DURING INFORMATIONALISM'S infancy, the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari were already claiming in their twin opus Anti-Oedipus (1972) and Milles Plateaux (1980) that the increasing collective schizophrenia of late-capitalist society was the main characteristic of the development of informationalism. Informationalist human beings can no longer see themselves as Cartesian, cohesive individuals, but have changed into schizoid dividuals right in front of their own sceptical eyes. The same moment that the concept of the indivisible subject explodes into countless fragments, irreconcilable internal voices fighting and plotting to decide a conscious agenda, a new emergent phenomenon is formed. This is the dividual identity linked to a body machine, the multiple ego that is admittedly impossible to determine, and full of contradictions, but which, on the other hand, is available for observation and discussion. The brain solves the problem of contradictions perfectly well by simply closing its eyes to them.
This paradox – unified disintegration – explains both the development of and the problem with the new, levelling supra-ideologies and the intellectual short-circuit that permits the return of Morality in the form of cultural relativism. The dominant moral system of our age is neither of the old, classical ideologies – which are, of course, in open conflict with each other – but an aggressively imposed universal understanding between the old ideological rivals. This is a matter of a supra-morality which, ironically, is at least as intolerant as all earlier forms of morality, in spite of the fact that its express purpose is precisely to create and protect a dictated tolerance between moralities.
Under this supra-ideological umbrella we find, for instance, the ecumenical faiths, academic cultural relativism, the supposedly post-ideological liberal right, the New-Age movement, urban middle-class Islamism, and the pseudo-Spinozist populist left. None of these ideologies will be particularly popular among the developing netocratic elite. Because they never manage to attract any followers apart from the comfort-seeking remnants of the undermined ruling classes of the dying paradigm.
The problem is just that there are so many of these lingering, drifting moralists all over the world. Cultural relativism has therefore managed to capture the position of dominant supra-ideology during the current paradigm shift. The phenomenon can be described as a sort of ideological supernova, the terrible calm before the storm that is the transition from the age of the mass media to that of interactive media. Because even if netocratic ethics are already being practised within virtual networks, it will have to wait a while to make its appearance in the wider arena. Here the moralistic supernova still reigns unchallenged.
In the meantime, ecumenical churches are full of coffee-morning ladies and converted cultural journalists who, as a result of the isolation of dreary and chilly churches, have become so nostalgic and desperate for reassurance that they would rather listen to platitudes from a placatory wimp than kneeling in the fiery glow of salvation from a feverish Pentecostalist preacher. The fact that this means the church has given up all ambition to win new souls is something that tends to get overlooked. The pleasure of consuming security now brazenly exceeds the demonological pleasure of born again preaching. The responsibility for young people no longer caring about the message of salvation is placed, in true moralistic spirit, on the young themselves, instead of weighing down the stubbornly self-righteous ecumenicals, for whom what was once the so highly prized conquest of souls has practically been transformed into a shameful sin from their younger days. This is ironic religion, religiosity which takes everything apart from its own message with deadly seriousness. Behind the politically correct platitudes there is no message left. But everything else is most definitely deadly serious.
It is worth noting how the ecumenical churches debate nonsense like women priests and same-sex marriages within the church for an eternity, without ever referring to any divine attitude towards the issues in question. The shameless nihilism of religion could hardly be more clearly illustrated. The idea of any sort of democratic church contradicts, of course, everything that religion stands for, in other words: the revealed Truth. If it is the congregation rather than God that makes the decisions in church, why pretend that the activity of the church has anything to do with God? Because a democratic decision-making process is only an issue when there are disagreements that need to be dealt with, the democratic church can hardly be anything other than atheistic. God is simply one alternative to democracy, a way of handling disagreements through diktat. A schizophrenic or indecisive god presumably fills no function in a religion with pretensions to universal validity, like Christianity, for instance.
The consequence of this dilemma is a silent understanding within the cultural arena: supra-moralistic cultural relativism demands that the church de facto becomes atheistic in order for it to be accepted by the contemporary cultural establishment. The church accedes to this demand with the reservation that atheism, which is synonymous with the abdication of the church from all its claims, is concealed beneath an attractive guise of democracy that is acceptable to all parties. This mutual act of cheating is then presented as an ecumenical renewal of the theological message, where the moralising edge is, perhaps slightly unexpectedly, turned inwards, towards the more orthodox practitioners of the religion itself. The irony here is of course that this supposed renewal – the word renewal ought to be seen in cultural-relativist contexts almost as a retreat; the cultural-relativist message cannot be renewed – actually pronounces the church's definitive death sentence, a sentence which is then carried out with sadistic slowness.
