Meaningful Maps, Global Brain Singularity, and Real Speculations (Part V)

The Logic of Hegel on Religion and Absolute Knowing, Peterson and Last

Photo by Gabriela

To stress, I don’t disagree with Peterson that a key role of society is to provide predictability, but this means a “working” society cannot help us if the very means by which it “works” sets us up for replacement or for being “flattened” out of humanity (the problem is “in” the logic of “working” itself). This is the case with Technological Capitalism today, and, with a nod to Paul Virilio, the point is that technology and accelerating rates of changes must be made primary in our understanding of society: technology cannot just be “added” to a society without fundamentally changing it or say a secondary concern to psychological development. This is very important, because it means that unless a society profoundly regulates technology (like the Amish), then the society will allow in its midst that which will easily keep it from “working” in the sense of helping people generally feel like they have a sense of what they can expect in the future. Personally, technology was a reason why I had to move beyond David Hume in my thinking, because if we used technology we simply would be forced to interact with difference, otherness, and Global Pluralism, and that required more resources than what was found in Hume (though Hume is still necessary with Hegel for “The Modern Counter-Enlightenment).

Predictability as a benefit can “pass over” into a vice, where difference, diversity, and creativity are snuffed out, perhaps even violently, to maintain predictability. Belonging Again (Part I) spoke regularly of “the banality of evil” which concerned Hannah Arendt, and as “givens” could generate this great horror, so the same might follow from “indestructible maps” that establish for people “what one thoughtlessly does” in their everydayness, which can include xenophobia, racism, and worse. To avoid these evils, we need to “pass over into otherness,” and technology can help with that, but if we so “pass over” too quickly or too dramatically, we can be overwhelmed and destroyed by the process. The more we remove technology and Capital from our lives, the more we could be at risk of regressing into a “banality of evil,” but the more we employ technology and Capital, the more we might be overwhelmed by anxiety and destroyed that way. There’s no easy road left, and it is in taking technology seriously that we can position ourselves to confront this challenge.

Taking seriously “The Global Brain Singularity” is at the heart of Cadell’s intellectual journey: he assumes technology and sees it at the heart of civilizational development (society is technology/culture, not “technology and culture”). ‘The discovery of the idea of the technological singularity was fundamental for me,’ Cadell writes, and we might imagine Peterson saying something similar of the discovery of “maps of meaning.”¹⁸³ Different from Cadell, Peterson’s thinking wants to mainly focus on civilization and culture in terms of providing resources for psychologically developing people to best address “the problem of chaos.” Peterson matters, but in not deeply thinking technology as essentially at the heart of the civilizational process, placing in it a “real contradiction” (Hegel), I think Peterson misses a tension that complexifies the problem (and for me leads to a more Freudian direction, for technology and libido are connected, though perhaps for Jung’s sake).

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Cadell’s book, Global Brain Singularity, ‘attempts to approach an understanding of global brain singularity through a logical mediation on temporal dynamics of universal process. Global brain singularity is conceived as a future metasystem of human civilization representing a higher qualitative coherence of order.’¹⁸⁴ The future society will not be without order or equilibrium, meaning in that sense it will fulfill the role that Peterson stresses it must, but it could be an order that we as humans cannot comprehend and that might overwhelm us. Here, we see another nuance to Peterson’s picture of society: even if society must entail some kind of order, there is no guarantee that order won’t leave us behind (it might not be an order “for us,” but instead of AI/Capital). Cadell will consider the possibility ‘of a potential emergence of a new ‘technocultural’ evolutionary process that allows for a new level of freedom for consciousness radically liberated from its historical constraints’ — while always aware that freedom can destroy us.¹⁸⁵

Cadell wants us to see technology as on a continuum of our evolution: he takes ‘the vantage point of billion years of interconnected evolution.’¹⁸⁶ This is very important, because if human evolution is indivisible from technological advancement, then this is further reason to understand that we simply can’t think the human or human society without thinking technology at our very essence (especially “medium condition”-technologies, discussed in Part II, a point that brings thinkers like William Ong and McLuhan to mind): a take on us that puts technology to the side will put us to the side. We also become ‘impossible to predict and reduce,’ and so to think the human we have to think of ourselves as and with the unthinkable: clear lines between “hero” and “dragon” are lost.¹⁸⁷ This in mind, we can understand why ‘the transcendent meaning of ‘absolute knowing’ [is] not ‘knowing everything’ but rather knowing that one’s own partial limited engagement with history as a ‘synthetic unit of consciousness’ [is] itself the becoming of absolute knowing.’¹⁸⁸ We are an (in)complete process that’s outcome is unpredictable: we are, in this sense, “a process-for-itself,” as taking technology seriously as part of a universal process can lead us to accept.¹⁸⁹ Isn’t this raising the human much too much? Cadell writes:

‘This perspective does not succumb to the trap of anthropocentrism as I am not arguing that humans are ‘reclaiming centrality.’ Instead, I am making the philosophical argument that humans could represent an important process in the context of the growth of local complexity that is part of a much larger ‘multi-local’ cosmic phenomenon.’¹⁹⁰

Capitalism as an extension of technology is also part of this process, as is the whole “State of Now,” hence a reason we must “tarry with the negatives” of today: to do otherwise would hinder the universal process, risking pathology.

Cadell also writes:

‘From my perspective, this goal should not be to eventually develop ‘one unchanging objective story,’ but rather to develop the open-ended empirical framework for a story of our collective history that everyone can, in turn, relate to and utilize on a personal subjective level as the story evolves and as our future horizon evolves.’¹⁹¹

Could this be the foundation of a myth like what Peterson supports, an effort we might also see in Brendan Graham Dempsey and Matt Segall? Perhaps, but even if so, it is a “Myth of Absolute Knowing,” different in character from Religious Myths that can lack A/B and “becoming-other” if not sublated. Such a Myth of Absolute Knowing must entail not just an evolution of the universe but also an evolution of the conceptual frameworks by which the universe is understood, which means a theory that tries to understand universal evolution must entail a “lack” in itself that can always (de/re)construct the framework via “a surprise and shock of difference” (“a theory of each-thing with Gödel” is very different from a self-effacing “theory of everything”). ‘[A]s a system becomes more complex, the quantity of possible interrelationships may increase, but also new qualities of interrelationship can emerge, that simply did not exist previously,’ and if conceptual frameworks do not shift, they will inevitably miss and even try to repress these new qualities (say the emergence of “hero/dragon” from a condition of “hero and dragon”; also, see Table 2.3 where Cadell describes the Atomic, Molecular, Cellular, Multicellular, Societal, and Superorganismal (‘networks of groups’)).¹⁹² ¹⁹³ Like Petrson, Cadell notes the importance of culture — ‘culture enabled humans to evolve the ability to consciously organize information with symbols (as opposed to organizing with biochemical mechanisms)’ — but this only means we require Religion sublated.¹⁹⁴ Looking back to Real Speculations, the Symbolic is central in how we manage and tarry with libido, which for Freud we must take seriously or civilization will suffer. Last writes:

‘When we think about libido as life force, we are thinking about somatic energy flows that move through bodily orifices (oral, anal, genital, etc.), and generate tensions, both developmentally (from infancy to puberty to adulthood to senescence), as well as structurally (manifesting in systemic-synchronic relations).’¹⁹⁵

Libido in the human lead to a need for the Symbolic and culture, and in associating the libido with the unconscious, Peterson is right that if mythology is necessary for culture, the loss of myth will lead to a failure of the Symbolic and the unbinding of a libido that could destroy us. Our minds are drenched in libido, which means we think according to ‘the pleasure principle, i.e. the tendency of our minds to seek gratification as relief and release from bodily tensions,’ and this is important to note because the Symbolic helps our minds feel enough pleasure (in understanding) that our minds are not overwhelmed and destroyed by themselves: in one way, we can see the mind’s desire for gratification as inhibiting its capacity for truth (which it does), but in another way we can see this seeking of pleasure as a necessary regulating principle of the mind to itself so that it is not Real-ly overwhelmed (by “the reality principle”) (hence why removing Capital versus negating/sublating it would be a disaster, as discussed in II.1, for Capital provides a pleasure of understanding via “compression”).¹⁹⁶ Pleasure with the Symbolic can hence regulate universal-human evolution to a rate that doesn’t lead to our self-effacement, but at the same time there is no guarantee that this regulation won’t go too far and “flatten” us to be replaced by technology before our AI-Causer (‘the story of eros’).¹⁹⁷

