# Profane capitalism, sacral attentionalism and the dark renaissance When capitalism spins in high gear, Zoroastrianism and Judaism demonstrate unparalleled success -- the Parsees of India and the Jews in Israel, according to all culture studies, belong to the world's most high-performing ethnicities. And in a parallel course of events the same capitalism becomes the unholy ghost that undermines both Christianity and Islam and propels a long series of outbreaks of fundamentalist madness within both these religions -- as a kind of spectacular supernova phenomena that adumbrate their ultimate collapses. We see a cavalcade of bloody acts of violence and fanatical moralist sermons that all are directed toward the advance of capitalism -- communist invasions and Islamist aggression. Since the subdued subjects more or less openly thirst for the consumer goods and services of capitalism, the result seldom becomes particularly devastating for the target in question. What happens instead is that Christianity's and Islam's fragility and character of Gnostic stories for children appears clearly. It is in the struggle against phallic capitalism that Christianity preaches its gospel of The Great Mother and her sacred child, a doctrine that attacks the secularized phallus, while Islam is the desperate boy-pharaoh's opposition to the same phallic logos. One aspect of capitalism's advance through the societal body is that it invalidated the entire Gnostic-dualist conception of a separation between body and soul. Instead the Zoroastrian summary of the ideological dilemma is confirmed: There are no fixed substances within either body or soul that are in a dialectical relation to each other. The dialectics is instead built into both the body and what we call the soul in advance. Capitalism was, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari point out, built-in as an eventology within nomadology right from the very start. Which sheds explanatory light on the post-Marxist criticism against capitalism, as it is formulated by for instance Mark Fisher in his book *Capitalist Realism -- Is There No Alternative?* (2008). Fisher and his ilk are nothing other than post-Abrahamic pillar-saints that in part attack capitalism for mercilessly revealing all of humanity's delusions about its own nature -- everything that humans are prepared to put a price on eventually gets a more or less fluctuating price on a global market -- in part also reject every thought of a world wholly made up of adamant traditions and an incapacity to change. ## But then we must ask ourselves: Where do the Marxists really stand? ## Is one admitting that capitalism actually can influence the world and set it in productive motion, which entails a qualitative change -- that is: explosively driving forth one event after the other and thus achieving a historical development -- or does one imagine that these longed-for events occur haphazardly every now and then, as the result of some kind of mysterious spell from pompous and pretentious pillar-saints with post-Marxist leanings? Never previously has the difference between phallic engineers and merchants on the one hand and castrated but pretentious and hypocritical boy-pharaohs and pillar-saints on the other hand, been clearer. It is thus capitalism we can thank for cleaning out Western dualism and completing a necessary monist renaissance. During modernism, Manichean Gnosticism returned within Christianity and Mazdakian Gnosticism within Islam in ever more vulgarized forms -- that is: as fundamentalist supernova phenomena before the impending breakdowns -- which laid bare the common, fundamental failings of both religions as thought systems. Capitalism mercilessly revealed how and why these religions have attained such enormous popularity through time and time again compromising away the classic, priestly demand to always speak the truth (Zoroastrianism's only ethical principle, *asha*). The classic memetics for the transfer of cultural codes and values collapsed under the escalating pressure from technological development. This revelation was so brutal that the ideological resistance was reduced to [[Epimemetics]], that is: the eternal repetition of symbolic slogans, without any connection whatsoever with actual reality. It is both simple and cheap to sell eternal life after death to the ignorant. As though people through just rattling off a few chants could become their own Egyptian pharaohs, equipped with and buried in gigantic pyramids. With epimemetics the sacrificial cult came into being. And the pointless bloodbaths were not long in coming. The problem was never capitalism and its explosive, phallic power. And the problem was not even God's or Allah's death (even if a god hardly could be more dead than the god who in a digital age becomes upset because someone for the sake of provocation goes about burning some printed matter). No, the problem was instead the fact that the woman and the boy tricked themselves into the Gnostic world of fairytales quite simply because the authentic, phallic religion was not within reach. China did after all have its Confucianism, Japan had its Shintoism; but the Western world pretended that the state and the business community were totally separate from the religion without which they could manage perfectly well. As though the function of a political ideology ever has been anything other than a religious conviction (see *Syntheism -- Creating God in the Internet Age*). With this delusion the entire ideological arena was left open to one epimemetic attack after the other. Enter the matrichal naivists who seriously proclaimed that *if only phallus would disappear*, heaven and eternal life would appear by magic, created out of nothing, without the least trace of assistance from phallic engineers and merchants. Abracadabra! There are always angels ready to be recruited, willing to work as slaves when there is building and cleaning to be done in *the new Jerusalem*. Everyone will get to suck the mamilla for eternal times (even if one must, of course, make an exception for some poor innocent scapegoat now and then, for the sake of social peace and quiet). At the same time as the authentic, phallic religion -- which of course welcomes capitalism's enormous power -- hides within the Zoroastrian and Jewish ideological legacies, as an authentic memetics of the authentic empire and the authentic nation. It is precisely here that Zoroastrianism and Judaism have continued to inspire the mimicking experiments for empires and nations that the Islamic golden age and the thereby related Enlightenment in Europe constantly refer to. The dualist Western world would never have managed without these phallic projects. That which was valuable in what the Western world created, emanated entirely from *the Persian-Hebrew root-of-the-phallus*. Capitalism must in this context be understood as a spiritual power, as *the dark renaissance* for the monist worldview that expels all dualist delusions from the societal body. ## For what is capital if not precisely the decentralized phallus that penetrates absolutely everything that allows itself to be regarded as profane? And after capitalism comes [[Attentionalism]], which entails an even more powerful phallic awakening. The reason for this is that attentionalism with all its algorithms constitutes a radicalization of capitalism's revelation about the actual state of things, certainly not some form of escape from truth. So if women and boys, without comprehension of the necessity of the phallic power, on their end lay claim to religion -- and fill it with new fairytales and victimhood myths -- this can only lead to the religious apocalypse and the breakdown of civilization (both Islam and Christianity are of course, as we know, fundamentally *eschatological religions*, shoddily fused as a patchwork of delusions about the original eventology of Zoroastrianism and Judaism). This state of affairs is summed up under the ironic concept *new age*, a state that American philosopher Alex Ebert summarizes under the mottos *personal manifestation*, *personal autonomy*, and *personal reality*, that is: the inevitable conclusion to *the dialectics of the Axial Age* as the atomized relativism in the form of apocalyptic madness. And it is, by the way, exactly this madness that capitalism produces in conjunction with the emergence of the Internet -- a