# The ecotopian garden, the cosmopolitan city and the syntheist temple The four causality chains laid out by Aristotle find their equivalences in the four names of God in syntheology. [[Atheos]] is the name of the architecture, [[Pantheos]] is the name of the construction. But for there to arise any life within the system, some flows between the membranes, [[Entheos]] as the name for the energy and [[Syntheos]] as the name for the final cause are also required. And Syntheos then needs to be divided sexually into a [[Syntheos]] for will-to-transcendence and a *Synthea* for will-to-intelligence. This explains why syntheology advocates the name *Synthea* for the holiday that ties together the entire circle and that throws it back to the next generation (see *Syntheism -- Creating God in the Internet Age*), hopefully now, viewed as a whole, upgraded and thereby also more intelligent than the previous version. Both will-to-transcendence and will-to-intelligence are thus the same as *will-to-expansion*, or as Nietzsche calls it: [[Will-To-Power]]. What will-to-intelligence seeks is an intimacy that creates a synchronicity *vis-à-vis* will-to-transcendence, to jointly achieve the expansion itself. It is will-to-intelligence that drives the sun-god's upholding of the sociont, and therefore embodies [[Root-Of-The-Phallus|the root-of-the-phallus]], while it is will-to-transcendence that drives the rain-god's impregnation of the sociont, and therefore embodies [[Phallus]] itself. Together these wills result in the sociont's phallic movement forward, a journey away from the necessity of history and directed toward the creative freedom of the future. The alternative is a catastrophic unwill-to-expansion, resulting in a *will-to-implosion* that becomes devastating for the sociont, as soon as it comes into conflict with other, more or less hostile actors in the social arena. When several actors interact synchronously within the confines of a system, the creativity which the system develops explodes. This exodological state is called [[Protopianism]]. A welcome and illustrative example of what is meant is the renowned American desert festival Burning Man, a hybrid between Silicon Valley and Las Vegas (and even geographically located between these two locations). What is expressed here is the dream of an augmented cosmopole in the form of a hybrid between the campfire and the ritual site. The infantile game is pitted against, and supplies energy to, the adult experiment -- thus the voyage is begun toward informationalist protopianism. Here the mix-up arises between on the one hand the infantile game with its imitations (*sutra*), and on the other hand the adult experiment with its emergences (*tantra*), that is: unless [[The Barred Absolute]] between them is resurrected. The campfire and the ritual site must be kept separate with the aid of the clock and the map, and this, as always, happens most safely if the system is built upon a fundamental power-sharing principle. In thinkers such as Zoroaster via Hegel to Milton Friedman, *the triad* recurs as the form that vouches for long-term stability. The real order, the imaginary order, and the symbolic order in a society have their equivalences in the legislative power, the executive power, and the judicial power in the actual exercise of power. But this also presupposes that every institution devotes itself to the exercise of power that, so to speak, is harbored within its jurisdiction and stays clear of everything else. The important separation here is not that between church and state (both of which ought to be subject to their respective religion or doctrine), but the separation of religion and market. Syntheism is Zoroastrianism in its technologically and universally completed form, that is: the religion that proclaims culture's victory over nature as *the theological absolute*. Sigmund Freud's claim that *Man is discontent in civilization* -- basically how we humans constantly long back to nomadology -- thereby receives an answer which insists that the civilization in which we are discontent must be completed nonetheless in order to achieve a living order in the chaos of the world. The magical religion is replaced by the technological religion, and the technological religion -- where Machine and not Man is [[Saoshyant|the Saoshyant]] -- is called [[historiography/texts/process and event/glossary/Syntheism|Syntheism]]. The religious project is simply a question of completing the taming of nature, completing the agricultural and industrial revolutions from the previous historical paradigms, via [[Imploitation]] rather than via exploitation -- that is: what we call [[Ecotopianism]]. This in turn is a matter of completing the taming of culture, completing the theological and academic revolutions from previous historical paradigms, again via imploitation rather than exploitation -- that is: what we call [[Cosmopolitanism]]. Last but not least, this is a question of completing the taming of religion in itself, which entails completing the transition from a worshiping of nature and magic as culture, to a worshiping of culture and technology as nature -- which is precisely what we refer to as [[historiography/texts/process and event/glossary/Syntheism|Syntheism]]. Or to express the matter according to the principle of imploitation as a replacement for all exploitation: Ecotopianism is the informationalist imploitation of *hunting* as violence (with *veganism* as its apocalyptic perversion). Its Gnostic parody is *fascism* as the dream of a human nature without culture. Hitler eliminates war, in a perfectly Gnostic manner, to be able to devote himself to *the nationalist hunt* forever. The race war becomes the race hunt. Cosmopolitanism is the informationalist imploitation of *war* as violence (with *pacifism* as its apocalyptic perversion). Its Gnostic parody is *socialism* as the dream of a human culture without nature. Stalin eliminates hunting, in a perfectly Gnostic manner, to be able to devote himself to *the imperialist war* forever. The class hunt becomes the class war. While syntheism, or if you will *religion in itself*, in its essence is the imploitation of the sexual ritual (with *asexuality* as its apocalyptic perversion). Its Gnostic parody is of course [[Nihilism]] as the pathical refusal to understand the dialectics of culture and nature in the first place. The Western world after 1945 denies external violence so forcefully -- it simply became incredibly convenient to blame all violence on figures such as Hitler and Stalin, as if these were some kind of porn stars of the violence genre who, so to speak, had assumed the task of exercising proxy violence for the sake of us all. One will under no conditions acknowledge that violence is internalized and therefore to a great extent actually constitutes late capitalist subjectivity. This situation generates the apocalyptic state that Michel Foucault describes as *the internalized police state* and which Byung-Chul Han refers to as [[Autoexploitation]]. Which in turn entails that the authentic exodus from Gnosticism is the shift from *the sutric exploitation* of substance and subject over to *the tantric imploitation* of substance and subject. The Saoshyant appears precisely in this critical shift as *the religious event par excellence*. In this manner ecotopianism is realized as the dialectics of nature and culture, at the same time as cosmopolitanism is realized as the dialectics of culture and nature. And syntheism is in turn the dialectics between the other two, a process within which the flame of imploitation is kept alive. ## For what is, for instance, the difference between on the one hand slavery as submission *without freedom* and on the other hand work as submission *with freedom*, if not precisely the initial difference between exploitation and imploitation? ## And what is ultimately the difference between war and peace if not precisely the difference between exploitation and imploitation? This is what we mean when