Cadell sees our relation to libido as at the heart of the question of universal-human evolution today, for if we can’t properly address libido, we will be overcome by Global Techno-Capital. He writes:

‘We must learn to ‘love the process,’ as is commonly emphasized today. But without a higher logic of renunciation and sacrifice, we can become short-sighted and too narrowly focused on what is and what we think we want, as opposed to what is possible (but beyond our vision), and what we might enjoy in the future (but not know that we want now).’¹⁹⁸

The future that will emerge from “the dialectic of creativity and energy” (II.1) (see “Metatheory Transition Theory” or MST) is unpredictable, but if there is a future which includes us, we will have come to terms with libido (perhaps that might be is the Great Filter). ‘[T]he evolutionary process as a whole tends to build and stabilize higher structural complexity over time, [but the] selection itself is not biased in any particular simplicity/complexity,’ and so we don’t have to be included.¹⁹⁹

Cadell emphasizes that, ‘[f]rom a cosmic evolutionary perspective, one of the primary differences between biological and cultural evolution fundamentally remains in the reproduction capability and pathway,’ and we might say that for nonhuman animals, the tension between reproduction and culture isn’t really there: they can carry out reproduction however their instincts go.²⁰⁰ But humans must meditate our instincts through culture if society is to function, hence why libido is a central problem, the stakes for which could be ‘children / sexual relationships / families,’ and more.²⁰¹

‘Biological evolution is a mature and independent process that does not require culture to exist. In contrast, cultural evolution is still very much a young and dependent process, requiring biological mechanisms to exist. This, of course, makes all of human evolution biocultural, and not simply biological or cultural.’²⁰²

It is wrong to speak of the human as “just biological,” as it is wrong to think of libido as “just a biological issue” — it is also cultural. Furthermore, we see sex today separated from biological function, and in this we must treat it as a psychosocial phenomenon that is increasingly distinct from biology (though never totally). ‘The future of cultural evolution could be the attainment of a stage of independent maturity in the same way biological evolution earned its own independence from physical evolution,’ Cadell writes, and so it goes with libido, which is not merely a matter of biological reproduction now: it is social (which hints at why appeals to biology and nature aren’t seeming to be enough to address collapsing birthrates, collapsing families, and so on).²⁰³

There is something necessarily repressive about society, meaning it must entail a “reality principle” or else it will collapse. Consider what Cadell tells us: ‘[i]t is not that Freud reduces everything to sexuality, it is that the non-sexual dimensions of our everyday life or psychic reality, are for Freud, metaphors of sexual impossibility.’²⁰⁴ The idea here is that ‘sex is something which is impossible,’ in the sense that a total unity is not possible, but if people realized this too soon they might be destroyed (like Beatrice smiling too soon, and so birthrates could collapse, mental illness set in…); hence, society and culture need to keep this realization from us, to some degree, and only let us realize it to a degree we can handle, until we perhaps even come to the place where we enjoy the impossibility (because not all failures are equal; because the constant ever might contribute to greater depth, meaning, and beauty; etc.).²⁰⁵ This manifestation of libido in and through a “pleasure/reality dialectic of society” as the human with a psychology requires, cannot be equated with the sexuality we see in non-psychological animals, and furthermore if sexuality is at the heart of evolutionary processes, it is not hard to imagine that a change in sexuality could be a deep and unpredictable change in evolutionary process itself.

Also, from Cadell:

‘The second crucial difference between biological and cultural evolution appears in a distinction between the fundamental natures of each process. In biological evolution, there is an endless and aimless differentiation of biological subjects whose future struggles and trajectories are independent. In other words, there is a struggle of genes, individuals, species, etc. within the biological order, but the biological order itself is not in a struggle towards any ‘common whole’ or ‘common direction.’ ’²⁰⁶

This hunger “to be a whole” is also another unique feature of the human subject, which also could manifest in how we are “toward” a singularity (for good and for bad). But as we have discussed throughout O.G. Rose, this orientation to wholeness can make us vulnerable to totalization which could lead to totalitarianism, and it is possible that society functions to give us enough of a sense of “wholeness” that this drive for wholeness (of libido) is satisfied, but not so much that we end up dysfunctional. Unfortunately, Modernity is a story of social capital breaking down, and so restrictions on our “drive for wholeness” have also waned, as we’ve also generated Capital and technology which help us feel like we really could “unify the world” (and in a way we can, through “flattening” and by letting our humanity be replaced versus extended by technology…). And so in the realm of culture we see increasingly a ‘conscious struggle for the universality of the symbolic order itself,’ which doesn’t sound bad, but if it is through the removal of all “givens,” this will prove self-effacing, and as we’ve discussed, Religion is not enough to address this loss without great consequence.²⁰⁷ We need ‘[c]ultural evolution [that] is also still capable of engaging in major trends of complexity towards higher integration (connection) through higher diversification (distinctions),’ and that requires Absolute Knowing.²⁰⁸ Otherwise, the historic shift that occurred where we came to believe in ‘a higher state […] possible in this world’ could end up leading to a deconstruction of all repressions and so our pathological breakdown.²⁰⁹

We can think of “the challenge of culture with libido” as the problem of having to (un)veil the truth of sex’s impossibility at a rate that makes it possible for us to move sex primarily into drive and speech (which is at the very center of culture), and perhaps this a critical point of libido in the first place, to sublimate and sublate from a biological function to a culture one. Lacan suggests that ‘we speak because we get as much or more enjoyment than in actually have sex’ (which suggests that a society which doesn’t train people in speaking, say because it doesn’t teach the humanities, might “fall back” into problematic sexuality), and we might think of this as saying that biological reproduction can be just as enjoyable as cultural reproduction, which is a reason we can be attracted to Religion, but this becomes problematic if we get stuck there and never negate-sublate.²¹⁰ For human evolution, speech is now primarily cultural and secondarily biological, and this is suggested by the shift to the focus on speech (which makes the SCM then fitting). The life and healthy development of a human might be mapped as a movement from libido primarily focused in the biological to the cultural, which we can overlap with the cosmic evolution as increasingly more cultural than just biological (which is also why “the social coordination mechanism” (II.2) is primary for the development of Global Pluralism and so cosmic evolution today, which is the evolution of Absolute Knowing as well). And since culture is indivisible from technology and systems, this is a move of evolution from the (more) biological to the biological-with-creation to (more) creation, with there being a “Real possibility” that we be left behind in this cosmic evolution. But that will be up to us and how we respond to the situation Cadell describes:

‘What is great about the sexual (non) relation [(or “lack”)] with an intimate partner as either your own otherness or an actual partner […] is that you never actually do have a fully consummated sexual relation as governed by your fundamental fantasy. Instead the impossibility of this sexual relation means that the mystery of your dialogue can go on and on and on and on. The drive reveals ever new mysterious about both yourself and the other, that you totally miss if you repress, foreclose, or disavow the centrality of the sexual (non) relation.’²¹¹

We need to accept lack in ourselves, then an intimate partner, and then in others (a process of (un)veiling), with each step making us more able to handle the next, and this process can be marked by steps in the speech act, which will be in the Symbolic.²¹³ Cadell asks in his work on the Global Brain: ‘if we undergo a fundamental posthuman transition, what will be the transition’s nature?’²¹⁴ The answer to this question is contingent on us, and how history unfolds will fundamentally reflect our relation to lack. ‘[W]hat creates our destiny [depends on how we] confront our lack and recognize it as the condition of possibility for the enjoyment of speech that is potentially a gift for the other.’²¹⁵ Though ‘the line between human and robot, or human and artificial intelligence, will simply start to become ‘blurrier’ (i.e. not a strict dichotomy) as the twenty-first century advances,’ the qualities of that blur will nevertheless reflect our relation to libido and speech: regardless the “metasystem transition” and it’s unpredictable results, that truth will easily only become clearer.²¹⁶

XIII

“Metasystem Transitions” are a key idea of Global Brain Singularity (discussed in II.1), and we could say that another difference between Cadell and Peterson is that Cadell is stressing that Absolute Knowing is necessary of subjects if they are to handle these radical and accelerating transitions, which will increasingly unveil a fundamental lack and negativity at the heart of human subjectivity. ‘[A] metasystem represents a punctuated equilibrium-like process characterized by an accelerated period of subsystem integration, before stabilizing into a new level of organization’ — take the radical and unpredictable change that happened around the invention of the printing press that then stabilized into “a new everyday way of doing things” — and a “metasystem transition” would be a change between metasystems (say between a system primarily based on agriculture and oral communication to a system based on fossil fuels and print).²¹⁷ Cadell writes:

