halfway through as a *boy*-*pharaoh* -- a masculine pathos without logos -- and the priest is never developed into a priest without the chieftain's admiration, but instead gets stuck halfway through as a *pillar-saint* -- a masculine logos without pathos. It is like only possessing a single cerebral hemisphere, without even being able to question the bizarre aspect of the situation that has arisen. This is the false phallus that strives for dictatorship and dogmatism and that lands in tyranny and idiocy. In this sensitive situation there is nothing to prevent the single dividual from taking over the entire field on his own, but the consequences will become catastrophic. For the dictator hates to hear that he lacks one of his eyes and thereby also one of his cerebral hemispheres. There is no receptivity for criticism or opposition in any form, wherefore the boy-pharaoh requires unconditional capitulation before political fundamentalism, just as the pillar-saint requires unconditional capitulation before religious fundamentalism. God loses one of his eyes when the false phallus is charmed by and chases after total power through the monopoly of the single eye on the *panopticon* of the phallic gaze. Polytheist iconology solves this dilemma by making the sun-god an older god than the complementing rain-god, and through compelling the sun-god to sacrifice an eye in exchange for phallic wisdom. The sacrificed eye is the self-castration that both gives the sun-god priestly wisdom (the father's *logos*) and at the same time leaves the void that enables the rain-god to take over the role as the virile chieftain (the son's *pathos*) with two intact eyes. What then is wholly aligned with this phallic self-castration is that the matriarch is an older woman who long ago has left the struggle for male attention that unfolds during the sexual ritual, and who precisely therefore possesses total credibility as the ultimate institution of wisdom. No one gets past the matriarch's unveiling gaze. It is always the sociont's and not the dividual person's survival that is central. At least as long as the golden Bronze Age's ideal applies, before philosophers during the decadent Axial Age start to proclaim ideas of the individual's freedom *vis-à-vis* the sociont, ideas that confuse and distort the external separation between the dividual and his heritage, with the internal separation between the eternal soul and the finite body at the moment of death. This theological mistake is the ultimate price that Man pays for the delusions that permanent settlement creates in the nomadological mind. If it is not I that move me and my body from point A to point B during war or hunting (spurred on by sexuality), but my ideas that move from my present life beyond this life to the next life (with the exception of sexuality), then it follows that I am my ideas only, or my body only, and not an embodied archetype in service of the sociont. The boy-tyrant's three false phallic dreams can be summed up as religious fundamentalism, political fundamentalism and technological fundamentalism. The authentic phallic dream can only arise when an ideologically reasonable foundation and a functioning technology actually exist, something that the adult, phallic man is totally clear about. Before these prerequisites are at hand, infantile dreaming is only hubristic and literally life-threatening. This means that Plato, despite all his other qualities, is the philosophical boy-tyrant *par excellence*. In *Phaidon* he stubbornly champions the thesis that the soul not only is separated from the body, but that it also is eternal, indestructible and superior to the body in all conceivable aspects. Plato's *philosopher-king* is the ancient Greek version of the ancient Egyptian boy-pharaoh, and since the philosopher-king neither is adult nor has understood the value of the collaboration between mind and body, he never becomes anything other than a tyrannical pillar-saint. Neurotic dictatorship always ends up in a *mythos* that mendaciously celebrates the only leader -- the false phallus -- as though logos or pathos alone would be able to defeat everything. The curse of dictatorship is that it cannot create anything new, it can only mimic and mimic the mimicry of the old or the alien until everything in the system stops and dies of an acute lack of oxygen. The explanation for this is that the very basic prerequisite for dictatorship is that the dictatorship by definition is the best of all worlds, a kind of nursery fantasy of perfection, infinity and immortality. Thereby nothing can be improved or rejuvenated. No really revolutionary impulses from the outside are capable of piercing through the armor. Thinking is afflicted by the anxious groveling's sclerosis. Dictatorship incessantly ends up in the hypocritical celebration of a tired and fat leader who opens a factory with clearly established objectives for mass production of nuts and bolts. This is simply a Stalinist mythos that tries to be logos so hard that it bores everyone to death. What we are witnessing is the Platonist madness in the demands from the boy-pharaoh and the