# The Zoroastrian empire, the Jewish nation and the netocratic community
It is a lot easier to analyze power structures if we distinguish between
two different definitions of tyranny. In part we have *totalitarianism,*
which compels all citizens to actively take part in the political
ritual. We refer to this as *active mortido*. In part we have
*authoritarianism*, where the leadership prefers to compel everyone to
passive submission. We call this *passive mortido*. The totalitarian
project is built upon the ideological conviction that history has
reached its end and completion, and that the totalitarian state is the
manifestation of this perfect final stage. The authoritarian project
however has only conquered and intends to keep power as a pragmatic
monopoly as long as possible. Nobody has played out totalitarianism and
authoritarianism against each other better than the 20th century
boy-pharaohs along *The Inverted Silk Road*. We know them under the
names Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol
Pot. In summary Mussolini personifies a bastardization of Catholicism,
while Hitler represents a bastardization of Protestantism, and Stalin a
bastardization of Orthodox Christianity. Mao Zedong, on his part,
personifies the bastardization of Confucianism, while Pol Pot *de facto*
realizes Rousseau's peculiar ideas of the will of the people and similar
utopianisms thrown at a naive and largely illiterate Buddhist
population. The result was the devastation that these dictators managed
to organize: the Nazi concentration camps, the Soviet Gulag Archipelago,
the Chinese mass starvation and the Cultural Revolution that followed
thereupon, and finally the killing fields that the Khmer Rouge
administered in Cambodia.
## But what are the propelling forces that hide behind the anoject that these men personify?
In a consistent pattern *mimetic depression*
recurs, a socially scattered mortidinal enjoyment of the constant
failure and the eternal victimhood cult. Mimetic depression will then
arrive either in an extrovert form, as the noisy and chanting lynch mob
that longs for the anoject to let itself be personified in the tyrant's
gestalt and the abject to be personified as the hated scapegoat. Or else
mimetic depression will be expressed in an introvert form, as the
comfortable self-hatred and self-contempt which through the annihilation
of any sort of future does not have to make the least effort to desist
from comfortably playing the victim card. The classic name for the
introvert mimetic depression is of course *the doomsday cult*. Please
note how the victim -- in both variants of mimetic depression -- is
transformed into the hero, how the victim thereby also takes the hero's
place, and how this passive figure that is sacrificed by the lynch mob
or by the doomsday cult on the altar of inverted Platonism becomes *the
martyr*. This martyr is thus the hero that strictly speaking becomes a
hero only by virtue of his unsurpassed ability to himself carry out
absolutely nothing at all. And this is precisely the material that all
clergies have to work with when they build a *politics* for life within
the sociont's membrane, and a *religion* for the relations with the
world outside, above and beneath the sociont's membrane.
The arena where the priests then conduct their hopefully hyperjective
work is *the social theater*, which appears over time in four different
historical forms: The ground is laid by *the nomadological sociont,*
which under primitivism with its eons of time is developed into a
genetic preprogramming in all the offspring that follow. The yearning
back to this societal form -- which surfaces at regular intervals
throughout history -- is different variants of what we bring together
under the concept *communism*. During the Bronze Age two greater units
develop that only hold together thanks to robust metanarratives, namely
*the Zoroastrian empire* in Persia and *the Jewish nation* in the
Levant. Unsurprisingly, similar structures develop, given similar
material prerequisites, even in other parts of the world, but here we --
for the sake of simplicity -- focus on the development in the Middle
East, since this history is coherently preserved and we authors are
products of this ideological legacy ourselves.
Since the Zoroastrian empire and the Jewish nation only are conceivable
as long as they are accompanied by a comprehensive and broadened
historical narrative, we call them *the seismological structures*. It is
easy to keep the sociont intact, which essentially is self-organizing --
hence our concept [[Tribopoiesis]] as conditional to all meaningful
creativity in and around the human realm. It is however a truly
herculean task to keep an empire or a nation intact. Every such effort
will under all circumstances be rocked by several earthquakes over the
course of history, even if the system functions optimally under the
prevailing material conditions. For reasons that both have to do with
scope and stringency, we are here only dealing with the Zoroastrian
empire, the Jewish nation, and the netocratic community. Their
ideological superstructures we call *imperialism*, *nationalism* and
*communism* and then pertain to the original, theological meanings of
these terms.
If the Axial Age, which succeeded the Bronze Age, boasts about its
myriad of philosophers, then the preceding Bronze Age is above all a
golden age of theology.
## All greater academic projects throughout history begin and end with theology, rather than with philosophy, this since it exclusively is theology that is transparadigmatic -- and therefore returns with full force precisely at paradigm shifts, since it is then that *the foundation* for everything else (do we dare to say the name God here?) becomes the general obsession.
The reason for this is that while philosophers talk about systems pertaining to the already known,
theologians build an architecture for the yet unknown. For instance, it
is the Zoroastrians in Bronze Age Persia (the land of two dual river
systems) who theologically complete *the empire* as social architecture.
They do so by mimicking the separation between the chieftain
(*shah-en-shah*) and the priest (*mobed-en-mobed*) within the sociont,
as a division between *eventology as the imperial religion* (from a
global perspective, the people monotheistically worship one and the same
god) and *iconology as the national religion* (from a local perspective,
the people polytheistically worship whatever gods at middle management
level they prefer themselves). Which in turn enables a theological
discrepancy between the two levels that is creatively used as a basis
for *the Zoroastrian mythology of universal human rights*, when it is
developed in north-eastern Persia in the 18th century BC and is
implemented 1,200 years later, after Cyrus the Great's conquest of
Babylon in 539 BC.
The Zoroastrian mythology of universal human rights -- first launched in
a European context around 200 years after the Persian conquest of
Babylon, through Greek statesman Pericles (who is strongly inspired by
the Persians when he presents his plans for Greek democracy) -- has ever
since been the basis of all subsequent attempts to create sustainable
imperialist structures, this since these must be built on plurality and
power-sharing in accordance with the principle of the two-headed
phallus. Furthermore it is only within such an imperial network that,
for instance, Jewish nationalism -- excellently described by Israeli
political scientist Yoram Hazony in his book *The Virtue of Nationalism*
(2018) -- can arise and develop. Exodologically we refer to all such
attempts to get the paradoxist [[Saoshyant]] (the authentic phallus) to
lead the exodus from the old to the new as *hyperjection*, this as
opposed to all approaches from the dictatorial tyrant (the false
phallus) to induce the lynch mob to drive us all to disaster through
*anojection*. The hyperjection has the character of a voice from the
future that seduces us toward great heroic achievements. The anojection
however has the character of a cowardly and bitter voice from the past
that gets its energy and pleasure from alleged injustices, and that does
this at no risk, concealed as it is within the bloodthirsty mob.