‘In the human system metasystems have generally stabilized within three different levels of complex organization: hunting, agricultural, industrial, and within three different broadly defined forms of control hierarchies: band/tribes, chiefdoms/kingdoms, and nation-states. The next system is likely to be constructed utilizing solar power (and a diverse mixture of other renewables, e.g. geothermal and wind) with a more distributed control organization that transcends contemporary nation-states (i.e. self-organized).’²¹⁸

Ideologies and “maps” tend to form around and reflect their metasystems, so when there is a metasystem transition, it is likely that “maps” will unveil their insufficiencies, which could be devastating if people are unable to transition from say Religion to Absolute Knowing. Not because maps will be destroyed by the transition, but because they won’t necessarily be unless people accept the change (which Peterson is right to emphasis people likely won’t), and so people could choose to hold to maps while the world changes around them, leading to pathology and repression. And if giving up their maps will result in people suffering negativity, then it’s likely people will rather suffer the pathology which follows from trying to maintain a map, especially if people don’t have the idea that they should interpret the suffering of negativity as positive (as virtue can equip us to think, as discussed by Thomas Jockin).

Zupančič in What Is Sex? wants us to understand sex as entailing a revelation that total unity is impossible, and a reason society contained sex to marriage was precisely to contain this revelation of “The Real” that, if unleashed, could undermine the whole Symbolic and social order in unveiling too quickly and too uncontrollably to average person the reality of (ontological) lack. Sex leads to an encounter ‘of internal contradiction and impossibility (of our gendered performances of sexuality),’ and so will also be the case with the Global Brain Singularity (which I think we can associate with a kind of effort for sexual unity).²¹⁹ Where there is connection, there is a revelation of incompleteness and negativity, and this might explain why what Cadell wrote has come to pass:

‘[T]he results of endless ‘positive’ ‘progressive’ notions of sexuality (i.e. liberation from traditional repression, the power of gendered performance etc.) has not resulted in everyone enjoying their sexual energy of life force, but rather a remarkable emergence of new anxieties, social paralysis and all new-isolationisms. If anything, the loss of a ‘big Other’ for the containment for sexual energy has left the most immature or primal aspects of our mind open to attack and exploitation by technocapitalist parasites […]’²²⁰

We can expect similar and surprising outcomes under the Global Brain if we are not prepared for negativity: it will bring us great opportunity and possible abundance, but also great challenge. ‘The global brain is a leading hypothesis explaining the current evolution of the human system. This hypothesis is meant to describe a distributed self-organizing planetary intelligence emerging from all people and information and communication technologies (ICT) connected via the internet.’²²¹ It is a great unification, and “unification” especially needs dialectical reasoning. As thinking about sex has often been too A/A (“it’s entirely good; it’s entirely bad” — positions which reflect a discourse stuck ‘emphasi[zing] its socially constructed nature [or] evolutionary historical reduction’), so the conversation on technology has fluctuated between doomerism and utopianism, positions lacking dialectics.²²² Where there is unification, there is a revelation of negativity precisely in the unveiling of the impossibility of completeness (a realization that, following Leibniz, had to be a “surprise of difference”), and if we are not prepared for this, we will easily interpret the negative experience as evidence we need to stay in Religion and some “map,” which in being “internally consistent,” could indeed “hold us” forever. And so Global Pluralism could “rationality” fail…

The more we approach a Global Brain Singularity, the more an experience of negativity and fundamental lack like that encountered in sex will be experienced by average people (the unity of technology and the unity of sex both unveil a lack that is especially traumatizing for those without Absolute Knowing). Zupančič ‘articulates the way in which, what unifies all identifies of desire […] is a response to a type of negative core as an event, and this response is ‘playing out,’ a ‘performance,’ which is trying to re-introduce an ‘absolute condition,’ something we must ‘look at’ and ‘manage’ (somehow). That is the political question.’²²³ Lack cannot be solved away, and it manifests most vividly precisely in moments of unification when we think lack is defeated (like Christ, it’s moment of defeat is its greatest victory) — “a shock of difference.” If we are not prepared for this, say by ‘ground[ing] our symbolic knowledge or constructive methods in […] self-impossibility, as opposed to its fantasized (imaginary) completion, the experience could be too much to take, and so the human will easily be replaced by technology versus extended by technology.²²⁴

‘[A]dult identity tends toward a stable social reification that is somehow informed by the dominance of the genital impulses encountered/traversed in puberty. However […] Zupančič emphasizes that the greatest paradox is that infantile sexuality precedes this instinctual sexuality which comes to dominate adult identity towards, ultimately, the reproduction of the species. What this means is that the appearance of stable social reification of adult identity is always-already undermined by the free-floating undefined zone of polymorphous impulses or pulsation that characterize infantile sexuality. Adults in general, irrespective of closedness or openness to natural sexuality, irrespective of this or that social/religious/spiritual identity, do not know what to do with this free-floating undefined zone of polymorphous impulses or pulsation (that is, they do not know how to think its logical meditation).’²²⁵

Technology as it advances only makes this more undeniably so, and at the Global Brain if we have not faced this reality and learned to meditate it, we will likely use our godlike power in a manner that destroys us. Sexuality is not something that we can “master away” through our maturity into adulthood; it is a Real that’s abyssal and mysterious character we can try to conceal and repress through such stories. Failure to take this mystery seriously leads to consequences that are ‘fully on display’ because of technology, ‘where instinctual sexuality aiming at reproduction becomes overdetermined by drive sexuality aiming for self-referential enjoyment.’²²⁶ Our hope is in this quality that can make humans unique: we embrace that we know we ‘do not know (the abyss of sex as ‘missing knowledge’).’²²⁷ Is that something we’ll be able to do as we feel technology making us more like gods? If not, our moment of greatest victory could be our greatest defeat (“anti-christ”).

To face “abyssal sexuality” and not run from the challenge, in contrast to isolationism, would be ‘to establish a commonwealth based on access’ — an open and interacting Global Pluralism — and this would entail ‘accept[ing] that the emerging technological revolution presents us with an immanent transition in our sociopolitical life, a transition we cannot prevent or control, but nonetheless a transition that can be guided towards a higher level of planetary self-organization.’²²⁸ This would be “Global Becoming,” we might say, and ‘the affirmation of the truth of the unity of Being-Noting, is Becoming. But we must think this on the level of the libido, the discovery of infantile/drive sexuality, and its political implications. For historical reasons, this task necessarily escapes Hegel’s own logical gaze (but not necessarily his logic). Who best understood both the truth of libido and Hegel’s logic? The answer is obvious: Jacques Lacan.’²²⁹ Hence Cadell’s focus on Lacan, for to ignore psychoanalysis is to ignore what is necessary for us as we approach the Global Brain Singularity, for in psychoanalysis we are trained to think and approach “becoming-other” (“becoming-alien”) while suffering increased “otherness” all around us. As in sex we encounter strangeness in ourselves and our partner that we must confront, so the advancement of technology will make us “strangers to ourselves,” while also making those around us increasingly strange. All this brings to mind what Peterson wrote on “the stranger,” giving us another opportunity to think and contrast Cadell and Peterson.

XIV

“The problem of chaos” that concerns Peterson is like the problem of releases” that concerned Rieff, and I certainly see overlap between Belonging Again, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, and Maps of Meaning. I would also say there are fragments of a sociology in Peterson, one I find helpful in how it links the individual and the collective through tensions of avoiding chaos without fearing it; I even see Peterson thinking that which aligns with Hume’s thoughts on “The Philosophical Journey.” The issue is that I disagree with his address, and I see “maps” as easily part of the problem when it comes to Global Pluralism and Capital in being “internally consistent systems,” which means it is actually problematic that “maps” can provide people a sense of meaning and belonging exactly as Peterson discusses (a bad address could be worse than no address at all).