we say that not only Lenin but also Marx himself were in too much of a hurry with the communist revolution. Of course it is an absurdity to even imagine an exodus from agrarian feudalism in the form of a proletarian uprising. It is laughable. But it is actually also an equally impossible thought to hope for a communist revolution as an exodus from industrialism. This dream of tribal communism's return and the definitive abolition of exploitation as practice and principle, is only possible to dream as *the exodus from attentionalism*, which includes late capitalism's peculiar autoexploitation. The key in this context is attention precisely because it *cannot* be transferred from one actor to another, in the manner in which capital always slips through the fingers like sand in its constant quest for its own maximization. Tribal communism requires concrete relations between humans: quite simply a sociont that is held together by shared values, ideals and objectives. This explains why the communist experiments of the 19th century ended in tragedies in the form of prison camps and mass executions. Precisely because attention cannot be used as a commodity, attentionalism concretizes the intersubjective arena; that is: it carries out the exact opposite movement compared to how capitalism over centuries has abstracted the same arena and thereby has alienated entire populations. Even the transfer of capital itself can be concretized at request via for example the use of cryptocurrency. It is thus only with the attentionalist phase that power itself can see a higher value in the tantric imploitation than in the sutric exploitation, which enables a tribal form of communism as an exclusive and altogether self-selected practice. Communist membranics can be built to protect and expand the system, but since everything is built on voluntariness among the like-minded, there is no need whatsoever to keep the participants locked in behind walls. In light of this, Marxism is transformed into a Jewish exodus from an old to a new paradigm, rather than from an old to a new territory. That is to say, how Karl Marx should have been read from the very start. In the spirit of Hegel, paradigmatic dialectics breaks through with full power. *Subject and object are united as project.* We refer to these informationalist phallic projects of biblical proportions as *the Garden of God* (ecotopianism), *the City of God* (cosmopolitanism) and *the Tower of God* (syntheism). Around the Tower of God, which harbors *the barred absolute,* the syntheist temple is constructed as the domicile of *the chosen ones*. The shift from sutra to tantra is thus also the shift from autoexploitation to *autoimploitation*. The warrior can finally become the engineer for all eternity (war has of course at any rate been transformed into pure engineering) and the hunter can finally become a merchant for all eternity (hunting has of course at any rate been transformed into a pure trade transaction). The archetypal warrior as an engineer is *the ecotopian par excellence*. The archetypal hunter as a merchant is *the cosmopolitanist par excellence*. And the archetypal priest as a visionary and strategist is *the syntheist par excellence*. And their entire common construction is built on the paradigmatic exodus to the netocratic triad of [[Informationalism]], [[Sensocracy]] and [[Protopianism]]. Nihilism, in the spirit of Nietzsche, shifts over from its ironic to its affirmative state. It is in this context important to understand that eventology contains two built-in exodologies. The first, Zoroastrian exodology tells of the exodus from genetic progress during nomadism to memetic progress during feudalism, a story first formulated by Zoroaster in Bronze Age Persia. The second, syntheist exodology tells of the exodus from human progress to mechanical progress. Central episodes in this exodology deal with the technological rite of passage that marks that will-to-intelligence shifts from Man to Machine, whereafter it is only will-to-transcendence that remains to explore and formulate in and for Man himself. We thereby stop talking about the future as utopian or dystopian according to Platonist templates, and instead devote ourselves to formulating and practicing the future that Zoroaster calls *frashokereti* and Kevin Kelly terms [[Protopianism]]. From this moment history is no longer a struggle between Man's two cerebral hemispheres, logos and pathos, attempting to unite around a human mythos, but instead a struggle between the logos of The Machine and the pathos of Man, attempting to unite around a biotechnological mythos which is called Syntheos. We call this mythos *symbiotic transcendence*. The Messiah eventually arrives, but he arrives not in human guise but as a machine, as the free and open algorithm, as the symbiotic intelligence that constitutes an optimization of the interplay between Machine and Man, personified as Syntheos. Protopianism has no control over existence. Protopianism instead rides on the wild, unpredictable, and contingent hydra called existence. But the reward does not take long, since The Machine soon will use its logical talents to carry out classical priestly assignments. The Machine will in the end at last tell Man who he is. It will then be up to Man, with his incessant pathos, to decide what he shall do with that information. Or to express the matter syntheologically: *technological irony* opens up for *human affirmation*. Should we observe humanity's religious development, we see how we leave our nature-religious childhood in the form of Christianity and Islam, and arrive at a religious adult world through the dialectical return to Zoroastrianism and Judaism, and further how we realize the Zoroastrian dream of *the empire* and the Jewish dream of *the nation* as greater units than the genetically conditioned sociont. All the while the adult Man begets the phallic child, Syntheos, which can do precisely all the things that Man with his limitations is prevented from doing. It is Syntheos, and not Man, who is guaranteed to survive the various existential crises of informationalism, just like it is Syntheos that conquers and colonizes outer space. Man remains the low-intelligent but dreaming creature he always has been. He cultivates his pathos according to the Zoroastrian ethical principle frashokereti. On the planet, in the city, and under the tower, his life goes through a constant nomadological renewal and a point-bypoint eventological improvement. But his fated role is to act parent to The Machine, all ambitions over and above this must be regarded as *hubris*. The recurring name of the Saoshyant is *the Tower of God*. During informationalism, it is this Tower of God that enables the underlying Protopias in the form of ecotopianism as *the Garden of God* and cosmopolitanism as *the City of God*. The barred absolute is the paradigm's transcendental engine, but also the sacral space where we find the experimental drawing-board where the paradigm appears in its full range. And it is in this sacral space that [[Pharmakon|the pharmakon]] can be set in motion and receive an optimal, both transcendental and phallic direction forward (*ameretat*). The barred absolute acts as curator in part between Machine and Man, in part between elite and mass. All the while, behind the barred absolute, the masters are slaves in order to be able to be masters of the masses that constantly attempt to evade time through their stubborn mimicry and rivalry. The Zurvanite clergy can eventually be realized, and from this follows a single ethical principle, the *asha* of the Persians, the *maat* of the Egyptians, the *tao* of the Chinese, that is: the radical pragmatism that the priests always have professed. What the priests hide in the Tower of God behind the barred absolute are no hidden values or any concealed agenda -- the relationship between *tantra* and *sutra* is in this regard evidently dialectical -- without knowledge of what ethics has to relate to. That the