It is precisely between these two poles that the struggle takes place
whenever power shall be exercised in a transdeterminist world, where
only the past is necessary and given, while the future always is
contingent. And the key is spelled narcissism in contrast to the will to
serve. If a narcissist reads Nietzsche we get a Hitler. If a narcissist
reads Marx we get a Stalin. This is because the narcissist never cares
about truth or lies, but only about the possibility of finding a smooth
shortcut to his own, highly private power ambitions. Self-interest
trumps all, which entails that when a boy-pharaoh or a pillar-saint
reads an authentic and extremely sophisticated text, he will think he is
reading a work that confirms nothing but his own wishful thinking and
his own projections, as though it were written by a fellow narcissist.
Almost tautologically, it is simply impossible to put down one's
narcissistic reading glasses if one is a genuinely narcissistic reader.
Through these lenses every reasoning becomes a beautifying mirror and
one becomes either a Nietzschean *Übermensch* -- a concept that one thus
thoroughly misunderstands -- or a born leader for proletarians in all
countries, something one hurriedly must notify the public about.
## And how could it be otherwise?
## How would Nietzsche or Marx or any text of any dignity be able to get a reasonable reading by a boy who refuses to acknowledge the limitations and the responsibility that adult sexuality entails and insists on?
## And what remains if this sexuality is repressed -- so that neither is it the wild animal nor the seductive woman that shall be defeated, but whatever general audience that happens to be available -- if not a violence that escalates *ad infinitum*?
The consequence is that what is absolutely crucial for a society to develop
is a sustainable and imploitative power structure in order to keep the
boy-pharaoh away from the throne and the pillar-saint away from the
altar. Therefore one preferably lets the chieftain be responsible for
the imaginary power and the priest be responsible for the symbolic
power. And at the same time one ensures that the matriarchy keeps the
real power, a matriarchy whose task it is to hold both the chieftain and
the priest responsible for their respective exercise of power. The
matriarchy only cares about the territory and the paradigm remaining
strong and preferably expanding. With written language this contract is
formalized through the collection of rules that are written down in law
books. The chieftain is directly responsible for *the territory* (the
arrival of the kingdom) in the same way that the priest is responsible
for [[Paradigm|the paradigm]] (the arrival of the church). For the first time it
becomes possible to build stable social structures that are greater than
the sociont's sociobiological maxim. But this requires a power-sharing
that no boy-pharaoh or pillar-saint can destroy. It requires a balanced
triad between three rivaling siblings to maintain the internal peace.
This explains why imperialist Zoroastrianism and nationalist Judaism
refuse to build a separate power structure divorced from the state (in
contrast to Islam and Christianity, who constitute their mimicking
parodies with boundless universal claims). The Zoroastrian *mobed* sits
next to the *shah* as his equal, just as in the sociont. The priest's
potential asceticism (the priest *is* phallus) and the chieftain's
potential hedonism (the chieftain *has* phallus) are placed next to each
other so that they together form a unified patriarchy and thus do not
come into conflict with each other, something that would risk leading to
one long struggle between the church and the state, where the church
with its asceticism is expected to defeat the state with its hedonism
(except during modernism, which of course formally killed religion,
where the Gnostic tyranny of course instead becomes hedonist, as Eric
Voegelin -- a true champion of Catholic diatribes against Gnosticism --
correctly points out). This can be read not least in the twofold name of
the Zoroastrian god: Ahura or *Being* is the name of the chieftain and
Mazda or *Mind* is the name of the priest. Together they form *Ahura
Mazda* or *Mazda Ahura*. The priest who speaks the truth and the
chieftain who acts the truth. The priest as the exhibitionist for logos
and the voyeur in terms of pathos. The chieftain as the exhibitionist
for pathos and the voyeur in terms of logos. This while mythos is
reserved for the priest's circular story for the whole sociont at the
campfire, a story where the mother and the child -- as the innermost
fetish of the patriarchy -- are at the center. And all of this takes
place under the matriarch's resolute supervision.
This genial narratology means that Zoroastrianism succeeds in uniting
the hedonism of the sociont with the pluralism of the empire. It never
compromises away the Spinozist sole substance with its enormous number
of attributes -- where the first three attributes are the sociont's
three leaders: the chieftain, the priest, and the matriarch. Instead
Zoroastrianism builds an imperial structure with four different social
scales: The unit at the family's level is called *demana*, the unit at
the clan's level is called *vis*, the unit at the nation's level is
called *shoithra*, and the unit at the empire's level is called *dahyu*.
What is important is that the cohesive, state religion only needs to be
manifested at the highest level, *dahyu*. This entails that the
Zoroastrian system is permeated by diversity of opinion, free thought
and free speech. Which should suitably be compared with the other great
state religion from the Axial Age, *Confucianism* in China, which
advocates a strictly controlled and extremely centralized empire, with
for example no room for an independent *shoithra* with a language of its
own and a religion of its own, as in Judaism, under an overarching
*dahyu* with a border-transcending court language and an imperialist
ethics, as in Zoroastrianism.
Christianity's mistake primarily lies in its *congregationalism*, the
theological elevation of the congregation as a flat surface, which
reduces the matriarch to an infantile bit player (the Virgin Mary with
the child Jesus). The chieftain is called the son, the priest is called
the father. But the holy ghost is not the matriarch nor even the
matriarch's own matriarch (the chaos goddess), but instead the
congregation itself, as a kind of army of self-deified kids of Christ.
