[Or, How to Civilize an Alien Planet With Just Your Imagination]
5027 words.
“If, as we have seen, the simplified, utilitarian descriptions of state officials had a tendency, through the exercise of state power, to bring the facts into line with their representations, then one might say that the high-modern state began with extensive prescriptions for a new society, and it intended to impose them.” – James C. Scott, on the concept of High Modernism
The 19th and 20th centuries were largely defined by their deployment of a novel intellectual construct called “ideology,” each iteration engineered to resolve distinct social ills. Counted in this group are Marxism, Fascism, Anarchism, and Liberalism, however each boast a multitude of branches. These are examples most familiar to Western eyes, but any out-of-the-box framework that attempts to encapsulate and resolve the human social experience – for now and forever – essentially functions as an ideology. Nearly all of them spring from systems-thinking, and the belief that political mathematics can be applied to create a utopia within the chaos of life. Using our highly developed tools of inquiry, we can craft a world apart. Implied is the faith that a perfect ideology can persist indefinitely; that eternal stability can be achieved.
This is not to say that all paradigm-shifts are ideological: while the French Revolution was certainly an outgrowth of radical Liberal ideology, the Industrial Revolution was not. It did, however, inspire its own ideologies reacting to automation and class warfare amplified through social mobility. At present, we lack a true reactionary ideology that responds to the information revolution. We find ourselves ramming a square peg into a round hole by using both the language and the framing of the previous century, reality slipping through our clockwork hands of antiquated worker/employer identities.
Our error is believing that these narrow systems engineered for human utility can contain all that graces the human experience. Ideologies force us to simplify reality, and while they can accurately probe the depths of specific social phenomenon, they fail to scale based on population size, and usually fail to translate culturally. On the other hand, any model that does not consider the animating force of ideologies is doomed to fail. Those who claim to be post-ideology frequently find themselves baffled as their predictions fail, believing that they had found the scalable, eternal Rosetta Stone to decipher all human behavior.
Can all of nature be contained within the unnatural, especially with our exponentially advancing technologies? And if not, are we yet due for an unprecedented paradigm shift to grapple with the fallout of the 19th and 20th centuries?
Reaffirming The Eternal
The primary incapacity inherent to ideology are that they seek to replace both the natural world and the spiritual world with High Modernism, which is the belief embraced by modern states that we can scientifically systematize the natural world to maximize utility 1. Replacing chaos with order, replacing pain with happiness. Not only can humans put their hands on the scales of reality to our favor, but we can also create our own scales. This remains the belief of the majority of politically active individuals. As expressed in a previous piece, this remains the goal of Liberalism and the belief in the end of history which, while rarely said aloud, still operates beneath the surface of its adherents.
While frequently engineered to respond acutely to social disruptions that leave huge swathes of society suffering or dead – technological revolutions, loss of identity, a corrupted elite hierarchy– ideologies can only operate within narrow purviews. Where things go awry is when we explode them out to describe all of reality, like when you chase Marxism down to the bedrock and end up with figures like Jacques Lacan explaining that the core of all reality is the male/female sexual dynamic. The world is made better with ontological horniness personified in Slavoj Žižek, but it appears smeared and disjointed when superimposed over society.
With revolutions and paradigm shifts of the previous centuries in our rearview mirror, where do we stand? Adherents of each ideology sit frustrated at either the lack of acceptance, or the lack material gains achieved after many of them reached their apex of influence. What they all have in common is the belief that the old world is dead; tradition is consigned to the practical dustbin of history, and we must master an entirely new language. Despite our attempts to sever connections to the world of tradition and spirituality, we still employ models that connect us to the mystical world, reaching deep into our genetic code. Religion, mythology, hero worship, metaphysics; they’re all still here, sprouting through the cracks in the modernist pavement. We can notice how even in Christian-dominated cultures, Pagan beliefs and mysticism still find their homes in the everyday folkways. This is why ancient superstitions persist in cultures dominated by new religious forms. This is why monotheists can still believe in ghosts and charms. Our distant past can be found right before our very eyes, and it is only its commonality that makes us blind to it.
