SOCIETY AND TIME. GLOBAL MECHANISM OF EXTRACTION

This article is an editorial revision of lecture №3 from the cycle “The Meaning of Time”

Chapter 1. Modern society: the apparent absence of beneficiaries in the open social space

The vast majority of people today are under very severe pressure from the modern society, which they perceive as pressure from the social environment with its daily challenges. Today, this pressure is spreading widely in various forms. Back in a days, in the bourgeois times, before the advent of the global lumpen and before the lumpenization and bureaucratization of the so-called “rules of the game”, money were a protection from external adversities: rich people were more or less protected from this pressure, they used additional opportunities. But today the situation is changing dramatically: money cease to have an independent political force, an independent authority (if such wasn’t originally a myth associated with the occult meaning of gold). Moreover, the relationship between people and their property is changing, in particular, between people and their money. Today, the state has so entangled all aspects of human relations that even in a liberal capitalist society proclaiming liberal capitalist values, no one can claim that he is in comfortable legal possession of his property, his money. Financial inspectors come, fiscal detectives come, tax police; money that moves from account to account is tracked and registered. Since the legal field has become unsteady and virtual, doesn’t matter to whom, you can at any time come up with an accusation and with equal success prove both that it is sucked out of finger and on the other hand that it is a terrible heavy and objective accusation, depending on the political situation. Take the money and throw a man in jail…

Khodorkovsky(Russian ex Oil Mogul) is a peripheral example of what is really happening around the world. In the United States, where many ignorantly and naively assume the existence of other relationships between a humanand his money, between a human and the state, people more powerful than Khodorkovsky were locked up in a lunatic asylums as soon as they took “a step to the left, a step to the right”. Therefore, today it is wrong to say that money is a protective layer between a humanand the outside world. Rather, they represent an additional burden and additional concern on the human to whom they are attributed.

Suppose a person is “hung” with a property worth a billion dollars. This person immediately becomes, in a certain sense, persecuted: he bears a huge responsibility for making payments to the state, to all sorts of humanitarian funds, he must constantly pay off the system that blackmails him to the point of using the paparazzi invading his private life. As a result, he must lead a reclusive life, protect himself with employees, bodyguards, etc. His life turns into a very problematic existence.

In addition, the life of a modern rich person is full of all sorts of duties: he must wear this, eat that, spend his holidays in a such and such way, meet such and such people. For comparison, a rich man of the 18th or 19th century was a real tyrant, an all-powerful master, to whom the household looked into his mouth, the servants spoke in a whisper, the mayor, for example, of a city, bowed from the waist when he met him. And today’s rich person is a person who is simply a clown or an actor playing a rigidly defined social role.

It may seem that people who do not own such property, who do not bear such responsibility, are freer; Perhaps they themselves consider themselves free people. Employees, pensioners — much freer? But, in reality, they, too, are bound by a mass of invisible ties, dressed in invisible social overalls that fetter their movements; and they have a certain program that is connected with their self-identification. A pensioner — if this is a rich, wealthy pensioner from the “golden billion” — is obliged to travel to Cyprus twice a year, is obliged to hang out there along the coast in colored Bermuda shorts, make photo shoot there; he has certain relationships with his grandchildren, with other pensioners, with pension funds, and etc.

It is clear that his time is somewhat freer: he has fewer contacts, less responsibility, fewer every minute challenges in relation to him; but, on the other hand, he pays for it by the fact that his time is empty. The modern pensioner is a walking corpse, he is marginalized and excluded from life. Yes, the social services doesn’t let him die, moreover, it pays him a huge tax, thanks to which the middle-class pensioner is now considered almost one of the main parasites — the ruling elite switches the indignation of the middle class to pensioners who supposedly overeat the workers. It would seem that this person lives for his own pleasure. But if you look inside his personal existence, then a pensioner is a social dead man, whose every second is meaningless. He has no goal, he has no mission, he has no task, he does not influence on anything, he is a virtual human. He just walks along the hot beaches of Cyprus and Egypt, spends time before finally he is cremated.