final eruption and vital sign before attentionalism with its [[Social Relationalism]] rewrites all the fundamental conditions for culture and society and thus leads us into a new paradigm. If however Zoroastrianism and Judaism are taken seriously -- if the Gnostic delusion with its perfection, infinity and immortality is ejected for good, and is replaced by the free and open algorithm as ideal -- then and only then can civilization be saved. It is exactly this salvation project that Zoroastrianism calls [[Saoshyant|the Saoshyant]] and that Judaism calls *the Messiah*. We must exit and leave our collective stupidity behind. Therefore we must rewrite the history of ideas that celebrates the communist and Islamist frenetic attacks on capitalism, we must understand that this entire tradition is nothing but another variant of the Rousseauian delusion on how we left the paradisiacal natural state in the form of matrix and were mislead by the evil phallus to instead choose capitalism's brutal adulthood. The only reasonable stance is of course the complete opposite: It is capitalism that, in the capacity of the phallic blood and energy flow, at last has shaken life into humanity and has let it sense its actual potential. Capitalism entails an adultification of Man, it compels him to leave his childish, Gnostic reverie behind, and it confronts him with the fact that war and hunting are the archetypological propelling forces of humanity. The name of war in our age is *the state* (the phallic talents that the Indian caste system encompasses under the concept *kshatriya*) and the name of hunting in our age is *the market* (the phallic talents that the Indian caste system encompasses under the concept *vaishya*). The outer circuit's warriors conquer and defend a territory on behalf of the inner circuit with the purpose of offering *protection*. We call this *the will-to-expansion,* something that historically generates *urban industrialism*. The outer circuit's hunters hunt and put down their prey for the inner circuit with the purpose of offering *provision*. We call this *the will-to-accumulation* that historically generates *rural agriculture*. The correspondence of these within Western philosophy is the Hegelian negation for the warriors and the Nietzschean oscillation for the hunters, and the dialectics between them is the phallic arena. American historian Robert Ryan even distinguishes between *the Promethean entrepreneur* for the warrior and *the Mercurian entrepreneur* for the hunter as two phallic archetypes. First Prometheus comes and steals the fire from the gods, then Mercury comes and makes people bargain between them for fire and its many byproducts. What is interesting here is that the industrialization of the world actually precedes agriculturalization (before we can produce food, we must irrigate water, et cetera). After we have domesticated ourselves we first tame matter in itself, and only thereafter can we also tame animals and plants. Civilization is therefore built on the dialectical conflict between *the phallus-worshiping warrior culture* and *the fertility-worshiping agrarian culture*. Please note that we work with two different phallic axes here: in part the two-headed phallus, in part the separation between warriors and hunters. Anthropologist Georges Dumézil instead stubbornly attempts, in a series of books in the mid 20th century, to find a *trifunctionality* among the Indo-European gods and archetypes. Priests, warriors and hunters (the latter are simply described as "producers") would in that case recur both among the higher and the lower gods within polytheist religion. But in part Dumézil finds no similar structure within other iconologies, in part the Dumézilian mythology lacks a real of understanding of the evolutionarily necessary hierarchies that regulate the relations between both gods and humans. A tribe cannot be the subject of an agonizing conflict between three distinctly different interest groups. It can only have a single and unified leadership without breaking down, but this exodological leadership must take various archetypological needs and talents into consideration. This is the background to the need for intellectual diversity. Then this must occur dialectically and hierarchically, and not trialectically and flatly, as Dumézil imagines. It soon becomes clear that Dumézil's blind spot is the human subject in itself, personified by the chieftain. The priest is quite simply Man that represents God before the chieftain himself, so that the chieftain can represent God before the tribe (and Akhnaten's mistake in this context in Egypt was that he, like other boy-pharaohs before and after him, aspired to have both roles simultaneously). Beneath both the priest and the chieftain -- as representatives of the sociont's history and future respectively -- there are the warriors and the hunters, ready to sacrifice their lives for the tribe's protection and provision respectively. And at the same time the shamanic caste outside the tribe lives on its own terms, without participating in any intratribal power struggle whatsoever. Dumézil apparently never had the time to study the Mithraic orders in the Persian and Roman armies, something that would have aided him in creating a better understanding of the sociont's necessary, dialectical hierarchy. Capitalism kills *the religion of magic* but does of course instead open up for *the religion of technology*. The world calls out for *the digital patriarchy* and the path there goes via the completed capitalism and its transition to the phallically even more radical attentionalism. In this new social relationalist reality all conceptions of personal manifestation, personal autonomy and personal reality become nothing other than childish nonsense that moreover signals the least attractive class to belong to. We are speaking of a consumtarian underclass characterized by what Alex Ebert has called *conspirituality,* that is a near-pathological avoidance of the facticity of everyday reality, through voluntary confinement to one's own filter bubble. Please note that attentionalism does not offer any loophole that makes it possible to circumvent brutal capitalism -- contrary to what the conspiritualists strive for and contrary to what all countercultural hippies have dreamed of for several decades -- to any kind of communist matrix worship. No, attentionalism is instead to be regarded as capitalism's deepened radicalization. During informationalism the sought, objectively valid value is not a question of goods and services, and how one sets a price on these, but every second in a person's life is measured with an intersubjective, universal yardstick where the unit is precisely [[Attention]], something that cannot be bought for money since the actual attention has precisely an attentional value that lies insignificantly above zero. The forthcoming artificial and symbiotic intelligences will not devote themselves to anything else. In this way attentionalism is just as much a radicalization of capitalism as capitalism in its day was a radicalization of feudalism. Yesterday's magic becomes tomorrow's technology when the guardian angels assume a digital gestalt in the form of algorithms, where every single algorithm reflects the fine-tuning that the actual dividual has accorded it in interplay with the surrounding culture. And precisely since authentic attention cannot be bought for money, it becomes *sacred* in relation to everything else that capitalism produces and presents. It is of course ironically enough capitalism that in a brutal way has taught us what we hold sacred; we do of course see clearly what is sacred, it is of course precisely what we refuse to place on a market or let the state arbitrarily regulate. He or she who insists on trying to haggle over the sacred is wholly profane, not to say vulgar, that is: *new age*, religion as unmitigated prostitution in the form of what Alex Ebert with clever wordplay calls *propheteering*. *New age* is the digital religion for the masses *par excellence*. But not for the elites who can afford to rise above capitalism and embrace attentionalism instead. Commercialized conspirituality is what they will avoid at all costs and regard as consumtarian trash. The sacral opposite of this cynical nihilism within the attentionalist society we term *cool*. And this *cool* is entirely free from