Every revolution and settlement has centred egalitarianism as the ideological archetype. “The human species is a single-status moral community”[1]. This goes beyond political ideology, expanding into cultural, religious and individual domains. A legal infrastructure has grown from the basis of universal human rights, endlessly developing new modi operandi based on self-referential criteria that moves beyond the nation-state. Identity is expressed in a comparative matrix of dividuated[2] parameters. Birth and biology are plasticised as mere tools or inconveniencies to be modulated.

Deleuze’s societies of control[3] are the obvious comparison – society delineated by the code. The code is a byword for access, choice and autonomy. Clear divisions and inverted ranks are there, paradoxically enforcing an equality situated within the code. An industrial logic in the division of society (as mirroring the division of labour). Everyone has their role, with even the excluded on the edge of society reflecting the legal order.

Refugees are given as a primary example of this distinction in liberal societies – reflective of the hypocrisy of human rights while being prevented from participating in normal life functions. But refugees are another industry of postmodern capitalism, both in human trafficking and in NGO lobbying and litigious arbitrage. While countries separate refugees, they also maintain them as a surplus population, housing them and laxly controlling their movements such that many stay irrespective of their status as asylees.

“A city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighborhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position—licit or illicit—and effects a universal modulation”[4]. Another comparison comes in the way of debanking, internet censorship and the policing of speech. But again this is arbitrary. The excluded are still integrated. The opinions of silenced internet voices now provide fodder for a sprawling podcast industry who endlessly complain of their treatment by journalists and politicians. The Covid response represented the most polarising example, showing the divisibility of rights and citizenship along an axis of testing, masking and medical compliance. Ironically, Covid was more discriminatory (looking at the distribution of its IFR across age cohorts) than the response to it, with the latter becoming so illogical in the face of the former as to become practically unenforceable.

Exclusion is not the primary aim. Instead, it is the levelling of individuals towards the dividual totality. The card, or the code, is sovereign. The affect of rejection is the recognition of a position of radical egalitarianism at the whims of an entity. The programming of a code is effectual but uncontrollable. Parameters of control grow as the varieties of behaviour create autopoietic feedback loops, exposing new modes that are subsumable to this machinic process. “An egalitarian moral ideal, hardened into a universal axiom or increasingly incontestable dogma, completes modernity’s supreme historical irony by making ‘tolerance’ the iron criterion for the limits of (cultural) toleration. Once it is accepted universally, or, speaking more practically, by all social forces wielding significant cultural power, that intolerance is intolerable, political authority has legitimated anything and everything convenient to itself, without restraint”[5].

Political authority is trans-ideological. While egalitarianism is associated with liberalism and its universalising tendencies, the same conceit infects all modern ideologies. Gray attempts a distinction between legalism and agonism in liberal (and post-liberal) systems[6]. While legalistic liberalism is the attempt at abolishing politics through the supremacy of the law, agonistic liberalism comes through values-pluralism, recognising differences between communities and individuals. But this is the same micropolitics that tolerance and egalitarianism subsumes. The petty differences of life politics and identitarian concerns that mean the wider constitution of the demos is left to abstruse forces. There is nothing totalising or organisational in a pluralistic agonism as forces ordering politics and culture are decided before the framing of antagonisms. The rules of the game are already agreed within a higher macropolitics, that of the code in societies of control. Post-liberalism plays the same trick, preserving “constitutive institutions or practices in modern civil societies”[7], a byword for maintaining the zeitgeist of acceptable beliefs within the limits of an egalitarian political order.

Radical politics and philosophy cannot escape this conceit as the fundamental assumptions of a collective humanity, of a universal community, are upheld. Lefebvre’s project of mondialisation demonstrates the limitations of radical thought that cannot escape a foundational egalitarianism (whether defined through the rationalism of Hobbes’ commonwealth or Rousseau’s state of nature). Through the overcoming of philosophy, as philosophy becomes world, comes praxis, “including creation as well as continuation, revolutionary praxis as well as repetitive praxis”[8]. Here the philosopher, through the unification of difference, must take responsibility over indifference. The totalising project cannot be above the historical reality, tempering creation to absorb the concern of the “masses”.

The centring of praxis belies the desire for wholesale change, for mondialisation beyond heterogeneous totalities. Philosophy, or even thought itself, must inhere action to avoid the problems of further abstraction of difference, or the cold brutality of denying being (“superabundant creation, cruelty towards beings cast into existence, waste, absolute play with being nothingness”[9]). This hubristic sentiment fits the adage of the modern politics of crisis – “something must be done”. But to ask why, no matter how cruel it sounds, is necessary to understand the aleatory nature of a complex modernity. Mondialisation becomes another egalitarian project, another universalising tendency despite its intention to move beyond universals into worldness.