Anyway, Peterson is aware of the challenge of otherness when he discusses “the stranger” in the section “The Appearance of Anomaly” (particularly important for me), and he writes: ‘Every culture represents and idiosyncratic paradigm, a pattern of behaving in the face of the unknown, and the paradigm cannot be shifted (its basic axioms cannot be modified), without dramatic consequences — without dissolution, metaphoric death — prior to (potential) reconstruction.’²³⁰ Well said, which suggests why people can be so hesitant to make even minor changes to their worldviews: if this shift caused a chain-reaction that impacted their underlying assumptions, “a small change” could cause their entire worldview to collapse (though not necessarily, hence “indestructibility”). To avoid this (which from a “cost/benefit analysis” can be rational to do), it’s not that people will usually put up hard barriers to avoid “otherness” or make obvious declarations that they are trying to limit diversity; instead, they tend to “just happen” to have not read that book, talked to that person yet, done that thing — “encountering otherness” becomes something we’re always “just about to do.” That, or people “drift,” or else we try to replace “deep difference” with “multiculturism,” which Hunter was right to warn would be a disaster (Part I) — we have many strategies to employ.

‘A foreign man, a stranger, is threatening because he is not firmly fixed within a social hierarchy,’ Peterson writes, ‘and may therefore behave unpredictably — with unpredictable consequences for the social hierarchy.’²³¹ If we cannot handle surprise, we cannot handle strangers, and so we will have to avoid them, meaning Global Pluralism is likely doomed. “The Question of the Stranger” is paramount, and a question arises: Is a society no better than its capacity to keep out strangers, or is it no better than its capacity to handle strangers? I think all of us would quickly reply “handle,” but is that how we actually act? The argument of Belonging Again is that we have never “handled difference” very well (we’ve often reduced it into “multiculturalism,” as Hunter discusses, or “flattened” it with Capital), and in that sense society hasn’t succeeded as well as it should have (not to say no progress has been made). Religions could help, because teachings in say Christianity reminded people that “they shouldn’t judge” and that God could come in the form of “The Good Samaritan,” which is to say Religion could keep an “opening” in society to help it avoid total enclosure. And now that Religion has declined and the problems of Pluralism has intensified, isn’t it reasonable to think that returning to Religion is a positive move, precisely as Peterson has taught? It’s easily an improvement move, but if Cadell is right that ultimately taking difference seriously will require handling “sexual difference” and what we’ve learned in psychoanalysis or else Absolute Knowing is impossible, then more is needed, which doesn’t mean Religion is abandoned but instead negated/sublated. And of course, the Global Brain Singularity will make us all strange…

Even if we want to believe that a society’s strength is found in how well it can “handle the stranger” versus “keep the stranger out,” without the right capacities, we simply won’t handle the stranger well, and this will risk what Peterson calls a “cascade” of doubts, uncertainty, anxiety, and the like that overwhelm a people and make life feel unlivable, a condition in which fascism and political backlash are likely. We simply require the right capacities to “handle strangers,” and these would be capacities I would associate with Cadell and Nietzschean Childhood. Can we “spread Childhood”? If not, then it is unlikely that societies which “handle strangers” well will exist in significant number, and if technology is going to make us all strangers, this lack of Childhood will be deeply consequential. Peterson is not a fool though, and he too understands our age requires greater capacities, hence his focus on individual development. He is also not a naïve Conservative, aware that there is a danger of ‘arrogant traditionalism, masquerading as moral virtue, [which] is merely unexpressed fear of leaving the beaten path […] The inevitable result of such failure is restriction of meaning — by definition, as meaning exists on the border between the known and unknown.’²³² Peterson is more interesting and tragic, telling us ‘[i]t is curiosity that kills the cat, but, equally, curiosity that guides the discovery.’²³³ But even so, since Peterson is operating in a “logical form” (A/A) that lacks Hegel, having the right notions will still lead to error, for the right notions cannot be approached in the right way without a sublated logic — so is Cadell’s warning.

Peterson stresses that our response to the unknown — on which our survival of chaos depends — must be a “heroic stance,” which is better than nothing and Religious, but, again, what happens when “the hero” becomes “the stranger” in his or her own hero-ness?²³⁴ Cadell through the Global Brain is helping us understand that increasingly we will not just live in a world where “there is a society that must think how to treat the stranger”; instead, we will be “in a strange society of strangers to themselves and others” (we are moving from a world of “I and other” to realizing “I/other”-ness). We can parallel this development alongside a movement which is contributing to it that Cadell draws attention to in Global Brain Singularity, which is the increasing growth of “cultural replication,” even at the expense of “biological replication.”²³⁵ By “culture replication,” we can think of the invention of technology, making of art, etc., and Cadell suggests in his book that evolution is moving to a cultural dimension beyond just the biological; as there was a time when evolution primarily occurred in terms of galaxies (say soon after the Big Bang), then chemistry (before multicellular organisms), and yet now we almost don’t even think about “chemical evolution,” just “biological evolution,” so we are entering a time when we might primarily think of “cultural evolution” as if the other evolutions aren’t even occurring (though of course they are always at play). Relative to most biological animals, humans are “alien” and “strangers”, and yet we are also part of biology; likewise, as culture develops, we can imagine entities coming into existence (perhaps cyborgs of some kind) which will be “alien” and “strangers” to others of human culture, and yet nevertheless the beings will be part of culture. Cadell predicts that this trajectory will be fully realized ‘before 2050, which suggests that this theory could be in some way connected to the hypothesized metasystem transition commonly referred to as ‘Global Brain’ […] In order to take this twenty-first century future seriously, we need only assume that the pressures of the modern developed world hold and accelerate globally’ — Cadell warns that Religion will not be able to handle this acceleration without pathology; we require Absolute Knowing.²³⁶

The future is unpredictable, but there are trends happening today that we can assume will continue and not be in this predicting the future; instead, we are identifying a basis according to which we can determine how we can prepare ourselves and for what. Right now, as we’ll elaborate on in II.2 with Cadell’s work, human evolution is caught due to energy constraints between “biological replication” and “cultural replication,” and increasingly “cultural replication” is winning out at the expense of biology. This is a negation of our self-effacement (“the replacement of humanity” by our “manipulative tools”), not a negation of our sublation (“the extension of humanity” by our “convivial tools,” alluding to Illich). But where energy is limited, one of these replications must win out over the other, which suggests the question of “spreading timenergy” (as David McKerracher discusses) is also the question on if “cultural replication” will “leave the human behind” or somehow “bring the human with it” — or if we’ll try to abandon and isolate ourselves from “cultural replication” for the sake of preserving “biological replication” (more Amish). This tension regarding energy will be expanded on more in II.2, where it will be suggested that “the social coordination mechanism” might with Geopadia increase inspiration and timenergy — but what all this means will be discussed later.

Cadell discusses “the subject-object division” that has characterized much thinking in history, which has contributed to us problematically thinking of “cultural replication” and “biological replication” as separate and unrelated, when really “subjects and objects” are “subjects/objects,” which means “biology/(culture/technology),” and so it is absolutely possible for the libido of biology to end up primarily manifest in culture and technology at the expense of “biological replication,” precisely because “cultural replication” doesn’t repress it but instead uses its very energy for itself. If culture repressed biology (say because subjects and objects were clearly split), it would be more unlikely that biology could be replaced by culture (for it would kill libido and hence the energy of its own possibility), but since the relation is a sublimation, libido can flow easily from biology to culture. There will be biological pathologies as a result, sure, but it could be easy to rationalize those away in light of the cultural and technological gains. Also, cultural and technological advancements will offer different ways to express and satisfy sexuality say with birth control, pornography, hookups, etc., all of which will increasingly separate sex and reproduction. This is key: advancement in “cultural replication” doesn’t mean there is necessarily less sexual activity (though it might), only less “biological reproduction.” And if we are energy constrained, it seems only rational to emphasize “cultural replication,” where we get say both technology and sex, whereas in “biological replication” we might only get sex (which could lose its novelty, please note). To change this fate and calculus favoring an evolution that prioritizes the cultural over the biological, we will need more timenergy, for we need enough energy to both sublimate libido into culture while also having enough energy for biology, all while we also have the economic options and support to sustain this lifestyle — a tall order, one that doesn’t seem addressable unless we tap into “intrinsic motivation,” drive, and/or a feedback loop that in using energy generates more energy (as perhaps possible through the SCM and Geopadia).

