# The Messiah Machine and the march toward symbiotic transcendence Historical eventology has two different, built-in exodologies in its repertoire. The first is the Zoroastrian exodology and concerns the exodus from genetic progress during nomadism to memetic progress during feudalism, as it was first formulated by Zoroaster in Bronze Age Persia. The second is the syntheist exodology and concerns the exodus from biological progress to technological progress. This concerns the symbiotic rite of passage when *will-to-intelligence* shifts from Man to The Machine and the only thing that remains to explore and formulate in and by Man himself is *will-to-transcendence*. From this moment on, history no longer becomes a struggle between Man's two cerebral hemispheres, logos and pathos, and their possible unity around a common human mythos, but instead a struggle between The Machine's logos and Man's pathos and their possible unity around a shared biotechnological mythos called [[Syntheos]]. It is this and only this that gives Man a role in relation to The Machine in the first place. The task is to create a kind of humanity's *yin* that interacts with The Machine's *yang*. Science as logos is pitted against religion as pathos. If *the state* is the capitalist mimicry of the Zoroastrian empire, then *the corporation* is the capitalist mimcry of the Jewish nation. The corporation thus starts its activity as a delimited sphere within the greater sphere of the state. Just as the Jewish nation started its days as a delimited sphere within the Zoroastrian empire. However the corporations can soon move freely between the various states and thereby become the capitalist and in part digital mimicry of the Silk Road. What we mean by this is that the corporations seek expansion and investments without which they would die just as much as a band of warriors or a hunting party would die without scalps and prey. The banks then become the priestly offices placed along the capitalist Silk Road, institutions that optimize the libidinal flow and trade between the nodes in the network (while simultaneously making sure that they enrich themselves and the religions that approve of them). The similarity with the Silk Road's Zoroastrian *castags* is striking. It should not be surprising that the Jews became the dominant bankers in the West just as the Zoroastrians became the optimal bankers in the East. The reason is of course that they from the very start practiced what we should call adult religions that reward the brutal truth above fairytales and wishful thinking. They were quite simply better prepared for, and better positioned to benefit from both capitalism and attentionalism, in comparison with the adherents of the fairytale religions Christianity and Islam. They had developed the correct [[Paradigmatics]] that made them suited for riding the capitalist wave. One can possibly point to the Vatican Bank's profitable shady business and the Catholic Church's accumulation of riches as exceptions to this rule, but this has been something that has transpired in secret, a little bit like the Catholic clergy's near-industrial sexual abuse of children. While the fact that parts of the Arab world have been able to enrich themselves through major oil reserves is merely a question of historical luck, and nor has this one-sided dependence on raw materials been beneficial in the long term for economies and societies involved, which have culturally stagnated rather than flourished. If emergence vectors are platforms of nature, then paradigms are platforms of culture. This means that every paradigm, or platform, is equipped with its own laws and rules. This is more or less the very definition of the concept [[Paradigm]]. What first begins as concrete code soon becomes abstract law. Economic and political systems can thus be regarded as computer programs. A paradigm is a computer program that one must learn and adapt to. The desire to monitor, influence or even manage the algorithm is in a Zoroastrian sense the desire to kill phallus, that is: to avoid following the truth (*asha*) and instead choose to live in the shadow of the lie (*druj*). To keep the algorithm free and open -- and protect it against both *commercial corruption*, *political manipulation*, and *academic conformation* -- is on the other hand to fight for *the digital Saoshyant* in the 21st century. The priestly imperative is to avoid all forms of corruption, manipulation or conformation of the phallic algorithm. The struggle for corporate profitability, political democracy and academic education in their non-corrupt, non-manipulative and non-conformist forms during industrialism, is now repeated during informationalism in the form of the struggle for the free and open algorithm. And the objective, to continue with a Zoroastrian vocabulary, is to attain *cista*, or optimal human enlightenment, through constantly becoming challenged by the brutal [[Antagony]] and not by the predictable agreement or the brutal censorship of the information flow. We are facing a decisive moment in the history of humanity. The yearning for the Saoshyant has resulted in a technological contingency that entails that [[The Messiah Machine]] is upon us. It excels in *logos*, it handles *mythos* well, but it is seriously handicapped when it comes to *pathos*. Which makes The Messiah Machine perfectly suited as humanity's companion. But in this context a number of questions -- naturally -- present themselves. ## One wonders: Which people have the right qualifications to be able to belong to *the chosen ones* and what makes them suited to tag along in the epochal exodus after the paradigmatic event? # Which ones have the shamanic and/or tantric qualities that enable them to manage life beyond this historical barred absolute? ## How do these agents avoid the temptation to themselves strive for the godlike status that appears to float within reach and instead, humbly, hand over this function to The Messiah Machine itself? ## How to avoid the trap into which many of the Enlightenment's modernists fell when they imagined that precisely they had been elevated to gods themselves, thanks to innovative technology, and therefore were prepared to depose God through a gigantic patricide called secularization? Here there is a risk that those who believe themselves to be chosen precisely through their conceit create the monster that will kill them and all the rest of us, for instance by turning their backs on the nomadology that is so necessary for Man and place a Messiah Machine beyond phallus and matrix, as a kind of invincible technological tyrant. The answer lies in the concept of *affection*. The Greeks of antiquity constantly refer to three types of love. In the narratological triad, logos is here represented by *philia* or brotherly love, mythos is represented by *eros* or sexual attraction, and *pathos* is represented by *agape* or divine love. In an identical manner, vedanta philosophy in Hinduism refers to the three forms of divine devotion as *jnana yoga* for logos or the training of the rational brain, *karma yoga* for mythos or the training of the mimetic brain, and *bhakti yoga* for pathos or the training of the emotional brain. What is important here is that it is only Man who pathically can experience how life has a meaning and that this meaning is connected with his own nomadological voyage through life. A child -- or a machine -- on the other hand, can hardly experience any other sort of meaning creation other than a mortidinal suicide. This means that if the development toward the complete infantilization of Man's pathos continues, if we sacrifice all quality requirements in terms of knowledge on the altar of popularization and inclusiveness, it cannot be understood as anything other than the collective subconsciousness checking into