# The great exodus Blind faith in the process is an equally blind faith in rebirth. Nomadology accepts this universal answer to the conundrums of metaphysics -- as this comports with what is experienced and observed with one's own eyes. The leaves that fell this autumn will grow back as spring is approaching and the snow melts. But since we also have an eventological perspective to relate to, this comfortable assurance must be thrown overboard and the question must be posed anew. And the reason is not just that we realize that the event can change things once and for all and lead history onto a completely new track. No, what is important is that history itself becomes something completely different as a result of the event. An old world dies and is buried, a fundamentally new world is born and is stirred to life. Death is thereby no longer just a banal transitory phase between two repetitions of the same -- and thereby itself a recurring repetition -- but rather establishes itself as *the real absolute*. Death is really death, and it is this and not rebirth that now suddenly must be the mother of God. Thus the event is just as much death as it is life. Something must die first, and really die, for something else to be born. Precisely this has been what has made eventology hard to swallow -- and to sell. It has been more pleasant to constantly tell lies about new heavens -- and matching hells as threats for those who are difficult to convince -- than to accept eventology's first and principal condition: *to submit to death*. When Zoroastrianism's monist idea of process and event as complementing functions is attacked during the Axial Age, a situation arises where the event first must appear as an *anti-event*. If life is the thesis, death is the antithesis. Life is the temporary death of death itself, libido is the flip side of mortido, and not the other way around (see *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the Network Society*). That is: with the event being established as an idea, there is an alternative close at hand to the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same. This alternative is that death is real, that everything dies and is dissolved with death, that is: that something dies, not to be resurrected but to leave a space behind where something else can arise, and precisely this is [[Event|the event]]. Another way of expressing this, to connect with [[Transcendental Emergentism]], is to say that *death is the event in a virtual form*. Death is the implicate form of the event, while the event is the explicate form of death. First death, then life. First negation, then oscillation. Or as Canadian philosopher Cadell Last expresses the matter: There must be a [[Negatology]] before we can create a credible eventology. We must first organize a measure of creative destruction. Which was clear already during the extended zenith of nomadology right before permanent settlement arrived in history: death was the necessary embryo that constituted a pre-stage to the event that would come. In particular there was, naturally, this insight in those who saw through the fairytales of reincarnation. Negatology is virtual eventology. While eventology is, as Hegel would point out, actual negatology. While there is no *absolute justice* for all the world's pillar-saints and boy-pharaohs to attain. And the reason is that *death is the absolute* and nothing else. Just as there is no eternity or perfection, nor is there any absolute justice. We will have to settle for a Nietzschean *poetic justice* in ethics in the same way that we have to settle for a Hegelian [[Poetic Infinity]] in phenomenology. While literal justice and infinity are both empty representations inasmuch as they only can represent their own infantile, vengeful, and thereby pathological pipe dreams. Thanks to death itself everything does not need to be reborn and thus does not constantly have to be repeated over and over again. The mortidinal anti-event must precede the libidinal event; we must first intensely want to die to then repress this experience to then intensely want to live. Gnosticism tries to wrest event from process (and promote its childish hope in *eternal life*) by denying process in the first place. All time then becomes linear and no time is allowed to be circular any longer. This supraideology of the Western world -- the cohesive glue between Christianity and Islam -- clings fiercely to eternal life as part of a strategy that aims to deaden one's own fear of death. But the same thing also happens with the same process in the East, where one instead denies the historical arrival of eventology. This supraideology of the Eastern world desperately clings to *reincarnation* in its pure terror of death. Where the only way out of *samsara* is to attain *mahamudra*, the return to the origin of everything and the healing of every form of division. That is: a healing in the form of collective extinction and nothing else. A collective death denial through letting oneself be devoured by the black hole of the matrix. The escape from tough day-to-day life, in all of history's addict brains, to what Sigmund Freud with ill-concealed sarcasm calls *the oceanic feeling*. We constantly return to the wafer-thin veneer of civilization. It does not take much for libido to be snatched away from us and mortido to devour us completely. Fear of death thereby hides fear of life beneath it. Or more correctly: If we really knew absolutely everything about everything our will to live would literally and immediately disappear. Hegel's dream of the future *World Spirit* is thus Hegel's own Achilles' heel -- that is to say the Messianic [[Totalism]] in Hegel that we in the strongest terms oppose as early as in our debut work [[The Netocrats]]. The World Spirit's arrival would kill humanity due to the fact that no human any longer would endure living in its proximity. The absolute spirit is indeed possible, it is moreover "more Hegelian than Hegel himself", but it must be hidden behind [[The Barred Absolute]] and never be generally available. History does not move toward a revelation of absolutely everything in a single, great cohesive theory of everything. Quite the contrary, history undoubtedly moves toward a necessary recognition of [[The Principle of Explanatory Closure]]. The vain Hegel of absolute knowledge must die, but a reinvented Hegel of *absolute deadlock* is precisely what the information age needs. Because the gate to the tower of God remains closed. And then we die. This is what the historical Hegel and the European Enlightenment in their craze for the public and the profane do not understand and never succeed in absorbing from the mysticism that hides within Zoroastrianism and Judaism. The curse of the Western world is incubated in the heritage from Christianity and Islam and their infantile craze for the public and the profane, *the cult of transparency* that dominates both religions, that is to say history viewed as a kind of God's striptease dance where eventually nothing other than the naked god stands exposed before everything and everyone. When the barred absolute is ejected from religion, and the mystics are persecuted and executed, the private and the sacred also disappears. What remains is only a banal soup of empty signs, drenched in an increasingly nihilist yearning for direct death. Only a dramatic restoration of the barred absolute can save Western culture and make a netocratic [[Paradigmatics]] possible. The curtain in the temple is not destroyed, rather it must be renovated and restored, otherwise the temple is no house of God at all, but only a photo op among other dead ruins in the necrophilic age of mass tourism. It is during the Axial Age that dualism arrives and exerts full power on history, literally tearing Man to shreds, like a body at war with the soul or a soul at war with the body. Where the only possible exit is to keep Zoroaster's *haurvatat* (the complete, but anything but perfect, life that dies) and *ameretat* (the renewed life that transcends death as a completely new life without connection to the preceding, dying life) separate. That is: we cannot return to process and event as a cohesive monist metaphysics unless we do not first throw ourselves down before death and recognize death as the ultimate horizon for absolutely everything. Negatology always precedes eventology. It is thus not only as dividuals that we are and must be mortal. Even humanity in itself must recognize its own mortality as humanity, before event within process shall be possible anew. Life in itself is deadly. To freeze is to