It is hardly surprising that the vacuous, nihilistic church is suffering serious problems trying to deal with its extremist cousins. The consumtary quasi-ideologies that are being preached and disseminated by various crazy groups in above all the USA, east Asia and Latin America, and the hysterical macho imams of the Islamic world, refuse – for obvious reasons – to march in tune, even if these aggressive missions, with their pathetic programmes for a return to medieval moralistic values, will in the long term lose far more than traditional religion in the growth of network society. But the extremists still believe, unlike more socially acceptable congregations, the God really exists and is active in the world. There is at least an honourable logic in their madness.
Let us consider for a moment one example of the consequences of nihilism: if St Paul had listened to his congregations instead of single-handedly forcing the faithful to follow his moral code, Christianity would hardly have outlived St Paul himself. Today's priests lack Paul's strategic brilliance. They are far too corrupt and concerned with appeasing worldly powers. Because they have even stopped referring to the will of God in their theological quasi-debates, they evidently no longer themselves believe in the existence of God. The triumph of atheism could hardly be any clearer. Does the Pope seriously believe that we should believe that the Pope still believes in God? When the leading lights in a religion stop praying to their god and instead start to meditate, that's a pretty good sign that faith in meaningful communication with a divine being has been lost. If there really is a god who can show the way, meditation can only be a waste of time (meditation is also an oriental philosophical practice, carried out by professional yogis, and has therefore for logical reasons never previously had anything to do with any religious floundering for a personal god). Religion is now starting to look like a narcissistic excess typical of the age, designed to fill the vacuum which pointless prayer can no longer fill.
The strength of academic cultural relativism lies in its attraction to conflict-averse and careerist academics within an increasingly under-resourced, marginalised and politically expedient field of activity. What is most striking in this context is the impotence of the academic world when it comes to constructing a universal set of ethics, even though we are well on our way into the first genuinely cosmopolitan era. Because the incentives to promulgate an ethical perspective are negligible within the academic world, while it is still worthwhile both economically and in career-terms to represent moralising intolerance, the browbeaten and increasingly proletarianised academics choose in large numbers to act as megaphones for cultural relativism. Interest rarely lies.
As a result, the universities emit a never-ending stream of resentment. There is no end to the number of unjustly treated minorities that have been manufactured. Nor are there any longer any grand urban planning projects that can be carried out, no bridge building or traffic management schemes to accomplish, without someone in the media arena perceiving themselves to have been so violently mistreated that everything must be brought to a halt and examined afresh. Leftwing academic populism and its line-up of cynical mouthpieces – with such renowned philosophers as Slavoj Zizek, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe all on the payroll – then connect the maltreated minorities with one another in their heart-rending theories of hegemony. The chain of equivalence that results is then supposed to represent The Universal in globalised society. Ostensibly weak groups are used as the planks out of which a solid media platform can be constructed. Moralism is throwing its weight around.
The netocrats might laugh ironically at this whole performance of shrewd vested-interest politics, all these embittered demands for attention and compensation. But they are nonetheless obliged to concede that this is a strategy that still works. Weakness is strength, self-pitying cultural relativism rules public space with an iron hand. And the slogan ‘Status quo for ever’ is a magical mantra for large and politically powerful hordes of nostalgia-freaks. Dissenters have to trek off to the developing economies of Eastern Asia and the Middle East to see netocratic architecture and experience modern metropolitan life which both encourages and is stimulated by change.
The problem with the pluralist message is that it doesn't work as an ideological attractor. Islamic, Christian, Marxist and eternalist academics may be commanded in the name of the holy multitude to burnish their own distinctive features, but this is really only a matter of superficial posing, never about absolute conviction. The totalitarian axiom of cultural relativism governs the whole of this ostensible multiplicity. Cultures and ideologies are really only decoration, and the only applicable norm is hypocritical, cultural-relativist supra-moralism. Dissenters will have their university wages withdrawn. As a result, we see a society obsessed with symbolic gestures, choice of vocabulary and dress-codes. All of this is dealt with academically by the institutions known under the Anglo-Saxon concept of Cultural Studies, and, in the media, by the vastly expanding number of opinion pieces by journalists. All of this noisy activity conceals the absence of genuine ideological criticism. Consequently, there is not much creative philosophy created here. That task has shifted from universities to virtual networks.