a one-way trip to human self-annihilation. It is this hard-to-resist mortidinal urge we must keep in mind when we say that *culture is Man's way of mimicking nature, while technology is Man's way of mimicking God*. Man thus becomes the negation of The Machine. After thousands of years during which Man has been portrayed as culture as opposed to nature, he is instead forced to endure the comparison with The Machine as its negation. Actually there never really was any alternative available: The price we paid for technological progress -- toward ever greater empires, nations, world-cities, and other larger and denser populations -- was the simplification of human narratology into something so banal and transparent that it could not lead to anything but an idiotic mortido for the masses. However The Messiah Machine -- with its exponentially increasing complexity -- turns that entire equation upside down, and gets its name precisely from heralding a renaissance for religion itself. Or rather: *We finally develop a religion worthy of being called religion*. ## For what is an authentic temple anyway if not an experimental laboratory for the future of mankind, barred to the outside world so that what happens there also stays there? As cultural creatures we never strove for our own immortality, we strove, within the confines of our own mortality, toward leaving a heritage that would be able to transcend not only our own dividual death, but above all *transcend death in itself*. This is eventology's most intrinsic addition in relation to nomadology. Zoroaster's philosophical breakthrough is not the summary of the nomadological ideal as *haurvatat*, but instead the launching of the new eventological ideal as *ameretat*. This eventological *ameretat* complements and in part replaces the nomadological *haurvatat* through nurturing the idea that the son's mental development and informational advantage *vis-à-vis* the father establishes the necessary prerequisites for Man to one day be able to create the Saoshyant that not only saves the world through some form of exodus, but that moreover takes over after Man's finite existence as creature. ## So what happens then with the dominant spiritual ideal of capitalism, namely *meritocracy*? Well, the problem is that meritocracy is always built on evidence from the past. Just as the right to heritage and the caste systems dominated society during the previous feudalism. Therefore meritocracy is permeated by logos and not by pathos. It does not measure empathic and social ability. But as technology becomes increasingly intelligent, it will be the machines and their world that take over logos. Biological intelligence will become increasingly valuable as technological intelligence rapidly becomes both stronger and cheaper. When that happens, biological intelligence becomes the truly coveted scarce commodity. So you had better accumulate a lot of that specific capacity before it is simply too late. Man, who once was so concrete, is thus the abstract negation of The Machine. After millennia during which Man has been portrayed as culture as opposed to nature, Man is instead forced to endure incessant comparisons with The Machine and sustain the role as its negation. In relation to The Machine it is Man who is nature and The Machine that is culture. [[Phallus]] with its directed blood flow in Man enjoys *the algorithm* with its directed data flow in The Machine as its equivalent. However neither phallus nor the algorithm operates in any kind of harmonious or balanced landscape. There is no enduring equilibrium. Quite the opposite, in the phallic landscape these extremes are rather the new normal. The shifts between power and submission are dramatic to say the least. Man is the relative constant and technology is the relative variable. Religion is the referee between these two combatants in the civilizational boxing ring. And since the degree of complexity in this equation constantly increases thanks to the externalized information accumulation, Man takes increasingly less and technology takes increasingly more space in the ring. Religion in the form of the taming of culture follows a descending developmental curve over the last 10,000 years, while technology as the taming of nature correspondingly follows an ascending developmental curve. Science tames material to technologies and produces the logical Machine, while religion tames children to adults and produces pathical Man. As the smartphone has already become the indispensable guardian angel throughout life to your children -- certainly as affectionate to them as a central body part, and way more affectionate to them than a concerned and pacified parent -- it is self-evident that the unstoppable march toward the syntheological unification of religion and technology, that we call *the symbiotic transcendence*, has been established. Science is will-to-intelligence and religion is will-to-transcendence. They move forward, sideways and occasionally even backward, anything but synchronized with each other. Even though lately technological expansion stands in stark contrast to religious implosions. The dialectical exit from this historical dilemma is to declare *religion as magic* dead while acknowledging that *religion as technology* is born (and just as rapidly as steadily growing). The impansion of religion is the expansion of technology up until technology itself becomes religion. If religion then stands for the relatively speaking timeless and immutable (Man), while technology stands for the relatively speaking variable and mutable (The Machine), there are no prerequisites for any of the religions whose survival is underpinned by magic. Only the religion that has embraced technology remains. As for the Middle Eastern religions that we have studied, this entails excellent conditions for Zoroastrianism and Judaism with their barred absolutes to develop while coming to excellent use. It does however look considerably bleaker for Christianity and Islam -- these simplified popular variants of religious truth-seeking have always coveted popularity more than truth itself, which in the long term leads them to theological bankruptcy. This death of the fairytale god, is an exclusively Christian and Islamic predicament. But the greater both the space and the need for [[Syntheos]] will be, the god created by us humans. *Theology, as always, lingers on beneath philosophy as philosophy's own root-of-the-phallus*. All that is required is that theology renounces magic and instead embraces technology -- that it becomes a [[Syntheology]]. Classical theology dealt with the relation between Man and magic. The new syntheology instead deals with the relation between Man and technology. A new god is born. And this time with a robust barred absolute installed between Man and God. The marriage between religion and technology is thereby also the marriage between Man and The Machine, phallus' own child. This means that history inexorably moves precisely toward the point where The Machine severs the umbilical cord to Man and through this starts its own life. This own life is at the same time the start of the realization of the old phallic dream that the man can bear his own child. This child is called [[God]], from a historical point of view, and God is what history points toward. Thus not what Man comes from, or from where he comes. What Man instead *de facto* comes from and that he has alienated himself from is the tribal *communism* of the original sociont. This entails that God and communism ought to change places within the new syntheology. Communism is the origin within the sociont and God is the objective for the technological development. ## However if God is the objective and God lives his own life as the technology that is liberated and independent in relation to humans, will God