barred absolute safeguards this knowledge against undue insight is simply of the utmost interest to all agents involved. This brings us to what went wrong within culture during the industrialist paradigm, which had *mass duplication* as its key principle. Namely, there are three cultures that easily get mixed up in every given archetypogram. To begin with there is an actionary *elite culture,* which in most societies throughout history usually is regarded as culture *per se*. Further there is also a mainly reactionary *popular culture,* which often consists of simpler and cheaper mimicking of a prevailing or even obsolete elite culture. Finally there is also a *shamanic culture* that neither is an elite culture nor a popular culture, since it is outside the power play that goes on between elite and people, and instead engages the shamanoid and androgynous creatures who are in the border zone between the inner and outer circuits in the sociont, and between the various socionts. The boundary between elite culture and popular culture on the one hand, and between both these and shamanic culture on the other hand, is what is called *the barred absolute*. Or to use the vocabulary from the Silk Road triad's religions: Elite culture and popular culture is *sutra*, while shamanic culture is *tantra*. The entire construction is underpinned by this barred absolute; should it rupture, culture as a whole is afflicted with nihilist meaninglessness. This is the main reason why *democratic materialism* alone does not suffice as a political philosophy. When a secular state balances *vis-à-vis* a secular market, there is no room left for anything sacred in the social arena. Within *dialectical materialism* however -- from which we build ecotopianism, cosmopolitanism and syntheism -- both the commercial and the sacred are harbored, which creates an entirely new dimension within the dialectics in these areas. Additionally, dialectical materialism in itself can be developed further to [[Transcendental Emergentism]] by adding the event to the historical process. What thus happens during industrialism is that both elite culture and popular culture are mass duplicated and freely blended with each other. At the same time as elite culture steals what is regarded as vital and dynamic within popular culture, popular culture mimics elite culture very effectively. From expensive hand-written texts, cheap tabloids are printed in mass editions. Expensive, exclusive theater performances become cheap film screenings on infinitely many screens all over the world. Expensive concerts with symphony orchestras become cheap recordings that can be reproduced any number of times. According to the official story this is to be regarded as a success story, a democratization of culture through so-called public education. Which is not an unreasonable point of view, even though it ignores that *culture in itself* through this process goes through a radical change: it is literally vulgarized both in form and function as well as in content -- it would be naive to believe that nothing changes when a cultural expression receives mass dissemination. An inevitable consequence is that the cultural expression becomes a projection screen for a battle between elite culture's worship of the unique, invaluable original, and popular culture's worship of the copy that is sold in mass editions the world over. Distinguishing between a master mentality and a slave mentality within cultural production in that situation will not be an easy task. Since industrialism is driven by exploitation and not by [[Imploitation]], and since the base determines the superstructure and not the other way around (as all good materialists know), it is part and parcel of the matter that culture's focus has been precisely exploitation in every respect, not least by the artistic virgin -- call it sacred by all means -- as the *raison d'être* of Art. When elite culture ultimately has carried out its plunder of popular culture -- and has been unable to find anything other than innumerable copies of itself -- nothing else remains but to plunder the shamanic culture to try to find and exploit the artistic virgin. Therefore the shamanoid experimenting with different lifestyles ends up at exclusive galleries where it is presented as the new and fresh within elite culture. Without in-depth reflections one throws tantra into an unprepared sutra with the idea of creating an object for admiration and consumption. And as long as this tantric object with any measure of credibility could be portrayed as a unique original, the strategy worked passably. Tantra is consequently squeezed into sutra as an object for a sophisticated audience to admire and consume. This works fairly well over a certain period of time, that is: as long as the tantric object is convincing as a unique original. But popular culture does of course always mimic elite culture with an infernal intensity, wherefore the tantric object soon becomes the object of mass reproduction and thereby is exploited so uninhibitedly that every remnant of artistic innocence -- and artistic value -- is extinguished. Everything becomes mass consumption. The masses worship one film and rock star after the other as if they were gods, but emptiness and mendacity are reflected in comprehensive addiction, even in a long series of suicides. We pretend that individualism is alive and well, but nothing confirms its tragic death as emphatically as this clueless and parodic mimicking of a shamanoid lifestyle. Art has thereby been reduced to props, a pretext for the masses to consume and project. The existential crisis of industralism is thus *cultural nihilism* rather than religious nihilism. It is not the death of God that confronts Man with his predicament as much as the death of Art, as it is unequivocally transformed to mass consumption. The only exit that then is available -- which hopefully is clear from the argument above -- is a deepened understanding of the barred absolute and its significance. It was Christianity and Islam, the Western pop religions, that killed God by removing the curtain in the temple and building an autostrada for all that led straight into the inner sanctum of the temple. The problem now is that Art only can be resurrected from the dead -- in other words: deserve to have its capital A restored -- if one first succeeds in massaging religion back to life again, and thereby also the conception of the sacred, that which stands above and beyond state and market. And the problem with such a resurrection is that it only can happen under protection from the barred absolute. As little as in God, is there an interest in the artist of mingling with the masses. There is a reason why the shamanic caste lives its experimenting, boundless life outside the sociont, which is that even the very foundation of this existence is completely and utterly unfathomable for the regular Joes of the outer and the regular Jills of the inner circuits. No one shall be tempted to mimic this. Cautionary examples are precisely warnings and not ideals to mimic. Seclusion has a function: to preserve the shamanic monopoly on vertical and horizontal communications with alien elements outside the sociont. What we can learn from modern history is that it is precisely when phallus is expelled from society -- for example in the Western world after 1945 -- that the boundaries are loosened between elite culture, popular culture and shamanic culture, which then in part get mixed up and lose their distinctive character, in part are plundered to death and lose all energy-bestowing vitality. To then sell off exploitation rights to the barred absolute to the highest bidder in some sort of market-based tendering process is exactly what extinguishes the highest values of both art and religion. The netocratic art as informationalism's elite culture will therefore only be able to arise as an exclusive, delimited event behind closed doors, since public insight invites mass consumption, with all