The attraction of the New-Age movement is a direct consequence of the growing fear of the specialisation of modern science. Increasing epistemic complexity demands a good deal of talent and knowledge if it is to be possible to combine it with a moralising and hierarchical social identity. So a supra-ideology emerges, levelling all human ideologies and fantasies, without allowing any empirical examination or argumentative comparison of the different ideas. This is the supreme instance of equivalence in thought: it's all just ‘theories’, and each one is as good as the next. Everyone is free to believe what they like. Everything is fine as long as it is sufficiently shocking and entertaining to win dissemination among old gossips and ayurveda clinics. The world can't be more complex than this, otherwise our blinkers go on. This is the core of the New-Age movement: being genuinely talented and able to think is synonymous with being cruel to people who are untalented.
This superficial attitude towards the Enlightenment's view of knowledge forces, paradoxically, the New-Age movement to create a huge demon which has to be presented as precisely inferior to all other fantasies – in other words, modern science itself. In order for chakra healing and pyramid energy to look like legitimate and interesting fields of knowledge, in order for ayurvedic treatments to be sold at a healthy profit, modern, high-technological discoveries such as the brain-scanner and the space telescope must be demonised. Knowledge is becoming evil.
It is hardly surprising that New-Age conspiracy theories about modern society aren't exactly hard to find. This new scepticism demonstrates enormous productivity when it comes to finding demons among new technological discoveries and scientific methods. New always means dangerous and evil. And when no other argument can be found, it always comes down to the same basic point: the balance of existence is threatened. The fact that existence has never shown any balance in any meaningful sense is in this context as unproblematic as the fact that those cherished chakra energies can never be proved by any currently existing means of measurement. The axiomatic goodness of the New-Age movement legitimises all manner of idiocies and sloppiness with facts. Crazy ideas about balance and energies fill the air. The New-Age movement is simply academic cultural relativism's stupid country-cousin.
This development has a socioanalytical explanation: fundamentally, the New-Age ideology is about the myth of victimhood as an epistemological norm. A piece of selected information no longer has a value in itself, nor is it even related to a context in which it can be tested according to scientific practice. Instead, information is evaluated according to its origins. Person and opinion are no longer separated, but are now indivisible. The more exotic, ancient and connected to oppression any proposal's origins appear to be, the more noble and true it is presumed to be. The truth is no longer something that is arduously worked out, and thrust blinking into the limelight, but something that is pieced together according to idle whims in an undecipherable torrent of opinions. Your view of life is no longer what you are actually convinced of, but a decorative pose or an image you want to project.
The spectacular lack of critical analysis within the New-Age movement means that marketing overkill can be extremely profitable. For instance, the number of reincarnated Egyptian pharaohs has risen, strangely enough, in recent years, while the number of reincarnated Ukrainian peasants, which logically ought to be considerably larger, continues to be insignificant. This reveals the fundamental driving force of the whole movement. Ultimately it is just about its supporters’ need to prove the superiority of their objective value compared to that of other people. The same banal old jealousy over titles that applied in the European courts of the 1600s is still alive and well. New-Age followers would dearly love to appear better, nicer, more noble and holy than other people. Their dense hatred of knowledge in turn means that any quasi-intellectual garbage will be favoured if it appears to serve this over-riding purpose. The winner is no longer the person in possession of carefully reasoned knowledge, but the most daring and entertaining liar. I'll pretend to believe your stupid lies if you pretend to believe mine. The one with the most daring and entertaining lies wins, grows rich and achieves social status and loads of sex.
This explains why the New-Age movement's demonology is full to bursting with wild conspiracy theories about the dubious morality of science. Everything is good and healthy as long as it comes from oppressed, forgotten or foolish people, while anything genuinely scientific and empirically proven is evil, because it comes from the strong and the knowledgeable. The foolish no longer merely have rights of ownership over paradise, as Jesus claims: they also have a monopoly over the truth itself.