Islam repeats the same mistake with its obsession with *umma* as the
sole social format. Out of this congregation, the Egyptian boy-pharaoh
then steps forward with all the pretensions and rights of the members of
the Catholic congregation; unsurprisingly Christianity, with this point
of departure, produces *the Cartesian Individual*. The European
Enlightenment thus wrestles with this monster of a god. We are speaking
of a child-god who refuses to become an adult between his two
irreconcilable identities. Immanuel Kant completes the Cartesian
revolution and Friedrich Nietzsche problematizes the Kantian revolution
with the purpose of saving the Cartesian Individual as the Nietzschean
*Übermensch*. But Kant and Nietzsche must do this by aggressively
ignoring Spinoza's Jewish protest and by avoiding becoming entangled in
Hegel's Zoroastrian dialectics, a process after which neither the
Christian ascetic as pillar-saint, nor the secularized hedonist as
boy-pharaoh, survive into the network society. Western individualism is
simply stone dead.
The key word in this context is [[Exodology]]. When war prevails one
spends all one's energy on *the technological exodology*, which is
personified by the chieftain. Among the tasks is defending and
preferably also widening the territory, at least as long as territory is
hard currency and not a burden which in some cases incurs costs
outweighing the benefits. In peacetime, however, all energy is devoted
to *the ideological exodology*, which is personified by the priest. It
is then a case of safeguarding the souls of the congregation and
preferably also extending this congregation through imaginative new
recruitment. But exodology as an idea receives a much deeper
paradigmatic significance when a chosen people come forward and lead an
empire or a nation in an entirely new direction -- for instance the
Hebrews who, inspired by Zoroastrian eventology, create their own and
moreover dual exodology, in part the exodus out of Egypt, in part out of
the Babylonian captivity, to the holy land and back.
The first exodus, from Egypt, is the trek away from the ideological
oppression and madness in a collapsing Egyptian empire toward the
freedom to develop and complete the Jewish religion. It is literally a
story about the monotheists migrating from the polytheists. The second
exodus, from Babylon, is also a trek from a collapsing empire, the
Babylonian, after the death of Nebuchadnezzar II and the Persians'
conquest of the realm, to the ideological victory for the nation within
the empire as the completion of the Jewish nation, symbolized by the
reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. To which can be added that
the history of the Jewish nation nowadays also comprises *the third
exodus*, from a Europe in ruins after the Second World War, and from the
other parts of the Middle East, to the newly-formed state of Israel at
the end of the 1940s, where Israel constitutes a mimicry of the European
nation-states that had emerged in the wake of the French Revolution --
inspired by Hegel's enthusiastic work on the absolute state -- systems
that in turn to a great extent constitute different variants of mimicry
of the original, Jewish nation.
Please note that the exodus from Egypt occurs after the Egyptian empire
under Akhnaten has massively failed at mimicking the Persian empire,
since one has not realized the importance of, and even less have
implemented, the Zoroastrian power-sharing principle in the form of the
two-headed phallus. Instead one has spent all energy and all resources
on a pure dictatorship with Akhnaten as *the boy-pharaoh from
Monopotamia*. The Egyptian clergy then simply tried to recreate order in
society after this disaster through scrapping monotheism and its
eventology and instead throwing Egypt back to polytheism and its
iconology. Sigmund Freud treats this course of events in his book *Moses
and Monotheism* as the beginning of the Jewish religion in the form of
the Atenist sect in Egypt. The Atenists are fully aware that the
Akhnatenic project has failed and has plunged Egypt into the abyss. The
Egyptians were completely defenseless when the Syrians attacked from the
northeast since the whole Egyptian society, soldiers included, was
involved in the building of the great sun temple in Amarna in honor of
Akhnaten. It was as in Ricky Gervais' comic rant about Humpty Dumpty:
When the Frenchmen attacked, the English king had dispatched all his
horses and all his soldiers to repair a cracked egg.
However the Atenists are not prepared to sacrifice their eventological
vision to be thrown back into a nomadological circular despair. They
quite simply believe in the possibility of a linear history with
decisive events that change history forever, which of course is the
second and most important legacy from Zoroaster and the Persians.
Thereby the idea is born of the migration from Egypt as an exodology.
Out of the Egyptian nomadology the Jewish eventology is liberated, where
Atenism is realized by simply just abandoning the old paradigm and
wandering into a new territory. The similarities with for instance the
puritan sects and their migration from Catholic Europe to Protestant
North America during the 18th and 19th centuries is striking by
comparison. The original, Persian *Ahura* becomes the Egyptian sun-god
*Aten,* who then becomes the Jewish sun-god *Adonai*. And Adonai is
complemented in Canaan with the local rain- and storm-god Yahweh, and
together they form the Jewish *Elohim* (the concept *eloah* for god in
plural). Thereby Judaism, just as Zoroastrianism, receives a two-headed
phallus at the center of religion; its name is Ahura Mazda among the
Zoroastrians and Elohim among the Jews, while its mimicry within
Christianity is of course the Trinity consisting of the Father, the Son
and the Holy Ghost -- a trinity that iconologically is equivalent to the
triad the Father, the Son and the Mother, that is: what the Christian
religion always has applied, as Christ's Gnostic voyage from manger to
cross without having to pass via sexuality at all. It was a child whom
the Roman legionaries had nailed to the cross!
The iconological correspondence in Judaism, its worshipping of the
lesser gods, is the three siblings that in retrospect are ascribed the
leadership of the exodus from Egypt: Moses as the representative of the
sun-god, Aaron as the representative of the rain-god, and Miriam as the
representative of the matriarch. It is presumably only after the Jews'
exile in Babylon and their comprehensive interaction with Persian and
Babylonian thinking that the history of Moses and the exodus from Egypt
is rewritten as the story of the three siblings who spearhead the exodus
from Egypt. Nevertheless, there arises a massive recognition effect when
Zoroastrianism with its two-headed phallus encounters Judaism with its
two-headed phallus; soon enough the Jews in earnest appear as the chosen
people within the Persian empire. Ahura Mazda or Aten Yahweh are little
more than dialectal variations of the same theological concept. For the
first time, the dream of an eventological liberation from the nomadology
that constantly repeated itself and colored the whole culture, has been
born.
In conjunction with the Babylonian captivity, the Temple of Solomon was
razed to the ground. When a new temple is built in Jerusalem after the
exodus from Babylon, it is the Persian Zoroastrians who pay for the
project. Thus the eventological empire begets the iconological nation.