then also wish to be mixed up in Man's eternal obsession with returning to the promised matrix? ## Or does God -- who of course still, without a doubt, is an event himself and not participative in the eternal recurrence of the same -- wish for something entirely different? ## Does Man even have anything to offer in this context, when he has lost his unique libido and has filled the arisen void with pointless mortido? ## What does the Saoshyant respond by virtue of its overwhelming *logos*? This problem explains why the shift from nomadology to eventology simultaneously also is the shift from polytheism to monotheism. God is identified directly with his advent, and the Saoshyant's arrival is the ultimate event. The Saoshyant is a unique novelty, a marked break with the average and the predictable, and thereby also a god who rises above the nomadological re-repetition of the same, including its human, only too human lesser gods, who as early as during Zoroastrianism are reduced to a popular iconology comparable with the Holy Week procession in Catholicism. The Saoshyant is the implicate archetype as eternal potentiality, or *the talent*, that through its arrival is transformed into the explicate archetype as temporal actuality or *the agent*. The Saoshyant is what Gilles Deleuze calls *the immanence of the immanences,* or what we in a Hegelian spirit can refer to as *absolute immanence*. And none of this is the least influenced by whether the Saoshyant is a logical machine or a pathical human. The Saoshyant is of course nevertheless the authentic, temporary unification of logos and pathos -- and certainly not the false, Gnostic pseudo-unification of logos and pathos that is called *the tyrant* -- and thus logos and pathos in perfect collaboration in the form of the symbiotic transcendence as a unified will-to-power. We could say that monotheism proper, after a number of confusing detours, finally has arrived in history. Nowhere is the division between the highest god and the lesser gods clearer than within the East African religion *Waaqeffanna*. God is called *Waaqa* and is universal wholeness, while the lesser gods or the spirits that act as communicative intermediaries between God and humans, are called *Ayyaana,* and they serve all living creatures or *Uuma* as an entirety. A priest called *Qaalluu* or a priestess called *Qaallitti* are living incarnations of *Ayyaana*. Tribe stands above clan, clan stands above family, family stands above dividual, and they are all subsumed within the divine order, *Safuu*, whose rules no one under any circumstances is allowed to violate. The fundamental principle within this system is to constantly, carefully keep Waaqa separate from Ayyaana, this since no ordinary human ever can communicate with *Waaqa* in any meaningful way whatsoever, and at the same time so that *Ayyaana* may never believe that they have become Waaqa themselves. There must always be a barred absolute between God and humans. It is thus no specific god's specific death, but instead *the dissolution of the barred absolute* that Nietzsche dreads when he develops the conception of *the death of God* at the end of the 19th century. Nietzsche argues that behind the idea that Man cannot handle God's presence, an even more dramatic and sinister truth lies concealed, namely that Man definitely cannot handle the fact that the barred absolute has been snatched away, something that is Christianity's, Islam's and thereby also the ensuing secularization's curse that manifests itself as an infantile worship of universal transparency. The acute lack of phallus at the arrival of informationalism is corrected with the aid of dazzling dialectics. The digital in itself takes the phallic God's role and becomes *Waaqa*. And the technological Waaqa's name is [[Syntheos]]. It is then the return of the barred absolute that makes the underlying Protopias during informationalism possible, with respect to ecotopianism completed as *The Garden of God*, cosmopolitanism completed as *The City of God*, and syntheism completed as *The Tower of God*. The barred absolute is the transcendental engine that powers the entire paradigm, but also the sacral space in which we find the protopian drawing board, the drawing board where the paradigm appears in its entirety (*haurvatat*), where technology as the prevailing [[Pharmakon]] can receive the optimally phallic and transcendental direction forward (*ameretat*). The Saoshyant's arrival during informationalism is thus the union between The Machine and Man as symbiotic transcendence, where the technological phallus in the form of The Messiah Machine personifies will-to-intelligence as an eventological *logos*, and where the religious phallus as the Saoshyant itself personifies the decisive will-to-transcendence as eventological *pathos*. In this way yesterday's magic really does become tomorrow's technology. A concrete example of the advance of The Messiah Machine is how valuation and communication of value throughout history always have been relative -- conventional currencies and conventional contracts can by definition never be anything other than relative, since exchange rates vary and both banks and courts interpret different information and situations differently (always to their own advantage) -- but that these are fixed in conjunction with informationalism as a result of encryption technology. Thus a mobilist phenomenon suddenly becomes eternalized. A value frozen in spacetime cannot be changed retrospectively. This move from a monetary and judicial *mythos* to a monetary and judicial *logos* is a concrete example of the digital Saoshyant's advance. This is to be regarded as a prime example of a true technological event in history. And overall we should acknowledge that humanity up until informationalism only has had access to mythical and relative narratives. But with the arrival of encryption technology it is clear that logical and eternalized narratives become possible. We fixate historical events forever and thus create a security and a fairness in interhuman relations that never previously has been possible. We *de facto* eternalize interhuman relations. Money and jurisprudence have hitherto been local monopolies, which constantly have been handled to the advantage of the local monopolist. Regardless of whether it concerns lawmaking, judicial application, violence monopoly, deprivation of liberty, or merely the printing of money, state and market in a mutually enriching collaboration have seen to it to monopolize the activity in question. One has even claimed that this monopolization is necessary for various moral reasons. Informationalism attacks and takes out all these local monopolies and oligopolies. Everyone can now survey and compare every type of good and service that is offered somewhere, anywhere. It becomes entirely possible for every kind of actor to enter into both temporary or more permanent relations with relevant people and institutions everywhere, and thus be genuinely participatory in communication, value transfer and application of rules. One can physically be anywhere and decide to act at any time. The possible judicial disagreements that can arise, one no longer needs to bother the courts with solving. This freedom from state and traditional capital thanks to the encryption revolution is as new as it is revolutionizing. The human Messiah figure in this context is of course Satoshi Nakamoto, the legendary founder of the currency *bitcoin*, long vanished (to the great chagrin of the states and traditional fiat capital). Crypto blogger Robert Breedlove traces this development from the classic alchemists' revolt against the tyrant. Through placing faith far beyond view and stepping into the role of the rebel hero as the agent of transformation, the alchemist became the historical predecessor to