Wisdom no longer has anything to do with knowledge or learning, but consists mainly of a fixed smile in the face of all of life's sillinesses. The holy smile, which venerated Eastern thinkers interpret as a sign of wisdom, is mistaken by the New-Age movement for wisdom itself. The result is the New-Age movement's collective theatre of false smiles and constantly repeated tales of progress, where Evil is a faded smile and an empty bank account. It is hardly surprising that the New-Age has long been the favoured ideology of the marketing departments of multinational corporations. There is no ideology that can compete with the New-Age movement when it comes to producing plastic smiles. This is marketing raised to the level of metaphysics.
Because this lovely smile is no longer founded on years of searching for the Truth – with all that this means in terms of sacrifice, training, learning, examination and questioning – the most profound wisdom is perceived to be easily attainable in just a couple of weekend courses led by stupid and narcissistic charlatans. Being able to exhibit a happy exterior and boast about your short-term thinking, rather than demonstrating hard-won knowledge spiced with the stimulation of long-term thinking, is the moralistic norm par excellence. It is hardly surprising that plastic surgery, intended to create gentler, smoother facial expressions, has become particularly popular among the adherents of the New-Age movement. Wisdom has quite literally become superficial.
If the Truth is the same as a first visual impression, then the Truth must also be synonymous with the first auditory impression. This explains why New-Age people are obsessed with the tone of what is said, completely ignoring what is actually said, a problem that recurs time and time again in the tyranny of political correctness. The intellectual standard is constantly being revised downward, no common denominator is too small any more. Our view of how the rhetoric and substance of a message relate to one another has become the very opposite of what it once was. The latter now provides the packaging for the former, which has taken over the role of primary signifier. This stress on marketing rhetoric at the expense of real substance perhaps goes some way to explain why the New-Age movement has such a strong following in the service industries, among vacuum cleaner salesmen and creative nail technicians who are into zone therapy. And because these niche groups make up a considerable part of the fast-growing service sector, the popularity of the movement is on the rise. It has managed to hit the demographic nail right on the head.
But popularity, we realise at once as good memeticists, naturally has nothing at all to do with truth. Some ideas find fertile soil in a particular context precisely because they are so bizarre. Tolerance of the spread of the New-Age movement is closer to being definitive proof of the lack of social criticism in our age. The great irony here is the very concept of ‘New-Age’. In a time of growing interactivity, which brings with it an increased prioritising of ethical thinking, the term ‘old age’ (or ‘old nonsense’) would have been much more appropriate. Because what is actually new in a discourse which is entirely taken up with fantasies of lost ancient civilisations, but which lacks any relevant ideas about the dramatic future which is already forcefully making itself known?
According to the ethics of interactivity, a person's worth and their intellectual capacity have nothing to do with one another. But it is precisely this false connection which holds the macabre power-structure of the New-Age movement together, which makes New-Age the principal adversary of the developing netocratic elite, as well as the quite exemplary ideology of the consumtory underclass. The attraction of the movement's message lies in its appeal to people's subconscious shame at their intellectual shortcomings, which is why this shame is carefully nurtured within the movement to keep its followers in their place.
So the problem is not that these followers are intellectually inferior, but that they confuse their own experience of inferiority with decreased value as human beings. The New-Age movement is the clearest example of our times of an opium for the masses: it is the consumtariat's self-destructive reaction to the emerging netocratic knowledge society, with its meritocratic hierarchies. While young netocrats order yet another latte in their metropolitan cafés, a consumtariat fixated with New-Age is looking for ghosts in a barn with television cameras in tow. The discrepancy between worldviews could hardly be greater.
The pseudo-Spinozist populist left is the equivalent of the New-Age movement in political discourse. Once again this is an ideology of resentment. In the same way that coffee-morning ladies are attracted to ecumenical churches, and the retail-dependent bourgeoisie drawn to ayurveda clinics, forgotten old leftwing sympathisers are drawn to the new populist left. It is hard to think of a more grateful target group, because leftwing activists have long been ostracised and left to internal power-struggles within their shrinking and increasingly marginalised political sects on the edges of democracy. For these forgotten groups in the borderlands of media-society, the populist left offers an attractive package of slogans which confirms that the Left is and has always been morally superior to the demonised Right. When this simplified and de-ideologised message is combined with comprehensive media attention, popularity is assured.