Religion is not sufficient as a mode to approach our biology/culture-problem without Absolute Knowing, for Absolute Knowing is what we require for the human to “go with” technology, while Religion will not prepare us to avoid “being left behind.” ‘[T]he inadequacy of passive epistemological reflection becomes unavoidable [to see] when reflecting on the future of conscious and technological evolution,’ and wherever there is any presence of “ontology and epistemology” versus “ontoepistemology,” we are in jeopardy of being too passive in our thinking for the technological transformation that is coming (for technology deeply is us).²³⁷ In Religion, there can be dogmas and first principles that are far too rigid, which even if the Religion (like Peterson) can be positioned for a worldview which suggests “subject is substance” (Hegel), that worldview could still “practically function” as if subjects and (some) objects are divided, for Christian subjects cannot in their development and unfolding change “The Trinity” or the Apostle’s Creed (generally, for example). If we are going to be Religious with Absolute Knowing, we will require a “Living God” who is “with” us — which for Cadell and Žižek suggests a Crucified God, which here we can think of as a God who comes into embodiment, suffering, and experience. ‘Here we do not aim to close and complete analysis,’ Cadell writes, ‘but aim to remain open and incomplete, as approaching an abstract understanding of the subject–object division in-itself does not reconcile the subject–object division in-itself. In order to reconcile the subject–object division in-itself we must move from the work of the abstract intellect to the concrete real of the work of our experiences and our emotions.’²³⁸ Agreed, as hopefully “the social coordination mechanism” (SCM) affords, and this means the work of keeping together “biological replication” and “cultural replication” is one we will feel: it cannot be outsourced away from ourselves as subjects. The hard road is the only road left, and it requires the sweat and blood our lives. (Un)fortunately, with “death drive,” such a challenge is actually what we want (anything else we will undermine and “self-destruct”).

I will not go into the full case here (likely waiting until The Fate of Beauty), but we can say that Religion lacks resources to take “death drive” seriously without Absolute Knowing — whatever gains Religion gives us, we’ll destabilize to feel better about feeling good.²³⁹ As Žižek says, ‘ ‘Death drive’ as ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ is the very insistence of an organism on endlessly repeating the state of tension.’²⁴⁰ We want tension, and if our social order’s legitimacy under Capital precisely comes from removing tension, then it is likely we will eventually try to undermine our social order (without totally destroying it — until we do). Where tension is removed, we will become self-destructive to regain it, and so we need tension as provided by the society in a manner by which we can ever “scratch our itch for tension,” our else we’ll easily turn on society. Capitalism has accomplished just this, as Žižek rightly points out and Mikey Downs teaches on, as has perhaps been historically necessary, but now Capital is leading to an AI that could replace us. What now? Well, we must come to terms with “death drive,” which for me can only be done through “intrinsic motivation” (as “joint attention” can address Girard’s “mimetic desire”). The “death drive” is always with us, repressed or not, and only drive as “intrinsic motivation” is sufficient to address its reality. As “joint attention” is a powerful response to “the loss of givens” (or else we might fall into “mimetic rivalry”), so “intrinsic motivation” is a powerful response to “death drive”: if we basically want to “work ourselves to death,” we need a “work” that doesn’t lead to our alienation but instead “the extension of our humanity” before our AI-Causer. In a Voice Society versus a Task Society (as discussed elsewhere in O.G. Rose), this “work” will naturally deal a lot with communication and interaction with others, which is where we run the risk of “Love(craft),” meaning we best address death drive in a state where we are at risk of being “reduced to ash.” This is why the effort could be Thymotic though, as our spirits require with Eros and Logos (as “Owen in the Agon” discusses) — but all of requires elaboration.

Our problem is not simply gaining paradise; it is keeping it. We can go mad without tension, as we can go mad with it — the key is “the right kind of madness,” which I think “intrinsic motivation” can afford us with a unique “line of flight’ (Deleuze). Religion entails nonrationality and a kind of “madness,” yes, which is better than nothing, but today we specifically need (with it) “the madness of Absolute Knowing.” Also, Religious “nonrationality/madness” easily ends up in problematic hopes for a “stable state” of heaven and the afterlife, a logic of A/A: we need heaven to entail tension, or else heaven will be lost. (Is this why there was work in the Garden of Eden?) ‘For Lacan, the death drive is more paradoxically related to something highly creative or generative of novelty in destruction itself, and also something where the suffering or negativity experienced by the ego, reveals a strange type of enjoyment.’²⁴¹If we don’t’ realize “the right kind of madness” (say in Nietzschean Childhood), we will still need the negativity we deeply enjoy, and we will realize it in a way that could prove fatal to us all. We need the negativity of sex, but we also need to be able to handle that negativity; otherwise, we’ll still need negativity and go find it elsewhere, possibly dooming the social. An insight of Lacan is that it is through learning to tarry with “the negativity of sex” (eros in Dante), precisely because it is an “essential lack,” that our “death drive” might always find the tension and work that it longs for without proving self-destructive or risking the social order (“lack” never ends, after all). Once “death drive” is fitted with sexuality, the libido can then be sublimated into a creative activity of some kind, and once we are so trained and situated in and through that sublimation, we might have the resources and virtue as subjects to then handle negating ourselves — our “givens,” our absolutes, our certainties, our identities…our A/As — toward Absolute Knowing, which would be a sublation of “(be)coming-other” (into A/B). As Cadell has pointed out, much comes down to how we sublate our sublimation of libido, possibly afforded to us by a new “drive myth” (Last and Peterson together in Nietzsche), and I personally think the SCM could help, enabling us to “belong again” with all stages of Hegel’s “Phenomenological Journey” — but now we look far ahead to II.2

‘One must become one’s own first cause, and to become one’s own first cause is to open the conditions of possibility to reconstitute the myths for the real of our time, inclusive of magic, science, dialectics and religion. As we accelerate towards technological singularity, the tensions will grow, and philosophers who have moved through Lacan beyond Lacan, will be more necessary than ever.’²⁴²

If “biological replication” and “cultural replication” are to dialectically evolve together, which ultimately means “technology evolves with us” versus “technology evolve beyond us,” we will require more energy (and not waste it on trying to destroy or strengthen “indestructible maps”), and the suggestion here is that “death drive” could be an (un)limited source of energy and motivation — anything less than “(un)limited” may not suffice against technology — in integrated relation with “lack.” That, or “death drive” will easily be restless and unstoppable energy against the social, and efforts to oppose this destabilization, based on limited energy, are doomed. A stalemate might be drawn between “death drive” used against the social and “death drive” used creatively, but the point is that either way, we need to integrate, use, and think “death drive,” regardless the future. Right now, for the majority, without Absolute Knowing, our best hope to address “death drive” is easily by plugging it into an “indestructible map” where it can create all the tension it wants without destroying the “internally consistent” worldview, containing it/us without repression. “Maps” and so what Peterson is offering is easily the best we can do to address “death drive” without Absolute Knowing, but I agree with Cadell that “maps” alone are insufficient for Global Pluralism. And the clock is ticking. The Singularity nears.

If Religion is ill-equipped to think “death drive,” and there is no other way to realize “intrinsic motivation” then through “death drive,” then this is further reason we must take Cadell’s admonishments against Peterson seriously.²⁴³ ‘Why would we want to bother with this dialectical approach of inscribing epistemology as ontology?’²⁴⁴ Biology, culture, and technology can emerge together no other way: it’s the only road on which the human will be found ahead, and it is the hard road.

‘In contrast to the postmodern knowledge axiom, we may entertain the dialectical knowledge axiom which suggests that the ‘map has its own territory.’ Your maps, your abstractions (dear reader), have their own geometrical structure, and that is what we are interested in. It is invisible dynamical geometry, real knowledge that is not static and fixed but active in the reflective process of constituting the Absolute. To focus on the nature of this invisible dynamical geometry is what it means to inscribe epistemology into ontology. Thus, we are not (only) interested in an external view of quantum gravity or self-organization, but the way in which these abstractions curve and warp being, the way in which these abstractions, the movement of them ‘in-themselves,’ are negations or annihilations of being. There is something about being that is incomplete, lacking, and not only in terms of our knowledge, but in terms of being itself. How else could our knowledge of being appear?’²⁴⁵

This is Absolute Knowing, the “mode of being’ in which “death drive” can be a sublimation of libido into an “intrinsic motivation” in (un)limited relation to “lack,” so negating/sublating the subject into Childhood — and in no other state will we perhaps have enough timenergy to hold “biological reproduction” (genes) and “cultural reproduction” (memes) together dialectically. One will be left behind, and if that happens, the human will be lost.²⁴⁶

Let us bring this work to a close.