Worldness in its dialectic pretensions is the subsumption of difference, of antagonism, toward a praxis of unified being. But this is the adding of complexity to an already complex manifold. A manifold that is autopoietic, inducing mimetic qualities in the subpopulations it has control over. This is the “computer that tracks”, a technology of power that absorbs all differences as variations of a theme. Ideologies and cultures become routes to understanding and overcoding, with behaviours deemed subversive or normative based on the preconditions of the interface. To link back to politics, liberalism (shorn of its ideational contradictions surrounding individualism and universalism[10]) is really a cause and an effect of societal and technological complexities. A la Foucault, this is the growth of order in society through institutional outgrowths (prisons, hospitals, schools) and subsequent ways of governing growing populations (demographics, statistics, etc.). The 20^th and 21^st centuries have only seen this spread through the ubiquity of information and the speed of logistics.

Mondialisation presupposes the capacity for control through praxis, while ignoring the flourishing of technical complexes and their posthuman and posthistorical trajectories. Posthuman in their speed of thought and instantaneous decision-making, as well as in the array of controllers that can influence their decisions (faceless bureaucracies become literal manifestations as decision-making is politically centralised but organisationally diffuse). Posthistorical in their constant repetition of cultures into a cosmopolitan display of universality. This mirrors the irony that Nietzsche notes in the historical mode[11], that the modern time allows cultures of the past to be regenerated into a menagerie of sights and sounds, potentially inaugurating new creations but also allowing a general deadening into pure repetition (Nietzsche makes a similar point when talking of the potentiality of science in an era of maximal discovery compared to one where the low hanging fruit have already been picked – poiesis is much easier in the former).

Praxis becomes hubris in a world of complex differentiation and diffuse control. In the political, it amounts to the belief in a variety of choice that need only be grasped by irresponsible political leaders. Climate change, immigration, stagnation. All are divorced from the totalities that underpin them – nation-building, ideological antagonism, a definitive lifeworld. In culture, it is the belief that we are on the cusp of a great explosion of art so radical it shakes the foundations of the informatic age, breaking through cultural disaggregation to a new universal form. In philosophy, it is the centrality of being as an end in itself, with no thought to its elucidation or distinction against or within a complexified, posthuman set of systems.

Emplacing praxis assumes action as a necessity. But we live in a world of constant activity and near limitless information. Totalities in their multiplicity may well tread on “the ruins of man and human being, among the debris of a life and culture in pieces, under cover of a technicality that he either accepts or fruitlessly challenges”[12]. But compared to what? Worldness may take over this technicality – will it then renounce its powers and accept regression? Will it reverse the complexification, turn against machine man? All while holding on to the fetters of egalitarianism?

Geopolitically, choices are already constrained. It is a choice on varieties of stagnation and pain. “Given modernity’s inherent trend to degeneration or self-cancellation, three broad prospects open”[13] – Modernity 2.0: a new global modernisation a la the age of exploration and colonialism; Postmodernity: a regression into Malthusian limits; Western Renaissance: the death and rebirth of Western (particularly Anglo-Saxon) nations. To do this requires the great contradiction of modern liberalism to be killed – the maintenance of a large, securocratic state at the whim of mass calls for wealth transfers and semi-privatised bureaucracies in interest groups, media complexes and lobbying networks. This is non-negotiable. So long as the institutional framework of the liberal state remains, scleroticism is a best-case scenario.

“The building of a new state requires industry and brilliance, and the sacrifice of many men. Men struggle and sacrifice when ideals beyond themselves make it possible”[14]. The construction of a new totality means the integration of the machinic into the mythic. This is the “middle of the road” tendency, between the fettered and freer spirits[15]. Fettered in industrial processes but free in the capacity to direct and hold them to account (at least temporarily). However, this leads to the question of what the new frontier will be. In a world fully mapped and delineated, where is left conquerable. The age of exploration and subsequently colonialism were the times of greatest expansion, demonstrating the prowess of brutal strength and commercial-cultural endeavour. Can this be created anew, or doomed to further repetition?

“When life is ordered in the perfect State, the present will provide no more motive for poetry, and it would only be those persons who had remained behind who would ask for poetical unreality. These, then, would assuredly look longingly backwards to the times of the imperfect State, of half-barbaric society, to our times”[16]. Looking toward the barbaric, pushing against the levelling of society into a homogeneous slop, would be a new frontier, battled both physically and philosophically. But in creating it, it would also be destructive as it regressed toward a lesser mode of existence, one defined less by technological interfaces and the conveniences they bring. If there is a praxis here, it is a praxis of anti-information that is accepting of the chaotic nature of the construction of a totality. This is a neo-Ludditic endeavour, relegating technology to a tool or extension rather than an intermediary or decision-maker. A potentially foolish endeavour considering the accelerating power of techno-informatic arrays, but then no less foolhardy or pretentious than the explorers of the early Renaissance.