Mircea Eliade’s “The Myth of the Eternal Return” paints a vivid picture, gathered from cultural histories across the planet, of how the ancient myths that still find a place in our everyday lives are ritualistic repetitions of various creation myths. These rituals that represent the cycle of death and rebirth allow us to break free from the punishing chaos of the universe by acting out the divine creation every year 2. This allows us to, in some way, control nature and step outside of time itself.
“Man only repeats the act of Creation; his religious calendar commemorates, in the space of a year, all the cosmogonic phases that took place ab origine. In fact, the sacred year ceaselessly repeats the Creation: man is contemporary with the cosmogony and with the anthropogony because ritual projects him into the mythical epoch of the beginning.”- Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return
The repetition of divine creation is a rebellion against profane time, that which we are subject to. This is similar to how sacred founding of a city abolishes profane space. The archaic man does not enjoy profane history and frequently attempts to break it. The rituals engaging the mystic world are how we attempt to grab hold of the universe while momentarily standing apart from it. But we never seek to make ourselves permanently apart.
We see the acts of creation reflected in our current historical period. Christians have a day of rest, just as God did. Aborigines circumcised with stone tools, just as the gods did.
The welding together of the human world and the mystical world can be expressed in ceremonies that reach outward, but we also see it directed inward as worship of the physical form. It can be found most extremely in the occult, where the human body is the model for the mystical world itself, a direct representation of the universe. The importance of the pineal gland in occult rituals, the body being divided into heaven (the head), Earth (the spine,) and Hell (the reproductive organs,) blood magic. Even in the political works of Yukio Mishima – echoing the sentiments of many secular traditionalists – the peak perfection of the physical form is the ultimate ontology 3. This sentiment has found a devoted audience with modern political dissidents who endeavor to create a doctrine of action in an era shackled with meta-commentary and postmodernist pollution.
“The men who indulged in nocturnal thought, it seemed to me, had without exception dry, lusterless skins and sagging stomachs. They sought to wrap up a whole epoch in a capacious night of ideas, and rejected in all its forms the sun that I had seen. They rejected both life and death as I had seen them, for in both of these the sun had had a hand.” – Yukio Mishima, Sun & Steel
The politically active search desperately for a recipe to inspire change in their political conditions, having become disillusioned with intellectualism. As with their ancestors, they look towards their own savage hands. Here, the human body is the complete realization of the mystical dimension. Once they strip away the metaphysics, they reveal the man of theory attempting to physically interface with divinity which remains beyond his grasp. Here, the distance is merely shortened.
Whichever direction you are facing, it is impossible to remove the participation of our physical forms in achieving metaphysical transcendence. Even as we attempt to separate ourselves from our material conditions to resolve them, we inevitably find ourselves only hovering above them.
The Vibrating Stone Tower of Soul
Man’s destiny is to engage aggressively with the spiritual world. Whether it’s Indian, Japanese, or German belief systems, all great peoples have their distinct methodologies to interface with the mystical, however they conceptualize it. We never, however, fully transcend the natural world. This is not our destiny.
In “Anthropomorphics,” Dennis Bouvard channels Eric Gans and his Originary Theory of generative anthropology. Peering back to the pre-paleolithic origins of humankind, Gans hypothesizes how the building blocks of first tribes emerged, pre-society and indeed pre-language 4. Placing ourselves millions of years in the past, we imagine how this apparent relationship with the mystical world began. Why do we have these belief systems to unite us at all? Furthermore, for what purpose did language even develop between members of a group? Certainly, language was innovated to communicate crucial information, but how does this transactional balancing act in groups first appear? Obviously, there is no historical or even theological record of this, and as a result all speculation must begin with the admission that this can only ever be illuminating fiction. Despite this, we can still explore some interesting areas of inquiry.