capital in all its forms -- it is of course not possible to swap or shop with it -- but it can only be appreciated and enjoyed as a form of dividual or tribal *cachet*. This *cachet* is thus the social, but not the financial power of attraction. Feel free to compare with the aristocratic country estate that the *nouveau riche* bourgeoisie quickly learned to buy and sell to the old, declassed elite's great dismay. This phenomenon -- the constantly growing importance of attention -- marks the shift from the capitalist to the attentionalist paradigm. ## With capitalism the brothel became a nightclub where the money was king, but what happens when money no longer can buy you entrance to the new clubs that rapidly acquire the highest status, where it is entirely different qualities than accumulated capital that make the doormen waive you through with a confidential smile? Welcome to the attentionalist netocracy. Figuring out what it takes to win the social game *without the aid of money* is precisely the new game in town; no sorry, online. The final phase of the capitalist paradigm -- a state that philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls *a world at war with itself* -- entails both the death of individualism and at the same time the death of collectivism. The only exit from this goes via a digital [[Tribopoiesis]], which leads to the return of the sociont as the realization of communism. The question is only which of all these isolated, communist spheres -- with their resolute membranics -- that precisely you and your loved ones manage to end up inside. It was mobile capital that eliminated the set privileges. Eventually society landed in a state of what philosopher Jean Baudrillard in the 1980s refers to as *hyperreality*. But as informationalism becomes a reality, sacral attention eliminates profane capital. What remains is what evidently is a class society where the digital patriarchy is the name of those who via the free and open algorithm constantly seek [[Antagony]], the deepest and most challenging truth, and who thereby become the governing netocracy, the new paradigm's elite. This is this aesthetic state that we return to as *the dark renaissance*. That is: the digital patriarchy (and the matriarchy to which it is closely connected) is the protopian netocracy *par excellence*, at the same time as all those who try to avoid the intense challenge of attentionalism become immersed in a time-killing escapism within masses of isolationist echo chambers. They get stuck in what sociologist and revolution theorist Guy Debord calls *society as spectacle,* where one passively consumes an existence where all that has been life has been replaced by medial representation. Exactly this is the [[Interpassivity]] that characterizes the digital underclass that we refer to as the *consumtariat.* Furthermore, a return to paganism under a Gnostic banner is no longer possible in a globalized and digitalized world. The state and the market are just as needed now as ever before, but the point here is that these institutions must be incorporated under their own, phallic religion, a religion that is technological and not magical, a regulatory framework built on priestly will-to-intelligence and spurred on by royal will-to-transcendence, quite simply a *syntheology.* The state needs the energy of the market and the market needs the stability of the state. That is: we here outline a religion that prioritizes [[Imploitation]] above exploitation, a religion that builds a robust membrane to thereby be able to maintain a vital *sphere* where the sociont can be developed beyond and across the generation gaps. The state and the market are subordinated to both *ecotopianism as membranics* and *cosmopolitanism as paradigmatics* -- two global projects that aim toward human adultification and which become possible thanks to an attentionalist sensocracy. But these institutions can of course under no circumstances whatsoever be subject to any Gnostic madness colored by a fear of phallus. There is simply no place left for such lofty ideas in a world that contains both nuclear weapons and various chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. We have on the one hand profane capital that eventually, on the other hand, must be subject to religious attention. The netocracy keeps a firm grip on religious attention, while state and market handle profane capital. It is not hard to discern the patterns here, how history repeats itself. Religious attention is the new imperialist eventology, while profane capital is the new nationalist nomadology. This is where the actuality of the timeless archetypes appears most clearly. If no one takes responsibility for in part protecting, in part providing for the sociont, this will of course have consequences in the form of impoverishment and plunder. The inner circuit can neither protect nor provide for itself. Protection presumes a transcendental drive to expand; provision presumes a transcendental drive to invest. The inner circuit -- which is terrified of risks and open conflicts -- can on its own only shrink the sociont and waste its resources. In this scenario, the outer circuit atrophies and disappears; what remains is the inner circuit, naked and with no means to either protect or provide for itself. Civilization is doomed. The conceptions of the inherent evil of capitalism and the existential dangers of attentionalism arise in a childish fantasy world where the milk as if by magic constantly pours out of the benevolent and omnipresent mamilla. In this fairytale world where mamilla possesses magic properties there is no insight into the fact that the authentic mamilla naturally is wholly dependent upon phallus for protection and provision, and that this phallus by no means is alien to pathical violence and sex. Truth becomes a lie when one cannot carry out such a transition from *mythos* to *logos*. Practically this entails that the child lingers at mamilla, petrified with horror at violence and sexuality. The phallic intrusion never occurs and the need for a transition is repressed from the fairytale world. The dream of the small object is thus the dream of the button that always can be pressed as required, whereupon all resources we need and all the security we long for are at our disposal, without any demands on a reciprocal effort. Thus the welfare-state intoxicates itself on its own marketing pitching and believes it is able to respond to people's every need without this having discernible consequences. The risk one takes is of course that the phallic forces leave mamilla to its fate and without either provision or protection, while the terrified children lie down with open mouths and demand the opening of all milk taps. These problems eclipse the classic *Oedipus complex*: the child struggles frenetically to keep the mamilla and thus also to keep *the inverted sexuality* whose primary characteristic is that it rejects the adult phallus' access to the mother's body. This never-ending attraction in the child to mamilla collides with the phallus' attraction to matrix. We return to how the misery of civilization begets self-appointed boy-pharaohs and pillar-saints. It should be of more than marginal interest in this context to notice that both Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx were notorious for accumulating enormous private debt that one was not very particular about repaying, while their many own children were left for others to take care of. They both *de facto* lived in complete and utter fairytale worlds. The private is thus political, and vice versa, which one would be wise to keep in mind. Next we witness how the often mentioned [[Alienation]] -- that is: how capitalism is alleged to separate Man from his own fundamental nature -- actually is an expression of hatred directed at unavoidable realities and the blatant truth of cause and effect in a society. As though it were a human right to be allowed to refuse to grow up and take responsibility for one's own provision. In this way the Marxist class struggle appears a struggle between generations: the adult children's struggle to always be allowed to remain precisely children and shirk the demands and responsibilities of adultification. Sure, it is called class struggle and Marxist activism, but actually it is but a poor parody on the classic trial of strength between an elder generation