A new conception of being and thought would emerge from within this, defined by separation from the masses and a distrust of ubiquity. Constructing a totality means control over populations, using them as machines to be directed toward particular enterprises. Here the fetters of egalitarianism would truly be shunned as orders of rank and hierarchy are enforced in the modes of creation. “The maintenance of the military state is the last remaining means of taking up and retaining the great tradition, with respect to the higher type of man, the strong type”[17]. In modernity there is no such state anymore. The equivalent would be a private association or network, capable of integrating itself with the logistical flows of commerce and communication, a modernised East India Company.

The objection comes in two forms. One, that this making machines of men is the same as the existing industrial imperative, that of the integration of man into technological networks as cogs in a process. A further division of labour that increases alienation (a petty concept that “is either radical, or falls back into apology for the status quo”[18]) and anomie. But this is the pre-existing condition of being in an informatic world of interfaces and arrays. Alienation is only important when you consider what it is alienated from. A pure essence of being? When has such existed? The idea presumes a telos of history, a horseshoe corrupted originally but bending back toward an initial state. Man’s investment in his being has always been alienated, intermediated by tribes, ranks and extensions of will beyond his own. The power to think is exclusive and limited. The actualisation of a man’s potential is something out of one’s control. Instead, it is invested in limited forms of autonomy, to own property and have a family. Most of existence has been the attempt to carve this out while having security around them. In the provision of that security, defined by nation or tribe, is the place of great politics that stands above the demands of mass.

The second objection is that this is a similar repetition to the cultural interregnum described earlier. Constant reference to earlier ages evokes the historical nature of modern time, the arrangement of ages as a collage of choice and reference. But again, this is the reality we are dealing with. Repetition is the refrain of a pastiche time where the low hanging fruits have been picked. Cycling through the repetitive is the remaining means of creation, the attempt to move being to becoming in new cycles of poiesis. Levelling tendencies rely on a “technological determinism” that “needs to suppress not just any idea of an inevitable redemptive future, but any radically different technological future”[19]. The nature of radical thought itself is incorporated into the framework of an unending progress, an innate telos that will free us from obligations and suffering. All systems suffer from this conceit. Capitalism’s mediation of profit and monopoly growth. Social democracy’s regulatory cocoons that dampen or destroy catallactic forces, enforcing a field of equivalence through an intermediated price mechanism. The hubris of technological development as the extension of human ingenuity while its forces grow beyond comprehension. Culture’s placing of epochs as choice architectures, removed of context to be made collectible. Repetition and its intermediation of being is the norm. One must follow its cycles of growth and decay.

Moving beyond the limitations of power as a universal project of “freedom, justice and love”[20] and their fields of equivalence. This is a rejection of mondialisation, of world-building as the means of moving beyond the current or the modern. What little of an elite is left is only interested in a world defined by these three unctuosities of power. A break with this is the construction of totalities that reject praxis, flowing into unending thought and self-interested actions. There is no philosophy without the flow of intercourse and communication that modernity has made possible. There are no projects without the capacity to organise, and this means utilising what being there is to constitute the new.

“We waver, but it is necessary to not to lose courage and give up what we have newly gained. Moreover, we cannot go back to the old, we have burnt our boats; there remains nothing but to be brave whatever happens – March ahead, only get forward!”[21]. Technological determinism is meaningless, for if it is happening it is beyond our control. Better to deal with what is in our grasp and adapt to catastrophes and crises rather than attempt the aleatory ideal. If God is dead, then he will not be reconstructed in statistics or modelling. “Once we are so related and drawn into what withdraws, we are drawing into what withdraws, into the enigmatic and therefore mutable nearness of its appeal. Whenever man is properly drawing that way, he is thinking – even though he may still be far away from what withdraws, even though the withdrawal may remain as veiled as ever”[22]. Descent into the depths of thought, toward being and will as extensions of power – a long gaze over terra firma. Owned space as an expression of being, moving from the gaze of the past into “deliverance from revenge (as) the will’s liberation”[23].