If you look at the unemployed youth, then maybe someone would envy these captains of the sandpits, who are chasing a tin can instead of ball in an empty lot, thinking about how to break a stall or find a drug that will help pass the time. But their existence is even more terrible, it is the most terrible, because young passionate people have a huge temporal and energetic potential, the potential of time, a charge of will, a charge of biological energy, from which meaning has been stolen.

They are put in the same position as pensioners, they are a walking corpses, but young. If a pensioner has a few years left before the grave, then in front of the youth, from the point of view of the youth, it seems as if a whole eternity opens up. How many years to drive this can through these terrible wastelands among the concrete teeth of rising skyscrapers? Or villas, fenced with barbed wire and greenery, which you can’t even get close to — you can’t even throw a glance behind their high fences.

How many years? This is from the point of view of a seventeen-year-old guy — as if all eternity in its empty meaninglessness hangs over him. The horror of this is such that the only way he can improve the situation is to take a knife or steal a gun and go out in order to challenge, create a brutal anti-system happening, perform a sharp action that somehow, albeit seemingly, will stop this eternity. And, even through his own death, through his sacrifice of himself, will return some meaning to this empty senseless decay.

This is the outline of modern society. This is the contour of a society in which the mogul, and the pensioner, and the unemployed guy from the suburbs, and the policeman who hunts this unemployed guy are in strange slavery. It is as if there are no those who receive a dividend in this society. Everyone pays, but in whose pocket does it all falls?

Chapter 2. Three social models: tribal, traditional-pyramidal and modern

Modern society presents a picture in which the schema of traditional society is reshuffled and restructured in certain ways. There are two main types of society: traditional society and modern society. Of course, they have sub-variants, there are different traditional societies. The traditional society of Medieval China does not, at first glance, look like the traditional society of Medieval Europe; both are not like the Abassid Caliphate, or the India of the Mughals.

However, if we look from a structural point of view, we find that all the diversity of traditional societies is reduced to a single scheme.

In modern society, which we consider the social space of the golden billion living in the so-called civilized countries, almost all elements of the traditional scheme are shuffled. As if we took a human skeleton and rearranged its bones in a non-standard order — for example, the chest goes to the place of the pelvis, the pelvis goes up, arms change with legs — this is a model of modern society. Only the head remains in place, the head is at the top, as it was, so it is at the top. But everything else is slightly shuffled.

There is another model of social existence — it is the model of a primitive tribe, about which it is said: this is a type of tribal existence, it is not even a society at all. Neither in the traditional nor in the modern sense.

What is a tribal model? This can easily be imagined with a lot of Amazon jungle-themed adventure films or something like that. Imagine a schematic square: young warriors, leader, old people, at the top — a shaman. Everything is visible, everything is here: the shaman is at hand, you can invite him, the old people sit and consult, the leader works with the young warriors. Young warriors are always at hand, they look at him with confidence, with a gleam in their eyes, which means that he can lead them, direct them, they will follow him, they will shoot from bows, throw spears. The leader receives instructions from the elders. Rather, he sits down with them, there is a discussion, but the collective opinion of the elders is an imperative. However, the elders are the body, and their spirit is the shaman, who can be invited in some emergency cases, he begins to enter a trance, and sees how to act. The whole diagram is here.

Chapter 3: The concealment of the priest in comparison to the tribal shaman

Both traditional and modern society have a common peak: a developed institution of the priesthood, which is outside of true feedback from the social space. The main difference is that the “shaman” — more precisely, the corporate institution of the priesthood in its own closed function — is invisible. It manifests itself to the public only in its most social, representative part, alienated from genuine “shamanic” affairs.