XV

Between Last and Peterson, differences arise in the relation between the individual and the society: while Peterson would emphasize individuals changing to change the social order, Last might emphasize that, though necessary, no amount of individual transformation, however important, will necessarily change the flows of Global Capital, the accelerating development of technology, or make the psychological demands of Global Pluralism any less daunting. Yes, “individual transformations” are required for these challenges, but also Capital and society set constraints on how much individuals can transform by themselves (by limiting “timenergy” or “the eye of value,” as McKerracher and Zak Stein discuss), so it is not so simple as telling the individual to change and the world changing as a result. The individual and the social are interpenetrating: where one ends and the other begins cannot be determined; we are all “always already” social. Peterson understands something like this in arguing we are all “always already” “mapped,” but his “map” seems more based on a collective unconscious that is tapped into by the individual. There is a difference between Peterson and Last in terms of “always already mapped” and “always already social,” and that difference matters. From my reading, where Peterson cannot readily include Last, Last can include Peterson: to say we are “always already social” can at the same time mean we are “always already mapped,” but the treatment of the social as possibly overdetermining the underlying logic of our maps (as A/A versus A/B) is of the upmost importance and what Last offers us resources to think.

Peterson makes a case that “the subject matters” and uses that to legitimize a Jungian response (his Jung) to Rieff; Last with Žižek makes the move that “subject is substance” but for legitimizing a more Freudian Lacanian response to Rieff. There is truth to both, for if there is an intelligible thought, there is a mythic structure (Peterson) and/or a trace of the libidinal (Lacan). Because “the map is indestructible,” the brain is always mythological, and that means if we deny myth we exist in conflict with our brains — Peterson is right. However, realizing this is Religion; if we want Absolute Knowing, we must also see in “maps” a deep problem, which is to say how “maps” can orient everyone to end up in small fascist states (likely destabilized into conflict by their “death drives”), especially if the libido is not addressed, for there is something pleasurable in the intelligibility and comprehension which fascism provides. Žižek warns of this, but those in Religion don’t have to see a reason to think Žižek (“the problem of internally consistent systems”). For Absolute Knowing, we need Hegel, Nietzsche, Lacan, and ultimately Žižek’s “Christian Atheism.” Since Absolute Knowing entails Religion, this stress on moving to Absolute Knowing is actually also to the benefit of Jung and Peterson: in Absolute Knowing, Religion is kept from self-effacement.²⁴⁷ Peterson alone stays in mythology and Religion; similarly, I came to conclude the Counter-Enlightenment could not think of a way beyond “social noumena.” Both alone end up in tribalism and so could breed fascism, world war, etc. Sure, both mythology and a “social noumenon” are better than nothing to deal with “autonomous rationality,” but neither are sufficient for Global Pluralism and Global Capitalism, as isn’t any “map” or “return to givens.” A negation/sublation is required, and that is the hard road.

Peterson is right that we require “maps,” and so it is reasonable to give them authority over us and “live our map well,” but this is not enough to address the problem of maps themselves if maps indeed are a problem (which this entire book has attempted to argue they are), certainly for Global Pluralism (if perverted into conspiracies, if they are used to paralyze us with Pynchon Risks, if they cause a Game Theory problem, and so on). “Maps” are a problem, and yet if they are necessary for value, and value is necessary for making sense of the world, then “maps are indestructible”—Peterson helps us make that case (so that we survive “The Real”). But if we end our work on this point, we stay in Religion and do not advance to Absolute Knowing, which Cadell suggests is necessary given advancing technology and our ever-complex society. What Peterson offers us is necessary but not sufficient for Global Pluralism, and unless we are to become more Amish, the Social we are moving into will require Absolute Knowing.

Peterson claims that “maps” help us with the Social, and many of his accounts in his book discuss how myths disclosure the ways to order society justly. Indeed, “maps” are necessary for the Social, and until our particular historic moment they were even sufficient — the claim is “not now.” I agree that many myths are concerned about society, and they are useful to think it, but each of us must interpret those myths, and in those interpretations, we are individuated. And there are many myths with different messages and lessons — which myths should be prioritized and in what order? Who decides? Furthermore, even if we accept teachings on the importance of “rightly ordered hierarchy” (take Peterson’s thinking on Marduck, who ‘creates order from chaos’), what do we do if Capital has trained and habituated us to judge those who should be at the top of those hierarchies as those who are best at “the logic of Capital” (and that logic is dehumanizing and “flattening”)?²⁴⁸ I like what Peterson says on ‘[t]he kingdom of the ‘son and father’ [as] an improvement over that of the father or son alone,’ but how in detail should the father and son work together?²⁴⁹ Also, if the father divorces the son’s mother, should the father lose authority? Some people think divorce is a major immorality — what will be said to them?

Peterson might say that culture arises from maps, and so if we have maps we can have culture and hence a Social (culture ‘is second-order abstraction, depiction of what which has already been made subject to order’).²⁵⁰ Sure, maps and culture relate, but our problem today is not “A Culture” but “Global Pluralism” and/or “Global Cultures” — or at least that step has to be taken seriously. Yes, there are many people today who lack a sense of culture, but if we bring that back and can’t address Global Pluralism, we will easily end up in the horrors of the 20th Century again. Peterson is right that basically everything in us wants to avoid unpredictability and so difference, so he might reply to this concern that it is an impossible goal. It might be, but then I think we are basically doomed before our AI-Causer. Perhaps not.

Peterson stresses social processes of apprenticeship and enculturation to bring collections of people into shared maps (‘[t]he individual’s identification with this pattern strengthens him when he needs to separate from his parents and take a step toward adulthood, and it strengthens the group, insofar as it now has access to his individual abilities’), thus generating a culture, and I don’t disagree that this shows how Peterson can get us “a culture.”²⁵¹ But can Peterson provide the resources for the spaces “between cultures”? What about if the relationship between generations and family has broken down, and what if what the parents are trained in has nothing to do with the world that their child find themselves facing (as Cadell often discusses)? If Global Capital and Global Democracy functioned as Francis Fukuyama hoped, Peterson might be enough — but they don’t, as Belonging Again (Part I) has worked to show. Still, there’s something to be said in that Religion can help people find a partner, form a community, and the like, and if this is what someone wants, it is rational to consider Religion. But that is precisely a problem if this keeps a person “in” Religion versus move to Absolute Knowing: if the process isn’t finished, the virtues of Religion can become vices. ‘[R]eligion can be revived by focusing on the very real dimension of problems for consciousness that have no final or complete answer but are rather fundamental mysteries of the historical process,’ but anything short of this will prove a regression and not help us ‘become the singularities of the moment that revive and bring to life society and culture for this universal movement.’²⁵² ²⁵³

Despite my criticisms of Peterson, we should understand where he is coming from, which is defined by historic realities that I fear we today don’t take as seriously as we should. As Norman Doidge writes, Peterson grew up during the Cold War and was haunted by the question of how we could be ‘on the verge of blowing up the planet’ because people wanted ‘to defend their various identities.’²⁵⁴ Peterson concluded that if we were willing to end all life because of our identities, then surely our identities and “maps” were far more important to us than often realized. Furthermore, I would argue that our “maps are indestructible” and that we are naturally “trapped in them,” which means we are trapped in that which will lead us to being willing to destroy the world. Peterson seems to believe that we have not rightly come to terms with this fact, and that if we had we would be much more careful to deconstruct people’s identities, worldviews, etc. (his critique of Woke). Peterson is right that people will fight for their identities to the point of apocalypse because their identities are functions of their maps, and without maps people cannot understand their lives and can go mad — so it is a choice between destroying the world and destroying the world (so why not a coinflip?).

To destroy maps is to destroy the axioms by which people operate, and since axioms are nonrational, if the axioms people follow lose their “stickiness” and legitimacy, how could they go about picking new axioms? Especially in a world of “autonomous rationality,” this would seem impossible: we must stick with the axioms we absorb and never leave them, being “autonomously rational” ever-after (never identifying the initial “nonrational act” that this required), or else we will lose axioms that we require to function and then axioms will be forever lost. This is not an option, and so people will fight to the death. Also, if our maps/identities are deconstructed or unveiled to us as axiomatically established (versus such without ever being thought about), then we could eventually face the reality of “internally consistent systems,” which is an abyssal reality that can overturn all our ideas about what thought is, how we understand—everything. The truth of thinking as entailing “the problem of internally consistent systems” can be deeply troubling, and rather than face that, we might prefer a fight to the death: we’d prefer the “innocent and thoughtless life” we had or go down fighting. There’s honor in that, yes? At least we can understand that position…

Many still believe Reason or Spirit could overcome identities and their problems, but Peterson is adamant that this is both wrong and dangerous. We require Religion, but Last is right that Religion must be negated/sublated into Absolute Knowing. Peterson helps us take the Cold War seriously, but Last admonishes that we must also take Global Pluralism, Global Capital, and the Global Brain seriously, or else it will be as if no progress from the Cold War occurred at all. Liberalism arose indebted to the Enlightenment, and Liberalism thought it was beyond war and madness, but these were repressed in the unconscious, and more and more we are seeing what was repressed leak out on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere (via posts that are clearly and even proudly fascist, racist, xenophobic, etc.). We are not beyond madness (it will always be with us, with lack), and we are also not still around as a species just because of genius, technical planning, or the like: there were numerous times during the Cold War or Cuban Missile Crisis (for example) where a random chance saved the world. But we forget these contingencies when we study history, and this contributes to seeing an arch of progress that seems to move beyond war and madness. This is not the case. History is often a story of hiding madness and chance.