Thanks to the pseudo-Spinozan populist left, old leftwing movements have once again ended up in the media spotlight. Their popularity in turn is deemed to confirm the truth of their message, or at least to add some sort of relevance to it. The hope of another 1968 attracts old leftwing activists and their guilt-ridden offspring, who, after decades of romanticised revolutionary story-telling, finally see a chance to do what their parents’ embittered generation wants. So the guilt-ridden offspring of the superannuated lefties run around at international conferences throwing Molotov cocktails at the cavalcades of politicians’ limousines, to the delight of the television cameras. Where their fathers failed forty years ago, the testosterone-pumped sons now hope to triumph. Otherwise there's a risk that both fathers’ and sons’ lack of ideological foundations and pathetic longing for moral superiority will be revealed.
These days there's no need for thick books to spread the message. The ideology has been stripped down and reduced to effective slogans in order to address a consumtariat with no patience for abstractions: the Left is simply the mouthpiece of The Oppressed. The Oppressed are by definition always right. Resistance is focused against something called ‘Empire’. And because The Oppressed are always right, the Left is also always right, so there's no need for any critical evaluation of its arguments. All of this only benefits the demonised Empire. Criticism is branded as such and directed towards a particular interest, and therefore the issue in question can be more or less ignored.
The problem is just that the traditional left often preaches the same message as evil Capital, which is natural enough, considering that they are both subordinate to a common supra-ideology. Within the pseudo-Spinozist left this problem is solved by embracing the opposing attitude in relation to Capital, regardless of what conclusions an analysis of such masters as Marx and Lenin might suggest, and even if the adopted position involves a negative outcome for the left itself. The fact that this logic means that the populist left is both self-destructive, easily manipulated because of its predictability, and dialectically subordinate to the initiatives of Capital, does not appear to worry the masochistic activists very much. They evidently have other aims for their activism than Marxist revolution and the empowerment of the working class.
This is really about an ironic resistance movement that doesn't know what it's resisting, and has even less idea what it would do if its resistance actually managed to topple whatever it is that it is resisting. What socioanalysts suspected about the 1968 movement – that it was mostly a fashionable phenomenon where the activists’ priority was to sleep with as many people as possible rather than change the world – no longer strikes activists as worth making a fuss of. The height of success within the pseudo-Spinozist populist left is, in spite of everything, to fly in a helicopter with Hugo Chavez over the jungles of Venezuela. Their ideology leaves no deeper traces in today's society. The concept of ‘radical chic’ has never been more appropriate.
Consequently, this nominally Spinozan quasi-leftwing movement has no qualms about entering into a variety of unholy alliances with groups that classical Marxists would hardly have regarded as house-trained. This is a marked change from the old Communists, who were relatively careful about whom they cooperated with. My enemy's enemies are now automatically regarded as supporters of the right cause. Everyone from superstitious animists to Islamic fundamentalists and extreme rightwing nationalists will do as company for the populist left, not to mention other consumtarian phenomena like ecumenical churches and all manner of New-Age groups. Everyone is welcome, as long as they are opposed to the common demon: global Capital.
It is particularly amusing that the left's desire for cooperation is so strong that it does not even need to be reciprocated. Islamic fundamentalists have time after time voiced their contempt for the amenable but naturally godless pseudo-Spinozists and their ingratiating offers of anti-globalist alliances. The Islamists want to force their own strictly literal interpretation of the Islamic faith upon the rest of humanity: consequently they are completely uninterested in forming part of the ‘Multitude’, the metaphysical phantasm of the quasi-Spinozan populist left.
Because everyone who claims to be exercising any sort of resistance is automatically regarded as oppressed, these activists are, by definition, always right, and must therefore always be supported. The abstract concept of resistance has thus assumed the role of the populist left's metaphysical axiom: why and in what way resistance is carried out is irrelevant, abstract Resistance with a capital R is always right in and of itself. Just as within the New-Age movement, there is a consequent confusion of person and opinion, and the reason for this error of logic is the same: the driving force of the pseudo-Spinozist populist left is the idea that the objective value of individuals is directly linked to their meritocratic status. This, again, is a question of resentment as an epistemological norm: because I feel sorry for myself – my narcissistic self-regard does not correspond with my social status – I am always right. The complications that arise when it later turns out that I didn't know what was good for me, or because I was too lazy to work out what was good for me, or that my interests turned out to clash with those of someone else, someone else who was at least as worthy of pity as me – all these problems are effectively swept under the carpet in order to keep the populist myth of Victimhood alive.