with life experience and a younger generation filled with fantasies and wishful thinking of an eternal childhood and a permanent relation of dependence. When Mao Zedong commandeers the young and purportedly unspoiled to terrorize their own parents, it is only Marxist business as usual, though in an extreme form. One believes that one need not have any skills, wishful dreams and phrase radicalism will suffice. The criticism against capitalism is wholly in line with -- and supports -- the Christian and Islamic fantasies of a new world, *the new Jerusalem*, that replaces the old world and that suddenly -- as if by magic -- just happens to be there, complete, eternal and boundlessly universal. ## For if the boy does not want to leave mamilla, if the boy refuses to become an adult, what is this then if not an answer to his prayers? The arduous voyage from mamilla to phallus is now canceled -- the terrified boy has once again turned into a contented suckling baby who lazily sips seemingly never-ending milk and who never needs to be confronted with any unpleasant forms of adult libido. ## And exactly this is what both Christianity and Islam promise all their followers in exchange for submission and the worship of the magical mamilla. But who should foot the bill? Thus we return to the corruption of Man's thinking during the Axial Age. It was bad enough that permanent settlement tricked the woman into keeping the child at her mamilla considerably longer than was optimal for the child's best interests (a gradually increasing prosperity thanks to improved food production undoubtedly helped matters). Namely, permanent settlement and its feudalism made the men stay away from the sociont for war and hunting to a much greater extent than previously. The phallic intrusion in the child's development was delayed or vanished completely. Often the presence of the tangible phallus was even replaced by fairytales of heroes from war or hunting (the modern computer games are of course perfect examples of this process). The collective adultification was disabled. The rites of passage vanished or were reduced to ridiculous symbolism without substance. And it was precisely this development that begat the Axial Age's *slacker* as an ideal in the form of the Gnostic boy-pharaohs and the pillar-saints. The dark flip side of the seemingly successful voyage from slavery via work to pure consumption is thus nothing other than the full-scale infantilization of an entire humanity. And it will unfortunately not end with some eternal and perfect fairytale life in a universal paradise. It will instead end with a far too premature death: an overgrown, overstuffed baby with diabetes and all manner of welfare diseases one can imagine, forced to wear its diaper from cradle to grave. Or as Hegelian philosopher Cadell Last rephrases the alienation critique: the only radical way to handle alienation is to regard it as a creative possibility, as a first ironic and then affirmative freedom in the same manner as all other historical ties that are severed in order for Man to come closer to the protopian ideal. The response to the Gnostic grotesqueness is thus a radical new reading of history that recounts the central roles of war and hunting in the human psyche. Divisions are necessary. As Hegel points out, the first division is always the division between division and non-division in itself. For an emergence to be able to exist, there must first be at least two emergences. Only thereafter can we speak of relationalism and dialectics in the first place. This explains why the first division in the sociont is the division between the soul and the body, precisely because this division is society in itself, personified by the priest as the soul as the logical will-to-intelligence and the chieftain as the body as the pathical will-to-transcendence. The second division in society is the division between war and hunting as dialectical phenomena -- both in themselves and in a relation to each other -- precisely because this division is the phallic project in itself, without which the division between subject and object becomes pointless. So with this second division we can distinguish between history as a flat, ticking *chronos* (the main project of the priest) and history as a question of identifying the perfect event as *kairos* (the main project of the chieftain). The warrior (the Indian caste system's *kshatriya*) and the hunter (the Indian caste system's *vaishya*) are two brothers with common parents. In Mesopotamian mythology these parents are the god Apsu, who is the father and comes from the mountains, and the goddess Tiamat, who is the mother and comes from the sea. And it is when the primordial mother Tiamat wants to kill her children that the son Marduk rises to his siblings' defense and kills the assailant -- a first example in history of the hero who slays the dragon. That the mother of the gods also is the dragon that must be slain does of course show that Marduk cannot become an adult god in his own right unless he chooses and personifies phallus by attacking mamilla, whose benevolence also is menacing. Through this act Marduk becomes the highest god in the Mesopotamian mythology, an early common predecessor of the division between the priestly sun-god and the royal rain-god. Marduk for the Babylonians later becomes the Mithras for the Persians; Mithras who kills the bull, meaning all phallic culture, from military academies to bull fights, are thereafter characterized by the cult directed toward the hero who kills the monster. The children's story with the same theme is of course Saint George who kills the dragon and who receives the princess as reward. But war and hunting always precede the reward. The division between the masculine and the feminine, the prerequisite for sexual attraction, only arises after war and hunting are concluded. In this process the warrior and his hierarchic *tower* becomes the predecessor to what we later call *the state*, while the hunter and his network-dynamical *square* becomes the predecessor to what we later call *the market* in the secular power structure. Thus there needs to be both a priest and a chieftain during war, just as hunting requires both a priest and a chieftain, this since both war and hunting are phallic projects that are built on both mind and body. And here the dialectically significant thing happens. The priest steps into the role as admirer of the chieftain and the chieftain steps into the role as admirer of the priest. The sociont is driven by *admiration* and not by rivalry. The war chieftain thus personifies war in itself, but it is the war priest who charts the transcendental course toward *territorial expansion*. War is more than a protective act, war is the prerequisite for the growing territory. The hunting chieftain correspondingly personifies hunting in itself, but it is the hunting priest who charts the transcendental course toward *commercial expansion*. Hunting is more than an acquisition of necessary provisions; it is the prerequisite for an accumulation of resources that enables a comprehensive investment in the future. And it is exactly this accumulation of resources that enables permanent settlement and the birth of civilization as a paradigmatic event. Hunting precedes war in this process, hunting is the environment where the hunter is trained to become a warrior. The hunter and the warrior are thus one and the same person with different roles at different points along the time axis in the nomadological society. With permanent settlement the split arises between them -- through a spin-off they become two mutually admiring brothers. That division then recurs throughout the entire history of civilization, and it takes place before the division in masculine versus feminine, where masculinity lands as the difference that is difference in itself, while femininity steps forward as the wholeness that always has been the wholeness as wholeness in itself. The key is once again a dialectical division and tension. This time not between the chieftain and the priest, but between the warrior and the hunter. Hunting is fundamentally nomadological, the prey is always the same prey. War is however fundamentally both nomadological and eventological. The scalp is always a new scalp, a historical event. Hunting is thus *nature and adventure*. War is *culture and conquest*. Hunting