Cadell writes that ‘there is no simple solution to capitalism and the neoliberal universality of the pricing mechanism as a way to resolve the problem of human nature,’ which is ultimately the problem that we all contain madness and will destroy the world for our identities.²⁵⁵ ‘Žižek’s work often functions as the opposite of the ‘Fukuyama consensus,’ suggesting an ‘end of history’ that is the decline of the neoliberal form in the face of impossible ‘commons problems,’ as opposed to its universalization,’ and this decline will be marked by a growing sense that madness can’t be erased away.²⁵⁶ This will tempt us with AI, technological utopianism, and “pod life,” for surely we could stop madness from destroying us if we just plugged up to a machine that let us enjoy our madness and fantasies alone? If we cannot handle the negativity of Global Pluralism, which requires Absolute Knowing, this indeed might be the best we can hope for (total isolation and VR immersion, like The Matrix). ‘It is [only] in and through that negativity (apocalyptic thread) that we can dance in the split (A/B) and the impossible contradictions of the scaling problem.’²⁵⁷ Is a life living like this what Peterson is getting at when he tells us: ‘Love God, with all thy mind, and all thy acts, and all thy heart. This means, serve truth above all else, and treat your fellow man as if he were yourself’?²⁵⁸ It could be, but not without Absolute Knowing, for what if our fellowman doesn’t want to be treated like we want to be treated (for we have been habituated by Capital)? What if our fellowman is too different from us to understand?

In a conversation with Tim Adalin of Voicecraft (July 2025), Cadell Last spoke of the “Dream of Capital” and the “Dream of Labor,” and how we have to think the contradiction between these two or else we will suffer autocannibalism due to desires (lacking drive) that we cannot handle. Cadell notes that most of our fears of Marxism are actually fears of Stalinism, Command Economies, and the State, not actually of Marxism itself, and Cadell warns that if we don’t think Marxism, we will not be equipped to address the antagonisms of our moment, which will make an opening for a return of National Socialism. This brings to mind Karatani (elaborated on in II.1), who warns that our world today is under a Capital-Nation-State triplex, and until we take Marx seriously, the reign of that triplex will continue indefinitely, leading to dire consequences.

The Dream of Capital (Capitalism) is basically AI, unemployment, UBI, and even “pod life,” a world where Capital can flow and function without being restricted by employment, while the Dream of Labor (Marxism) is the ability to do our work without worrying about money (drive and/or “intrinsic motivation”). There is a profound contradiction between Labor and Capital, and if we don’t take on this challenge, Cadell warns we will end up in endless Culture Wars with little hope of progress, leaving the Capital-Nation-State unchanged. What is to be done? For me, I think we have to “spread Childhood,” the overarching point of the “address” of Belonging Again. The human need for “belonging” is indestructible, which is a great problem, because this hunger tends to end up in fixed categories that deny “becoming-other” in favor of reifying some particular and “indestructible map” — which leads to a world of small fascist states that will likely end up in war, in response to which there will be a great unification, then an eventual decentralization in response to that — on and on (ever-swinging between centralization and decentralization, all to the benefit of the Capital-Nation-State). We must learn to find “be-longing” in non-fixed categories and becoming-other, and Cadell is right to suggest this will require us to think small business and “commodities that serve communities” (a negation/sublation of Capital). Communities can mediate our desires, and without them we are devoured by our desires and dreams, either of say Capital or Labor, as is inevitable if we don’t face the antagonism between Capital and Labor and instead accept the autonomous form of one or the other. But Cadell is right that the leaders of community must work according to drive and “intrinsic motivation,” which means they don’t need community, yet community needs “subjects of drive” if it is to avoid being self-effaced by its own desire. Can we think this paradox? Why would “subjects of drive” (Children) bother with community? Because they Absolute Choose it? Beauty?

A lot is being said, much which needs unpacking, but my claim is that Cadell is positioned to think these challenges with A/B better than Peterson with A/A, regardless how necessary Peterson might be for the journey. No step alone is a journey, even if every journey requires necessary steps. That said, to defend Peterson, though Peterson is often accused of being angry (I’ve made this criticism), if we take seriously that he believes the disregard of myths and maps could lead to a holocaust and nuclear apocalypse, then we can understand why he is angry. Peterson might think that we today really don’t understand how horrible things could get if we don’t take maps, stories, and identities seriously: consider what he writes when he goes into detail on ‘when the Japanese invaded the city of Nanking in China in 1937 [and] began a program of systematic brutality and execution that lead to the death of more than three hundred thousand civilians in six weeks.’²⁵⁹ This is the madness Peterson sees coming without Religion, and though in one sense he is right, this madness will still come if we don’t negate/sublate Religion into Absolute Knowing. That is Cadell’s point: Peterson does not go far enough in the Phenomenological Journey to stop the very thing that horrifies him. But we should not dismiss what horrifies him. Not at all.

If Peterson is right that ‘[a] society ‘works’ to the degree that it provides its members with the capacity to predict and control the events in their experiential field — to the degree that it provides a barrier, protection from the unknown or unexpected’ (like the Symbolic shields us from the Real), what do we do when we find society becomes a source of “a banality of evil” that leads to an “evil and predictable everydayness” of the Holocaust?²⁶⁰ How could we say this society doesn’t “work,” and if we make this claim, on what grounds should we justify and then enforce our judgment? According to our individual map? But the others don’t accept our map, so should we force them to do so? And so we’ve returned to Global Politics and possible war. Can Religion help us with this problem, beyond war? Cadell warns us that it cannot. Order itself can be a dangerous luxury, as Peterson himself understands, hence why he believes we must venture and confront chaos, but what if the subject who confronts chaos and learns to handle it, precisely in becoming the kind of subject who can handle chaos, finds his or herself the source and birthplace of a new, higher form of chaos and of “the dragon”? And what if in becoming a “hero” we lose the feeling that we “belong” anywhere? Such possibilities are suggested by Hegel’s A/B, but if we are prepared for A/B versus A/A, we might not become pathological when these possibilities emerge and are realized. But how do we “prepare for and become A/B”? It requires encountering and becoming more skilled at handling “the shock of difference,” for only then can we fully feel, with our full selves, the truth of “becoming-other” that Hegel stresses. Until we are deeply “surprised by difference,” we might acknowledge the existence of “otherness” and even speak of its importance, but we will not deeply feel or see it in ourselves, which then can make us an unknown mystery to ourselves. Isn’t that horrible thing? More hopefully, no, for as long as we maintain confidence (as Nietzsche helps us with), the loss of certainty invites the possibility of “intrinsic motivation” and drive.

Despite the difficulty and trauma of Hegel’s A/B, there is hope in it, for it means we can ever be an “unknown” to ourselves and so source of “intrinsic motivation.” ‘Where everything is certain, we’re in order,’ but that is for Maurice Blondel when we cease to care and end up bored.²⁶¹ So we can introduce chaos, and this creates an antagonism by which we find meaning, but easily through conflict, war, and violence. Hegel’s A/B adds uncertainty to all things (including “the hero”) by making everything a “becoming-other,” and in this we could see a “decentralization of (un)certainty” into each individual so that we don’t need “a big/centralized problem or unknown/chaos/enemy” by which to derive care and meaning. Through Hegel, we make ourselves (un)certain and so a possible and paradoxical source of care and drive. Zarathustra is a subject who reconciles himself to this reality about himself, but he does so with and thanks to encounters with others in a Pluralistic Social. We must do the same, or else we will find ourselves inevitably enclosed by Reason, Spirit, and/or Religion. We all must be in “maps” and in that sense enclosures, yes, but we don’t have to choose them over “the other” in moments of encounters and relations. To choose the other and become-other — this is the work of Absolute Knowing.