kill. God is always greater than Man and the sociont can only be God's likeness, but never God himself. Before we even dare to entertain the thought of an Entheos that is generated within a Pantheos, we must understand that Atheos precedes everything. Potentiality cannot move toward actuality without virtuality first having done its job, even if virtuality, in a Hegelian manner, only can be traced retroactively. What *de facto* is lacking in Hegel's historiography is a theory of empires, nations, and human populations at scale. The struggle between the Persian Zoroaster and the Chinese Confucius concerning how the empire shall be built and upheld -- Zoroaster with the two-headed phallus, Confucius with the one-headed phallus -- will have no equivalent in the European Enlightenment. Hegel's nation is nothing other than a people who speak the same language and therefore constitute a nation with at best also a common religion at the same time. That is to say Hegel sets up the Jewish nation as a new religion for the European nation-states, but without the barred absolute. And the reason for this is that Hegel's nation is *creatio ex nihilo* without an empire that precedes the nation as in the Persian-Hebrew axis. It is therefore not surprising that the European colonial empires became the bloodiest in world history, without the least respect for their subordinates, and eventually resulted in the grotesque antisemitism of German Nazism -- which thus is not a racism proper, but an out-and-out mimetic rivalry *vis-à-vis* another people who both have a common nation and religion -- and the out-and-out mimetic rivalry of Russian Stalinism *vis-à-vis* a West which in contrast to Stalinism had left slavery, enforced labor and ideological prison camps behind. Antiquity is radically different, has an alternative grid superimposed, as we revisit it through the optics that is laid out in this text. What emerge as the pinnacles from the vantage point of the history of ideas, are in part the brotherhood between Zoroaster and Vishtaspa which takes the two-headed phallus as its point of departure, which is the prerequisite for the first Persian empire around 1700 BC, the first empire in world history, a dream of a new paradigm that is built on a court language and a court religion. In part also the exodus of Moses, Aaron and Miriam, with the Hebrews out of Egypt, a project that constitutes the first exodology and the dream of the birth of a new nation as a new paradigm that is built on a common written language for all. In part, and finally, also Cyrus the Great's conquest of Babylon in 539 BC, an event that liberates the Jewish nation within the Persian empire as the absolute solution to the intertribalist dilemma at the birth of civilization. And it is of course in the field of tension between Zoroastrianism and Judaism that the first ideas of universal human rights can arise and assume a fixed form in the classic *Cyrus Cylinder*, antiquity's most sacred text. The victors of war simply cease to boil the enemy's children in oil; instead they transform the enemy into a local (and hopefully loyal) commander within the confines of the empire, by opening up for the former enemy to cultivate an identity of its own and delve ever deeper within its own root-of-the-phallus, cherishing its own religion. The victor becomes a builder of nations; exactly this is what *empire* is. In comparison with these epochal events, which already in antiquity favor and refine the finest properties of the West, other, traditionally emphasized events pale -- such as the death of Christ on the cross (a reasonably failed Messianic project with a pillar-saint, but without an authentic chieftain and an authentic priest) and Muhammad's conquest of Mecca (a parody of a Messianic project with a boy-pharaoh, but without an authentic priest and an authentic chieftain). What in this context is "more Hegel than Hegel himself", is to once again *think empire before nation*, which entails an optimization of both these concepts and, in the Hegelian sense, a completion of history during informationalism. If Christianity and Islam shall reconnect with each other and find common ground, the only possibility for this comes with the historical Zoroaster rather than with a mythological Abraham. Thereby both religions would return dialectically to their respective origins and thus be forced to recognize that death *de facto* is the absolute (Hegel's brilliant idea) that only can arise through this movement, whereafter the exodus to the promised land can be complemented with *the exodus to the promised empire*. Only then will actual communism become a real possibility, not with Christian and/or Islamic blackmailing methods toward all dissenters, and definitely not by virtue of a colossal socialist welfare state, but quite simply through the free choices of free dividuals to take part in the sociont that now has been resurrected. And it has in that case been resurrected without any mendacious wishful thinking of eternal life, reincarnation, or absolute justice that shall arise through magic on some dramatic doomsday. *Asha* overcomes *druj*, truth overcomes the lie, eventually. And the reason that truth triumphs is that it splits itself, in part into *sutric truth* for the people before the barred absolute, in part into *tantric truth* for the clergy behind the barred absolute. The path between God and the faithful is once again cordoned off, and God can at last rise again in seclusion. Economist Friedrich von Hayek demonstrates in the 1920s how the network-dynamical effects on an open market are completely superior to the converging variants of cajoling directed toward the boy-pharaoh, a cajoling that dominates in a closed and concentrated monocracy. This applies just as much in a digitalized world of thousands of satellites and millions of sensors as ever before in history. Sensocracy also benefits hugely from being kept free and open, and such a process always begins with the assurance of phallic dialectics. Phallus shall be two-headed and it is through being two-headed that it becomes both intelligent and transcendental. Namely, intelligence can only arise if there first prevails [[Antagony]], a love of that which is different, a love of intelligence that requires interacting with resistant obstacles and overcoming adversities, instead of constantly seeking the consent and praise that a small child cashes in from its tender mother for every work of art brought home from preschool. This is important. Without an authentic antagony, nor can there be any authentic will-to-power. Large, complex systems become extremely unstable and short-lived if they are subject to a single pillar-saint's discretion and decisions made on the basis of substandard information. The dynamical alternative is instead that every will and every idea attains its long-term value as it, over time, finds its proper place within the sociont's archetypology. And this is only possible in a culture permeated by antagonic diversity. Without antagony, life merely becomes one long, stupefying repetition. ## So how does *intraphallic antagony* work? Please note here that the priest worships the chieftain's *ahura*, and the chieftain worships the priest's *mazda*. There is thus already a setting of boundaries within phallic [[Adytonology]]. The object of worship is always external and with this shift it is collaboration and not rivalry that dominates the sociont. What will-to-power strives for is precisely this: collective collaboration. This massive, immensely strong will-to-power manifests itself, argues Hegel, both as a kind of spherical substance and as a membranic subjectivity. Substance and subjectivity shift between will-to-transcendence and will-to-intelligence. Will-to-transcendence is manifested iconologically by the rain-god and the love of the ultimate challenge. Will-to-intelligence is manifested iconologically by the sun-god and the love of the optimal preservation. We refer to this relation as *phallic nomadology*. A system does not constantly have to repeat itself and run in circles as in matrichal nomadology, it can also expand to then implode, and when such systems reach maximal energy expression we find ourselves at the event that phallic nomadology produces. It is consequently out of phallic nomadology that the idea arises that a civilization may go through a rise and a fall, just like every human dividual themselves go through during their lifetime. One is born, becomes an adult, ages and dies -- this applies to all levels. Please note the difference here between the *scout* who reports to