The hidden attraction behind the anarchistic utopianism of the populist left is the opportunity to feel morally superior, an attraction which for obvious reasons is strengthened when your self-image is dominated by a more or less accurate appreciation of your various shortcomings. The Victim is the rightful Master, this is the basic significance of being a victim. At the same time, populist leftwing activism presupposes subconsciously that the radical left will never win power: the victim will thus never become the master. Holy anarchy will remain a utopia, and power will always belong to the evil but subconsciously worshipped Capital.
The opening of the gates of paradise will be perpetually postponed, and Satan will always keep hold of power. This subconscious conviction means that the activists never need to take responsibility for what they say or do, not even to themselves. Only those in power have to be adult: those in eternal opposition can continue with their childish ways as long as they like. It is hardly surprising that the propaganda of the populist left largely consists of picture books drawn by scribbling schoolchildren, and their ideology does not permit any criticism to be directed to the idealised children in their followers’ nurseries.
Cleverly, the quasi-Spinozan populist left carries out its media activism without such obsolete and infected old labels as Marxism and Stalinism. It pretends to stand for something new by not having any ideology at all. As a result, it can appear untainted in television debates. The absence of classical Marxist ideological criticism is striking. At most, the ideological content consists of a few suitably abstract quotes from Spinoza, pulled out of their original, intellectually complex context, which achieves the desired effect because the academic left is far too impotent and starved of attention to muster the energy to question the proposed slogans. The cost of this lack of ideology is that their activism has no long-term impact. When the television cameras are switched off, everything reverts to how it was. The left has not undergone any ideological renaissance, but has adapted itself to the market and become part of the commercial popular culture that it proclaims to criticise. It has been transformed from an ideological movement with long-term goals into a short-sighted testosterone spectacle for the consumtariat, a sort of quasi-intellectual macho-variant of the New-Age movement.
The basic reason for the shortcomings of the universalist supra-ideologies is that they never succeed in bridging their inbuilt contradictions. Denial of this problem might foreseeably rescue a dinner-party conversation, or hold together a hastily organised demonstration against a common enemy, but it reinforces rather than resolves the fundamental conflict in the collective subconscious. The supra-ideologies therefore never succeed in genuinely uniting their supporters behind a cohesive and attractive social identity. They remain supra-ideologies rather than genuine ideologies.
The preoccupation with nostalgically yearning for the cohesion of a dying moralistic network makes the authentic production of identity impossible. Moralism has no future, least of all in supra-ideological form. If the clergy's outfits are losing their power to create identity through their transformation into just one marker of ethnicity among others, the ideology in question will hardly win any new followers. Questions of life and death may conceivably entice people to make considerably greater sacrifices than questions of fashion and individual taste. Particularly if the underlying message is that all ideologies, regardless of their content and history, are of equal value, and, reading between the lines, equally true, and therefore equally superstitious and mendacious. If all ideologies are valid, no ideology is more valid than any other.
If conversion seems meaningless as a result, there is no longer any reason to go out into the world and battle for souls. What was once a fevered and exciting cup match is now a pointless friendly where the result doesn't matter, because cultural relativist supra-moralism does not permit anyone to win, or even to try to win. Victory and loss are connected to a moralistic worldview with one objectively higher valuation, and one objectively lower. So it is easiest to pretend that the contest no longer exists by moralising over competition itself.
This development shows that the traditional ideologies nowadays look as though their primary function is to beg money from states and institutions, rather than winning new souls for The Truth. The rain-dance is now performed for the benefit of tourists rather than calling forth rain. Churches are transformed from places where souls are won for paradise into cultural memorials and museums. When we know how stubborn Morality is, we can draw the conclusion that the overriding aim of this transformation is to change shape in order to survive. When ethnically or tribally delimited Morality loses its credibility, Morality soon bounces back in a new, universalist form. The first thing the new Morality condemns is, naturally, the old Morality, precisely in order to conceal and simultaneously preserve the discursive monopoly of Morality.