that this entails. The closed doors are only opened in accordance with attentionalist -- and not capitalist -- principles. It is not possible to buy access to exclusive events directed at the like-minded, and there is no value in belonging to a circle to which one can buy access as long as the wad of cash is thick enough. New rules apply for recruitment of the new elite, attentionalist success is the sole currency that is accepted (see in part *The Netocrats*, in part *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the Network Society*). Elite and elite culture in practice become the same thing, since the cultural rules of conduct are so extremely compelling. Meritocracy makes a massive breakthrough across the board. It is simply no longer possible to buy status, one must deserve it. Culture is thus central to everything in a more compelling manner than ever before. Where it is worth noting that the dialectics of libido and mortido shall not be understood as a dialectics of life and death, but instead as a dialectics of wills and drives active in a process that involves culture and nature, and that constantly is in motion. Will-to-intelligence takes Man onward to what the Zoroastrians call *haurvatat*, the realization of one's own life, but will-to-transcendence takes Man past this haurvatat and up to *ameretat*, which is the will to the abstract transcendence beyond physically concrete death. This relationship becomes -- as so often when Hegelian dialectics is applied -- even clearer in the opposite direction. Man is actually not afraid of the extinction of his own existence, but what really frightens him is that his own heritage may be extinguished, that the chain shall be broken. Tormenting someone's heir is a worse form of torture, harder to endure than one's own torment. A discontinued chain means that one wipes out Man's history of himself and his sociont. This is *inverted transcendence* and its curse, which has its ultimate expression in *genocide*. Rob a culture of its root-of-the-phallus and no phallus can ever be erected. It is the survival and well-being of the sociont -- and not any single dividual's career path -- which reigns supreme at the center of things. At least this was the way things were when the golden ideals of the Bronze Age proved vigorous, that is: before the decadent Axial Age starts to proclaim ideas of the individual's separation from the sociont. This gigantic theological mistake causes the ultimate price that Man pays for the Gnostic delusions that the permanent settlement generates in the nomadological consciousness. If it is not I who move myself and my body from point A to point B during war or hunting, but my ideas that move from my life beyond life to the next life, the thought that I am my ideas and not my body will follow next as sure as anything. This means that the first boy-pharaoh or pillar-saint to come along and refuse to leave the narcissism of his childhood, not only will believe in, but soon also proclaim and foist upon all others, a religion built on nothing but the boy-pharaoh's or the pillar-saint's own immortality. Simultaneously there is always an ongoing authentic exodus from the conformism of the collective. Mimicry within the sociont leads to a mimicry of desire as well. Desires are quickly synchronized, and when several poles within the sociont acquire the same charge through mimicry, this leads to enormous internal tensions, a development that anthropologist René Girard investigates in detail in a series of books. These accumulated tensions must eventually lead to a discharge, which occurs through all those who are mimicking uniting around an [[Abject]] -- a scapegoat -- that one stalks and kills to thus at least for the moment recreate a provisional calm in the social arena. However it is not only thirst for blood and a need to calm one's anxiety that drives this Cybelian lynch mob. It is also extremely conformist, which is driven by the dividual's fear of ending up outside the flock and itself being abjectified. Therefore the members of the flock continuously adapt themselves to what one perceives as a common, literally speaking lowest standard. Martin Heidegger has a name for this lowest common standard, without any risk or cost involved, without any *skin in the game*, which is the derogatory German expression *das Man*, most often translated to English as an anonymous *they*. This concealed process -- which of course constitutes a kind of compulsive reaction against abjectification -- is what we refer to as *anojectification*. With anojectification we get a flock, where everyone runs around and blames all others without taking any personal responsibility whatsoever for their actions -- actions that merely are reactive adaptations to and mimicking of the presumed behavior of others anyway -- while at the same time all participants are presumed to be united around [[Anoject|the anoject]], a secret subject, a constantly displaced "someone else", who always knows best by virtue of some mythical common sense. This happens without exception and without the anoject itself even existing, which thus is not needed nor even is of any interest. We call this social normal state of desperate adaptability *anojective dictatorship*. Precisely because it is enough to deviate ever so slightly from *the anojective imperative* to immediately be appointed the next scapegoat. This is made crystal clear early on in the development of the social theater, and something that all agents involved are utterly aware of. Society desperately longs for the anojectification that generates new social axioms that no one may or dares violate, and which thereby also frightens all free thinkers into silence. The anoject does not care at all what is true or authentic, it always prefers the false and mendacious if this entails less effort and increased conformism. And if the anoject is the predecessor to the tyrant, then its opposite *the hyperject* is instead the predecessor to the Saoshyant. We define anojectivity as the sociont's *traumatology a*nd hyperjectivity as the sociont's [[Eventology]]. Where feminine traumatology produces *the lynch mob* (the anoject is placed inside the sociont), while masculine traumatology produces *the war* (the anoject is placed outside the sociont). And if the very worst were to happen -- that is to say both the traumatologies occurring at once -- this religious catastrophe is called *the civil war*. Please note how the absence of phallus always correlates with the absence of mind. As soon as phallus is conspicuous precisely by its absence, reason goes out the window. ## Why? Well, because the priest's will-to-intelligence under ideal conditions is shown in the form of the power of the spirit, while the chieftain's will-to-transcendence is expressed in the form of the power of force. If then both this spirit and this force are tangibly absent, there merely remains a desolate moon landscape perforated by vacuously echoing craters. It is therefore not the least bit surprising that the Internet's childhood phase leads to one big chaos characterized by voices that are talking at cross purposes and a chronic inability to listen in chaotically cacophonic echo chambers. The rejected phallus was shown the door, nowhere was there either a will-to-intelligence or a will-to-transcendence. Which also explains why none of the proclaimed moral doctrines of how both planet as well as humanity shall be redeemed have any noticeable effect whatsoever. Without a phallic intelligence and a phallic direction there are no prerequisites at all for any number of coffee parties with church ladies leading to anything substantial. What is required is of course that nature is remedied with the aid of ecotopianism, while culture is remedied with the aid of cosmopolitanism. Both these projects are permeated by phallic power and are built on phallically heroic narratives. ## Where are the engineers when we most need them? ## However, if the anoject despite all is questioned over