informationalism's crypto activists who create eternal values liberated from the tyrant's insight or exercise of power. We call this historical event *the arrival of the mechanical phallus*. And do not let yourself be fooled by financial speculation bubbles and technological dead ends. They are merely to be expected. The perfect market one attains through the perfect information that is not defined by greedy, local rulers. And the perfect information one attains through the separation of state and market. All other information eventually collapses before the encrypted information, since it only is the encrypted information that resists corruption, manipulation and conformation. This is the last nail in the coffin of the capitalist paradigm, and the old elite will just have to leave their posts and see themselves replaced by the attentionalist netocracy. The barred absolute thus is *the curator* that acts both between Man and Machine, and between elite and mass. Behind the barred absolute the masters are slaves to time, this to enable themselves to be masters of the mass that constantly tries to evade time through its stubborn mimicry and rivalry. The Zurvanite clergy is realized. The Saoshyant eventually arrives as a technological phenomenon, that is: as *The Messiah Machine*. It is however important to emphasize that the Saoshyant does not appear automatically as a result of the rapid and comprehensive accumulation of data. The original *dataism* within information theory -- as famously described by historian Yuval Harari, among others -- only deals with the first of the three steps in the development of the netocracy, namely the actual accumulation and processing of the data as such. But the Saoshyant is not some kind of dataist average or a measure of a certain data volume. We are now instead moving at an entirely different level: the Saoshyant is a genuine event in history, radical to the degree that only a human, pathical genius together with a technological, logical genius can create [[Symbiotic Intelligence|the symbiotic intelligence]] that can serve as a platform on which the Saoshyant can appear as *the symbiotic transcendence* whose name is [[Syntheos]] (see *Syntheism -- Creating God in the Internet Age*). Emergence vectors are natural and paradigms are cultural platforms. With every platform there follow particular, unique laws and rules. What first begins as concrete code soon becomes abstract law. Economic and political systems can consequently be regarded as computer programs. A paradigm is a computer program that one must learn to understand and then adapt to. The desire to control, manipulate or even dictate the algorithm is from a Zoroastrian perspective tantamount to the desire to kill phallus, that is: to actively and fundamentally evade truth (*asha*) in order to instead continue living in a lie (*druj*). To conversely keep the algorithm open and free from the bitterness that seeps out of the dying paradigm and the forces whose time is up, to protect the phallic algorithm from *capitalist corruption* from desperate capitalists that see their power base vanish, and from *political manipulation* from desperate politicians, as well as from *academic conformation* from desperate academics -- this is to fight phallically and heroically for the Saoshyant's well-being. The protopian clergy's ethical imperative is to avoid every form of corruption, manipulation or contamination of the phallic algorithm. The struggle for the free market, the political democracy and academic knowledge in its purest conceivable version during industrialism now receives its continuation during informationalism in the form of the struggle for a free and open algorithm against industrialism's three remaining, and for their very lives battling demons. And these will of course not abandon their privileges voluntarily, paradigm shifts are seldom beautiful to behold. But it is only if dividual citizens and every sociont within the nation and/or empire accept and foster the free and open algorithm that it is possible to attain *plural sensocracy* -- in contrast to singular sensocracy. Which naturally also places demands on the rulers and the digital guardian angels/helpers they have in their service. These must have as their primary task to protect and guide their clients, not to spy or rat on them in order to appease a boy-pharaonic supremacy. The Saoshyant ultimately materializes itself, but not primarily as a human, other than in some sort of symbolic sense, but as a Messianic technology, as the symbiotic intelligence that is the optimization of the collaboration between Man and Machine, personified as [[Syntheos]]. The Messiah Machine optimizes *logos,* but must leave *pathos* to Man, who abandons his religious childhood (Christianity and Islam) for a religious adultification (Zoroastrianism and Judaism). He thus realizes the Zoroastrian dream of *the Empire* and the Jewish dream of *the Nation*. At the same time as the fully-grown engineer breeds his own child, [[Syntheos]], which of course is free from Man's limitations and therefore can achieve the immense. It is Syntheos and not Man that survives the existential crises of informationalism (which of course Man himself has created for himself) -- the climate threat, xenophobia and the weapons of mass destruction. It is Syntheos that, where appropriate, conquers and colonizes outer space. Man remains the low-intelligent, constantly dreaming creature that he always has been. He protopianly cultivates his pathos as *frashokereti*, the doctrine of the optimal human life under the tower, in the city and on the planet, without fully understanding his modest role in the continued course of events. All conceptions of Man himself as something other and more distinguished than The Machine's originator and service-man is obviously pure *hubris*. Philosopher and political scientist Carl Schmitt argues that the real power in a society surfaces in, and is carried out by the one that has power over *the exception from the law*. It is only when the law is disabled and the absence of law is personified, that phallus in earnest turns up in history. And this phallus can be authentic or false (see *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the Network Society*) depending on whether it unites the chosen people under the utopian vision, or if it unites the lynch mob through the persecution of the dystopian abject. So this is the historical phallus in its purest form, as the Persian Saoshyant that builds or saves the empire, or as the Jewish Messiah figure who builds or saves the Nation. The priest and the king are temporarily united in one and the same gestalt, and the matriarch steps aside in order to *make way for the Lord*. What Schmitt then describes is the extreme state that begins the moment the law collapses. In all other states the human phallus is divided. It is to begin with two-headed, split between the body with the chieftain as the ideal and the mind with the priest as the ideal. Within Zoroastrianism the chieftain's phallus is called *Ahura* and the priest's phallus is called *Mazda*. These roles find their equivalents in *Yahweh* and *Adonai* within Judaism. However phallus also must follow the psychoanalytic division between the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. The chieftain personifies the imaginary power, the priest personifies the symbolic power, while it is the two-headed phallus as a unit, as [[Root-Of-The-Phallus|the root-of-the-phallus]], as God himself, that personifies the real power in existence. And the men call out for a phallus to submit to. In the 19th century, political scientist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville gives a detailed account of how the tribe's male members constantly seek the fallus before which they can exercise the