Heidegger talks of deliverance in its metaphysical properties, particularly its religious ones as the repentance of sin. But this doesn’t escape the “it was”, instead placing being in stasis as an essential aspect of the relation to God. The relation never changes while words of repentance and forgiveness grow hollow. Freedom, justice and love become reflections of a disturbed ego, trying to understand their placement in a decontextualised will. The will of God is now just an interpretative matrix, a choice architecture like any other. Greatness is gone, the veneration of saints and the warriors of the Crusades forgotten as religion becomes a project of modernity, maintaining a metaphysics of repentance but stripped of morality and obligation. Being has no meaning in religion beyond the implication of salvation. It is a transaction like any other – faith to be saved. Thought is removed altogether, with even religious authorities devolving into pure revisionism. God is an afterthought, with clergyman barely believing in his provenance.

Primal being as the capacity to will has moved beyond religious metaphysics as the latter has devolved into revisionist demoralisation. “To impress upon becoming the character of being – this is the highest expression of the will to power”[24]. Moving from thought to totality and sitting within the liminal space between them. “No way of thought, not even the way of metaphysical thought, begins with man’s essential nature and goes on from there to Being, nor in reverse from Being and then back to man. Rather, every way of thinking takes its way already within the total relation of Being and man’s nature, or else it is not thinking at all”[25]. The essentialism of being is a myth, an intermediation of the will of others to create the fettered spirits.

Language and representation demonstrated the first signs of being. Semiotics as a carriage for the earliest thoughts and abstractions beyond everyday existence. But they also represented the first technology of power, of a kind that could enslave and hierarchise. Knowledge is a capacity for control, dictating the flows of intercourse toward specific ends. Great politics is the emergence of the division of being within the being of Beings, the distinctions between the microcosm and the macrocosm of wills. Owned space is a concept of rank, from the petty to the tyrannical. The microcosm of will through property and family represent the smallest aspects of being, to strive and emplace control over one’s domain. The macrocosm is the full extension of will, to the becoming of being and the remaking of the space surrounding it. “Being unconditioned, eternity, independence of time, self-affirmation. All philosophy strives only to find this highest expression”[26]. To strive beyond oneself for legacy and historicity, to break cycles and remake space. Creating the new frontier out of the vestiges of the mappa mundi.

This Zarathustrian disposition is that of a mountain philosophy. Mountain philosophy, not as Julian Barbour describes it[27] (as a process of discovery through the gradual uncovering of scientific truths much as the terrain reveals itself the higher one climbs), but as the will to explore, to find new heights and survey the great expanse as literally and metaphysically beneath you (climbing toward the Godhead itself). Soaring as a free spirit above the parapets. This may well be unattainable, as utopian as the desires of regulatory forces to end all negative feeling. It could be swallowed by the levelling tendencies it opposes, becoming another circuit to be routed by the infinite code. But this is no time for humanism or posthumanism, for diffusion through global networks. The age of man’s intelligence is closing. The capacity for thought is overtaken by the speed of logistics. Logic is a plastic entity, dictated by the acceleration of time horizons – economics, politics, culture all run on logistical rhythms. Globalisation is a project of logistics, the network form its organisational locus. Expanding the capacity of will over owned space may end up a temporary salve, a last gasp of being over networked intelligence. There is no other way to oppose the levelling tendency, the homogenisation and digitisation of being into a constant bricolage of cyphering. Existing in the shadows is for the rats, an antihuman tendency that has no future. The return to primal being on the flows of technological determinacy, standing above massification and the anomalies of modernity as a cold onlooker surveying the frontier beneath him.

To move beyond the levelling tendency, totalities and their creators must unmake maps and look upon the vestiges of the world as a conquerable landscape. Looking upon it from the mountains as a vast expanse, owned space to reflect greatness in being. The world can be made explorable, but not controllable. Chaos reigns, but within it a mountain philosophy of coldness and barbarism, a regression of the machine and a reassertion of man, can begin to rise.

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[1] John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake

[2] https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Dividuation

[3] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gilles-deleuze-postscript-on-the-societies-of-control

[4] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gilles-deleuze-postscript-on-the-societies-of-control

[5] Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment

[6] John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake

[7] John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake

[8] Henri Lefebvre, Metaphilosophy

[9] Henri Lefebvre, Metaphilosophy

[10] https://collapsepatchworks.com/2023/10/06/individualism-and-post-liberalism/

[11] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

[12] Henri Lefebvre, Metaphilosophy

[13] Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment

[14] https://im1776.com/2024/12/09/greenland/

[15] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

[16] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

[17] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

[18] Henri Lefebvre, Metaphilosophy

[19] https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit

[20] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

[21] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

[22] Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?

[23] Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?

[24] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

[25] Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?

[26] Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?

[27] Julian Barbour, The End of Time