is about killing what nature provides. War is about eliminating the enemy. Killing an animal and eliminating a human are two completely different matters. We are dealing with essentially different spirits to handle after hunting and war respectively are concluded. Thus hunting only requires that phallus defeats a nature that is solely body but not mind. A *tactic* is sufficient to do this. War does however require the elimination of a stranger that the situation turns into an enemy and who is every bit as much body and mind as the warrior himself. Thus a tactic, a method, does not suffice, but there also needs to be a *strategy* for winning the war. When the hunter and the warrior are one and the same person in the sociont, this generates the phallic primordial religion that consists of the worshiping of *the Minotaur* as the hybrid between human and animal. The hunter temporarily becomes the warrior via the Minotaur. The warrior temporarily becomes the hunter via the Minotaur. The difference is that hunting is an *orthograding phenomenon,* while war is a *contragrading phenomenon*. These concepts come from philosopher Terence Deacon's theories on membranics and emergences. Orthogradation means that the phenomenon is deeply grounded within the sociont. The only participants are the outer circuit within one's own sociont. Contragradation means that the phenomenon only arises in an open conflict between the various socionts. The orthograding hunt generates a symmetry and a calm within the sociont. The contragrading war however generates an asymmetry and concern within the sociont. Hunting is thus fundamental and constant in relation to war. But war is -- under the prevailing historical prerequisites, *nota bene* -- an interruption in an eternally grinding orthogradation sought by many. The risk is otherwise that the constant symmetry is experienced as imposed and suffocating. The atmosphere within the membranes becomes stagnant and one can soon feel a stench of decay. Hunting is therefore to be regarded as *the implicate order of the phallus,* while war is to be regarded as *the explicate order of the phallu*s. Hunting is the small event within the eternal recurrence of the same, the seed to the dream of the eventology that is to come. War, once it breaks out, then becomes the great event that upends history and reroutes the development onto an entirely new track at the moment when the new paradigm that enables the war is a fact. Vegetarian attacks on the orthograding hunting and pacifist attacks on the contragrading war do not change anything, since the drive to carry out violence to the great chagrin of the Gnostics is as constant as the sex drive viewed over time has ever been -- not least among the hypocritical and passive-aggressive Gnostics themselves. Should one try to avert hunting and make war impossible, this only entails that violence is uncontrollably redirected to other membranes within the sociont. Passive aggression consequently explodes. This fact appears particularly clearly with the arrival of informationalism in an industrialized world that has been spoiled by increases in peace and prosperity, ever since the balance of terror and the presence of nuclear weapons led to comprehensive outbreaks of pacifism and vegetarianism. ## Violence has not disappeared, of course --how would that happen? It only assumes new expressions and is internalized -- for lack of other arenas -- within informationalist Man himself, which philosophers such as Foucault and Deleuze seldom are remiss in pointing out. Violence seeps out as male, open aggression and as female, passive aggression in all possible confused contexts and in all possible directions. But above all it appears as self-hatred and self-contempt, directed toward the subject itself. In this context Byung-Chul Han speaks of [[Autoexploitation]] as the curse of informationalism. The risk of eliminating every possibility of contragradation is that all the violence that exists will be orthograded, which eventually leads to the sociont exploding in a blind, unfocused violence, alternatively that it implodes as a result of corrosive autoexploitation. This development is intensified by the very paradigm shift in itself. When the old institutions die and the new institutions have not yet been established, there quickly arises a vacuum-like state, a string of *absentials* that must be filled with substance. *Privation* is the absential that arises after the vanished real power. Privation breeds *corruption*. C*astration* is the absential that arises after the vanished symbolic power. Castration breeds *conformation*. *Frustration* is the absential that arises after the vanished imaginary power. Frustration breeds *manipulation*. It is important to understand that the new paradigm does not arrive pre-assembled as a luxurious piece of design furniture, but rather as a hard-to-grasp building kit from IKEA, a flat package without any fixed power structures and impossible to survey (see [[The Netocrats]]). But with the old structures' collapse, it is necessary that the arisen absential be filled with some form of energy. This filler then either comes from below, as a node that emerges spontaneously from the network, which entails that anarchy can transition into [[Plurarchy]] and that a new paradigmatic upper class can take shape when the nodes find each other in a more powerful, more exclusive (and excluding) network. Hierarchy and order returns when [[Nodalization]] breaks through. But the absential can also, if needed, be filled more rapidly by precisely warriors and hunters who are trained in handling conflict situations, who therefore act transparadigmatically and who always can assume power. War's contragrading nature vanquishes the new paradigm and makes it accessible to the sociont. Hunting's orthograding nature then rides out into the new paradigmatic landscape and hunts its prey, which can take the form of, for instance, a technological entrepreneurship. The warrior then becomes the root-of-the-phallus or the implicate phallus, while the hunter is phallus in itself or the explicate phallus. Consequently every paradigm shift throughout history creates an enormous power advantage for the sociont's outer circuit. It is as in the fairytale: he who vanquishes the dragon gets both the princess and half the kingdom. At least. Phallus is risk-taking in nature, matrix is risk-minimizing. In this respect informationalism does not differ the least from earlier paradigms. It will at least initially generate a powerful *digital patriarchy*. Gradually, and as a result of the dialectics between the smaller clan and the greater tribe, the warrior and the hunter are developed into two different characters who later shall divide the phallic world between them. They now appear as engineers and entrepreneurs respectively. The division of the Minotaur gains momentum as early as with written language and permanent settlement. The warrior becomes the *engineer* who builds the world and creates magnificent art from the strategy in the form of *architecture*. The hunter becomes the *entrepreneur* who acts within and between socionts through cashing in on the greatest art of tactics -- *the trade route*. It is phallus that plans for and builds the *infrastructure* that maintains and extends civilization. There the warrior has *diachronic priority* over the hunter, since the warrior's existence is a prerequisite for the hunter coming into existence. Without the root-of-the-phallus there will be no phallus. This means that war is not a necessity *per se,* but the outlet for the contragrading phallus via the engineer is nevertheless a must. This means that hunting is not a necessity *per se,* but the outlet for the orthograding phallus via trade is nevertheless a must. If neither weapons nor agricultural tools are produced, the civilization has soon heaved its last sigh and has died of itself. At the same time the engineer and the entrepreneur, just as the warrior and the hunter, must deliver their scalps and prey somewhere. And the addressee where all such deliveries are received is quite simply *the inner circuit* or the *matriarchy* where the sociont nomadologically is reborn in the form of a new generation. The gravity that drags the warrior and the hunter back to the inner circuit is sexual attraction. The mind is drawn to heritage and the body is drawn