Gans hypothesizes that we conjured sacred communal rituals merely to interface with the unknown through real world actions, at first to make sense of our relationships with each other, and then to make sense of our relationship with the universe. In what we call the “Originary Scene,” we imagine our farthest flung ancestors, lacking language or even what we would identify as community. One day, these hominids – akin to the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey – reach a eureka moment as they gather around a dead antelope and spark profound relations to each other rather than individuals in a hierarchy of dominance. Rather the alpha claiming his fill through oppression and then every subsequent man for himself, an awareness beyond self-interest appears in relation to this thing everyone desires.
“Gans assumes that the mimetic crisis is organized around some object of appetitive desire – most likely a food source, perhaps a recent kill. Ordinarily, among the higher primate species, the object would be consumed in order, first the Alpha animal, then the Beta, and so on. But on this occasion, the mimetic rivalry introduced by the object overrides the pecking order as all members of the group move towards the object at the center. Appetite becomes ‘desire,’ that is, a social phenomenon involving one’s relation to others and not merely the object itself. Desire intensifies the mimetic crisis. However, within the group, some member hesitates, presumably out of something like terror (‘anxiety’ would not be quite right here,) is seen by others to hesitate, and is imitated by others. The gesture indicates a renunciation, perhaps momentary (but that is enough,) of the desired object. This, what Gans calls ‘the gesture of the aborted appropriation,’ is the first sign.” – Dennis Bouvard, Anthropomorphics, An Originary Grammar of the Center
This environmental “center” that the primates gather around contains an object of desire, in this instance a food source. We see sheer animal desire and fear give way to more complex mimetic interactions; rather than just fearing the strength of the autocratic alpha and falling to self-interest after that power is fulfilled, we have introduced power to the center itself, and granted those who desire it a language with which to interact both with it and through it. We channel our desire through this center and use it to connect with each other in a completely new way.
Subsequent social development changes what occupies that center, beginning with the concept of “this is how we behave around a food source to secure the health of everyone,” which then metamorphizes to centering “this is how we must behave to secure future food,” perhaps ritualizing preparations for a hunt or employing superstitions that ensure luck. This eventually develops into rituals engaging with an abstract spirit that will ensure the security of food, then ultimately the worship of this apparent power that keeps the tribe united, although the entire time we remain tethered to this primordial frame. We stay connected to the creation myth of the center.
The existence of the center of every community is this amorphous plasma consisting of survival, desire, community, history, and precision through action. It is impossible to separate these components from each other.
Humans developed society the way an infant develops their mind; a symphony of desire and hardcoded survival processes ultimately building towards more complex goals, and then to contextual social values, then perhaps mindbending philosophy. All along the way, it is the same developmental mechanisms constructing themselves, and the same original relationship with the divine unknown as represented through our very real and immediate relationship with the universe. There was no separation between our actions and our collaboration with the spiritual world, they just evolved.
Phenomenology presents another way to marry the mystical world to the corporeal world, and by extension the ideological world. In phenomenology, consciousness takes primacy and its act of intentionality, and is concerned with the universe as perceived phenomenon without any prejudices or presuppositions. This precludes whether or not the phenomenon in question exists in the material world and is detectable by our sense inputs, or our linguistic representations and our imagination 5. It “exists” whether you can touch it, or you can picture it in your mind’s eye. We can see a horse standing in a field and be sure it exists, but if we imagine a horse in the same scene, both are referring to the existence-independent category of a horse. There is an essence of this thing called a “horse,” and it will survive if all horses become absent from the material world.
Furthermore, what is a chair, in an a priori sense? Does it refer to an amalgamation of matter that can be sat upon? Because if so, a lizard perched upon a rock is on a chair, and even to the uninitiated something about that seems inaccurate. Does it need to be made out of wood, or is it material independent? Does it need to have a specific design? Most would say yes, and that implies it must be created by humans for human purposes. We have thus summoned into being the unique category of “chair,” and the existence of the chair is real if a sketch of it beheld by an extraterrestrial and stamped in its own mind. Phenomenology grounds itself in the theory of intentionality, meaning that the observer takes precedence in defining what is real, which affords the observer certain privileges since it can never exist outside of existence. It is immersed in the real, so representations of this reality constitute, in some form, reality itself.