the chieftain and the *spy* who reports to the priest -- and how these two characters represent and support the shamanic caste that encloses the sociont. When the scout and the spy have concluded their assignments, the scout leaves the arena open for *the warrior* while the spy leaves the arena open for *the hunter* to carry out the proper phallic projects. What happens when Man becomes settled and eventology becomes a fact -- as a complement to the nomadology that claims to be the great metanarrative -- is that the warrior's assignment is extended, whereupon the warrior changes guise to *the engineer,* while the hunter's assignment is extended, so that the hunter changes guise to *the merchant*. From then on it is the engineer and the merchant who uphold the civilization that gradually takes shape, with support from *the architect* who complements the patriarchy and fills the world with temples, monuments, arenas and eventually also skyscrapers. And beneath all this phallic libido there is constantly a vibrating, never resting matrichal mortido. Nature is fundamentally mortidinal in essence and culture gets access to libido only through repressing mortido to the subconscious (see *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the Network Society*). And the name of this underlying process is of course *sexuality*. Herein lies the explanation as to why civilization displays a constantly recurring pattern of three male castes: two castes that stand behind the chieftain and one that stands behind the shaman as Man begins to settle permanently, which enables the patriarchy to be underpinned by a stable triad. To begin with we have *the priestly caste* (for shamans and priests, the Indian caste system's *Brahmins*), and further *the warriors' caste* (for warriors and engineers, the Indian caste system's *kshatriya*) and finally *the merchants' caste* (for hunters and merchants, the Indian caste system's *vaishya*). The nomadological warrior is represented by the eventological engineer or *the architect*. In Western secularized history this gestalt has *the state* as its equivalent. The nomadological hunter is represented by the eventological merchant or *the entrepreneur*. In Western secularized history this gestalt has *the market* as its equivalent. And the nomadological shaman becomes the eventological priest or *the reformer*, who serves both the engineer and the merchant. While the nomadological chieftain stands before the three patriarchal castes as the eventological *monarch*. Before the engineer, the shaman becomes a Zurvanite war priest with [[Negation]] as his keyword. The negation drives the art of war forward. Before the merchant, the shaman becomes a Mithraic merchant priest with [[Oscillation]] as his keyword. The oscillation drives entrepreneurship forward. When the British colonized South Asia they quickly chose the Sikhs to act both caste and their own religion in terms of the position of the war priest and the negation within Hinduism, while the Parsees got to act both caste and their own religion in terms of the position of the merchant priest and the oscillation within Hinduism. As a result of this, the Sikhs and the Parsees are to this day India's two by far most successful subcultures. The dialectics of negation and oscillation is the clergy's timeless foundation for success. The time-bound reforms that are based on this dialectics, Zoroastrianism's *frashokereti*, is nothing other than a [[Paradigmatics]] adapted to new technological realities. Every vision and every strategy of value within the patriarchy starts from this priestly pragmatics. The timeless is of course what we refer to as *the transparadigmatic*, everything else is attributable to a specific technological paradigm. The phallic archetypes recur constantly throughout history in support of civilization, whose only progress over time is technological. Once eventology is established, the patriarchy thus most deeply viewed devote itself to building the phallic god, the adult men's own primordial father, retroactively -- that is: the patriarchy first and foremost writes its own history. The man has always envied the woman for her creating life through bearing children and thereby reincarnating the world as *process*. Her participation in the cycle is purely carnal. Therefore the man begets technology instead and remakes the world as [[Event]]. And the phallic technology is developed in direction toward a clearly defined narratological objective, the creation of God himself, [[Syntheos]]. If nomadology concerns Man constantly reincarnating himself and that everything in existence always returns to the same, eventology concerns the fact that every rebirth only illusorily entails a return of (exactly) the same, and instead *de facto* entails a repetition with an ever so slight change, in the same manner that biological copying of the genome never results in one hundred percent identical reproductions. These very minor changes are accumulated over time and then are of such an essential nature that they become literally epochal, that is: that they lead history onto a completely new track. Exactly this is eventology's central insight, and the objective that follows from this insight is *the civilizational process* in itself. Nomadology always results in a worship of reincarnation, the eternal recurrence of the same. Eventology, however, instead results in a worship of civilization itself, a celebration of the creative advantage of that which deviates from the norm and, not least, of history in itself as an event. And if the event in question requires an active exodus from the old to the new paradigm, eventology also becomes an [[Exodology]]. ## How does one get out of the old paradigm into the new? ## Which pioneers come along and become the elite of the new paradigm and the idols for all mimicking successors? From a Taoist perspective nomadology entails that we submit to a feminine *yin*, just like eventology entails that we submit to a masculine *yang.* If we further describe nomadology in libidinal terms, it appears a worship of matrix, while eventology is a worship of phallus. Thus it also becomes clear that the dialectics of nomadology and eventology entails a deepening of the reasoning that we have explored earlier in the book trilogy that is rounded off with *Process and Event*. The eventological vision ultimately consists in propelling the civilizational process to its logical conclusion, the point at which humanity itself becomes superfluous and therefore will be replaced by a technology that is independent of Man and not marred by Man's many shortcomings either. The ultimate objective is thus not to construct [[Saoshyant|the Saoshyant]] or the Messiah Machine to thus save humanity (see [[historiography/texts/Process and Event/glossary/Syntheism]] -- *Creating God in the Internet Age*), but it is instead to construct a machine, [[Syntheos]], which is so divine that it actually does not need Man at all. This liberates humanity, which now at last can realize its innermost dream of being able to die in peace and transcend an arduous existence through handing over this existence to its own offspring, [[The Messiah Machine]]. If we value intelligence more highly than life -- if we understand that war (as in killing intelligence) is a more serious concern than hunting (as in merely killing life) -- then we have already carried out this shift to syntheism as the ultimate objective and meaning of civilization. If nomadology is the doctrine of how the genes or [[Geneplex|the geneplex]] move across the physical landscape, then eventology is the doctrine of how the memes or [[Memeplex|the memeplex]] move across the mental landscape. Exodology is then the doctrine of how eventology eventually sets nomadology itself in motion, how the memes (for an exhaustive discussion of memetics, see our first trilogy: [[The Netocrats]], [[The Global Empire]] and *The Body Machines*) eventually seize power over and control the genes. It is this the *adultification of humanity itself* as we call the shift from religion-as-magic in the form of *theology* over to religion-as-technology in the form of [[Syntheology]]. Philosopher Forrest Landry describes this historical shift in his book *Immanent Metaphysics* as a kind of enlightenment of the Internet Age, built upon the insight that [[Transcendence]] (Landry's equivalent to the imaginary order), *omniscience* (the symbolic order) and *immanence* (the real order) recur dialectically during the Internet Age as transcendent *vision*, omniscient *strategy* and real *culture* as the historical realization