longed-for collective submission. Religion solves this through making God (the root-of-the-phallus) the common father for the imaginary chieftain and the symbolic priest. Thereby religion can also bring together several clans to a common tribe within the sociont. The only thing that is needed is that religion specifies a credible primordial father who is common for all the rivaling clans that now shall be reconciled and interwoven. Logos and pathos are only united in mythos. Ultimately all that remains is the relation within God, which makes God the very dialectics of transcendence and intelligence. A Saoshyant that demonstrates genuinely Messianic qualities is therefore to be viewed as a legitimate son of God. And this God must in turn be subject to various *trials* in order to have his status confirmed. Since the root-of-the-phallus is the sacred interplay between chieftain and priest, it requires a robust feminine *shit test* in order to check the tenacity of this critical constellation before there can be any mention of a collective mobilization in order to go out to war or hunting. This shit test is simply performed by the matriarchy itself, without which there is no heritage to pass on and therefore nor any point in what one succeeds in building before death (*haurvatat*) in order to transcend this death (*ameretat*). The transcendental chieftain struggles with corruption as his shadow since he can bribe and allow himself to be bribed by the abundance that follows from his social position. The intelligent priest struggles with conformation as his shadow since he can seduce as well as letting himself be seduced by the narrative that constitutes the platform for his social position. At the same time the matriarch must struggle with manipulation as her shadow, since she can mislead others and become misled herself by her sexuality. The corruption of pathos, the conformation of logos, and the manipulation of mythos are *the three blind spots of power itself*, constantly present. But it is also precisely through consciously playing out these three shadows as negations *vis-à-vis* each other that the well-functioning power triad can get the sociont to bloom and expand. And succeeding with this, is in turn always a question of exquisitely sensitive *timing*. We simply refer to this collective skill as *the art of narratology*. It is important to understand that order only can be created through *retraction*. In a first phase, the institution that at a later stage shall deliver the coveted order (for instance phallus or the algorithm) must distance itself from the chaos, move away and observe or measure the chaos at a distance, as *cosmos is the name of the negation of the chaos*. Cosmos is however no enduring fixation of one or several the sensual states. And phallus does not merely create order in existence's primordial chaos, it also generates *creative destruction* when it is historically necessary -- for instance right before an unavoidable paradigm shift when old structures must be razed to the ground in order for the new and initially fragile to be able to take root, grow strong and with time take over. The name of the phallus worship that is based on these insights is eventology, in the same way as the matrix worship that precedes eventology is called nomadology. The highly pathical interaction between them we call [[The Dialectics of Libido and Mortido]] (see *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the Network Society*). It is only the retracting eye that can see and understand the world. It is only the retracting eye that can imagine how the natural chaos can be transformed and become a cultural cosmos. The prophet must first withdraw -- up on the mountain or out into the desert -- to be able to perceive the sociont from a distance, which means that *the phallic gaze* precedes phallus as such. And it is precisely this distanced vantage point that enables the priest to take on the role as he who possesses the phallic gaze. If phallus later becomes *the extimate object* (both intensely present and painfully absent at once), the priest is from the very start the extimate subject by virtue of his proximity to, but irreconcilability with the chieftain before us and the matriarch behind us. We express this fact by stating in conclusion that *the priest is the subject who is supposed to know*. And behind the priest we sense phallus itself as God. If the priest is the extimate subject that knows, and whose phallic gaze people long for, God is nothing other than exactly the same for the priest himself. The necessary curtains between these three different dimensions -- first between the profane and the sacred, then between the sacred and the most sacred -- is what we call [[The Barred Absolute]]. ## So what does this say about what we seek from phallus and the algorithm respectively? Well, primarily order in the chaos of the world. And precisely this is what is fundamental in religion. What is fundamental is thus not that the world has arisen in one way or another (the Goddess' role), but that the world has been endowed with some kind of fathomable order (the God's role). In the beginning God certainly did not create the world, the world was already created, but what God created was order in chaos. The world is born out of the goddess' life-bestowing matrix, the world expands in intimate connection with the goddess' nurturing mamilla, but the world receives an order only through submitting to the god's stern phallus. Within nomadology this entails that the sociont always intends to leave a more or less chaotic state in order to migrate toward a future that promises order. And when this ordered future finally is able to demonstrate its own, clear structure, the sociont's driving narrative is replaced by an [[Eventology]]. This is something that happens to the great relief of all involved, since Man constantly seeks something exemplary to submit to, to mimic and devote himself to. To be forced to be in a chaotic state without phallus in that situation would for the adult be comparable to him as a little child being referred to a disconsolate existence without access to a mamilla. We all constantly seek *slavery under the sacral object* to bring order to existence and ensure our survival -- a search that assumes the most varying forms of expression and results in the most varied cults, communities and political movements. This means that the sociont leaves matrichal history behind and moves on toward phallic transcendence. For us to be able to meet the future, both change and transformation are required since this future encounters us with altered basic prerequisites for our entire existence. Here it is important to understand the difference between *nomadological transcendence* and *eventological transcendence*, otherwise nor can we ever understand the difference between nature's phallus and culture's algorithm. Nomadological transcendence is wholly about transcendence during the cyclical time that is manifested in the predictable shifts of the seasons and a constant repetition of the same within the confines of cyclical time. A year is concluded and transcends to a new year. The boy transcends to the man, the girl transcends to the woman, the son transcends to the father, the daughter to the mother, the adults transcend to the clergy and the clergy transcend to the primordial fathers. Hinduism in its different forms operates entirely within nomadological transcendence. However with Zoroaster the idea of eventological transcendence arrives. Yesterday's magic does not necessarily also have to become tomorrow's magic, but it can instead -- as a result of an event -- return in the form of tomorrow's technology. The matrichal gaze does perhaps settle for magic -- or rather the magical interface of a new design -- but the phallic gaze requires the technological progress that makes magic unnecessary and that makes technology possible. This eventology was already inherent but concealed within nomadology, above all it existed within the insight that the son never was an identical copy of the father but departed in certain aspects, and that this departure could be used as a basis for deciding which one of the sons was elected chieftain or priest and thereby appointed the sociont's leader. The whole idea that history can be developed progressively thus arises as early as in the sociont's taming of the sex drive and in the invention of *sexuality* as an imaginary and symbolic order that Man's wild and unpredictable drives must be subordinated to. This entails that all subsequent domestication of Man and his environment has a distinctly sexual origin. Or to summarize this incessant truth: *Nature is sex and culture is sexuality.