We can, of course, see the Pope once a year in white robes waving his hand in front of the millions of pilgrims who kneel; he pronounces some formula of peace in thirty languages, and, of course, this is a “shaman”. However, we find it here not in a really shamanic function: to see the otherworldly truth and bring it to the elders, who will formulate a political task and set it to the leader. We see its functions as a purely representative authority. An old man in a white robe forms the outline of a misty-lunar sacredness, which awakens in the hearts of millions a vague longing for truth and beauty, for goodness and meaning, thanks to which life still has value in their eyes and its burden, perhaps, is worth bearing .. .. Not everything is so bad, there is truth, there is a radiance of goodness in this world, it is in this beautiful old man, the bearer of peace and grace, whom we see from afar in a white robe, who greets us from the higher spheres, makes us a sign with his hand. “And that’s why it still makes sense to live,” millions of people think, ten percent of which, if they hadn’t seen this old man, maybe they would have committed suicide right away, while others, for example, would have started breaking shop windows and going rogue. But one thing stops them: how will I break the windows and give free rein to my destructive “ID” (the Freudian “it”) will become a skunk when the embodied “superego” is presented in front of me in the face of this old man. So we all must, holding hands, behave like exemplary citizens of a large human family.

Thus, the shaman appears before the civilized society very rarely, the shaman is collective, very complex, which cannot be seen and witnessed in its ontological completeness.

Behind this elder high priest are hierarchies of invisible people (and perhaps not quite people) directly connected with the truth, unknown to ordinary beings. “Shamans”-priests see it, they know it, they don’t talk to ordinary people, but their interlocutors and partners are exclusively the masters of life.

The priests speak to those — we have not named them yet — who are the main recipients of dividends from this society.

All three types of society: an archaic tribe, a traditional social pyramid, and finally, a complexly hierarchized modern society with its parliament and democracy — all this is an instrumentalization of the power of the “Great Being”. By this term, we mean the archetypal model of collective humanity, the maintenance and implementation of which is entrusted to the super-elites, who are in direct communication with the priesthood, as representatives of the “Great Being” in our real world.

Chapter 4. The Reality of the “Great Being” and the Power of the Super-Elites.

What is power? There are many different things to say about power. Usually they say that power is when I command you and you do it. That is, power comes from the side of the master in relation to the servant or to the slave. Someone must obey, and someone gives the command. But, I have this question: this description of power seems to me very external, because power is a fundamental internal state of being. I’ll give an example. Let’s say a man was ambushed on the street, a couple of gangsters surrounded him with knives, they order him something, and he is forced to do something under fear and a threat to his life. In this case, they say: he was under the power of gangsters. Indeed, many philosophers, including Hegel, said that the relationship between master and slave is such that the slave is forced to work for the master under threat to his life. I am convinced that this is a fundamental, very serious simplification of the situation. When I was at gunpoint or a knife was put to my neck, and they tell me: “give me the wallet”, yes, of course, I will give the wallet, maybe, but I don’t think that I am in this guy’s power and that he has power . Because he put me in a purely external situation, which is like this now, but tomorrow he will gape, and I will knock out this knife, or at some point he will hear steps, drop the knife and run away.

If we take power from this side, then I am not convinced by such a situation in which someone can force me to do something outwardly. Then, is it possible to say that the client who came to the restaurant has power over the waiter? He gives commands: bring this or that. The function of the waiter is to take the order and receive the money. But can we say that the client has power over the waiter? If power comes down to this, then it is generally ridiculous. But he takes orders. Many go to a restaurant to experience the feeling of power. They understand power in such a way that they just need the ability to formulate an order to the waiter in order to feel like they are at the top of life, like they are a masters of life. But it’s a pure joke!

What is power? Power, if taken in the highest sense, from the point of view of the archetypal traditional nobility, is a state of independence, self-sufficiency, omnipotence and freedom, in which all possible states are combined into one. That is, it is an integral self-sufficient free being, which in itself has its own foundation, its own meaning and its own idea. Such is the power in the view of Plato, Socrates, such is the power in the view of Nietzsche, who was probably the most serious modern philosopher who expressed the problems of the will and the problems of the project of today’s elite, which it intends to implement at any cost.

Nietzsche is the sharpest philosopher among those who dealt with the existential aspect of power. He believed that the closest thing to the ideal of a supre human being, whose state embodies this state of power was Goethe, the superfigure of Germanic culture. In addition, Cesare Borgia was somewhat like a super human being, Napoleon and, probably, Caesar were a little like a super human being. However, they were all approximate, not real super human, and Goethe was the most genuine super human being. Goethe united reason and feelings in himself, rose above them, created a single personal fusion, in relation to which he became master. He conquered his ego. His lower elemental “I”, rose above the passions, controlled the course of his thoughts, he united all the elements of his being and existed in a luminous gracious self-sufficiency, as if in timelessness. And this, according to Nietzsche, is the super human being.