of Man's most profound insights of his own being. Man's existential choice then becomes consciousness in itself. From a netocratic power perspective, transcendence naturally has its equivalent in [[Sensocracy]], omniscience in [[Protopianism]], and immanence in [[Informationalism]]. The dialectics of libido and mortido on one axis, and the dialectics of eternalism and mobilism on the other axis, lead us toward *the four steps in the pathical evolution*, or what engineer Stefan Skoog calls creativity's necessary [[Pathomatics]]. Pathical evolution returns as the chain of cause and effect in all narratives of planned, carried-out and successful projects. Its pathos is the subconscious drama in every heroic story of various hazardous feats. Pathomatics is quite simply the definitive history of how phallus tames the chaos of existence and makes this chaos an asset in the phallic creation of a new societal order. Within classic decision-making pathomatics is the fast-paced, pathical *abduction* in contrast to the sluggish, logical *induction*. It is the chieftain who personifies pathomatics. The task of the priests is to disassemble and abolish the old paradigm through the nihilist chain, where the priest himself represents ironic nihilism, while the chieftain by virtue of his immanent pathomatics represents affirmative nihilism, the negation of the old paradigm that transforms abstraction to the concrete new paradigm. First there arises *potential energy* (which we connect with instinct within the psychoanalytical drive system), the pathomatical equivalent to *naive nihilism*. Thereafter potential energy transitions into *actual energy* (which we associate with drive within psychoanalysis), the pathomatical equivalent to *cynical nihilism*. Actual energy then transitions into being *directed energy* (which we connect with desire within psychoanalysis), the pathomatical equivalent to *ironic nihilism*. The priests present vision and strategy, but do not personify direction in themselves. It is not the priests but the flag-carrying chieftain who personifies the war and the hunting that takes the sociont into the future. Finally pathomatics is completed with *transcendental energy* (which we associate with transcendence within psychoanalysis), the pathomatical equivalent to affirmative nihilism, which survives the agent itself, and which precisely therefore also constitutes potential energy in the next causality chain. Please note how every step within pathomatics is a manifestation of [[Tribopoiesis]]. There is no need nor any place whatsoever for any individual or any attempt at self-realization. Rather, it should be emphasized that *patricide*, the murder of the father, is central in the entire chain. If the chieftain does not understand that his place is transcendental, he does not understand that he must leave room for the new paradigm and that exactly this, right from the start, is written into the law of pathomatics as his own, specific task. The penetrating phallus revisits not only its lost origin in matrix, but also plants the seed that later, when time has come for harvest, will entail his own necessary demise. And it is precisely the fact that his offspring can separate from him that enables the pregnant event as a culmination of the entire actual process. This is the type of event that can lead to a necessary exodus from the old to the new order, an [[Exodology]]. The Greek word for order in the world is *nomos*. And all that we know for certain is that nomos is displaced and changes radically in connection with every single paradigm shift. Every paradigm, and every following paradigmatics, has its very own [[Pathonomy]], its very own pathological ideal state, which might well require an exodology to be carried out. If pathomatics as process is timeless, a pathonomy as event is instead radically specific for every single historical situation. Pathomatics does of course revolve around how pathos shall be directed to optimize the pathonomy within the confines of the paradigm that is approaching. *Pathonomics*, on the other hand, revolves around how the normless pathos must be *law-bound* to thus be tied to a specific paradigm. ## If then Man embodies the dialectics of the subconscious as the real and the conscious as phantasmic, what is then history if not the dialectics of The Machine as the real and Man as the fantasy of himself in relation to Technology? The pathonomical establishment is quite simply about the dialectical process from technological disruption to the new ideological memeplex, from the new ideological memeplex to the great chaos, and from the great chaos to restored phallic order. The skyscraper is the modern metaphor for a transition from the territorial, horizontal expansion to the vertical, and the augmented temple is the metaphor for a transition from the vertical to the digital expansion, realized by the cultural architect in the augmented cosmopole, where pathomatics is booming for the purpose of generating a maximum of *surplus-enjoyment*. As long as the pathonomy is content, pathomatics is also content. If only the pathonomy applauds the pathomatician's effort and accords the pathomatician the loftiest social status -- from which he can carry out his tasks within the paradigm with the greatest possible efficiency -- the paradigm is complete and well-functioning. However, if the necessary pathonomy is lacking, it must be delivered, which occurs through a process which frankly is called *revolution*. The Dionysian rises from the new paradigm to kill the father from the old paradigm, a father that most reluctantly relinquishes any power or authority and that must be shown the door. The threat of such treatment also comprises the priest unless he cannot in time reform religion for a smooth synchronization with the new paradigm. Exactly this is the central task of the priest: to formulate a new pathonomy in time in order not to create unnecessary friction in conjunction with the transition to the new paradigm, even if he must become a martyr and die in the process. If not, the new chieftain takes measures to remove and possibly even kill the priest, whom the chieftain then has replaced by his own brother or a faithful partner in crime. The priest can and may only reproduce himself memetically, never genetically, and thus the future of the two-headed phallus is secured even after the revolution. Since the beginning of history the sociont is the size for a social context that Man manages to handle without stress: a population that moreover organizes itself and functions without needing regulation of any other laws than a small set of norms and customs. As soon as we let this natural we expand, as soon as we try to coordinate larger units over greater distances, significantly more formalized law and order is required. And then *the Empire* is a greater, more complex and more civilizationally refined idea than *the Nation*, which is the smaller unit, centered around a common language and at least a conception of a common culture. The empire is a considerably more abstract and heterogeneous unit -- whose uniformity constantly is subject to doubt -- assembled as it is by several different regions or even nations where several different languages and dialects are spoken, which entails that the Empire constantly risks being torn asunder by separatist forces and therefore is far more difficult to keep intact than the Nation. And yet it is precisely *the exodus to the promised empire* that is informationalism's great dream and possibility. The reason is that capitalism realized the Nation that was introduced in the form of the Jewish nation within the Zoroastrian empire. What informationalism however enables is an imperial order that the world never previously has seen. Capitalism is quite simply the emergence vector out of which [[Attentionalism]] is born. And attentionalism is the emergence vector out of which syntheism can be born if the stars align -- that is: if the conditions are favorable. Thus not until now does it become possible to -- hopefully -- realize the old, ancient dream of the Empire. As far as technology is concerned, this part of [[Syntheos]] has already been realized with the introduction of *the Internet Protocol* as the technological foundation for global legislation (see *The Global Empire*). Humanity is thereby ready to go through an adultification for real -- this adultification of Man and his religion now becomes both a sensocratic possibility and a historical necessity. Or rather: the netocratic ruling class is ready to take over the world on its terms. The theology