“If it is true that I am sitting on a horse, both the horse and I must exist. If it is true that I intend a horse, the horse does not need to exist. Thus, an important aspect of intentionality is exactly its existence-independency. It is never the existence of the intentional object that makes the act, be it a perception or a hallucination, intentional. Our mind does not become intentional through an external influence, and it does not lose its intentionality if its object ceases to exist. Intentionality is not an external relation that is brought about when consciousness is influenced by an object, but is, on the contrary, an intrinsic feature of consciousness. […] Thus, intentionality does not presuppose the existence of two different entities – consciousness and the object.” – Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology
There are a variety of ways to encode humanity onto the universe, and this is one of the many ways human societies are distinct in non-trivial ways. This is why our values are so real to us, even though they inhabit our mind and are manifested temporarily in interactions. Our rituals stamp our fingerprints onto the unknown, our imagination sits alongside the real, our social systems are divine entities negotiated with our environment. This is why our beliefs are so vivid and crucial, and why the diverse ways groups employ these rituals and tools create higher walls of division than secular humanists want to accept.
Consider this: if we were dropped onto an alien world, what would we as colonists replicate to transpose our humanity onto a distinctly inhuman planet? How would we as extraterrestrials ourselves dominate that space differently than we did it in the past to adhere to a new existence? Can the genetic code of our civilizations survive with the same human element but a different environmental element? When confronted with a truer unknown that we would have ever witnessed on Earth, would we abandon our nihilistic secularism and engineer a new, but familiar, spirituality around the center?
In practice, would we bring soil from our homeland and transplant it onto new land, as Romulus did during the foundation of Rome as a replication of Troy? We would need to conjure the spirit again as our ancestors did, but with radically different minds. To impose our existence onto the unknown in the form of a replicated civilization, we will need an extremely surgical intentionality couples with profound rituals.
The Man at the Head of the Man as a Head
Civilizations have life cycles, living and dying like multitudinous behemoths. While we struggle to comprehend the complex cellular behavior of internal forces – economics, culture, religion, political dynasties, etc. – we can at the very least record its larger movements from retrospective vantage points. Despite the heightened awareness electrifying the individual DNA strands populating modern nations, we still have not transcended the geopolitical dominance of civilizations. America still exists, despite its efforts to convince the world it does not. Such is its civilizational power.
George Bataille, in his study of the phenomenon of surplus, put forth a theory that a society consumed and recycled energy like a living entity, comparing it to how living creatures must consume more resources than it needs to not only maintain itself, but be put towards growth 6.
He posited that whether it is a predator devouring prey or a business consuming labour, there is always surplus in every exchange as a universal constant. Rather than the wicked scheme of capitalists, it naturally unavoidable . As long as the animal, human, or system is growing, the surplus energy consumed is being burned off productively. However, since infinite growth is unrealistic, every life form eventually reaches its ceiling; what happens when growth is impossible, but every energy transaction contains more than we need? If the surplus cannot be expelled in growth, it must be destroyed in some other way. This form of destruction is either completely wasteful, or hazardous to the entity. This is what is known as the accursed share.
“The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy that is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed by its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.” – Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share
In humans, extra energy consumption results in the production of waste, and if it remains it takes the form of fat which threatens the life of the organism. Bataille’s area of focus is economics – specifically – wealth accumulation, so when applied to accumulation of capital through financial transactions it turns into a hoard which atrophies the holder.
In this sense, things of value – money, resources, treasure, even human beings – must be willingly sacrificed in a public display. Surplus agriculture is productively destroyed in feasts, surplus resources re expelled in lavish festivals, and surplus people are sacrificed at the altar otherwise they rot in the gutters. A good leader needs to die for their people – for the larger system – for this entity that is always being kept in balance. Rather than a manifestation of the divine, the leader is the ultimate sacrifice to the divine.