If we think about whose image Goethe is in Nietzsche’s philosophy, if we also think about Goethe’s message, what his teaching, his culture expresses, if we also think about Faust, the strongest and deepest thing written by Goethe, then we will understand that this is the state of the “Great” (as the Illuminati expressed it) or “Supreme” (the Jacobin term) being, which in the Islamic monotheistic tradition is called Iblis. Iblis — he is also Lucifer, Dennitsa, Ormuzd, Apollo — is, according to monotheism, the creature that arose first, woven from the primary pra-energy (“fire”). He is in absolute opposition to the “God of the Prophets” — the center of incomprehensible extra-anthological subjectivity, the external expression and protégé of which, according to monotheistic theology, is the physical man.

The state of Iblis is the ideal state that Iblis had until he was cast down for disobedience to the Almighty, because he refused to bow to Adam(peace be upon him). As the first being that combined light and heat, the two main attributes of primary fire, Iblis felt himself in complete self-sufficiency, combining in himself all possible states in that perfect balance, which for traditional metaphysics is “freedom”.

Supreme human being as an image of a higher being, as a kind of ideal, which Nietzsche defined as the goal of a new humanity, or, more precisely, of genuine people, is a projection of Iblis onto the earth. And this is what the masters of life, those beings at the top of society, want to become optimally. But there is an intermediary between them and Iblis, because Iblis is a supernatural being, Iblis is a being who, according to the instructions of the Almighty, is in “front, back, right and left” and is many times superior in its “gross” and “subtle” capabilities comparing to a human being. Direct contact with him or orientation to him is extremely difficult, so for this purpose there are intermediaries — shamans or priests. All priests and shamans, regardless of confessions, regardless of the method of organizing mediation, regardless of their declarations, are guided precisely by Iblis, who is a universal mediating point of connection of all possible structures and manifestations that can only be realized.

Man is formless because he can take any form. He can identify himself as anything. His body, of course, has a form, but this is a lower, gross form, which in this case does not matter. We are talking about the true form when a person considers himself to belong to a race, estate, caste, hierarchical status in a pyramid, etc. All those models that he chooses for himself, with which he endows himself, are forms that, in principle, are rooted in his nature, and he, under the influence of certain conditions, can already position himself as this or that. We call form what a person gives to himself as a spiritual being, those states that he can experience and acquire.

So, the priests consider Iblis as a global total being that has the ability and control over all forms and all states. This knowledge and this position of the priests comes from the deepest times, from the golden age, and, undergoing various modifications, exists to this day. It exists in an unexpressed fundamental way even at the level of the collective unconscious of the priestly caste. Moreover, the priestly caste has capabilities and abilities that far exceed the capabilities and abilities of an ordinary person. These are people who own their own time and have a talent or capacity for contemplation, a unique ability that most people lack in one way or another. And they have, in truth, no inclination or desire for this. Most people spend their time chasing a piece of bread, caring for a family, completing certain tasks. They do not have the opportunity to be distracted by simple abstract contemplation. Meanwhile, in a simple abstract contemplation, there is colossal power. People who can indulge in such contemplation and practice it gather such energy, such authority and personality weight, that they have an almost magical influence on those who come close to them. There are very few people who are able to simply meditate without falling into a trance, namely, to contemplate actively, becoming a mirror of everything that exists, who have this ability innately, and they have always been among all peoples at all times of mankind. And it is they who are elected to the role of mediators between the dark supernatural beginning that tempts a human, and people as a social fabric.

Society is simply a mechanism that embodies the power behind contemplation, the power of temptation, which is poured into this gray space between heaven and earth.