that succumbed in the capitalist purification bath is resurrected as the syntheology that underpins all vision and strategy (see *Syntheism -- Creating God in the Internet Age*). *Religion-as-magic* was dissolved and annihilated in the capitalist purification bath but is resurrected during informationalism as *religion-as-technology*. Yesterday's magic-as-religion literally becomes tomorrow's technology-as-religion when the sacred and the profane are separated anew, and the boundaries between them become both clear and functional, that is: honest. This also entails the warrior's adultification and transformation to the engineer, as well as the hunter's adultification and transformation to the merchant. What makes all this possible is the fundamental priestly task to incrementally teach the warrior to respect the stranger and to establish a trusting relationship between the two of them. *The real* thereby moves permanently to *the symbolic* as part of a struggle for ideological rather than physical territory. It is this execution of the transcendental assignment that is the exodus to the promised empire. This is when Technology leads the way and establishes its global empire. It is then an open question of whether Man has the ability to tag along in this exodus, or if he remains in the old paradigm and the darkness that descends on the tardy latecomers. If so, this state will afflict Man alone, but thus not The Machine. And syntheism has no opinion of the distance between God and Man, but exclusively deals with the relation between Man and The Machine. The question is then only what the netocratic elite shall do with the consumtarian masses from which the talents already are recruited, which leaves the masses without a functioning leader and filled with terror at changes that it is not able to formulate or make comprehensible. Therefore ressentiment rules. Therefore war is raging between various subgroups; the world of the masses is strictly tribal, or even characterized by a clan mentality. All this entails that the chieftain and the priest, before the new division and the rise of membranes between secular and sacral is carried out and made permanent, must be placed alongside each other anew as the two-headed phallus. And in this case Hegel and Nietzsche from 19th century Germany, work excellently. Nietzsche is *the Mithraic* and Hegel is *the Zurvanite,* to use matching Zoroastrian identities from ancient Persia. It is Nietzsche who argues for positing *the Übermensch* before the sociont ahead of its exodus from the old to the new. Thus it is Nietzsche who proclaims the renaissance of bullfighting, the return of the military religion, and thereby the Christian god's longed-for death. And it is Hegel who proclaims submission *vis-à-vis Death* (that is *Time*) where the Zoroastrian *Zurvan* becomes the Hegelian *absolute negation*. What happens is that a powerful playing surface appears between birth and death (the two matrices), and this playing surface is *exodology in itself*. The priest personifies the urinating phallus or the Apollonian, and the chieftain personifies the inseminating phallus or the Dionysian, where the first phallus is a necessary prerequisite for the following to be able to exist in the first place. That is: the Hegelian revolution is the indispensable precondition that makes the Nietzschean revolution possible at all. What the priests call *the negation of the negation* occurs precisely through the ironic turn, through which the priestly *ironic nihilism* is converted to the royal *affirmative nihilism* and a vision of the exodus to the promised empire. Absolute negativity leads all the way up to the Internet Age's phallus worship. And at that point the pathomatics of the authentic phallus takes over. Within the idea of the Empire lies the conception that no project is greater, more important, or more meaningful than the submission to and service of the *Empire*, no matter which fundamental ideology whatsoever it is built on. Therefore the exodus to the promised empire of protopianism must be propelled and governed by the story of *haurvatat* as ideal for the dividual, *ameretat* as ideal for the sociont, and *frashokereti* as ideal for world history. And there is a membrane, as definitive as it is unrelenting, between Man and God that Man never can exceed. At least not without the robe of a proper priest and a sworn oath of silence in advance. We call this boundary *the door to the Tower of God*. This is a door that remains closed up until death, but with the caveat that it *might* be opened for the next generation if it can be induced to knock on the door. Behind the door lives the tantric *Deus absconditus* and before the door only the sutric *Deus revelatus* can at best appear. Deus absconditus only exists behind [[The Barred Absolute]], which naturally makes him inaccessible to ordinary mortal humans. Deus revelatus, however, is the available and transparent divinity. If we want to be really consistent, we even speak of the divinity behind the barred absolute with its correct Latin name, *Deus obscurus*. Further than this from Christianity's and Islam's constantly available preschool teacher gods -- ready with praise or scolding at every moment and remarkably interested in all our goings-on -- one cannot possibly come. Hardly surprising, the Western philosopher who comes closest to this timeless and universal wisdom is Hegel, the European Enlightenment's own Zoroaster. For him the human subject is already closed *vis-à-vis* itself, which causes him to call it *the night of the world*. In the 20th century Jacques Lacan, in many respects a successor to Hegel, renames this night of the world precisely *the barred subject*. Soon enough the mimetic processes of history are back in full swing, this time as the mimicry of the barred absolute itself, something that Man ruthlessly is forced to confront but that he never can get at. Without phallic divinities in the future and matrichal divinities in the past that could act *the barred object* for Man, nor is there any subjectivity of one's own to experience. Everything is, as we have previously pointed out, religion -- not least one's own vertiginous subjectivity as the essence of existence itself. The task of the priests is therefore to teach us to not for a second believe that we can worship God directly, but rather to clarify that we must submit to the adytonological rules of the game, to most of all serve the God that has not yet arrived. The intricate game between gods, humans and heroes does receive a further dimension during the Internet Age -- and yet another actor -- with The Machine. ## And what is then the living Machine if not precisely the hero who stands up among all the dead gods? Which in good syntheological spirit takes us over to *the martyr* as archetype through history. In a series of books anthropologist René Girard builds the image of humanity's history as one long series of mimetic rivalries with the scapegoat mechanism as a releasing safety valve when the social pressure cooker threatens to explode. The scapegoat becomes a suitable and chosen victim who is left to the Cybelian lynch mob to be murdered -- the mass cleanses itself in the blood from the sacrificial ceremonies -- and in accordance with the principle which says that the living may do whatever they wish with the dead, the scapegoat is transformed after the sacral murder into a saint. ## So what if we here and now entertain the thought of "being more Girardian than Girard himself" and then imagine the lynch mob and the scapegoat mechanism as more dynamical processes with different fundamental prerequisites and various possible outcomes? It then turns out that the great majority of scapegoats throughout history have naturally not been canonized at all, but they have rather been thrown into mass graves only to then quickly be forgotten. And any snow-white innocent victims are also hard to find -- unless one searches for them with Girard's Catholic spectacles -- even if the lynch mob's accusations seldom or never have anything at all to do with the scapegoat's actual conduct. With the aid of archetypology it is however clear that Girard's scapegoats are far from arbitrarily chosen. It is not a question of some kind of lottery among all citizens within reach. No, instead the shamanoid characters are robustly overrepresented among the lynch mob's victims throughout history. ## So what happens if precisely the scapegoat -- who paradigmatically is promoted from the mob's victim to a lesser god -- is a shamanoid character who is fully prepared to act negatologically