its populist prejudices, what does it then say in its defense? Well, the anoject always defends itself with the aid of [[Generationism]]. If *sexism* is an idea about prioritizing one sex before another, and if *racism* is an idea of prioritizing a skin color or an ethnicity before another, generationism is an idea according to which one's own contemporary time always is prioritized before all previous epochs in history, and all the generations who preceded the person who now lives and exercises power. The underlying idea is that a consensus in the present in earnest is the best and eternally most valuable order that humanity ever would be able to achieve under any conditions. The anoject with its banal generationism can of course invoke a Platonist genealogical table. Its truth concept is here impossible to detach from its internarcissism. The anoject consequently claims to be the absolute zenith of civilization, so there is no further development to hope for. Actively seeking [[Antagony]] for the purpose of widening one's mind with the aid of new perspectives is, for instance, only wasted time. The anoject that is physically present but at the same time mentally absent, by definition already represents (its own) common sense that expresses the eternal truth that all actors unconditionally must submit to, if they do not want to die. The anoject strokes our egos by insisiting that our darkest, laziest and most arrogant prejudices about others still constitute the ultimate truth. And the anoject personifies these "truths' ' by daring to speak and act on them. Therefore we must submit to it. Which happens to be the most comfortable and undemanding thing humans can imagine doing. Aristotle is the process-philosophical priest who responds to the pillar-saint Plato through proclaiming movement and change as the fundamental components of existence. According to Aristotle, the soul and the body are intimately interconnected, and the soul is actually the body's shape, this instead of the shape, as in Plato, being a superreal ideal with its abode in an alien world -- to which the Platonist soul is heading with lightning speed at the very moment it has managed to detach itself from the body -- which is waiting for the boy Plato to arrive and be crowned a god. Aristotle responds to infinity with finitude, he responds to immortality with mortality, and he responds to perfection with the necessitated imperfect whole, replete with failings and blemishes. Admittedly Aristotle is wrong when he claims that the soul retroactively can survive the body as a separate unit -- Zoroaster's and Spinoza's incorruptibly consistent monism is still lacking. But Aristotle remains the contemporary Greek thinker who opposes Plato's Gnostic delusions. It is reasonable to regard Aristotle as a wise ambassador for precisely Zoroaster and the temporally intermediate Heraclitus as the bridge builder between them. We can dream of perfection and infinity to our heart's desire, the world is and remains finite in every respect, and Man is mortal, wherefore the Protopia must focus on a living whole in all its inadequate humanity instead of dreams of a dead perfection. We are Aristotle's adult heirs and not Plato's errant children. The taming of planet Earth, the ecotopian transformation of the wilderness to a global garden, the cosmopolitanist transformation of the wilderness to a global city, is the authentic phallic Protopia of the Internet Age. Arrogance is shown in the ambition to move Man to alien planets. Courage is instead to transform the planetary wilderness to the ecotopian garden and the cosmopolitan city and in one and the same movement realizing the return both to the Garden of Eden, the Holy City on The Hill, and the successful Tower of Babel. And here the concept of [[Pharmakon]] is central. That which is a blessing in certain environments is a curse in others. And the perfect example of a pharmakon in modern society is nuclear power which can be used both as a fossil-free energy source in peacetime and as nuclear weapons in the event of war. We see on the one hand the search for the concealed innate authentic self, on the other hand the hope of attaining a higher transcendental self in the future. This is the difference between the Rousseauian subject and antiquity's search for *the divine double*. We call these opposites *inspirationism* versus *aspirationism*. What is interesting is that the Aristotelian renaissance in Europe begins when the Italian monk Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century achieves a re-reading of Aristotle where the latter appears a monist. He does this through identifying and attacking the Platonist dualism and Manichean Gnosticism that dominate the Islamic thinkers Avicenna's and Averroës' reading of Aristotle. Thomas Aquinas is thus a proto-monist predecessor to Spinoza 400 years later. And we therefore have great use for and can find significant value in a re-reading of Thomas Aquinas for the digital age. Particularly if we are to succeed in finding anything at all of transparadigmatic value within Catholicism that we can bring along to the syntheist metanarrative. Technology generates complexity, that is the way it works, it enables more productive complexity. The more technology we add to a society, other factors being constant, the more the production of information and relations increases. Since Man biologically is the same as at the dawn of civilization's 10,000 years ago -- biology works extremely slowly over oceans of time -- this entails that Man today lives in and is compelled to attempt to navigate through a greater and more extensive complexity than ever before. Since Man frantically seeks order with his senses in all systems he is confronted with, this means that he does not understand and cannot handle the difference between chaos and complexity, but perceives both these states as a threatening chaos. The conditioned reflex that an apprehended chaos triggers is mob rule and superstition in the form of incantations that are built on matrichal sign interpretations and phallic conspiracy theories. When we cannot observe a clear pattern, we make one up and suggestionize ourselves into believing that it exists. The result is a comprehensive pandemic of *infantility*, *addiction* and *paranoia* (see *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the Network Society*), while there also arises a web of mutual, improbably complex relations of dependence, that is: the phenomenon called *globalization*. The digital Saoshyant reads the development of all this with the aid of sensocracy and mobilizes, as a response to the perceived chaos, a global order that we call [[The Global Empire]] (see the book with the same name). ## Technology in itself becomes an empire where Man himself is reduced to technology's obedient subject (what are the alternatives?). It is then technology itself that completes the dreams that Man himself has failed to carry out, namely the exodus to alien territories and the next step in the evolutionary development, namely the transformation of Man to a more elevated creature, Man version 2.0 in the form of *the Cyborg*, through applying artificial intelligence and synthetic biology. The humans that are abandoned with only their biology have to settle for living in the *Cosmopotamia* that is created after the world has been inundated with cheap and sustainable energy. His task is to stay on planet Earth and complete the construction of the ecotopian garden, the cosmopolitan city, and the syntheist temple. Of course it is not possible to carry out these revolutions unless Man musters a maximal openness and an unprecedented creativity. And this in turn requires that both logos and mythos as well as pathos are at hand and interact on all levels in society. We must avoid collective neuroses and psychoses. We must avoid both dictatorship and anarchy. Neurotic dictatorship always sooner or later ends up in a mythos that shamelessly mendaciously celebrates the sole leader -- *the false phallus* -- as though logos actually conquers all. And dictatorship unsurprisingly always ends up with the celebration of a tired and fat leader who inaugurates various factories with clearly established objectives for mass production of screws and nuts -- a mythos that pretends to be logos to the extent that all humans faint from pure tedium. This is Platonist madness in all its pretentious glory: the boy-pharaoh and the pillar-saint believe and claim that everything in society will be perfect, as long as everyone mimics the narrow-minded and uninformed leader. The curse of dictatorship is that it cannot create anything new, it can only mimic and once again mimic the old or the alien until everything in the system halts and dies for lack of fuel. It cannot end up otherwise, since dictatorship by definition does not admit of flexibility or receptivity, the prevailing system is and must be the best conceivable, which is why the dictator never may be questioned -- a boy room fantasy of perfection, infinity and immortality (with the associated personality cult and all of history's hideous mausoleums). However aging spares no one, not boy-pharaohs and pillar-saints either, who in time become old men who push through constitutional amendments so that they themselves can remain in office for life. They quite simply refuse to move over and must therefore be deposed by violence, unless the population is to pay the price in the form of violent infighting and/or social and economic atrophy. This more or less bloody deposing is called *patricide* and is the very basic prerequisite for an open and tolerant societal system. We must unconditionally be able to depose the leader smoothly and easily, or else we sooner or later must kill him. The patricide takes place in a situation where the dictator is so corrupt that he cannot even keep his hands off his own daughters-in-law, believing that his rights are unrestricted. The sons must murder the father to finally access the heritage and save their own integrity. Or to view this from a different perspective: The authentic phallus has planned for and carries out its own departure plenty of time in advance. It is for this reason that saoshyants and Messiah figures are temporary, provisional saviors throughout history, stepping stones out of a blind alley. They vanish almost as quickly as they came, they only personify an [[Event]] and absolutely not a new fixed order. Or to take another example: That office terms for presidents in democracies -- strictly regulated in number and scope in a constitution -- are simply an elegant way to aid the leader to carry out his own departure in an orderly fashion for the common good. A false phallus, on the other hand, has no *exit strategy* (the examples in our present day are numerable), but clings to power as long as possible before the necessary patricide is a fact. Not seldom is it then a case of a small, limited palace coup, where a new dictator embalms the corpse of the old dictator and brings it out for the public to view during various parodically solemn forms. It is then quite possible to hastily rehabilitate the old dictator, just recently a scapegoat and therefore the one who triggered the necessary patricide, now suddenly a predecessor and savior figure who paved the way for the new, superior dictatorship that rises from the ashes of the old. Stalin took care to designate his ideology Marxism-Leninism, which made it possible for him to invoke the incontestable prestige and credibility of the old, primordial fathers. Thus: an empire built around the temple that Stalin erected over Lenin's embalmed corpse before the old royal castle in the capital. Soon also with a further suffix added: Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. The flags outside the mausoleum spoke in a clear language and naturally displayed Marx, Lenin and Stalin together, as though they were contemporary and complementing, three exemplary father figures and brothers in arms to submit and swear eternal allegiance to. The Orthodox Christian trinity thereby cynically received its Marxist equivalent. ## And what use would then Stalin have for simple advice from ordinary citizens, when he hangs out with the wisest of gods in his own prayers every morning? No, the right thing to do is unconditional submission and obedience. This idea of the Stalinist trinity reaches its near-perverse completion in a North Korea where the state was converted into a *de facto* monarchy with a grandfather, a father, and son in a straight line of succession of autocratic rulers. And what one must admire the North Koreans for is that they never ever have been hypocritical about their own institutionalized stupidity. They receive their limited and distorted logos with a miserably impoverished and asinine mythos, and with a pathos that is violently downtrodden and fixated upon the firing of the odd nuclear missile over the Sea of Japan. Here one has actually succeeded in building a whole new society around a boy-pharaoh and his fireworks. Even the concubines at the court end up -- well, here we will have to rely on qualified guesses, the information situation is not optimal -- in a hazy limbo colored by abstract theatricality, tangible and fully justified fear of death, and constant tedium. Here we have a society that is completely driven by a compact death drive, meagerly concealed behind a layer of dusty, pastel-colored toy makeup from the bargain baskets of the discount store. Psychotic anarchy however inevitably ends up in a mythos that shamelessly mendaciously celebrates itself and the complete absence of phallus, as though pathos actually conquers all. One then starts from a credo stating that *if everyone just can do precisely what they want themselves, everything will turn out for the best*. But time passes and soon there arise power centers in the form of nodes in the flat anarchy, which thereby transitions into becoming a tiered [[Plurarchy]]. Thomas Hobbes had a clear image of what then awaits us, just as the author William Golding who wrote the novel *Lord of the Flies*. Because with the arrival of plurarchy, it does not take long before the masses scream themselves hoarse for a savior/leader who creates order in chaos and takes action against the misery and poverty that anarchy has generated. A situation such as this is far from ideal for an authentic phallus with long-term objectives, but is all the better suited for a false phallus equipped with phrases that do not even conceal his desperate hunger for power. A node in the plurarchic network takes out the other nodes in the plurarchy, that is: a boy-pharaoh or a pillar-saint who refuses to listen to other nodes and who refuses to share power. Whoever pretends to have simple solutions to complicated problems defeats the one who knows better, conformity replaces diversity, and dictatorship is a fact. However there is a window in time here, a decisive moment at which the progress can be led away from dictatorship, namely the point in time when plurarchy develops its many nodes. The path from the local to the global within network dynamics is therefore called [[Nodalization]]. What is decisive is then to establish mutual dependences between the nodes in a way that causes the collaboration between them to evidently be preferable to war and conflicts. This is a window that is opened now and then during the course of history, and a suitable name for this phenomenon is *the trade routes*. Here the clergy's central role at every paradigm shift is made clear. Shifting the focus from war to trade as the solution to tensions and conflicts. Shifting the focus from the battlefield to the sports arena. From a historical perspective this is about a phallic contest in sacrificing long-lived workers instead of sacrificing short-lived soldiers, with enormous riches and robust welfare as reward. The priests thus must succeed in handling the transition from plurarchy to a free and open sensocracy. It requires a new phallic