to matrix where inheritance and matrix are driven by *the will-to-reproduction*. It is here that the third division, sexuality, makes its entry into the human psyche. The success during war and hunting strengthens the male libido. The ceremonial display of war fortune and hunting fortune before the sociont strengthens the female libido. These practices then lead further to the sexual ritual, which plays out against the backdrop of the barred absolute, which distinguishes the adults from the children, who firmly are kept outside. It is thus the priest who proclaims the strategy as truth-as-a-fact during war and hunting, while it is the chieftain who proclaims the vision as truth-as-an-act. And it is the priest who proclaims the regulations as a truth-as-a-fact during the sexual ritual, while it is the chieftain who carries out the sexual act as truth-as-an-act. The priest is thus in a Hegelian sense *perceptual with passive receptivity* (voyeurism), while the chieftain is *conceptual with active spontaneity* (exhibitionism). This state of affairs is to begin with nomadologically genius and highly functional since it contributes to the sociont avoiding all conflicts concerning its heritage. The chieftain looks to the best for his own offspring in the next generation. The chieftain's heritage is *genetic*. But the priest can without offspring of his own only look to the common good of the sociont in the next generation. The priest's heritage is *memetic*. This is of course the difference between on the one hand nomadology as the genetic heritage and, on the other hand, eventology along with nomadology as *the dialectics of genetics and memetics*, that is: as civilization itself, which thus now becomes possible to imagine and to conceptualize. The first marriage is thus that between chieftain and priest, the second marriage is that between warrior and hunter. Only the third marriage is the nowadays conventional union of man and woman. And we have to imagine that the diachronic sequence for this innovative institution reasonably explains the old truism that "men are obsessed with marriage while women prefer to think about weddings". In marriage and at weddings, the fixations with processes and events naturally trade places with each other. Civilization's voyage is ever since this division a voyage from *the genetic heritage to the memetic heritage,* which constitutes the driving force behind all of history. That is: Hegel's *Weltgeist*. Once we have become settled the phallic restlessness transitions from a voyage of the body to a voyage of the mind. Or as philosopher John McDowell summarizes this division of roles in his classic work *Mind and World* (1994): Perception is allied with heteronomy. The priest thus personifies *sentience* or the objective truth of the sociont, by virtue of his passive receptiveness. The conceptualization is however allied with autonomy. The chieftain thus personifies *sapience* or the subjective truth of the sociont, by virtue of his active spontaneity. And the priest with his objective truth has *diachronic priority* in relation to the chieftain, he is the prerequisite for the chieftain, with his subjective truth, to be able to take his place. Without the root-of-the-phallus there will be no phallus. And without phallus there will be no civilization. As everyone knows the sexual act has both a bright and a dark side. As everyone knows it is anything but a peaceful picnic. At least not exclusively. A predominantly bright side, at least in theory (many complications can arise) is the sexual ritual, exercised within one's own sociont and with its matriarch as a sort of guardian saint in the background. The really dark side of sexuality we tend not to speak of, that which plays out after a bloody showdown on the battlefield, that is: outside one's own sociont, within the conquered territory after several men and elderly people among the adversaries have been killed, including *the matricide* of the matriarch. What then remains is the sexual siege of the enemy's women, as if this was a given. In this context it bears bringing to mind that the migration that took place during the so-called migration periods of history did not entail any comprehensive treks carried out by women. During these migrations it was essentially male warriors and hunters who moved across vast areas, killed as many enemies as possible to then lay claim to the losers' territories and women. Whereafter the men continue to bear the same surname, while the women change their names where warranted. The family belonging thus follows the man as the fatherland, while homeland belonging is inherited via the woman as the motherland in the dialectics of genetics and memetics. This explains why Zoroastrianism invents *the empire* as the perfect variant of the fatherland, with the outer circuit as the model. Which in turn explains why Judaism invents *the nation* as the perfect variant of the motherland, with the inner circuit as the model. The religious belonging among the Parsees of India is inherited according to tradition via the fathers, and the religious belonging among the Jews is inherited according to tradition via the mothers. Which in turn leads to the unification between them in conjunction with the development of capitalism in Europe, which compelled the institutionalization of war and hunting as the state and the market. Since war is about the organization of the killing of culture and hunting is about the organization of the killing of nature, it is the state that handles the monopoly on violence and the market that handles the monopoly on trade. Bureaucracies are built to handle the accumulation of information and resources. A religion that acts dialectically in the interplay between state and market would be able to maintain an optimal equilibrium between their respective arenas. But without a religion in this dialectical role of the referee, the state and the market tend to end up in constant conflict with each other. When the state eliminates the market this results in *dictatorship*. When the market eliminates the state this results in *anarchy*. The authentic phallus therefore personifies religion as a buffer and a communicating vessel between state and market. Before the state and the market, the chieftain and the priest always stand united. Both state and religion need intelligence as well as transcendence. While it is the false phallus -- with its Gnostic and wholly uncalled-for choice between body and soul, and with the ensuing demonization of the deselected -- which proclaims that the choice between either the state or the market is necessary to make. The catastrophic result is not a long time coming. ## Gnosticism always leads either to dictatorship or anarchy. But why would the Gnostic take any responsibility for this? His future is of course still called the apocalypse, after which the perfect and eternal paradise materializes itself as if from nowhere, as if by magic. And the Gnostic himself is at the center in his capacity of everything's objective and meaning; like a fairytale prince he enjoys suckling down the first shimmering drops of milk from the queen's mamilla. Conveniently enough the competing king's phallus has been mysteriously eradicated. This is what it looks like, the false dream of an eventology without nomadology, the false dream of a soul without a body, of a world where there no longer is any war or hunting, where violence and sex no longer exist, and where both the territory and all the necessary resources exist in magical abundance. However capitalism demonstrates -- in no uncertain terms -- that all this merely is pious wishful thinking. It does not kill God, but it pulls out the cords that keep magic alive by artificial means, and underlines what the realities are in the world of the adults. And thus it compels humanity to finally grow up and bid a last farewell to the importunate infantilization of the Axial Age. The direction we can discern in history is a voyage from fairytales toward a truth; capitalism's role in the brutal awakening that is necessary, is central. The point of civilization -- its task -- is not to embed Man in comfort that gives him the possibility to wholly devote himself to his infantilization and not have to grow up. This can hardly be the objective for human creativity. A more reasonable view is that civilization aims to make Man's