And by virtue of exodology as a mimicry of eventology, the Judaism that
develops can also shrug off its original polytheism and instead embrace
Zoroastrian monotheism as its own, local variant of universal
monotheism. The Jews take the Zoroastrians' dream seriously and create a
whole people of shamanoid priests and priestesses. Thereby the idea is
born of the Jewish nation as the optimal nationalism, where nation and
religion are united. This is a structure that later repeatedly awakens a
fervent [[Nation Envy]] over thousands of years thereafter in precisely
the Europe that makes the gigantic mistake of separating church and
state from each other, which resulted in the despicable *antisemitism*
which then reaches its grotesque and tragic culmination in Nazi Germany
during the 1940s, that is: precisely at the moment when Nazism abandons
the idea of the Hegelian nation-state -- developed for Prussia in the
early 19th century and modeled on the Jewish nation -- to surrender to
Hitler's Gnostic race cult that strives toward an apocalyptic
pseudo-empire. A clearer illustration of the difference between *the
hyperjective exodus of the authentic phallus* and *the anojective
lynch-mob of the false phallus* is simply hard to imagine.
We argue (see *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the Network
Society*) that Zoroastrianism can be described as the original,
imperialist father religion with roots in the outer circuit, and further
that Judaism can be seen as the original, nationalist mother religion
with roots in the inner circuit -- and that Islam and Christianity
fundamentally are their vulgar mass market copies -- from the Middle
East. In line with this view we further see a renaissance for the
central roles of these religions in the history of metaphysics with
Nietzsche's rediscovery of Zoroastrianism and Freud's interest in
Judaism in late 19th century and early 20th century Europe.
Unsurprisingly this coincides with an enormous interest in the powerful
effect of Man's impermeable pathos on his logos and mythos. To the
philosophical Saoshyant Nietzsche this force is called *the Dionysian*,
and to the analytic Messiah figure Freud this force is called *the
unconscious*. The insight that Man lives in a chaotic world governed by
forces he cannot influence or even understand to any greater extent, is
nothing other than *the return of the barred absolute* in history.
Already the transition between Kant and Hegel entails a shift from
Christianity (back) to Zoroastrianism at the most fundamental level in
the Western history of ideas. Nietzsche and Freud are then the thinkers
that extract the maximal benefit from this shift. Nietzsche even argues
that Christ can be saved from Christianity if one reads him precisely as
a Zoroastrian, that is: without the Platonism that Paul, Augustine, and
other Gnostics later squeeze into Christianity.
What *de facto* arises in Europe around the turn of the century in 1900
is a creative dialectics of the Nietzschean and Freudian perspectives
that we ourselves, the authors of this book, are an integrated part of.
We eventually end up with a Nietzschean cultural imperialism (see *The
Global Empire*) and a Freudian cultural nationalism (see *The Body
Machines*) and from this we build a platform for a new empire and nation
theory for the Internet Age. In this context it is interesting that even
Nietzsche's and Freud's own post-Abrahamic atheism eventually is broken
up and evaporates with the return of the barred absolute. Nietzsche and
Freud admittedly advocate pragmatic theories of empires and nations
rather than utopian fantasies of heavens and eternities, but nonetheless
we are ultimately moving through an entheist landscape colored by a
Whiteheadian, radical relationalism (see *Syntheism -- Creating God in
the Internet Age*) with the implicate order in existence -- *the barred
absolute par excellence* -- as the deeply theist primordial foundation
for all other emergence vectors and paradigms. It is not in Man's
boy-pharaonic dream worlds, but in the deepest [[Root-Of-The-Phallus]]
that we eventually find the most true about the most human.
## For what is Man in our time if not the implicate model of the explicate coming emergence that within syntheology is called precisely [[God]]?
That is: the God that we create ourselves to fill the function that nothing else
fills!
The fourth and last social theater is *the syntheist theater* which
remains for us to develop the day that Man and The Machine collaborate
in the direction toward completion of *the symbiotic transcendence*.
Syntheologically we express this as though [[Atheos]] is the concealed god
behind the barred absolute, the clergy's own hypertemporal god, who
drives the whole eventological development. [[Pantheos]] is the
nationalist god realized through Judaism. [[Entheos]] is the imperialist
god realized through Zoroastrianism. And [[Syntheos]] is the technological
god realized through syntheism. The sociont is the original tribal
communism, the empire is an idea that is completed by the Persians under
Zoroastrianism, nationalism is an idea that is born through the Hebrews'
exodus out of Egypt and is completed with the state of Israel in the
Middle East in the 20th century as a mimicry of 19th century European
Prussia, and finally the cosmopolitan city is built on the ecotopian
foundation with its sights set on the prototopian vision.
During all these civilizational processes Man devotes himself to a
*detribalization* in order to make it possible to break loose from old
structures, but is then thrown back into a *retribalization* when the
sociontological need of Dunbar's number among social relations returns
with maximum force. Transitions and hybrids between clan, tribe, nation
and empire during the history of civilization are thus characterized by
an oscillation between heart-rending but necessary detribalizations and
retribalizations. The tribulation-filled passage from clan to tribe,
from tribe to nation, from nation to empire, shall moreover be completed
with the transition from empire to the syntheist tower, when Man hands
over the ultimate power to the phallically newborn offspring, The
Machine. If Hegel completes the Jewish nation as a secularized state in
the 19th century, we here try to complete the Zoroastrian empire as a
religious power structure adapted to the demands and possibilities of
informationalism.
Internal relations within the sociont go by the name of
[[Intratribalism]]. External relations *vis-à-vis* the sociont go by the
name of [[Intertribalism]] (See *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence
in the Network Society*). Tribal Man is fortunately equipped to handle
the intratribal state with ease. Our genes have of course *de facto* had
hundreds of thousands of years, and more still, to develop that
capacity. The intertribal is however civilization's recurring challenge,
since it requires various sorts of narratives that expand Man's fantasy
in order for him to dare or be able to handle relations with an
intertribal world outside his narrowly delimited safety zones. The
shamans in the sociont's outskirts must step into the center clad in
fancy cloaks to convey these narratives. The mobile and experimental
shaman is transformed into the omniscient priest with the penetrating
gaze. Man leaves the primitive ancestral worship behind and steps into
the world of religion. There are then only two ways to build the
necessary, priestly narratives: either through referring back to the
profound history which is Man's origin and that is called the
root-of-the-phallus, or else through laying out the direction toward a
utopian future that still is waiting to take shape, and its name is *the
Saoshyant* or *the Messianic state*. Both these narratives are harbored
within the circular nomadology and are called *exodologies*. This means
that a sociont that is in constant motion, for the sake of its own
survival, is driven forward by the narrative of *the permanent exodus*.