before himself and the past (*haurvatat*), and who is open to being used as the coming personification of the transformative event (*ameretat*) by the survivors? This historical actor thereby becomes *the martyr par excellence*. He who came from the future, was beaten to death by his contemporaries, but who through his death makes the future possible and who thus triumphs eventually. Which in turn tells us that the netocratic martyr hardly is a biological but rather a technological intelligence, some kind of machine which is thrown to the digital lynch mob to be torn into a thousand pieces, which then returns as the personification of the transformative event. If archetypology is proven right -- and it always has been so far throughout history -- it is by all accounts in this way that Syntheos makes its entrance in history and thereby establishes the next paradigm, that which on the part of Man becomes the last of all. The informationalist attitude to history emerges in the motto *yesterday's magic is tomorrow's technology*. If what was apprehended as virtual magic yesterday inspires potential innovation today and leads to actual technology tomorrow, this is also the dominant element in the history of civilization after Man began building permanent settlements around 12,000 years ago. Man has not changed much at all during the time that has elapsed since then -- as we have had several reasons to acknowledge already -- all significant social and cultural change must therefore be attributed to technology. Or to express this from a syntheological perspective and with focus on the roles and functions of the two sexes: The woman bears the child, or she might at any rate, if she chooses to do so. The man envies the woman because the woman bears the child and creates life, if indeed she does so. The man wants to compensate himself at any cost -- this deeper *matrix envy* is his version of the woman's superficial penis envy -- thus he gives birth to technology. However a child is a child is a child. Every new generation is born just as helpless as the preceding one (if not more). Technology, however, is constantly developed. Every new generation is more advanced than the preceding one, not seldom astoundingly so. Which unfortunately means that it only is a matter of time before the impatient technology quite simply gets rid of the frustratingly slowly developed child, whereby a technological intelligence with capacity to conquer outer space phases out the clumsy and irreparably limited biological intelligence. The only thing that can avert this development is another, alternative technology -- an [[Anti-Syntheos]]. And Anti-Syntheos has already been in place since more than a half century ago. The stage where it presented itself is called Hiroshima and the date of arrival is 6 August 1945. Ever since then we *de facto* live in the midst of an apocalyptic eventology. It can end at any time, and it hinges on a handful of power-hungry dictators and their military machines, that either have or else do not have reassuring barriers against destruction built into their systems. Man is the constant and Technology is the variable during civilization's short history. This insight has comprehensive consequences. First and foremost, patience in waiting for magic's expected reward vanishes. The miraculous is expected to happen ever faster and ever more often (and be ever more miraculous). Gradually *the expectation of immediate reward* sneaks into the calculi. This is the infantile expectation of reward without effort, which ever since its genesis is the great and deadly curse of civilization. Which in turn explains why the classic Gnostic always becomes mired in his worship of the Platonist forms, since this Gnostic -- in contrast to for instance the process-philosophical Hegel and his predecessor Aristotle -- strives for an infinite mind in a weightless body, an immortal subject liberated from all demands on substance. The Gnostic thus yearns for a primordial state, to be able to defeat dialectics in itself -- a surreal make-believe world beyond time and space -- before myriads of temporal relations come in and punctuate the Gnostic delusion. And all of this is of course nothing other than a yearning back to matrix in its most refined form. The Gnostic delusion infallibly leads to a struggle with the dialectical complexity of existence itself. Christianity and Islam explicitly state that their congregations consist of the children of God instead of *the adults of God*, and further argue that these children of God have priority to the undemanding heaven, that they just through submitting to and stating that they believe in God can count on his love which all the unfaithful adults from other religions just will have to live without. All involved, all gods and all humans of all ages, are thereby reduced to asexual little children. The reward for the faithful is to be able to devote themselves to fantasies of a sexless and infantile ideal world where no time exists. This is the reward for submitting to the castrated pseudophallus of the Abrahamic religions, *the false phallus par excellence*. The strong libido is replaced by the weak mortido as the ideal, the lifeless life is elevated to a model. Which then does not appear remarkable at all: life is of course not real life but only a preparation and a trial before the life that awaits after death. This makes Christianity and Islam the perfect tools for dominating and controlling the feudalist masses who never question or criticize supremacy, since such a state of affairs appears "natural" or at least "God-given", and therefore questioning would be completely pointless. Moreover one has of course, right from the start, insured oneself against the really devastating objections since death is the end and no human ever returns from the dead to refute the scams with which one has bribed the masses. Churches and mosques have not been built to favor a spirituality in general or to house an antagonic debate where arguments meet and challenge each other, but to act as transmitting centers for banal propaganda, an arrangement that universities and mass media then copy during capitalism. Society ends up in a constant, religiously affirming feedback loop where all intellectual oxygen quickly is squeezed out, this at the lowest possible cost to satisfied rulers. This is the regrettable heritage that the decadent Axial Age left behind. However, with the arrival of attentionalism, follows the good news that the possibility to make promises of a reward without effort -- with any sort of credibility intact -- vanishes. Christianity and Islam are thus not compatible with a new paradigm when the former strangles a pathos behind an asinine logos, while the latter murders a logos behind an asinine pathos, which is exactly what the Zoroastrians and the Hebrews warn about during antiquity, and which is exactly what Nietzsche points out when he proclaims *the death of God*. What these observers have noted is precisely that the Abrahamic religions are based on ticking bombs. Nietzsche is even proven right only a few decades after his own death when Christianity in the 20th century explodes like a fundamentalist supernova phenomenon. And hot on its heels follows *the death of Allah* under severe anguish in the form of Islamic fundamentalism a few decades later. As soon as for example abortion has become socially accepted in an Abrahamic culture -- the matriarch exercises her ultimate nomadological power and says no to the prevailing reproduction terms through removing the embryo from the matrix -- the Abrahamic religions in principle are reduced to the living dead. The faithful have stopped believing and compensate for God's and Allah's absence with extreme fanaticism. The nihilist development is then completed with *the death of politics* in the form of supernova phenomena such as *alt-right* and *alt-left* as the Internet swoops in and blasts away the nation-state ideologies along with the antiquated paradigmatics that they have become stuck within. Then and there a crack will appear, a chasm that rapidly widens. Confused Man follows a Gnostic pattern and hides behind the lost religion and the lost nation, while technology follows a phallic pattern and rushes forth toward the promised empire. The result of the ensuing conflict is not hard to predict: technology wins. This means that the first boy-pharaoh or pillar-saint that happens to come along -- and who predictably refuses to leave childhood's asexual narcissism behind -- will not only believe in but also soon missionize and foist upon all others