Applying this theory to nations and empires, he explains that to maintain healthy stasis, surplus must be productively destroyed, otherwise it will be unproductively destroyed. While Bataille’s agenda is nakedly anti-capitalistic and his solution to this problem is for America to redistribute its wealth around the world, the conceptualization of surplus as an inevitable – nigh thermodynamic – reality of exchange is interesting.
Civilizations have always existed with the figurehead – king, emperor, khan – as the representative conscience with the consent of the elites and people, but directing the entity alongside the mythology, which constitutes its soul. Even now, the greatest city-states and nations on Earth can trace their roots to foundational families and dynasties, either biologically or otherwise existentially existing as an extension of its own creation myth. In these stories exist a few key people who have reached heroic stature; decisions do not flow from them, but everything flows through them. This doesn’t need to owe a time debt to millennia: Americans have their Founding Fathers, China has Confucius, but even in the emergence of syndicates in wake of governmental collapse and remain entrenched, as we see with the shifting identity of the samurai. In one form or another, the organism of civilization is defined by these genetic codes and chosen leaders must exist within their shadow.
In this sense, the conscience of a civilization cannot be represented in the leader, only occupied by the leader. Joseph De Maistre, in his exploration of the very nature of sovereignty, explains that rather than a status achieved through the exertion of power, sovereignty is an essence that must be occupied 7. Like the accused share, this is a naturally occurring phenomenon rather than a social construct. It is an inevitable thing that must be reckoned with if we wish to maintain a healthy society.
At the center of a coherent civilization there is a space that demands a human presence otherwise its form cannot hold, and it is either occupied by one person (in the case of a monarchy) or by several people (in the case of an oligarchy.) Throughout history there have been a multitude of cases where a society existed not with a figurehead but rather a collection of elites running the show. De Maistre’s position is that these are the only two possible realities; there has never been a civilization, nation, or empire that is controlled by the people, or by an abstract principle or rule of law. Any system that claims to be run by the people is in reality controlled from the shadows by some form of elite. If nobody occupies sovereign space, degradation ensues.
“The different forms and degrees of sovereignty have made us think that it was the work of peoples that had modified it at their pleasure; but nothing could be further from the truth. All peoples have the government that suits them, and none has chosen it. It is remarkable that it is nearly always to its misfortune that a people tries to give itself one, or, to put it more exactly, that too large a portion of the people aim at this object; for, in this disastrous experiment, it is too easy for the people to deceive itself as to its true interests; to pursue doggedly what cannot suit it, and, on the contrary, to reject what suits it best; and we know how terrible the errors of this kind.” – Joseph de Maistre, On Sovereignty
Rather than a power-hungry autocracy, the interplay between those in authority, the foundational spirit caretaken by the people, and the elites that occupy the oft ancient institutions, is the true form of a vibrant society. The monarch is simply the momentary occupant of a space within a much larger and complex system, the organs of which operate largely beyond their control. Their job, like the job of your own consciousness, is to keep the organism on the momentum of survival, an organism that otherwise operates beyond conscious control.
We know what a healthy organism looks like when these spaces are occupied by healthy entities, and we definitely know what they are like when occupied by unhealthy entities. In the case of Emperor Nero in Rome, we see what happens when a great empire is inflicted with insanity, its conscience corrupted, its sovereignty turned against itself. Nero separated himself from the organs of power and Rome’s ancient institutions carving a path of destruction against its elites and literally wandering the streets at night as a deranged rapist 8. The organism was stricken by sickness, exemplified in the great fire of Rome that swept through it under his reign. The kingmaker organ, known as the Praetorian Guard, which had both approved of the ascension of Nero and ushered him into his position as the shepherd of the very soul of Rome, was eventually called upon to extinguish him. The consciousness of Rome was corrupted by madness, and the body marshaled its forces to preserve the gene so the soul may continue, the forces themselves generated from the people as reciprocal stewards of the essence of the organism. And while the civilizational organism has such internal process through which to expel toxins, the slow entropy of death can surely be amplified by such infections.