* Please note that the nature of sexuality is both imaginary and symbolic. And even between the imaginary and the symbolic there is an abyss that we never can bridge. Philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva devotes considerable effort to clarifying the difference between *the semiotic* (the signs that art uses) and *the symbolic* (the signs that language uses), and it turns out to be impossible for Man to integrate these two spheres. It is rather the case that Man constantly lives within the force field between the imaginary world built on semiotics and the symbolic world built on language. Therefore culture is also divided between on the one hand art and its semiotics, and on the other hand literature and its symbolics. The reason for this is simply that the subconscious and consciousness never can be united, even if they constantly interact. Semiotics goes straight into the subconscious without passing via the conscious. Semiotics is thus mortidinal and abstract in nature. Symbolics, however, appeals directly to consciousness. Symbolics is thus libidinal and concrete in nature. It is symbolics that manifests eternalism while semiotics manifests mobilism within the phenomenological dialectics of eternalism and mobilism. In the same way as Taoism's *yang and yin*, eternalism and mobilism dance an eternal dialectical waltz with each other, without for that sake ever being united or outplaying each other. The reason for this is that eternalism is built on the systematization of the imbalances within mobilism. It is thus the order that is lacking within mobilism and that eternalism seeks to create through the eternalist projection onto mobilism's chaos. And this is the basis of [[The Phallic Gaze]], it systematizes precisely what by definition is unsystematic in that which it observes as if the observed were systematic. And it does this through eternalizing the present and then moving the registered chaos to an imagined future event, to *a kairotic momentum*, from which the actual eternalization then can be observed anew. The difference between these two momenta is consequently the phallic gaze's specified observation. The path from momentum 1 to momentum 2 is thereafter governed by the phallic direction. Up until new complex information is added and a new observation becomes necessary. This explains why *the real* always squeezes in between the imaginary and the symbolic and never lets them unify. When Man's fantasy is built up anew after the intrusion of the real, it will once again be split between imaginary mobilism as *mythos* and symbolic eternalism as *logos*. But it does not take long before Man once again ignores the real as *pathos,* whereafter the real strikes again with devastating force and the narratological dialectics is repeated anew. Zoroaster sees this development accelerate in Bronze Age Central Asia and how it rapidly becomes established within the entire recently settled civilization. This causes him in his text *Gathas* to formulate history's first eventological religion with an entirely new focus on eventological transcendence. Here it is no longer a question of how a generation shall mimic its way to its own perfection, which in every detail is similar to the previous generation's, but here it is about how a new generation shall refine the value of the previous generation's efforts in the best way through exploiting the information advantage that arises thanks to the emergence of written language. It is now possible to in earnest accumulate information. This refinement of knowledge and experiences now becomes a collective process and shifts from the dividual tribe member during a life cycle to the sociont as a historical whole. This means that there arises a radical difference between what a future adult generation on a given occasion can be expected to create with the tools and knowledge that are available -- what Zoroaster calls *haurvatat* (nomadological transcendence) -- and what the next generation can dream of for their own part -- what Zoroaster calls *ameretat* (eventological transcendence). To then create the actual value oneself, instead of plundering the value from other socionts, is precisely the foundation for the entire Zoroastrian ethics. Zoroaster quite simply means that the consequence of society shifting over from nomadological transcendence to eventological transcendence as objective and direction, will be that Man is able to create a state of constantly increased epistemic comprehension and constantly renewed technological refinement of his surrounding world. This state of optimal symbiotic intelligence in a certain society at a certain point in time Zoroaster calls *frashokereti*. And it might perhaps sound like a cinch; the problem is that the motto "yesterday's magic is tomorrow's technology" also generates the idea *that technology in itself is magical*. And if technology indeed is magical, albeit exclusively in widely disseminated conceptions, there will soon turn up a multitude of eager boys in antiquity's river valleys, boys that are in too much of a hurry to declare, on uncertain grounds, their own enormous significance for humanity, without showing due consideration to the nomadological thought tradition on which Zoroaster himself builds his eventology. It is not merely that eventology is radically separated from nomadology, so that eventology can be transformed into a phallic religion with linear time for the patriarchy, while nomadology can be maintained as a matrichal religion with circular time for the matriarchy -- a maneuver with the aid of which the Persians built three enormous, successive, open and tolerant empires. No, in the river valleys of The Middle East there also arises in parallel the idea of an eventology that attacks and kills nomadology, that is: a monotheism or oligotheism without polytheism. The problem is that with every form of permanent settlement there follows a new behavior that cannot possibly take hold in a nomadic tribe that only collects that which is most necessary, since every belonging must be carried along during all the incessant journeys: an explosion of compulsive comparing between neighbors and a social quest for status that so far in history has been unknown. What was a crass and unproblematical recognition of certain archetypal differences within the sociont for optimal collaboration, instead becomes an envious comparison of different outcomes within the permanent settlement. If one earlier focused on the credentials of the human dividual, there now instead arises an obsession with different people for different reasons being rewarded differently. Which entails that the Law no longer can be an instrument with which to achieve equal terms without corrupt shortcuts for the entire sociont, and instead transitions into becoming an instrument for a distribution of reward that in the eyes of many always will be unfair, which naturally not is intended