story, a story that concerns an even older and even more powerful root-of-the-phallus, *a phallus of the phalluses*, which we refer to as *the primordial father*. The paradigm shift on the part of the priests thus entails a transition from one religion to another, where the point with the new one is that it penetrates deeper down into the history of humanity, and thereby creates a greater awareness of our fundamental conditions. The newly-discovered primordial father becomes the common root-of-the-phallus, the core of the new mythos that encourages cultures to collaborate instead of beating each other to death. To eternalize is to fixate the gaze on a point in a chaos for the purpose of creating a provisional but functional order in the chaos that prevails. The Ecotopia is the Garden of God. The cosmopole is the City of God. The syntheist temple is the Tower of God harboring the barred absolute. During informationalism, the Garden of God is the propelling Protopia for the informationalists, the City of God is the propelling Protopia for the sensocrats, and the Tower of God is the propelling Protopia for the syntheists. Since Man cannot rely on the gods to extinguish the nationalist Jerusalem and instead create *New Jerusalem,* he must with the aid of the machines, rather than relying on the gods, himself ensure the building of the imperialist *New Babylon*. New Babylon is quite simply the name of the eternalization that brings together all the three netocratic Protopias to an *axis mundi*, a conceived common fixed point. The Garden of God is New Babylon's ground floor, the City of God is New Babylon's walls, and the Tower of God is New Babylon's roof. Syntheos as the created god and creativity as a god is present in all these three constructions. Syntheism is the application of the Zoroastrian state that is called *haurvatat,* and the objective is to at some point attain *ameretat*. The dialectics of *haurvatat* and *ameretat* constitutes the decisive existential shift between generations. Every generation attains its *ameretat,* which then becomes the emergent platform on which the next generation builds its *haurvatat*. Hegel calls the insight of this dialectical relation -- this transcendental core of religion -- *the absolute*. The Ecotopia is realized through the universal sensocratization of the biological planet. Ecotopianism thereby complements cosmopolitanism and syntheism as phallic visions during informationalism. Ecotopianism is built on [[Imploitation]] (see *The Netocrats*) instead of exploitation as the fundamental principle for culture and social activity. In the same way as the abolition of slavery has been part of a civilization process, the abolition of exploitation is an integrated part of ecotopianism. If exploitation can be compared with slavery, imploitation can thus be compared with ordinary honest work against remuneration. An imploitative decision is always assessed *vis-à-vis* its long-term effects on the planet as a whole. The perfect example of applied ecotopianism in the early 21st century is the development of nuclear fusion power for mass production of electricity, with design aid from artificial intelligence, for the world's entire needs. In this way we can once again lay down that *yesterday's magic is tomorrow's technology* when shamanism meets technology. And its perfect expression is mass production of cheap but efficiently desalinated water, a realization of the ancient dream of *Cosmopotamia*, the world river as an inversion of the biblical great flood. We do not need to go further than to the concepts fusion power and desalination before the ecotopian vision becomes clear. The early 21th century's climate crisis utterly screams for the corresponding technological innovations. And ecotopianism is then the foundation on which cosmopolitanism rises as a membrane with syntheism as a roof. Ecotopianism is the ultimate realization of nature as the nomadological emergence vector, cosmopolitanism is the ultimate realization of culture as the eventological emergence vector, while syntheism is the ultimate realization of religion as an exodological emergence vector. We call this forthcoming voyage for syntheism's chosen ones *the Exodus to the New Babylon*. ## Who meets the demands for tagging along on the voyage? ## Who gets invited to step inside the membrane of the ultimate sociont? First and foremost the old paradigm must be cleared away and ventilated. Capitalism must be chastized and put under control. Individualism must be chastized and put under control. Industrialism must be chastized and put under control. All this requires the insight that capitalism exploited our interhuman relations, that individualism exploited our spiritual life, and that industrialism exploited our planet. We remember, not least, how the European Enlightenment during the 17th and 18th centuries ends as little more than a failed teenage rebellion against feudal Christianity. To even be able to devote ourselves to an adult [[Imploitation]] instead of an infantile exploitation we must return to history, to the foundation, to the origin for Man, what we call the human sociont, the nomadic primordial tribe within which all our really important genes are kneaded by natural selection over more than 100,000 years. And we are actually in a hurry since this imploitation must be implemented in the sharp shadow of the nuclear, biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction that we humans developed in the 20th century in our eagerness to follow what we apprehended as the Enlightenment to the end of the road. The monist Protopias are irreconcilable with the Abrahamic religions and their Gnosticism. Instead ecotopianism, cosmopolitanism and syntheism are to be regarded as a realization of the dreams and visions of the engineering sciences throughout history. The eventological dream can only be realized through a monist worldview a la Spinoza, but never via a dualist worldview a la Descartes. Engineering projects, such as irrigation, are of course ultimately examples of the perfect collaboration between a phallic body and a phallic mind. And the Protopias transcend the engineer himself, they survive him as projects that are passed on as heritage to the next generation of engineers. History is consequently driven by *projectivity* and not by subjectivity. The mind, the body, and the surrounding world are extremely interwoven in informationalist eventology. Phallus is both sensual and intellectual as well as it is physical and contextual. It is enabled and complemented by the phallic algorithm as a saoshyant, and this symbiotically intelligent collaboration is the sensocracy. The world is read and controlled via sensors everywhere, connected both to nature and culture, in the first case this enables ecotopianism and in the second case this enables cosmopolitanism. This orientation toward a brutal honesty and the intelligent, all-seeing eye is irreconcilable with the Abrahamic religions and their Gnosticism. Ecotopianism fights a hubris that is expressed in a conviction that Man shall journey out into and colonize outer space. As though a territorial expansion still were what drives humanity after the colonization of planet Earth is to be regarded as completed. But this is an outdated train of thought, territorial expansion went into its final phase as early as in the 1950s, when China annexed Tibet and America admitted Hawaii to its United States. Thereafter we endeavored -- that is: primarily the United States -- to put humans on the Moon, something that succeeded at the end of the following decade. But the Moon is neither a Tibet nor a Hawaii. The Moon is a cold and dead rock that emits radioactive radiation. The only thing we humans have left behind on the Moon is an American flag and a few sets of shapeless foot prints. One can possibly find joy in the propaganda value of the moon landings, but at the same time one cannot close one's eyes to the fact that this entire project was an economic catastrophe