transcendental drive more efficient and thereby make him divine. That is: civilization turns adults into even more adult adults, consciously dialectical adults who accept their mortality, and not into deeply childish fairytale princes and princesses, terrified at adultification, unable to handle violence and custom. Capitalism kills all reveries of perfection, infinity and immortality once and for all. Simultaneously it paves the way for informationalism, sensocracy and protopianism. What is required is a barred absolute placed between the sacral and the profane, a zone where religion has a monopoly on the sacral -- within the walls of the temple there are no surveillance cameras or monetary transactions -- while the state and the market handle the profane according to their own discretion. For an initiation into the mysteries of religion, a trained ability is required in order to handle violence and sex, mortido and libido, in an unfiltered manner. This is the tantric religion for the adults among the adults, and not for adults that have been tricked into believing that they can afford to continue being children. In the same manner the sutric religion establishes a barred absolute between the children and the adults up until the children are ready for the rite of passage. It is only through this radical return to the archetypology that was generated under the sociont that humanity in earnest can find its way back to its archetypal identity. The male and the female, the old and the young, the shamanoid and the androgynous, can now orient themselves within the tribal terrain after many centuries of illusions that Man can reshape his nature and become something he is not. It is not Man that shall be remade -- he is who he is -- but it is The Machine that shall be developed to attain its full syntheological potential. And nor is it the masses that shall be hunted by force in the future, threatened by desperate boy-pharaohs and pillar-saints. It is *the chosen ones* that shall be tempted to step forward to themselves carry out the exodus to the augmented future. It is thus individualism that generates the false premise that "we are all the same'', which in turn generates the modernist obsession with [[Plasticity]]. If all of us were born the same -- the individualist version of the Christian and Islamic conception that "before God we are all alike" -- the actual differences between people are only a question of plasticity and thus also highly influenceable. Biological differences between men and women, physiological differences between old and young, are swept under the rug and ignored to create space for a playhouse of Rousseauian boy-pharaohs and pillar-saints who wish to use people as an undefined material that they themselves can reshape, wholly according to their own discretion. But the actual possibilities to reshape people is as small as the risks are large. Man's plasticity is highly limited, which makes for a renaissance of classical archetypology. It is simply futile to mobilize resistance against a sociobiology that of course will not allow itself to vanish through wishful thinking. The only feasible path is to understand it as a necessary constant around which everything else must be built in a human, all too human, society. It is not Man in his relation to nature who shall be reshaped, and nor is it Man in his relation to culture that shall be reshaped. [[Ecotopianism]] is of course actually the completed dialectics between Man and nature, in the same way that [[Cosmopolitanism]] is the completed dialectics between Man and culture; we are now speaking of functional collaborations and not banal moralizing. Thus ecotopianism becomes the technological realization of the full potential of hunting. Whereas cosmopolitanism becomes the technological realization of the full potential of war. Hunting is brought to civilization as an imploitative activity under ecotopianism. War is brought to civilization as an imploitative activity under cosmopolitanism. The agricultural taming of nature and the capitalist taming of culture thereby attains a new level. Violence is channeled so as to come to constructive, dialectical use (Zoroastrianism's *asha*) instead of destructively being concentrated as dictatorship or being diluted as anarchy (Zoroastrianism's *druj*). The digital libido can flow freely and without risk when protopianism is realized. Phallus seduces and tempts when it is exposed in the bazaar of ideas, but has no ambitions to compel the subjects to blind obedience. And when phallus demonstrates an impressive surplus, matrix responds with a warm generosity. The explicate substance fills the implicate void. It is important here to understand the contributions that have been made to the history of ideas by the art of conducting war and hunting respectively. It is during war and hunting that existence's transdeterminist nature and the dialectics between the future contingence and the historical necessity is revealed in that the separation of the chieftain from the future and the priest from history already has taken place. Determinism and indeterminism are only local phenomena. From a global perspective existence is transdeterminist. The warrior or the hunter becomes *the third man* in the phallic mythology. He completes the trinity that otherwise is constituted by the chieftain and the priest. It is exactly this opening between the historical necessity and the future contingence -- Hegel calls it *freedom* and Whitehead calls it *creativity --* that is the seed to what we call protopianism today. It is namely during war and hunting that freedom and creativity first become tangible assets through the warrior and the hunter learning how to handle *probability*. This probability is the power relation between the potentialities, an implicate power relation that under the pressure from the decoherence of existence -- that is: the gravitation of the surrounding world -- sparks an explicate actuality, an event to celebrate and absorb, or else a trauma to treat and overcome, for both the warrior and the hunter. First as natural probabilities during hunting, then as cultural probabilities during war. In both cases the warrior's and the hunter's own libidinal potencies respectively must be included. These are the accumulated experiences of expressions of freedom and creativity that underpin civilization. Both the warrior and the hunter live on within all of us, but they have received extended and not restricted roles. This entails that the warrior's transformation to the engineer is not tantamount to a castration that has robbed him of his weapon, but it is instead a case of a dialectical realization and reinforcement of the warrior's violent libido. And likewise, the hunter's transformation to entrepreneur shall not be apprehended as a castration, but as a dialectical realization and reinforcement of the hunter's violent libido. The warrior continues to chase *scalps*, the hunter continues to chase *prey*. The sum of violence is, just as the sum of sex, always constant. The question -- and what varies-- is only how these libidinal powers are channeled and used, how they are cherished in the best possible way, not how they are contravened or even prevented. We have of course learnt that every time violence is accumulated within the sociont, the arrival of Cybelian lynch mobs will be as certain as death and taxes. The only way for the warrior and the hunter to agree is then through finding an innocent abject on which to unleash the collective's entire frustration. This is exactly what Hitler did with the Jew in Germany and what Stalin did with the kulak in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. And the frustration comprises both sexes. When tension boils over within the sociont, the women in the inner circuit are in no way calmer than the men in the outer circuit. Rather the reverse. All the while every messenger lives with the highly tangible risk of being confused with the unwelcome message. The first ones that the mob throw into concentration camps are always the shamanoids and the androgynous themselves. If one does not fit in, one stands out; if one stands out the role as scapegoat is close at hand. Which explains why pacifism and vegetarianism constitute such grotesque attacks on the phallic libido. It is naturally not because peace with one's neighbors or cultivation of fruit