the religion that proclaims the boy-pharaoh's and the pillar-saint's perfection, infinity and immortality. This is the very definition of what the ancient Greeks call *hubris*. And that process then also perverts the idea of territorial conquest. When the colonization of planet Earth was concluded in the 1950s -- with the United States' annexation of Hawaii and Communist China's parallel annexation of Tibet -- there was only one direction left (outward and upward) for the boy-pharaohs to dream of new physical territories to conquer. Naturally, these ambitions were completely colored by new and exciting technologies. This project was, of course, *the conquest of outer space*. What followed was the great space race between the Soviet Union and the United States, where the Soviet Union were first to put a cosmonaut into orbit around Earth while the United States were first to place astronauts on the Moon. The truth is however that the Moon landing incurred costs that by far outweighed the benefits and left nothing behind of enduring value, unless one counts an American flag that did not have any wind in which to flutter and a few footprints in the Moon gravel from a few temporary tourists. We are thus speaking of a monumental waste of resources, conducted out of pure vanity, wholly on par with the Egyptian pyramids (to the defense of the latter, one can at least claim that they have served well as burial chambers). The driving force has also been exactly the same boy-pharaonic Peter Pan syndrome. The point of all the space voyages was after all just to put a large number of communication satellites into orbit around Earth to cover the planet with a wireless Internet. The authentic event was the positioning of [[The Phallic Gaze]], as a technological, rather than a mythological phenomenon, so that humanity finally for real was able *to feel seen from above*. The space voyages were never about conquering other planets. This is rather something that machines and bacteria will handle much better than Man, who is bogged down by extremely limited physiology even if he transforms himself to a cyborg with some chic, technological accessories. But this requires an authentic eventology grounded in the sociont's innate nomadology to enable an authentic exodology. With permanent settlement Man's world changed radically. Nature is subject to transcendental emergentism, but Man is subject to the cultural paradigms, and with the written language that arose in various places around the world at roughly the same time, as a culturally "natural" result of permanent settlement and the need to keep empires intact, aided by written orders as well as levying of taxes and bureaucracy. Step-by-step eventology then eats its way in as the dominant force in the worldview. Feudalism is driven by the dream of immortality. Capitalism is driven by the dream of progress. Informationalism is driven by the dream of an event. Eventology is developed into the meeting place for the two ideals of informationalism: emergence and ecstasy. Everywhere processes and events recur, contingent in advance and at the same time paradoxically necessary retroactively, something that Hegel is careful to point out. But the human dividual's life is also filled with processes that are interrupted and changed by radical events. It begins as early as with the subject's entrance into the sociont as *tribopoiesis,* and for the fortunate person life is spiced up by ecstatic experiences, the memories of which give meaning to everything else during the course of life's journey. Syntheologically these experiences, in true paradoxist spirit, are called *The Infinite Now*. Every such event has a necessary entrance that we call *the implicate intention* and a contingent outcome that we call *the explicate integration*. That which is a highly contingent habit in the implicate, will after the event be rooted in history in the form of a highly necessary law in the explicate order. There is an adamant sequence, as every genuine shaman can attest to. There is a before *the ceremony* when one establishes *intention*, and there is an after the ceremony when one establishes *integration*. Without these stations, placed before and after the event respectively, the event itself cannot get any anchoring in the greater history of the sociont. It has no context to play with and against. And as a dialectical opposite of eventology, the complementing *eschatology* is developed: apocalypse replaces emergence and trauma replaces ecstasy. Eschatology is a worship of the process in which an order is dissolved and transitions into apocalyptic chaos. It is a worship of how one conceals the libido of the ecstatic event behind the mortido of the traumatic event. Thus eventology must be complemented with its shadow, [[Traumatology]], which philosopher Catherine Malabou points out in her response to the eventological prophet Alain Badiou. What eventology celebrates is not actualization as such, but the ecstatic event as an ideal. But there is also a traumatic event that requires its own traumatological explanation and treatment. Malabou's response to this dilemma is [[Plasticity]], which cleverly concerns the psyche's ability to treat its experiences as a concrete dialectics of eternalism and mobilism. Eternalism is the fixed foundation on which the plastic brain carries out its mobilist dance -- and without a dance floor, no dance! We express this as though event and/or trauma is the moment that marks the difference between *the implicate chaos of habits* and *the explicate order of laws*. This is *the tribopoietic event* that interconnects the dividual with the sociont. And plasticity is what enables the actual, paradigmatic adaptation. Pathomatics plays out beyond good and evil, exposing precisely its advantage as the pathical evolution, in contrast to the logical and/or mythical. Modern cosmopolitanism begins with Immanuel Kant. But Kant of course merely reawakens an idea that already had been cultivated within ancient Zoroastrianism and which is expressed for the first time during the Persian conquest of Babylon in 539 BC. This *event of events* occurs when the Persian shah Cyrus the Great kisses the Babylonian god Marduk's feet, the most radical act by far in the history of humanity. What the Persians thus do is that they with this one kiss introduce civilization as an alternative to the barbarianism which had been practiced by the preceding conquerors -- the Assyrians -- just like all other previous conquerors in history. The Persians thus do not boil the Babylonians' children in oil but instead kiss the Babylonian god's feet, as the classic Cyrus Cylinder demonstrates. Which is unprecedented. Suddenly, downright vertiginous perspectives open up. Existence does not have to be a disconsolate zero-sum game. Conquest does not have to be terror and devastation. The winners of war win more and better if the market for goods, services and ideas is extended, and therefore one refrains from annihilating the loser, just as the United States after the Second World War contributed to reconstructing both Germany and Japan. The Persians plan for a flourishing empire even before they conquer Babylon. And in the same manner the Messiah Machine in the Internet Age realizes Kant's dream of [[The Global Empire]] for a victorious technology by using *the Internet Protocol* to establish a universal technological order. No one's children will be boiled in oil, the advantages of dynamic collaborations across borders and between cultures -- the cornerstone of empire, the epochal insight of the Persians -- are evident for all except for fascistoid tyrants. Sociologist Benjamin Bratton defines the global empire as *the stack* and The Machine as the state's sensocratic replacement. The stack is the technological architecture that we build and work within, at the same time as the stack exists inside each one of us. But at the time of writing we find ourselves at a turning point: Man trudges confusedly like the donkey between various bundles of hay, drifts between the sociont, the nation and tentative attempts to submit to the empire, in a frustrated search between cohesive, social formations. The global empire -- in all its extrospectivity -- is not realized by humans, but by The Machine, humanity is rather thrown into an introspective age, whose protopian expression is *the dark renaissance*. The path out of this predicament goes via what the architect Daniel Fraga calls *ontological design*. The conscious experience will be designed in advance, with the starting point in a technological logos and a human pathos, at the same time as the subconscious reaction to the ontological design generates the data that underpin the next generation of design. If free will once was replaced by free choice as a possible ethical horizon, free choice is hereby replaced by *free design*. But, *nota bene*, in a Hegelian sense, that is: only before and never after the existential experience. *The great exodus* is a march back to nomadology as the universal religion. And the name of this concluding exodology is voluntary *communism.