Such corruption can, unsurprisingly, turn the body against its own mind. This is how the organism dies; it no longer has faith in its own form or right to exist.
In this vibrant societal model, we see the complex relationship between a society’s population, its leaders, its elite, its foundational mythology, and the historical circumstances that act as the environment. At no point is the civilizational organism separate from the mystical realm that connects us to our natural environment. To extract one component and give it precedence would kill the entity; the civilization is greater than the sum of its parts. The entire reason it exists is to propagate itself into the future, and reducing its complexity would inhibit this goal surely as if you began counting your breaths and consciously operating your limbs.
The Fingers of God Emerge like Nuclear Ghosts
In the first volume of Arthur Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will and Representation,” he outlined the irreducible elements of the universe; that when all sensory input was stripped away, we still have space and time. Alongside these, he included the “will” as an inherent force everything in the universe possesses, including intelligent life and inert matter. The will is irrational and aimless; it merely describes how forces and objects appear to be animated to action 9. An individual has a will to fulfill their desires, but similarly an asteroid hurling through the vacuum of space has a will. Intelligence, in this view, is just a higher form of will, while the laws of physics are a lower form of will. Similarly, gravity has gradations of complexity, with the attraction of masses as the lower end and electromagnetism as a higher form.
“Spinoza says that if a stone which has been projected through the air, had consciousness, it would believe that it was moving of its own free will. I add this only, that the stone would be right. The impulse given it is for the stone what the motive is for me, and what in the case of the stone appears as cohesion, gravitation, rigidity, is in its inner nature the same as that which I recognise in myself as will, and what the stone also, if knowledge were given to it, would recognise as will.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1
Anything that is animated by will – the essence of action itself – will continue on its path until it intersects with the will of another, like the asteroid striking a planet exerting its own will orbiting a star system. In a vacuum of space and time, the will continues on forever. In the real world, is impossible to imagine an object existing without intersecting with the will of another on a long enough timeline, even on a microscopic level. This is to say that all objects, phenomena, and energies in the known universe have something approximating an irreducible spirit, and nothing – not rocks, not molecules, not a bucket of water – is simply inert.
What we conceptualize in our minds – what we believe – exists categorically just like anything in the material world. Furthermore, it can never truly exist apart from it, and we should not even desire to create simplified systems that attempt to exclude nature due to perceived lack of immediate utility. All that exists has a spirit that animates it, just at varying levels of complexity. While it may not be life, it is alive. Your beliefs are real as long as you are the cultivator of them.
Nature itself is not static, and what may seem like stale repetition in the form of ritual is in fact a reassertion of the dominance necessary to establish communication with the unknown. New unknowns will demand new rituals, or evolved rituals. Even though you recognize the inexorable joining of the race to the time and place it generated, you become a force of generation and there is no reason to believe that you need to imprison yourself in your location or time. If you believe this, you will inhibit your chances of survival.
If man intends to colonize strange new worlds and project his influence across creation, he will never do this from a position of secular scientific historicism. The essence of civilization is a living organism that is just as real as the blood and soil materialism which informs our geopolitical period, but conversely this organism cannot be transplanted without the divine relationship to the blood and the soil along with it.
- 1.Scott JC. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press; 2020.
- 2.Eliade M. The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History. 2nd ed. Princeton University Press; 2018.
- 3.Mishima Y. Sun and Steel. Lyle Stuart ; 1970.
- 4.Bouvard D. Anthropomorphics: An Originary Grammar of the Center. Imperium Press; 2020.
- 5.Zahavi D. Husserl’s Phenomenology (Cultural Memory in the Present). 1st ed. Stanford University Press; 2003.
- 6.Bataille G. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Vol 1. 1st ed. Zone Books; 1991.
- 7.De Maistre J. Major Works, Volume I. Imperium Press ; 2020.
- 8.Romm James . Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero. Vintage; First Edition; 2014.
- 9.Schopenhauer A. The World as Will and Representation. Vol 1. Dover Publications; 1966.