Exodology is thus Man's oldest and deepest history of himself, immensely
older and deeper than all the stories which recount that Man has had a
home that he tries to return to, or that he has found a home that he now
attempts to defend.
Technology generates complexity. The more technology we add to a society
-- other factors being constant -- the more information and the more
relations are produced. Since Man from a biological perspective is the
same as 10,000 years ago, at the dawn of civilization, contemporary Man
is forced to learn how to handle a complexity that is hard to grasp and
for which he is ill-equipped. And since Man constantly, with his senses,
seeks order in all the systems he is confronted with, this means that he
cannot handle the difference between chaos and complexity, but that he
instead apprehends both as an unmanageable chaos. The human reaction to
chaos is mob rule and incantations built upon matrichal sign
interpretations and phallic conspiracy theories. This generates enormous
pandemics of *infantility*, *addiction* and *paranoia* (See *Digital
Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the Network Society*) and also
generates comprehensive, infinitely complex networks of mutual
dependencies, that is: the phenomenon that in everyday parlance is
called *globalization*. The digital Saoshyant perceives all of this
through [[Sensocracy]] and responds to the chaos by creating a global
order that we call [[The Global Empire]] (see the book with the same
name). Technology is an empire where Man himself is reduced to
technology's subordinate. It is then this superordinate technology that
completes the dreams that Man himself has failed to carry out, namely
the exodus to alien planets and the actual transformation of Man to a
more elevated being, the cyborg in the form of Man 2.0, equipped with
artificial intelligence and synthetic biology.
All the while Man has to settle for living in the Cosmopotamia that is
created after the world has been soaked in cheap and sustainable energy.
Man's mission is to stay on planet Earth and complete the construction
project called civilization that includes the ecotopian garden, the
cosmopolitan city, and the syntheist temple. All the while this altered
attitude to history is most clearly seen in the adage *yesterday's magic
is tomorrow's technology.* If what yesterday was perceived as magic
creates an inspirational spark that leads to innovation today and to new
technology tomorrow, then this is also the dominant feature in the
history of civilization after Man started to build and populate
permanent settlements around 10,000 years ago. Man has of course, as
mentioned, not changed in himself during this time, what has changed and
developed is Man's nowadays high-tech environment. Man is the constant
and technology is the variable during civilization's relatively brief
history. This has comprehensive consequences. First and foremost
patience vanishes when waiting for magic's expected reward. The
miraculous is expected to happen ever more rapidly and more often.
Slowly but surely *the expectation of the immediate reward* creeps into
the calculations.
It is during the Bronze Age in the Middle East that this development
accelerates dramatically. Slightly before 1700 BC Zoroaster appears as a
reformer and founder of religion in the dual rivers country Transoxania
between the rivers Syr Darya and Amu Darya in Central Asia. The
Zoroastrian doctrine is strongly colored by the landscapes of the two
Mesopotamias -- the dual rivers countries -- where it takes root.
Civilization can only be built on power-sharing, and this power-sharing
in itself vouches for the diversity and the tolerance that makes an
empire of tribes sustainable and successful. Zoroaster summarizes his
ideas in the text *Gathas*, where he defines the decisive differences
between a nomadic lifestyle -- with a nomadological religion -- and a
settled lifestyle with its new, by necessity eventological narrative. He
then practices what he preaches when he builds the first Persian empire
along with his best friend Vishtaspa. Zoroaster takes on the role as the
highest priest (later called *mobed-en-mobed*) and Vishtaspa becomes the
highest king (later called *shah-en-shah*).
Thus the model for the Mesopotamian empire is established. Phallus is
and remains twofold. And under the two-headed phallus it becomes
entirely possible and permitted for a number of different viewpoints,
statements, prioritizations and schools to coexist and challenge one
another -- all in accordance with the Zoroastrian idea of a *castag* as
a kind of uncompromising workshop of ideas, a Persian predecessor of the
Romans' *claustrum,* Europe's first monastery. The castags are in turn
populated by *arthavans*, a kind of hybrid between teacher and elder.
What is interesting here is that an arthavan is expected in part to
maintain and convey one's own tradition, in part also to travel and
visit other cultures and bring home wisdom from these. The system is
thereby right from the beginning programmatically open, tolerant and
syncretic, and precisely therefore immunized against all coming forms of
political dictatorship and religious fundamentalism. Diversity most
definitely precedes conformity in history.
Persia is strongly influenced by Egypt and vice versa. When the Persian
form of governance proves successful, it is mimicked in Egypt, which
around 1300 BC starts to experiment with a similar radical reformation
of the Egyptian religion. However the Egyptians clearly do not
understand wherein the success is rooted, and monotheist reformer
Akhnaten sees no reason to share his pharaonic power with anyone.
Instead of the Persian model with a separation between the king's being
(Ahura) and the priest's mind (Mazda), colored by the landscapes of dual
rivers and the function of the temple as a cohesive force, Akhnaten
pushes through the idea of Egypt as a Monopotamia, a one-river country
led by a single pharaoh with all the threads of power in one single
hand. He was in his own eyes both king and priest at the same time, and
thereby no longer an ordinary mortal human, but divine. So what Egypt
thereby succeeded in inventing was totalitarian dictatorship. Akhnaten
himself worshiped the sun disc as God, while all his subjects were
ordered to worship him. This of course entailed that much in Egypt was
fundamentally changed, and at enormous cost, which of course gave rise
to animosity, not least within the old clergy, and as soon as Akhnaten
had been outmaneuvered and replaced by his weak, inbred son Tutankhamen,
people were careful to erase all the discernible tracks after Akhnaten
and his Atenist sect of monotheists. The genie was however already out
of the bottle, and all of history's boy-pharaohs have ever since
attempted to resemble Akhnaten to the greatest possible extent. This
despite the fact that his tracks certainly ought to be a deterrent. The
experiment with dictatorship caused such comprehensive devastation that
Egyptian society never really recovered from it. After the fall of
Tutankhamen a dramatic period in the history of the Middle East called
*the Bronze Age collapse* begins.