If all voices are suddenly to sing in unison, the universal supra-moralism must be pacifist. The universally prevailing peace, Pax with a capital P, the constant smoothing out of all conflicts, is the new metaphysical axiom, from which all other moral norms are fixed. Every war and conflict throughout history has been exclusively bad, we are told. Empire-builders and colonisers are the new demons. A sharp and aggressive tone of voice is the new evil, while no-one cares about heretical arguments themselves any longer. The remarkable thing is all the constant talk about our post-ideological state, as though cultural relativism and the ideology of the correct tone of voice were not themselves ideologies. What is this stifling of opinion for, we might ask, if not to conceal the fundamental internal contradiction within the universal supra-moralism?
Pacifism is, like all other variants of humanism, yet another moralism. And just as humanism conceals an amoral core – the fundamental bestiality of humankind – pacifism conceals a core of absolute and unreasoned violence. Because the driving force of pacifism is not the avoidance of violence, but the assertion of the pacifist's moral superiority over the warrior. This makes the pacifist ideology the perfect weapon for anyone seeking to set themselves above all ideologically handicapped warriors. As usual, Immorality is running amok through the subconscious while Morality stands in the focus of consciousness. Obviously, this is why pacifist demonstrations are the most aggressive, noisy, morally bombastic, and consequently the ones which most often tip over into violence against the forces of law and order, which is always said to be the fault of the forces of law and order. And the violence that is provoked is taken as proof that their own aggression needs to be stepped up.
Here we see the point of the moral system's internal monopoly on power: because God has been subordinated to the governing social order, he has lost his omnipotence and can thus no longer be regarded as a god. If God's ten commandments no longer apply to my neighbour – because he follows another moral system to me, which I have promised to respect for the sake of the Multitude – the commandments cannot in the long term apply to me either, because they have lost their universality through the acceptance of any deviating opinions. Quite simply, there is no longer any god behind the commandments, which removes any obligation to adhere to them. The consequence of this is that the faithful moralist either has to renounce his moral system entirely, or continue the fight for its universal validity.
Morality's inbuilt inability to compromise in turn strengthens Morality's tendency to nurture hypocrisy, a constantly recurring double standard. The inbuilt paradox explains the immense respect that fundamentalist practitioners enjoy within every religion and ideology, whether or not this is officially acknowledged. Fundamentalists are, as a consequence of Morality's inbuilt inability to compromise, the only coherent and credible spokespeople, in spite of their extreme and aggressive attitude. The so-called forces of moderation, the adapters, are in contrast traitors to Moralism, obviously guilty of double standards. They can only hope for the generosity of the world around them, but never for the respect of the fundamentalists within their own ideology. The fact that Islamic terrorism is afflicting moderate Muslims so badly is therefore entirely logical, and certainly nothing to be surprised at.
The intention of nurturing and maintaining Moralism is to placate the omnipotent and all-seeing Judge, even if the Judge is only a passive observer of and not a participant in the communicative process. Moralists are encouraged, consciously or unconsciously, to see their actions as ingratiating bribes in order to win the favours of the external Judge. In the world of Moralism, relations are always about manipulation rather than affection, which in turn explains why moralism seeks out and flourishes in environments where manipulation is the most prized behaviour. Because manipulation is incompatible with love – I can never know is someone loves me if I have manipulated that affection into being, just as I have no reason to manipulate a particular sort of behaviour if I really love someone – means that morals and love are ultimately incompatible.
The primary impulse towards moralistic behaviour can be seen in a child trying to please its parents. This is the same impulse which finds expression in a collective form when the primitivist tribe dances and makes offerings to the Rain-God in the hope of a downpour that will save its threatened crops. A child which gains its parents’ attention and appreciation only when it does what its parents want – instead of that appreciation being the result of unconditional affection – will naturally develop into a formidable moralist. The tragedy is that the result is the same is if the reaction had been the exact opposite: children ignored by their parents will become, if possible, even more convinced of the power of manipulation, albeit in a genuinely tragic sense since this conviction is then combined by the subconscious belief in their own inadequacy. Other children are favoured, children who are superior to me. But there is no affection beyond the manipulation. Unconditional love is completely unthinkable.