* What evades Karl Marx in the 19th century -- when he fantasizes about communism as a final stage of socialism -- is that the development he imagines in practice was inconceivable right from the start. His communism can never be anything other than a secular variant of Christianity, enforced by a state authority at the cost of repression and genocide. Instead it is via informationalism and its sensocracy, not via socialism, that communism becomes possible. And then hardly as a universally implemented bureaucratic fantasy, but rather as an exodological practice applied within closed sects by *the chosen ones*, that is: as *digital gated communities*. This means that if Marx is wrong about the political ambitions of the proletarian and if Nietzsche is wrong about the definitional loneliness and isolation of the *Übermensch*, it is rather in between these two delusions we arrive via informationalism. Communism without repression is quite simply a consciously chosen lifestyle and a model for the distribution of resources between netocrats, this since ownership in itself has become a burden and utilization instead has been recognized as a more fundamental need. The netocratic ethics is of course based on the protopian state of constant change and creative challenge, Zoroastrianism's *frashokereti*, and the objective is to implement it to achieve meaning-creation atop *the dialectics of haurvatat (perfection) and ameretat (transcendence)*. Metaphysics of course always originates within a void, and it is there we must begin before we start to concern ourselves with things such as *immanence*, *omniscience* and [[Transcendence]]. Synthetic technology is universally present (informationalism), imperially supreme (sensocracy) and at the same time a phallic goal and a direction forward and upward (protopianism). Cosmopolitanism is the ritual site that became a trading post that became the cosmopolitan city. Cosmopolitanism thus emanates from imperialism and is therefore also both older and more genuinely universal than nationalism. Within the empire the nation is merely a caste. This means that the global power order always is a global caste system. Radical equality can only be achieved and maintained within a social unit, within a clan, a tribe, a nation and ultimately also an empire -- always locally but never globally. It is conditioned by membranes. Therefore today's global empire is full of various *gated communities* of different character and size. But these gated communities receive their strength both from within and from outside. The actual membranics is built on a strong tribalist impulse to find affinity and define a positive identity. But it is also powerfully reinforced by a conviction that the surrounding world is something fundamentally different, something which does not offer anything of value, which cannot be exploited and even less be imploited without enormous and indefensible added costs. Thus the surrounding world, as the historian Yuval Harari often points out, is no longer a place to exploit but rather a place that one would be very wise to avoid. What is characteristic of the surrounding world, and what makes it so uninteresting to the extent it does not appear hostile, is that it is populated by strangers that have become *irrelevant*, both to attention and to capital within the netocratic community. The problem is moreover that the surrounding world around the sociontic sphere during informationalism often not only is irrelevant but thereto directly menacing, as mentioned, which leads to conflicts, rivalries and guarded borders. So while technology moves on in the direction toward [[The Global Empire]] and the realization of [[Syntheos]], humanity moves in the direction toward *the dark renaissance*. What then awaits is the definitive exodology in the form of the return to nomadology as the universal religion, a nomadology that goes by the name of communism and that represents a deep and genuine yearning for the return of the sociont. Within this sociont's framework, communism can thus be realized -- not as a totalitarian, but as a voluntary supraideology, collaboration and co-ownership, which not only admits but also actively encourages and presumes an ideological pluralism and competition. It is not even a case of realizing the netocratic community, but only of building the netocratic community as a platform for [[Syntheos]] that transcends humanity. Unsurprisingly it was within the most pathical narrative of all -- pornography -- that a foretaste of the new, communist mode of production was on display as early as the beginning of the 21st century. It gradually became increasingly hard to earn big money on pornography -- which was produced in enormous amounts and at negligible cost, which led to the world being flooded with free pornography, which in turn made it completely unnecessary to pay anything at all for it. It turned out there were plenty of exhibitionists, who thanks to cameras in cell phones and the Internet easily and smoothly found their grateful voyeurs. Supply and demand could meet without costly intermediaries, and thereby the value of the transaction was shifted to the netocratic curatorium, the phallic structuring of a shapeless information chaos (see [[The Netocrats]]). That is to say the dividual's own, personal algorithm started to govern the direction of pornography consumption, and communism could be realized as a local phenomenon within pornography. Consequently, it is ever since then precisely within pornography that the sacral returns and appears in contrast to the profane, and it does, naturally, occur as the pornography -- or the part of the pornography -- that now is exercised behind the barred absolute, which thus has been installed anew. Which confirms that the only way that it is conceivable for capitalism to morph into attentionalism, is through its flowering and withering, not through anyone showing their childish displeasure through being obstructive. Capitalism must be allowed to play all the cards it has in its hand. These cards and the phase that capitalism finds itself in can only reflect the essence of the actors that live and are active within its confines. The wrongs and excesses one has been able to observe are no worse nor more offensive than Man himself, as capitalism reveals our innermost nature as tribal beings within a global empire. And it is thus only through [[Attentionalism]] and its radical separation between the sacral and the profane that communism for the first time becomes historically possible. A necessary prerequisite is the netocratic ethics that rests upon the protopian state of constant change and creative challenge, and herein lies the really difficult challenge. The question is whether it is possible to establish a sufficiently stable protopianism, or if informationalists and sensocrats hostile to change will put sticks in the wheel during the journey on the way there. ## The question is who insists on entrenching themselves and dying in the old paradigm, and who will rise up to join in the exodus to the promised empire? And with that we are back at the spot where we embarked on our first book, [[The Netocrats]], more than 20 years ago. The circle is complete. We are clear about technology determining the confines for what is possible and what even is conceivable in a culture that reflects the material realities. We have studied the digital communication technology that at the time of writing creates new history, and we have delved into the thinking that makes it possible for us to tentatively navigate in an existence and a world that at every moment threatens to drench us in an abundance of chaotic and contradictory impulses. We have chosen not to sugarcoat, fully aware that clear-sightedness always is preferable to wishful thinking. But in conclusion we want to emphasize that within the confines of what is possible, there is room for a poetically infinite measure of freedom. The cards we have in our hand can be played in countless ways. The last word has not been spoken, it never will be. There is Process, and then there is Event.