As there is hope in difficulty if we realize ourselves as A/B versus A/A, so the same applies to “maps” if we were to understand them as entailing Gödel Points. This is destabilizing and difficult to think, but if we do every “map” can become a source of mystery and “intrinsic motivation,” as I believe the subject needs to fully thrive, especially when faced with the AI-Causer and approaching Global Brain. Where AI does everything for us, if we still have “us to do,” there will always be a reason for our existence, but for us to do the work of being human is to enter places of ourselves where madness is risked. Ultimately, it will come down to how we can handle madness, which is to say it will come down to if we can handle negativity. Peterson understands this, but Religion is not sufficient for an address, and ultimately perhaps the effort is impossible, hence why the best we can hope for is the “comprehension” and “flattening” of difference made possible by Capital (discussed in II.1). But if Capital is leading us to an AI that replaces us, this “final option” will be our finale, and perhaps this is our destiny. But perhaps not. Perhaps we can tell ourselves a different story in a world where the stories we tell ourselves change who we become. Peterson is right about this, and Cadell penned a relevant paragraph:

‘In [many] contemporary scientific domains we are dealing with a situation where epistemological constructs or narratives must be inscribed into the ontological nature of the thing under observation. For example, technological singularity theory is a narrative that becomes directly involved with itself in the creation of the technological singularity; quantum computational theory is a narrative that will itself generate technologies of immanent universal consequence to all observers (even if no one knows what these consequences will be); and modern quantum gravity narrativization requires a way to reconcile observation with the strange dynamics of curved spacetime. The irreducible commonality to all such scientific problematics includes interiorization: What is reality inclusive of observation? What is reality inclusive of narrative?’²⁶²

Who might we become if we gained a new “drive myth” inspired by Nietzsche’s Childhood, especially if there was an infrastructure (like the SCM) which could habituate us into this story? Right now, even if we do realize new possibilities for the human being, ultimately these “new possibilities” tend to fall into ‘individual expectations (usually middle class liberal expectations),’ as “Owen in the Agon” has warned on, precisely because we realize these new possibilities through infrastructures, societies, and institutions which are organized by, and so habituate us to, Capital.²⁶³ With new social infrastructure, we might even realize the fullness of Jung, then able to ‘allow[] the power of archetypes to lead us towards different ends.’²⁶⁴ In that world, we can live out and understand what Cadell wrote: ‘The map has its own territory and points towards a horizon internal to and yet outside of itself, to be immanently constituted by its own dynamical motion.’²⁶⁵ Si muove. Muove.

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Notes

¹⁸³Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 439.

¹⁸⁴Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: xvii.

¹⁸⁵Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: xviii.

¹⁸⁶Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 7.

¹⁸⁷Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 9.

¹⁸⁸Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 10.

¹⁸⁹Is there a reason for this process? Well, there’s a purpose at least insomuch as evolution entails a purpose, a point to which we might respond that evolution has no purpose, but at the very least there has to be a reason evolution occurred x way versus y way, which suggests that even if a given change in the universe will ultimate fade away, it’s odd to say the entire process of the universe has no reason for why it evolved x way versus y way: it’s just that the reason is in the whole and found where the “subject and object”-divide breaks down. Hence, it’s not mad to ask if ‘our ability to comprehend the universe (knowledge) [might] function for a purpose that is still mysterious to us.’¹

¹Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 10.

¹⁹⁰Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 11.

¹⁹¹Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 12.

¹⁹²Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 19.

¹⁹³Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 20.

¹⁹⁴Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 20.

¹⁹⁵Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 539.

¹⁹⁶Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 540.

¹⁹⁷Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 541.

¹⁹⁸Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 542.

¹⁹⁹Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 23.

²⁰⁰200Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 24.

²⁰¹Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 544.

²⁰²202Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 24.

²⁰³Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 24.

²⁰⁴Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 545.

²⁰⁵Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 547.

²⁰⁶Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 24.

²⁰⁷Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 25.

²⁰⁸Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 28.

²⁰⁹Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 41.

²¹⁰Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 546.

²¹¹Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 548.

²¹²Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 549.

²¹³If this is done, it is possible that we create and incubate drive, as sublimated in speech, helping it develop. For more on what this could lead to, see “The Impossibility of Fulfilling Desire Is the Possibility of Intrinsic Motivation” by O.G. Rose.

²¹⁴Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 58.

²¹⁵Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 549.

²¹⁶Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 58.

²¹⁷Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 87.

²¹⁸Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 87.

²¹⁹Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 560.

²²⁰Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 562.

²²¹Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 97.

²²²Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 568–569

²²³Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 570–571.

²²⁴Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 573.

²²⁵Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 579–580.

²²⁶Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 580.

²²⁷Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 582.

²²⁸Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 134.

²²⁹Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 585.

²³⁰Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 249.

²³¹Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 250–251.

²³²Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 281.

²³³Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 300

²³⁴We can also associate this with “Love(craft),” another topic that often comes up in O.G. Rose, and we could say that Peterson lacks a concept of “Love(craft),” discussing instead the challenge in “the appearance of anomaly” which “the heroic” must face. How Dante “addresses” Beatrice though is very different from how a hero fights a dragon.

²³⁵‘Evidence that cultural replication is now superseding biological replication can […] be found in two other phenomena emerging in their early stages: increasing life expectancy and increasing number of people in developed countries opting not to biologically reproduce at all,’ for increasing life-expectancy means there is greater energy which could enable more biological reproduction, and yet people are having fewer kids.¹ Cadell works continually in his book to connect the fates of energy-use and evolution, and where greater energy is available, we should expect to see signs of new directions of evolution, and right now we are indeed seeing greater energy leading to more “cultural replication.”

¹Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 158.

²³⁶Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 160.

²³⁷Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 242.

²³⁸Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 233.

²³⁹This approaches what “sin” means: sin is not about ethics, but our inability to “keep” the beautiful.

²⁴⁰Real Speculations by Cadell Last. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 594.

²⁴¹Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 626.

²⁴²Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 597.

²⁴³Now, perhaps Religion can address this problem through a deep Theology and/or Philosophy of Beauty, such as Thomas Jockin is working on, but even then, this might work only because beauty entails a “passion” that requires us to “die to our self.”

In “death drive” we see a hope and longing for tension, and if we interpret this tension as evidence we need completeness, we will fail, but then we might interpret this failure as evidence we need completeness — on and on. If we don’t interpret RSI right, as discussed in II.1, as a need to “integrate with lack” versus “overcome lack,” we will easily be stuck in an endless and ironic feedback loop of self-effacement.

“Death drive” can perhaps better be thought of as a “die-to-self drive,” which can be intrinsic motivation. If this drive is directed toward “a third” in Algebra, then we can move to Geometry (a hope of negation/sublation), and so incorporate negentropy into an otherwise entropic loop.

²⁴⁴Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 262.

²⁴⁵Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 263.

²⁴⁶To take all this seriously is live as if “the map is indestructible,” and perhaps until this moment in history it was acceptable for people to live and talk as if “maps were destructible,” as if Reason or Spirit were enough. But this is no longer acceptable, but until now we didn’t have the technology to “practically live” as if “maps were indestructible.” However, we now have the SCM; the average might be habituated differently.

²⁴⁷Perhaps the problem if that Peterson ended Maps of Meaning discussing “Hostile Brothers” instead of “Love(craft)”?

²⁴⁸Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 132.

²⁴⁹Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 131.

²⁵⁰Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 149.

²⁵¹Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 221.

²⁵²Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 105.

²⁵³Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 466.

²⁵⁴Peterson, Jordan. 12 Rules for Life. Toronto, Canada: Random House Canada, 2018: xiv.

²⁵⁵Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 429.

²⁵⁶Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 33.

²⁵⁷Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 437.

²⁵⁸Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 455.

²⁵⁹Peterson, Jordan. We Who Wrestle With God. New York, NY: Portfolio/Penguin, 2024: 420.

²⁶⁰Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 226.

²⁶¹Peterson, Jordan. 12 Rules for Life. Toronto, Canada: Random House Canada, 2018: 36.

²⁶²Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 243.

²⁶³See “Collapse of the Hero’s Journey” by Owen in the Agon, as can be fond here:

Collapse of the Hero's Journey

²⁶⁴See “Collapse of the Hero’s Journey” by Owen in the Agon, as can be fond here:

Collapse of the Hero's Journey

²⁶⁵Last, Cadell. Global Brain Singularity. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, 2017: 265.

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