A pat on the head for good grades in school thus becomes a prime example of moralising behaviour in all its glory, and the effect is obviously strengthened even more if a sibling with worse marks gets less attention. In the same way, a tribe that gets rained on the day after a rain-dance will soon start rain-dancing even more, even forcing previously passive members to take part in the ritual. Behaviour that we believe leads to rewards soon becomes the behaviour we identify with and see as a necessary condition of our survival. In this way we are encouraged to identify ourselves with either moralistic or elitist behaviour, depending on the system of punishment and reward in operation. Because these processes are fundamental in our production of identity, they are particularly deep-rooted and extremely difficult to direct.
The important thing in this libidinal process is not who the moralistic Judge is. It doesn't matter if we focus on a god, a goddess, a state, a party, a collective, an ego, a phallus, a matrix, or any other sort of metaphysical illusion. The conviction that there is a judge at all is what is important. The idea of the Judge, the absolute Phallus or Matrix, is far more important than any individual judge, postulated phallus or matrix that we imagine that we are courting with our morally correct actions. A pat on the head from our father only gains the desired credibility when we presume that our father in turn has received his authority from a father of fathers, the Ur-father, the absolute Phallus. As if there were really such a phallus.
This means that the primary arbitrariness in the production of values, the unpredictable aspect of God, also constitutes the precondition for the co-dependency between God and believer. If the believer can never predict in advance what God is going to think, he can never make himself independent of God in order to get his own existence and identity confirmed. Every decision must be referred to His Arbitrariness in person. This ruthless dependency reveals the subconscious, libidinal pleasure of the moralist: he takes pleasure from finally having found a credible external judge to appease, he no longer has to bother with a superego or take account of other judges and their wills.
This primal pleasure is the explanation why extremist sects force new members to cut their social contacts with competing moral authorities, such as their biological family or their ethnic background. The pleasure of obeying the sect leader's capricious orders must not in any way be disrupted, because it is this pleasure which holds the follower within the sect. The sect-member identifies whole-heartedly with this pleasure, and thus, in the long term, with the sect and its constant dramatic changes of direction. As a result, sudden separation or exclusion from the sect will often lead to acute psychosis. Cut off from the source of arduously constructed identity, all identity is lost and the psyche collapses.
The moralistic worldview presupposes a free-standing, substantial and cohesive subject, an absolute ego, a soul that exists in the sense that it is responsible for the urges, desires, intentions and actions of the body without itself being part of these processes. The ultimate purpose of the subject is to be the object that the external judge can judge. Goodness and evil in our actions must be ascribed to a specific object, and the moralistic subject is precisely that object. The subject is simply produced by and within the moralistic process so that someone can be held responsible for the impulses of the body. And this someone must, for obvious reasons, be something more than the Body itself, something outside the incomprehensible and mysterious totality of the Body.
However, closer inspection reveals that there is no such moralistic subject. After all, the subject, as should be clear from the preceding chapters, cannot even be localised. Moralism's credibility is lost the moment the Judge – and thus also the moralistic subject that the Judge is to judge – is revealed as an illusory myth, invented and maintained by an obsolete power-apparatus. All that is left of the once so sacred Human Being, after science's unmasking of the illusion of the ego, is a cohesive physical body steered by urges and desires, a network of organs that lacks both a centre and a responsible, decision-making subject. It is this body-machine, this dividual, that is at the centre of schizo-analytical investigation. The subject is reduced to a social convention, a linguistic necessity, an eternalisation which, from a mobilistic perspective, only exists as a synonym for the Body itself. Moralistic metaphysics are thus fatally punctured. Moralism has never been the opponent of nihilism, as it has always claimed, but ought instead – not least because of its inbuilt contradictions – be seen as the main defender of nihilism. The Judge is not just a monster and a victim that is perfectly suited to be the driving force of moralism, but simultaneously the force which inflames humankind's subconscious urges and desires in a society that is increasingly heading towards the opposite of moralism: ethics. The consequences for the citizens of informationalism are comprehensive: the great liberation project of our time is to eliminate all ties, intellectual as well as emotional, to an obsolete moralism. Only beyond this liberation can the ethics of interactivity be found.