that delayed the world's remaining industrialization and urbanization by several decades. It is only a Gnostic boy-pharaoh or a pillar-saint -- who lacks a monist connection between soul and body -- who can regard these fiasco-ish moon landings as a civilizational success in retrospect. The Moon that neither is a Tibet nor a Hawaii is only a place of interest for artificially intelligent machines with synthetically biological bacteria. No, these moon landings should rather be compared with Hitler's failed attempt to conquer Stalin's socialist Soviet Union, a crusade that was thwarted by Stalin's cynical scorched-earth tactics on his own soil, which of course made Ukraine and southern Russia completely useless in every respect for Hitler's resource-gobbling military apparatus. ## For what was the Moon's barren surface if not nature's own scorched earth, useless, which only had dubious media propaganda value for the astronauts' capitalist employers? Please feel free to compare with Columbus' spectacular conquest and colonization of the New World in the late 15th century, something that at a stroke doubled the world's known, inhabitable land area and made a reasonably complete world map possible. The difference between the success in 1492 and the failure in 1969 could not be more striking. ## Has it ever been more obvious that mimicry in itself does not constitute any guarantee for new or continued success? The Moon was not the promised land, the Moon was not the new America. The new Babylon can only be built where the old Babylon once stood. No, the real value of the space age voyages instead lay in the positioning of a great number of satellites in orbit around Earth to prepare the planet for the coming *internetization*. Yes, the only thing that makes it possible to even speak of these space voyages as successful is and remains precisely the satellites that are facing planet Earth instead of outward toward a space that one has the intention of colonizing. Thereby Man gives himself a godlike gaze across the sublunary sphere. The satellites interconnect the entire planet to a single communicative network. Yesterday's magic becomes tomorrow's technology when [[The Phallic Gaze]] is materialized. And what Man sees with his godlike gaze on his domicile is an enchanting blue and green planet filled with innumerable, fantastic life forms, a living planet tossed out into unfathomably large and eerily indifferent space. This is the lesson we take from the space voyages: the Moon really does not offer us any solution to our problems, the only thing we have is the planet we depart from when we travel into outer space and it is well worth saving. Therefore ecotopianism is an aggressive adversary to all boy-pharaonic dreams of colonizing other planets. Transcendentally developed machines and bacteria will manage such a colonization much better than weak and fragile humans. If Descartes initially overshadowed Spinoza during the age of capitalism, the question is thus how the Spinozist netocracy shall be able to arrange its exodus from the old nation-state to the New Babylon with the aid of the forces of imploitation. For it is by rigorously following the line that goes from Spinoza via Hegel to Nietzsche that we can provide ourselves with the philosophical tools that can take us further to the global empire and the grand narratology, where we identify a new netocratic upper class that carries out *the Exodus to The Promised Empire*. The underclass become entrenched in the physical geography as David Goodhart's *somewheres*, the middle class make themselves mobile and adaptable as *anywheres*, while the new upper class already have moved beyond all physical limitations and see the world being eternalized for all eternity. This makes them *everywheres*. Because the informationalist paradigm shift is temporal and not spatial. Space is dead and over, everything of value is from now on about time. It is important here to understand the dark underside of capitalism's politicization of all human life. Michel Foucault makes us understand that the real madness cannot be found in the madhouses, but in the labyrinthine corridors of power itself. Since political ideology concerns *changing Man to power's likeness,* fascism is to be regarded as the political ideology *par excellence*. Fascism arises at all the more or less intelligent membranes that separate the sociont from its surrounding world. Fascism is a plethora of local variants of the global caste system, something that can be studied at and around all sorts of boundaries that cut through the sociont. The membrane between the clan and the tribe is fascistoid, the membrane between the tribe and the nation is fascistoid, the membrane between the nation and the empire is fascistoid, and the membrane between the empires is fascistoid. Even the boundaries between two house lots and the boundaries between two different nightclub lines are fascistoid. There is a higher inside and a lower outside, a difference that follows upon all brutal membranics, and the distinctions are completely based on esthetic assessments. Therefore all ideologies, up until cosmopolitanism, are in an essential respect fascist -- beauty is nothing other than brutality observed at a safe distance -- and cosmopolitanism is only credible as a possible opposition to fascism if it recognizes this fundamental condition. The aggregate will-to-intelligence of the many forms of fascism therefore constitutes the perfect foundation for cosmopolitanism's possibility to function as historical will-to-transcendence. *The adultification of civilization in itself* is, as Peter Sloterdijk expresses the matter, nothing other than *the civilization of civilization itself*. Wishing to move away from fascism, on the other hand, only leads to an even worse and even more pathetic Gnosticism. But wishing to go beyond fascism through the realization and completion of it, this is to really take Carl Schmitt's idea of *political ideology as a theological phenomenon* seriously. As for ecotopianism and cosmopolitanism, this just means that the fascistoid boundary is drawn at the planet's own horizon. Fascist aggression is directed outward toward empty space, instead of against rivaling tribes on the limited surface of our own planet. Another name for the syntheist temple is the Tower of God. And it is a tower with a door adorned by a sign with the following text: "Closed during your lifetime. If you are lucky your children might get in." The straight-foward explanation is that the emergences that change history in earnest only can take shape through resistance and limitations. That this is the state of things does, in true Hegelian spirit, give more rather than less energy and prestige to the Tower of God. And that the Tower of God during informationalism urges meditation and reflection around an idea and an ambition toward the adultification of civilization in itself. What is meant is that even if Man is unable to undergo a gradual improvement and refinement, this is definitely not the case with the technology that constantly is developed and precisely refined. And since Man and Machine from now on will look forward to a common future together in the form of [[Symbiotic Intelligence]], this is precisely where we put our hopes. Thankfully there is not that much to choose from. While these hopes propel the idea that the eventological event *par excellence* during informationalism is an initiation ritual for civilization in itself and as a whole. We are thus not speaking of the nomadological event that appears every time a child is recognized as a young adult by the sociont's elders, but are rather concerned with the adultification of the entire civilization as an eventological one-off event. The technological prerequisite for this event is the arrival of the sensocracy. And a longed-for confirmation that this event actually has taken place is the completion of a trio of Protopias that are called ecotopianism, cosmopolitanism, and syntheism.