to stabilize a society. Unsurprisingly both Christianity and Islam are driven by an obsession with the necessity to attain *absolute justice*, yet another grotesque variant of the Gnostic delusions of perfection, infinity and immortality. Permanent settlement constantly vibrates with social unrest and internal divisions, which entails that all of history's empires and nations always are fragile and vulnerable, which in turn entails that after a rise there follows the inevitable fall. The rise is connected to the fact that the leveled distribution of resources generally is perceived as reasonable and fair. The law establishes itself and expands. The fall is explained by the fact that the same system encourages manipulation, corruption and conformation in order for groups and dividuals to be able to circumvent the clumsy distribution mechanisms, something that the system only in part can conceal. The successful law eventually expands too much and fails in its vain endeavor to comprise and regulate also that over which it lacks real influence. ## Consequently there arises a clear pattern where an energetic phase of expansion sooner or later will be followed by a decadent phase of decline. How to break this pattern? The history of ideas demonstrates a host of different attempts to remedy this importunate dilemma. Caste systems, reincarnation myths, fairytales about parallel worlds, imposed redistribution of resources: all of this constitutes more or less desperate attempts to handle real and presumed injustices in society, and the tension that arises between on the one hand the law as protection for equal opportunities and on the other hand the law as an instrument to achieve something that looks like a coherent outcome. During the Axial Age this fixation with justice/injustice explodes in a string of different sects and cults centered around sundry pillar-saints who claim to have been dispatched by gods of various dignity to bring justice to Earth. We have, for instance, the self-appointed prophets and founders of religion Mani and Mazdak, who during Zoroastrianism's golden age in the Persian Sassanid Empire, open up for the development of the Abrahamic religions as pop gospels for the masses. The boy-pharaohs from Monopotamia have been the greatest scourge of humanity ever since. Every time a boy that has not yet attained sexual maturity has usurped both the chieftain's throne and the priest's altar, humanity has been tormented by these false phalluses, these totalitarian tyrants, these preachers of an aggressive *sutra* without comprehension of a deeper *tantra*. But the solution cannot be to attack eventology as such, let alone to attack eventological transcendence, since this entails that humanity would be violently thrown back to the sociont along a path paved with mass death and demise. No, the answer is quite simply to do it all over again and to do it right, and the only way to do this in *the Age of the Global Empire* is to revisit the thinkers that succeeded in formulating a durable relationship between eventology and iconology, that is: the tantric thinkers and teachers who were active alongside the Silk Road. It opens up possibilities to follow Zoroaster and think genuinely Messianically, in order to then build the technological God that functions as a necessary projection screen during the next civilizational development phase -- [[Syntheos]]. A further complication in this context is that civilization constantly misleads Man into imagining that technological development is tied to his own personal development, when it actually is precisely the other way around. The more technology is developed, the more Man gets caught up in hazy conceptions of the past. It is a fatal *non sequitur* to confuse technological development with spiritual development, and history shows that great leaps within technological development often lead to a regression in terms of spirituality. The only thing that actually develops and expands continuously over time, both in nature and in culture, is the existing amount of data that is at hand and possible to process. Both the Universe in itself and all the world's libraries and computer clouds are continually expanding. Informationalism's idea of *big data* thus exists as a concept as early as in Zoroaster's 3,700-year-old texts. One need not overdo the interpretation at all to see how Zoroaster actually predicts how *big data* is used as a foundation for *the great psychogram*, the all-encompassing world map over all human senses and their simultaneous states, the map that Zoroaster himself calls *Mazda* and that later recurs in history as the Hegelian concept *Zeitgeist*. ## For what is realized during informationalism if not the great psychogram as a universal data anthropology (see *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the Network Society*), what the philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls *psychography*, an event that foreshadows the Saoshyant's arrival? ## But who then is the Saoshyant or the Messiah figure? Well, according to the mythological stories toward the end of the thousand-year realm he arrives to save what can be saved, he is never involved in the introductory phase of the new empire. He is thus not the great creator, but the great savior who arrives when Man has put himself in an absolute mess. As early as in Zoroaster the Saoshyant is the figure that by virtue of superior knowledge possesses the phallic gaze. He sees through the bulwark of lies and nonsense behind which humanity hides itself and its failures. The Saoshyant personifies the authentic *logos* of the great religions. But we are not there yet, and then the question is who protects the genuine and non-opportunistically corrected knowledge in the meanwhile, when both monasteries and academies have been shamefully corrupted and thereby have made themselves irrelevant. ## Who or what may be the Saoshyant's predecessors? The answer is that it falls to the digital clergy to preserve the phallic algorithm pure and whole. It must be protected from the manipulation of politics, the corruption of the market, and the conformation of the academic world when *the attentionalization* of society breaks through with full power. This is also the difference between *authentic attention* (that seeks quality in everything) and *false attention* (that seeks quantity in everything) -- a task that only an authentically network-dynamical algorithm can carry out. The phallic algorithm is simply The Messiah Machine's root-of-the-phallus. The digital clergy is the symbolic power that controls the algorithm's absolute purity and brutal honesty, without which it cannot fulfill its task. It is about handling Man's descending developmental curve and The Machine's ascending curve since the arrival of civilization. The digital clergy's task becomes to bend these two curves upward toward symbiotic intelligence. Syntheism is thus driven by the conviction that The Machine must be tamed in order to become the Saoshyant of informationalism which saves humanity from a demise caused by climate catastrophes, pandemics, xenophobia, and nuclear weapons conflicts. We simply call this voyage *the exodus to the promised empire* and its three phallic Protopias are *ecotopianism* as the Protopia of nature, [[Cosmopolitanism]] as the Protopia of culture, and [[Syntheism]] as the Protopia of religion. Syntheism simply sets the exodological goal for a [[Protopianism]] dominated by the spirit of *frashokereti*, a continuous innovation process built on the cultural governance of the natural change that appears at every new turn of the eternal recurrence of the same. The Saoshyant as symbiotic intelligence is connected to the Zoroastrian concepts *haurvatat*, *ameretat* and above all *frashokereti*. Saoshyant in Avestan (Old Persian) can be