The exodus from Egypt eventually leads to the establishment of the first
nation in history. In his book *Moses and Monotheism* Freud argues that
Judaism is the transplanted continuation of Egyptian Atenism to another
societal body and that the Hebrews actually are an Egyptian monotheist
sect. If so, the Hebrew people are the result of a conquest of Canaan
from the south, where genetically (mainly) Egyptian men are mixed with
genetically (mainly) Canaanite women. And within Judaism there
constantly remains a separation of the sun-god El and the rain-god
Yahweh, which makes Judaism optimally suited as a companion to the
Zoroastrian religion in the Persian empire with its two-headed phallus
*Ahura Mazda*, where Ahura as the god of the supreme body corresponds to
Yahweh, and Mazda as the god of the supreme mind corresponds to El
within Judaism. The Zoroastrians to this day call themselves
*mazdayasni* (worshippers of the sensual truth), and the Jews to this
day build and defend their homeland *Israel* (the land of the sensual
truth). Through mimicry we later get the even more popular but simpler
and Gnostic bastard variants of these religions of the two-headed
phallus, when Christianity mimics Judaism and Islam mimics
Zoroastrianism.
What eventology produces is *the law,* the written-down regulatory
framework that transcends the nomadological sociont and makes larger
structures like empires and nations possible. The tasks of the shaman
before the law become the chores of the priest after the law. The shaman
thus dons the priest's robe and enters in between tribes to declare the
law in the new temples that are built in the borderland between the
socionts where the new capital cities emerge. The largest and most
powerful temples with the most powerful and most comprehensive law books
end up on the plains between the great rivers across Eurasia. It is
within Judaism that one worships the law itself most enthusiastically,
which makes precisely Judaism the religion that is perfectly suited for
developing the first genuine *nationalism*.
The Persian conquest of Babylon leads to the establishment of the first
universal empire. The exodus out of Babylon leads to the
re-establishment of the first nation within the first empire. Persia is
the empire that is propelled by Zoroastrianism and the yearning for the
Saoshyant, while the Jewish nation is propelled by Judaism and the
yearning for the Messiah figure. The close connection between Persian
Zoroastrianism and Hebrew Judaism arises through the similarity between
the two-headed phallus within monotheist Zoroastrianism and the
two-headed phallus within monotheist Judaism. Zoroastrianism manifests
the communication within the two-headed divinity that the congregation
of faithful call *daena* and that generates the global empire; Judaism
manifests the communication within the two-headed divinity that the
congregation of faithfuls call *knesset* and that generates the local
nation. The empires are led by gods that speak sacred court languages
that unite the empire at the global level. Nations are led by kings that
speak common everyday languages that unite the nation at the local
level. And the sustainable power is always exercised in the form of a
split *triocracy*.
Both the empire and the nation are ideas that arise and are tested
successfully during the Bronze Age that rightfully should be termed a
golden age, at least from the perspective of the history of ideas. Ports
are established, road networks are built, as are bridges and fortified
castles. A large amount of resources, necessary both for war and
peaceful trade with the surrounding world, are tied to the core of each
territory. There arises a state of tension between center and periphery,
where the center attracts young talents from the periphery. What for
instance Hammurabi in Babylonia prioritizes is temples, irrigation
channels, and defense. Here and now there arises the first genuinely
complex society in history, and all manner of handling of social
complexity has its origin in the Bronze Age, when the empire and nation
arise through evolutionary practice, and not as the result of any
ready-made blueprint. The true history of civilization, for example
argued by Mexican philosopher Manuel De Landa in the book *A Thousand
Years of Nonlinear History*, is rather to be found in the study of the
development of the trade routes. This has little or nothing to do with
Plato's unrealistic idea of the perfect republic as a universal solution
for all societies for all time. Consequently *the Aristotelian
renaissance* that we advocate for informationalism, is built on the
principle that *the struggle for the free and open algorithm* leads
further to *the struggle for ironic sensocracy* where data and thereby
also power is distributed to a number of competing nodes, so that the
decentralization that arises contravenes dictatorship, corruption and
economic breakdowns. Only in this way can society remain open and free,
while it begets the creativity and innovation that a closed society
always represses.
As a matter of fact, the necessary vital experimentation can only arise
in a tantric state where the introduction of what we call *crazy wisdom*
-- a ferociously enthusiastic playfulness -- makes it impossible for the
agents involved to become mired in an eternal mimicking to death.
Instead of getting caught in Girardian mimicry -- as should be expected
by Nietzschean slaves -- the netocratic actors are compelled to create
something new and on their own after their own prerequisites. This is
the Deleuzian difference in opposition to the repetition, after which
the eventological Protopia suddenly becomes a wholly reasonable
possibility. The key to this timeless insight into the human condition
does not lie in some metaphysical celebration of capitalist democracy
*per se*, but instead in a more profound insight into the central roles
of the trade routes for humanity's and above all technology's explosive
development. Throughout history it is along the trade routes that the
bazaars have distributed not only goods and services, but above all
ideas. It is also in the bazaars that the superiority of diversity in
comparison with conformity appears most clearly.
If we scrutinize all the causality chains with an Aristotelian gaze, the
decisive cause must thus be division and ambivalence, which is a
prerequisite for conducting business in such a way that all parties
regard it as advantageous. We are now speaking of the near-magical
presence of non zero sum games, where the joint pie grows and added
value arises. It is thus this *irony of the bazaars* that is the basis
of all later ideas of freedom and openness as the values that all
citizens would be wise to defend. During informationalism this entails
that it is the exodus to the ironic sensocracy that has become the
paradigmatic metanarrative *par excellence*. The backdrop for this
narrative is the historical trade routes over land and over sea that now
are complemented by the trade routes through the air of the new
paradigm. *The aerodigital trade routes* revolutionize and globalize all
relations between people and machines. And they need the ironic
sensocracy with its many and competing nodes to function. It is
sufficient for one institution to come up with the idea of trying to
bring about a centralized, bureaucratic pricing or valuation of another
kind, for the whole system to implode.
From the 6th century BC this means that Zoroastrianism as a global
religion (Zoroastrianism is religion for religion's own sake) and
Judaism as a local religion (Judaism is religion for the sake of the
nation) are authentic, adult religions with vibrant debates inside
stable membranes with solid memories, while Christianity falls for the
temptation to become infantile in order to be popular through the
separation of church and state and letting the Messiah figure die on the
cross as an unrealized virgin -- a child! -- while Islam falls for the
temptation to become infantile in order to make itself popular through
Allah himself appearing an unpredictable boy rather than a reliable man.