pillar-saint that *if everyone just performs what I spontaneously wish, then everything will be perfect*. In conjunction with the arrival of informationalism this ideological tradition is forcefully dominated by the Rousseauian ideological legacy (for an exhaustive account, see *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the Network Society*). In part this is because the great thinkers from the Enlightenment and Romanticism have fallen into oblivion (it is tedious to open and read thick books when one feels obliged to devote entire days to surfing, scrolling and conjuring), in part because of the new communication technologies promising milk and honey to everything and everyone who just opens a social media account. Everyone requires attention but few are prepared to really listen. The result that we all can observe is *the golden age of internarcissism*, and all of this can only end in dismay when no one has the strength to look at or listen to any other loudmouth than themselves any longer. The underlying cause of this massive intellectual breakdown is that the Western left abandoned Marx in favor of Rousseau in the 1970s, when it turned out that the Western worker had scant interest in any form of socialist or communist revolution. At the same time there emerged a Rousseauian right that also was quick to assume the sacrificial role and that also tried to shriek themselves to attention. It is, to take a significant example, precisely anti-Marxist embitterment that powers the entire text in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Rousseauian manifesto *Hégémonie et stratégie socialiste* from 1985, the book that later kick-starts the entire movement that is called *intersectionalism*. The underlying driving force is of course the surgical and medical interventions that make it possible to actually reset and reshape the entire population in accordance with the wishes of the Rousseauian lords-of-the-flies. It is then part and parcel of the matter that any black transsexual person whomsoever is preferable to a white heterosexual worker as a figurehead for the intersectionalist cult. It is a case of a cult that for understandable reasons -- Rousseau was a hard-to-beat mass producer of fancy self-contradictions -- both worships the being that its adherents claim that they have been accorded by fate without mercy (in other words, defending a caste system), and the becoming that they at the same time equally firmly aspire to, and that they must be accorded at someone else's expense (in other words, promoting a class society). It means that all of existence and history in retrospect must be adapted in part to what the narcissist experiences as necessary and given, in part to what is said to be freely chosen. Of course, the audience do not have -- that is: "the perpetrator" within the home-made sacrificial cult -- any right whatsoever to a will of their own, or any possibility at all to refrain from the imposed spectacle. Now is the time to bring social justice through whining and rancorous, theatrical diatribes in the media. The foundation for Laclau and Mouffe's digital sacrificial cult was laid as early as a couple of decades before in the form of Herbert Marcuse's influential essay *Repressive Tolerance* (1965). Marcuse argues that since all resistance to the good cause is driven by the false consciousness, an ideologically conditioned misconception of the state of affairs, there is no reason whatsoever to leave any room for deviating points of view. Marcuse thus does not proclaim any exodology, has no idea that a new society is to be created by new masters after a resolute exodus from the old paradigm. No, the resistance against the good cause shall be confronted with blind and ruthless violence, so that the new paradigm can be established on the old territory that now is ravaged and liberated from every form of resistance. When the pillar-saint Marcuse gets into his stride, the absurd irony of the title emerges. Repression in itself is of course completely intolerant, so little wonder that the text became immensely popular in both the West and the East, among all the world's pseudo-Marxist boy-pharaohs. ## And what else could be expected than that contemporary Jacobins would be the first to pounce on the keyboards as soon as the Internet channels were made generally available to everything and everyone? The damage is of course left for the naive and ahistorical civilization to live with for generations to come. From Buddhist princes, via Abrahamic saviors, to American college students, history is full av these self-appointed boy-pharaohs and pillar-saints -- a kind of bittersweet parody of the sociont's authentic chieftains and priests -- who put youth before wisdom and who flaunt mortidinal asexuality while rejecting the libidinal life force. It is sufficient to follow the hyperjective Indian guru Osho's formidable character assassination of the equally anojective Indian guru Mahatma Gandhi to get a good laugh at this civilization's tragicomic feebleness. The YouTube clip can be found under the priceless heading *Mahatma Gandhi's Poverty Is Very Costly*.