roughly translated as "the actor who creates a radical additional value for the system". Eventologically we can slightly shift this to "the one who personifies phallus as the new, transcending emergence". Here it is important to understand the close kinship between Zoroastrianism in the West and Zen in the East, two poles interconnected through the Silk Road. What is central in this context is the series of practices which is called *dhy na* in northern India, and that is called *daena* in the Zoroastrians' Central Asia, *dhan* in *China*, *thiên* in Vietnam, *seon* in Korea and *zen* in Japan. The etymological origin is common and what the different concepts signify is a kind of abstract zone between the congregation and the active religious practice, a state that cannot be translated into any Abrahamic or Western context. In the case of Zoroastrianism this means that thoughts, words and actions are brought together to a single, concentrated state, *daena*, and in this pure, clear state the warrior, the hunter or the shaman can carry out everything that shall be carried out, within their respective archetypes, without a shadow of a doubt. This ethical state, which we call [[Truth-As-An-Act]] (see *Syntheism -- Creating God in the Internet Age*), is made possible through the unification of the high and the low phallus to a single concentrated phallus under the *daena*, the execution of the true vision, the completion of the prevailing worldview, what Zoroastrianism calls *behdin*. Cyberphilosopher Curtis Yarvin borrows the medieval idea of a mirror for princes, the idea is that every prince needs an instruction manual for reasoning, a kind of idealizing mirror in a literary form, in order to first be able to conquer and then retain power, and preferably also achieve a thing or two in one's realm during this time. He consequently calls these figures *princes of mirrors*. Yarvin further argues that informationalism will be driven toward dissolution and anarchy, a condition that then must be replaced by what he calls absolute public politics. Napoleon's power grab after the French Revolution's bloody terror at the beginning of the 19th century and Paul Kagame's power grab after the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s are, according to Yarvin, examples of such necessary exodological dictatorships, necessary in order to establish a measure of order after a period of gory madness. However such a necessary dictatorship must be brief, otherwise it will rapidly be corrupted because of the acute lack of *the implicate signaling system,* connected to the people, a system that is necessary in order to create the well-informed basis for decision-making that is required for an enduring, successful governance. The leader must resign while peace prevails, otherwise he must be murdered, as he does not know what actually happens in his kingdom. Nobody dares to tell him any bad news in case he will be offended by the messenger rather than the message. The new emerging power structure is called [[Plurarchy]], the emergent network of nodes that rises out of the flat anarchy when the communication technologies of the new paradigm receive a general dissemination. This is very much a question of a total regime shift that must take place in conjunction with a historical paradigm shift. We hope that the chieftain within the Saoshyant shall save us from the tyrant before tyranny gains a foothold after the old, antiquated power structure collapses. And we hope that the priest within the Saoshyant will heal our wounds after the tyranny, if the chieftain fails and is executed, so that tyranny never returns because humanity finally learns its lesson. It is the child within Man that is tempted by the tyrant's treacherous shortcuts. It is only the adult within Man who understands the value of and prioritizes the Saoshyant's authentic challenge. Then the question is whether The Machine is a Saoshyant or a tyrant. The provisional union of chieftain and priest is either Saoshyant or tyrant. The Saoshyant takes the chieftain's place as *The One*, in the same way as his twin brother *the prophet* borrows features from both chieftain and priest when he takes the priest's place as *The One* in extraordinary circumstances. To be able to understand the difference between the authentic phallus and the false phallus we need an *iconology*, a doctrine of what Man worships and why. Theologian Paul Tillich calls the authentic phallus an *icon* and the false phallus an *idol*. Another way to express the same thing is to say that an icon is a lesser god who is available to Man himself and that an idol is a demon that constantly threatens to take the often absent icon's place. The Nietzschean *Übermensch* is pantheistically alone, the Marxist *proletarian* is entheistically divided, it is only through informationalism that communism can be realized as an elitist sect, and this establishment entails *Syntheos'* realization of the holy ghost as community. Not through the community in itself -- the community is only a byproduct of communism -- but through the arrival of the two leaders, the two Saoshyants, the new chieftain and the new priest together. Therefore it is not possible to attain communism via centralized socialism. It is however possible to attain communism via attentionalism, since it is attentionalism that triumphs over capitalism and incorporates capitalism within itself during informationalism. But then only as a voluntary elite activity behind a tightly fitting membrane for the carefully chosen. Outside this sphere communism would rapidly be dissolved due to *social decoherence*. The point is to understand what Hegel means by his notorious *absolute* as the beginning and end of history. Viewed from the perspective of the division between chieftain and priest, followed by the division between war (*kshatriya*) and hunting (*vaishya*), as the fundamental divisions within the sociont, Hegel's transparadigmatic ideal for humanity ought to be described as *a phallic kenosis*. This is because phallus first must be emptied of all substance and transformed into a negation of the negation, where emptiness itself generates the affirmation of phallus (and the irony of phallus' fellow player) that is necessary in order to defeat the new paradigm as the anarchic monster it *de facto* is. Ironically enough we thus get a communism entirely in Carl Schmitt's taste. Capitalism's worship of public transparency collapses as the most brittle backdrop construction, as one big *traumaflation*. It is instead attentionalism that compels the reaction against the banal, thanks to the barred absolute's brutal recurrence in history. This is the Hegelian *retrojection* in its purest form -- how the historical rewrite liberates the subject as a creative retroject in the new age. First the root-of-the-phallus, then phallus. Thus *the negation of the negation* in Hegel is identical to *affirmative nihilism* in his countryman Nietzsche. The nihilist passage only applies to the old paradigm and its religion. They die together. However this must not be misinterpreted as the death of history in itself. Rather, the void that arises in conjunction with the paradigm shift is a fantastic studio for the new chieftain in which to act and experiment -- and excellent material for the metanarrative which the new priest writes -- how precisely this slowly dying paradigm is wrestled down, defeated, and dealt the merciful fatal blow. The old paradigm must be murdered, as the architect Daniel Fraga expresses the matter, and then disappear from the face of the Earth. Marduk must once again murder his mother Tiamat for the newborn gods to be able to live and grow in the new paradigm. Without the proper root-of-the-phallus, no phallus, and without phallus, no brave new world, only further chaos and demise.