and vegetables are odd in themselves, but because pacifism and vegetarianism do not understand the ambivalent power in the civilizational irrigation of the phallic libido, but hate and attack the phallic libido in itself. Unsurprisingly, the recurring penchant for pacifism and vegetarianism in postmodern society is an ill-concealed attack on capitalism as a libidinal force, something one under no conditions wants anything to do with. These conceptions are fundamentally hostile toward sexuality. They are thus fundamentally mendacious and infantilized. It is once again a case of the tenacious, Rousseauian myth that capitalism in all its forms is to be regarded as evil exploitation. It certainly is not. Capitalism is merely the exposure of the libidinal brutality that propels the entire civilization forward, and as the key to the truth of this libido it is a powerful producer of value for everything and everyone. Meanwhile the attentionalism that follows from capitalism will, after a few decades of confused teething problems, only reinforce this libidinal brutality further. The digital and its algorithms is rather, as philosopher Mark Stahlman expresses the matter, one big wall of brutal truth that now confronts humanity against which all attempts to lie or engage in wishful thinking inexorably are crushed. There is no alternative to radical authenticity unless one decides to definitively say goodbye to reality and stay with the fairytales. Capitalism made Man's relations to in part nature, in part culture truer and more forthright, and this was its great contribution to the civilization process. Attentionalism will only dialectically reinforce this development and make Man's relations to nature and culture even more brutally honest. While the names of these projects are, as mentioned, ecotopianism and cosmopolitanism. Thus it is attentionalism that kills the false communication that was called advertising and marketing and that every day committed assaults on people's senses with its furious bombardment of tasteless kitsch and noisy shallowness. The only thing that survives the completed attentionalist revolution is authentic communication, liberated from commercial corruption, political manipulation, and academic and massmedia-driven conformation. What triumphs in the end is the bazaar's simple motto that speaks of *the best product at the best price*, which will not hinge on advertising or marketing finding their way back to this reasonable message, rather the reason is that it is solely authentic communication proper that the phallic algorithm will sift out and hold aloft. In the digital bazaar no one can hear you scream, the algorithm will make sure to find you in the silence quite simply because you locally, or better yet globally, actually represent the best product at the best price, which is the only thing that the search engine's netocratic users *de facto* are interested in. The algorithm must find you to maintain its own credibility. If it does not, it is either substandard or corrupt. What makes capitalism a brutal truth-teller is that capital establishes an objectively true value for all products and services that are available in a market. The relation between supply and demand determines a price that is true until the basic prerequisites are altered. The sacral however, is what cannot have a price and that consequently neither can be bought and sold. What capitalism reveals when it kills sundry vulgar quasi-spirituality is thus not that God has suddenly died, but how little life and substance there had been in people's religiosity from the very beginning. Nowhere did this become more glaring than in the Protestant revolt against the Catholic church's letters of indulgence, the corruption of religion *par excellence*. The problem was of course never that capitalism revealed the Catholic church's desolate emptiness, it was not the messenger's fault that the church had been corrupted. The problem was that the religion itself lacked substance when light was shed on the printing of paper money and thereby revealed the corrupt duplicity. It is thus not correct that capitalism alienates people from each other or from human nature. It is exactly the reverse. Capitalism only tells the truth, and it is the only effective vaccine against open war that humanity has ever had at its disposal. It unites people the world over across national boundaries, it ties people together with bonds that consist of common interests. But this global network of global networks demands an entirely new level of brutal truth reflection, which luckily enough is a development that attentionalism supports and reinforces. That religion returns with full force during the digital age, to protect the sacral behind the barred absolute, does of course entail that capitalism cannot enter. It is frankly not possible to purchase a place behind the barred absolute. You must first earn your place there on purely attentionalist credentials. This is the very essence in the difference between capitalism and attentionalism, where the theological comprehension of attention's power and historical role is what Marxism always has lacked. That is: up until the publication of [[The Netocrats]] in the year 2000. The anti-capitalist critique is thus based on a false premise. It is true that Man is a product of the sociont. And it is correct that the sociont was a communist society. It is however not at all true that the sociont was a matrix where all were kind and merry and sat and sang perky camp songs the whole day without having to contribute to the provision of the collective. This is the great Rousseauian lie that Marx never settles the score with -- but rather, on the contrary, builds his critical theory from -- even if he in a true Jewish manner imagines the proletariat as the Hebrews that are to leave slavery in Egypt under capitalism and march out into the promised communist paradise. But to execute this logical somersault Marx must lie -- to himself and to his many followers -- about the root-of-the-phallus. It is true that the sociont as an idea entails a correct formalization of Man's origin as [[Tribopoiesis]]. But a formalization does not allow an idealization, unless one cheats by arbitrarily adding Platonist forms as an ideal. Forms are only archetypes that have been chiseled out over millions of years of evolution. And archetypes are in themselves no ideal, they are only forms that one would be wise to understand and adapt to, but they are no more than that. And they are definitely not eternal or perfect. This is where Marxism's Platonist shadow is laid bare. Both matrix as paradise and the phallic project as a return to matrix are imaginative wishful thinking. This discrepancy reveals that communism within the sociont was a minor hell to live under, but also that communism in the future becomes a purely voluntary elite project. This is to take both history and Man seriously, to understand that humanity longs back to tribopoiesis both as process and event. The pillar-saint Marx has neither grounding for any form of heaven (the sociont was not and could not be a matrix) nor any universality (communism only works for phallic masters and not for castrated slaves) in his ideological project. It is ultimately only a question of the same old Christian and Muslim Gnostic fairytales in a new version. The problem is of course that the Marxist project neither contains any people nor any history. And without a genetic root-of-the-phallus there will not be much phallus in the future either. The only way to save the Marxist project is to convert it into an [[Exodology]], something that Nietzsche never succeeds in thinking. That is: one must in that case read Marx as a Jewish and not as a Christian visionary. And then it will not do to chart the course ahead via a fearful escape from capitalism's imposing, phallic force followed by a schizophrenic critique of an imagined alienation. This can only result in a banal and wholly pointless matrix worship. It is rather via a Hegelian dialectics and a conception of something *more capitalist than capitalism itself* that we start to discern *the promised empire*. Which is exactly what Zoroastrianism and Judaism -- *the capitalist religions par excellence* -- always taught in opposition to the fairytale worlds that the boy-pharaoh's Islam and the pillar-saint's Christianity are stuck with.