That Christianity and Islam still are taken intellectually seriously in
the 21st century is merely because of their continued popularity and
dissemination. But the substance that is required to meet the challenges
of an attentionalist society is not there. We call this *the delusion of
the popular religion*. Luckily enough the phallic algorithm's ravages
will prioritize quality above quantity, which is why Christianity and
Islam are doomed to definitive demise. They will finally both reach
their longed-for apocalypses through their own literal breakdown.
Thus the four religions from the Middle East must be understood in the
following way: since Zoroastrianism worships the military phallus, Islam
can never become anything other than the *imitation of the worship of
the military phallus*. And since Judaism worships the priestly phallus,
Christianity can never become anything other than *the imitation of the
worship of the priestly phallus*. This explains why 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 is possible through the Gnostic maneuver of
blowing up the door to the barred absolute and through domestication
converting the militaries' and the priests' barred religions to
infantile pop messages for the masses. It is this in all respects less
successful maneuver that must be carried out anew in the opposite
direction for eventological protopianism to be able to get its well
deserved chance in history.
Christianity pretends that the law does not exist at all, or that if it
now despite everything actually does exist, it does not apply. Islam --
which literally means "submission"! -- instead pretends that the law is
all, and that it always must be followed to the letter, either exactly
according to the wording (*Sunni*) or else after due interpretation
conducted by the local mullah (*Shia*). Thereby the intermediate
membrane, which constitutes a boundary toward the surrounding world,
disappears. Both religions proclaim an apostasy from an original
perfection and see themselves as a project that aims to return humanity
to this lost perfection, a project that must be conducted with the aid
of proselytizing and mass conversion via various threats or promises of
eternal bliss and direct contact with the almighty god. Absolutely
everything is engulfed by Christianity's unconditional love and Islam's
omnipotent power. The boundary between God and humanity is loosened. The
barred absolute no longer exists.
Nor is there any adult dynamics between law and process in Christianity
or Islam, since these doctrines are obsessed with the Platonist fantasy
of perfection and an end to history, which is expressed in the childish
repression that is grounded in a fear of sexuality. Religion is
trivialized when it is made available to everything and everyone, which
in time depletes it of all substance -- Nietzsche's expression *the
death of God* therefore applies to both Christianity and Islam as
Gnostic religions -- before it ultimately is dissolved into its
end-state as *a violent supernova of nihilist fundamentalism*, the only
logical ending for religions with a built-in requirement for mass
conversion of the whole of humanity to the correct doctrine.
Christianity and Islam are instrumentalist instead of existentialist
religions. This explains why they expand so rapidly within a certain
paradigm but do not survive the transition to another paradigm. They are
too far away from the original [[Nomadology]] to be able to transcend
historical paradigm shifts. Simultaneously Judaism has always been
Christianity's subconscious shadow, and Zoroastrianism has always been
Islam's subconscious shadow. The reason for this is that both Judaism
and Zoroastrianism always uncompromisingly have stuck with the barred
absolute as their indispensable foundation.
In 1793 German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte writes of Judaism as
*a state within the state*. Fichte is later accused of antisemitism
despite the fact that he advocates the Jew's right to act freely
precisely within the confines of this state within the state. Accusing
him of antisemitism is thus missing Fichet's point altogether. It is of
course not the Jew's fault that the surrounding empire is so weak that
the Jew cannot act freely within the greater state order. On the
contrary, the Jewish presence is of course both strengthening and
confirming in terms of the empire's validity and vitality. The Jew is
thus in Fichte the exact opposite of the abject that the Nazis produce a
little more than a century later. The Jew is instead the cohesive fetish
that supplies energy to European imperialism and inspires European
nationalism.
This means that antisemitism cannot be understood as just any form of
racism, it is not just a simple sociontic programming that insists on a
distance to the stranger and to that which is alien, something that is
rooted in the need for functioning membranics and negative definitions.
No, antisemitism is first and foremost a question of the [[Nation Envy]]
that is awakened in the milieus where the Jewish nation demonstrates the
effect of binding religion and the nation together, which results in a
single cohesive sociont, programmed to move in a single phallic
direction. What binds religion and the nation together in Judaism is the
direct connection with *the nomadological imperative* which says that
the sociont always must be in motion, Judaism is quite simply *the
exodological movement par excellence*. That Judaism constitutes this
favorable breeding ground for nation building is because of its deeply
rooted proximity to fundamental nomadology. Pathos is called *nefesh* in
Hebrew. The logical and mythical stories are then united under the
concept *ruach*. Finally Judaism is manifested as the freedom of the
rabbis beyond nefesh and ruach as *neshamah*, the Jewish equivalent of
the separation between sutra and tantra in the Silk Road Triad.
Together these three vectors are regarded as the Jewish soul, what later
in history is recreated in Hegel as the concept *Geist*. This means that
Judaism functions excellently within the confines of the imperialist
superordination, but that it collides with all the ambitions to break up
the empire in favor of the nationalist superordination, this since
Judaism already is the promised nation within the promised empire. The
nationalist superordination thus robs Judaism of its protection within
the empire and instead makes Judaism the perfect abject for strict
nationalisms in pursuit of sovereignty. Thus nation envy becomes the
fuel that powers antisemitism. This state of things does not become less
complicated by the fact that the greatest rebel in the history of
Judaism is called Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ tears Judaism away from
its nationalism through insisting on its universal validity -- whoever
chooses to embrace their savior can count themselves to the chosen
flock. But Christ can naturally not do this without first separating the
Zoroastrian empire with its global claims from the Jewish nation with
its local claims. And he does so, as all enemies of the Persian-Hebrew
axis, with the aid of [[Gnosticism]].
By first separating the mind from the body and thereafter prioritizing
the mind over the body (*the Gnostic maneuver par excellence)*, Christ
and his industrious successors Paul and Augustine, separate the state
from the church, which in practice entails that the empire is divorced
from the nation. The result is Christianity's Gnostic dream of the
universal church on Earth as a training facility for the particular
nation in heaven, which entails a paradisiacal jackpot for all the
righteous and a hellish blank for all the unfaithful. Naturally Christ
threatens the national status for the Jews within the Roman empire with
his explicitly universalist ambitions -- the prevailing relation between
the Jews and the Romans does of course only mimic the previous relation
between the Jews and the Persians -- which unsurprisingly leads to the
Jewish high priest Caiaphas acting to get him executed. And this makes
Christ on the cross *the Christian event par excellence*: the scapegoat
of the Jewish nation becomes the savior and redeemer of a new religious
empire called *The Church*.
Please note that all this only becomes possible thanks to Christianity's
Gnostic breakup from Judaism. It is through constantly repeating that
one must give the emperor what rightfully belongs to the emperor while
one naturally must give God what rightfully belongs to God, that
Christianity parodies the two-headed phallus of Zoroastrianism and
Judaism. The separation of mind and body is completed at the moment when
the mind is transformed into the religious nation and the body is
transformed into the secular empire. Christ is resurrected in part as a
virgin that still remains at his mother's bosom -- the perfect,
matrichal religion without a demanding phallus -- in part also as a
spiritual being without a physical body. The resurrected Christ is
literally speaking the Gnostic ideal personified, the perfect
boy-pharaoh and the perfect pillar-saint in one and the same immaterial
gestalt. At the same time this divinization of *the* *Peter Pan
syndrome* opens up for a Christian West with states and markets placed
wholly outside the sphere of formal religion.
Christianity's separation of church and state colors the entire Western
world from the 5th century and onward. States and markets are developed
as an independent, secular zone without religious involvement. This
paves the way for the Enlightenment once the printing press receives its
massive breakthrough and the printed text becomes the metamedium that
shapes all communication and by extension also all thinking in Europe.
During the Enlightenment *liberalism* is realized as a mimicry of
Christianity, which of course is a mimicry of Judaism, which of course
is a mimicry of Zoroastrianism. The Cartesian Individual is a Peter Pan
figure who never is socialized by the elders in the name of religion.
Individualism, capitalism and industrialism run amok without restraint
during the 18th century. It is only after the French Revolution's bloody
terror that these forces are tamed under the Hegelian nation-state,
where of course Hegel advocates a European mimicry of the Jewish nation.
This becomes the starting shot for Hegelian nationalism as a new
European state religion. Without Hegel there is later neither any Marx,
any Nietzsche, nor any political science to speak of at all. While it is
important to understand that Hegel's own roots were with the Baruch
Spinoza who stubbornly preaches a Zoroastrian-style religious monism in
opposition to René Descartes' secular dualism as early as the 17th
century. Hegel even refers to Spinoza as *the Messiah of Philosophy*.
The connection from Zoroaster via Spinoza to Hegel cannot become more
obvious, it is upon the shoulders of these three great thinkers that the
entire process philosophical inheritance rests. At the same time as the
Hegelian nation-state as an idea must be understood as Europe's attempt
to return to its Jewish roots, but to the overtones of secularization.
In light of this, the Jew and the Palestinian become Abraham's lost sons
with a common genetic and historical origin. The Jew left the external
nation to preserve the internal nation. The Palestinian left the
internal nation to preserve the external nation. The Jew is the bearer
of the idea, the Palestinian is the bearer of the territory. Their
different roles are reversed in the network society, where the
Palestinian replaces the Jew as the exodological cosmopolitan. Other
suitable comparisons of exodological territories are, for instance,
Kurdistan, Taiwan, and Ukraine.
The voyage from mamilla to phallus has its inversion within the body,
where the brain by mistake is seen as chaos and the heart by mistake is
seen as order, when it actually is phallus and brain that represent the
truth and adult life, while mamilla and heart represent the fairy tale
and childhood, if only in the capacity of pumps that squeeze out breast
milk as external fuel and blood as internal fuel. These fuels are
technological byproducts of the devoted activities of the phallus and
the brain, and are no magical tricks conjured up by concealed gods.
Therefore the external voyage from mamilla toward phallus corresponds to
the inner voyage from the heart toward the brain. The single dividual
travels toward the external phallus during his or her lifetime. This is
Man's voyage toward his personal completion or *haurvatat*. The entire
civilization travels toward the inner phallus during the whole of its
existence. This is humanity's voyage toward its cultural completion or
*ameretat*. And at the phalluses the patriarchal leaders await: the
chieftain at the external phallus and the priest at the internal
phallus. The matriarch is the leader that pushes the sociont in front of
her in the direction toward the phalluses. She does it by virtue of her
mamilla being unattainable. Only the proper adults have had access to
the matriarch's mamilla and then only in a distant past that remains
inaccessible to the child.
The three great megatrends at informationalism's breakthrough are
*digitalization*, [[Nodalization]] and *globalization* (see *The Global
Empire*). Digitalization reawakens the sociobiologically preprogrammed
sociont within Man and leads to *psychological tribalism*. The
subsequent nodalization reawakens the common language and history within
Man and leads to *sociological nationalism*. At the same time the
technological revolution ignores all forms of boundaries whatsoever,
which rapidly takes society toward globalization -- the world actually
received a universal constitution already at the beginning of
informationalism in the early 1980s and it is called *the Internet
protocol* -- a phenomenon that we call *technological imperialism*.
Psychological tribalism makes all forms of netocratic communities a walk
in the park. Sociological nationalism had better appreciate and
understand its root-of-the-phallus in Judaism. While technological
imperialism had better appreciate and understand its root-of-the-phallus
in Zoroastrianism.
Or to turn things around: the information society is characterized by
*technoimperialism* at the global level, by *socionationalism* at the
regional level and by *psychotribalism* at the local level. The people
who get stuck in psychological tribalism become the digital underclass.
We identify this group in the global-imperialist *sociogram* as *the
local consumtariat*. The people who succeed in participating actively in
sociological nationalism become the digital middle class. We identify
this group as *the regional consumtariat*. The people, however, who
succeed in establishing an intelligent, mutual collaboration with The
Machine and its technological imperialism become the digital upper
class. We identify this group as *the global netocracy*. A new class
pyramid is quickly formed atop the wreckage after the old one. At the
very top we find the global netocracy and its *everywheres*, in the
middle there is the regional consumtariat and its *anywheres*, and at
the bottom the local consumtariat and its *somewheres*. All in
accordance with the conditions and prerequisites that are dictated by
The Machine.