Chapter 5. Comparative anatomy of societies

We talked in a nutshell about what a tribe is in which everything is in sight: warriors, a leader, old people who in this archaic structure do not feel like outcasts, “pensioners”, but the real masters of time — gerontocrats. The old people have a special status because they are about to join the host of ancestors, to the invisible church of the tribe, because among all pagan tribes the first and natural religion that they profess is the cult of ancestors. An ancestor, once dead, becomes independent of the flow of time, it becomes eternal, it passes into the category of causes, in relation to which the living are only a consequence, and this is the most obvious form of victory over time. Moreover, each of these people knows that if he leaves descendants, he will be eternal in their memory and will join this invisible church. Therefore, the old people have power, as intermediaries between the ancestors and the living.

Let’s move on to traditional society. Its structure is similar to layers of coarse and light, thinner clay, located one above the other in three layers, in which refinement, subtlety increases from bottom to top. Below is, as you know, the most primitive stage. This is the very bottom of the triangle — the simplest workers, peasants, peasants, the lowest servants; above them are small merchants; above them are small solitary artisans. This is the simplest triangle of traditional medieval society. The second triangle in the middle starts with the free townsfolk-proprietors; above them are merchants who already have the opportunity to travel somewhere, money changers, financial tycoons who already have contacts outside this town or this region; above them are knights, warriors. And the highest triangle is: below the apparatus of the monarch, the state; above it are governors or governors; above it is the monarch himself, the pharaoh, the Caesar, and so on. These are the three triangles, the three fundamental hierarchical components that underlie the traditional social hierarchy.

In order to understand the inner mystery that characterizes these components of the social anatomy, it is necessary to imagine each of these triangles as if presented to a mirror: the mirror reflection closes the real triangle to a kind of virtual square. In this hypothetical “mirror” a fourth point appears, inherent in each of the triangles, but invisible in real space: this fourth point is a secret priestly presence within each successively hierarchical layer of the social pyramid, which we analyze as a triangle. An invisible priestly factor transforms each triangle — always relatively unstable! — into the most stable, inert geometric figure: a square!

An invisible priestly presence accompanies each layer of the social pyramid. Below, there are also dedicated and hidden ustazes, hidden sheikhs, who operate at the level of small traders, small artisans; they bind the lower classes into special networks of patronage, maintaining stability, and explaining to them the problems and injustices of this world. Knights have orders. And the highest level of priesthood works with the pharaoh, who is the personification of the “Supreme Being” here among the people. Ultimately, the pharaoh directly identifies himself with the “Supreme Being”, and says to the people: “I am your supreme lord” (Quran 79:24).

Caesar also considered himself a god, and forced all nations to offer sacrifices to themselves in their temples, and even tried to force the Jewish people to do this. The highest level of priesthood works with the “caesar”, which mediates directly with the supreme being.

This is the traditional society. It has one goal, one task — to squeeze out of people from top to bottom their time, their meaning, their energy and transfer upwards to the pharaoh and priests who feed this secret resource of humanity the “Supreme Being”, in which the balance of all forces that form the great cosmos is realized. Space is a place in which each next moment contains less than the previous one, it is subject to the principles of thermodynamics — cooling, entropy. And the task of society is to continue its existence in spite of this. That is, every next moment it is necessary to compensate for the decrease and cooling of the environment around the human community. This is compensated by the energy and juices that are squeezed out of people from below. Direct current upwards, to the pharaoh — this is the channel through which the entropy of the natural environment is compensated so that society can continue to exist despite the aggression of absolute zero.

But how much can be taken from simple slaves, servants, artisans, how much can be taken from people who have their own physical time, 24 hours a day, and an elementary environment: 2–3 neighbors, several close relatives, the owner-employer and the overseer are extremely close a world of communication and a very poor human space. Their physical labor is worth almost nothing. Such a society, metaphorically speaking, can send a hundred pennies upwards. And each next moment of the existence of society is more expensive: tomorrow you have to pay one hundred and ten, the day after tomorrow — two hundred, the next day — three hundred. The demand of the cosmos for human space is growing exponentially. Entropy acts as a kind of pump that draws energy, draws juice from people, and they are not able to give more than their actual social condition, their social infrastructure, their productive forces allow.

It turns out that progress is needed in order to be able to “pay off” with the cosmos. The owners and organizers of human space, the priests, go for a systemic restructuring of traditional society, which they bring down from above, but make it look as if it had taken place organically from below. They carry out preventive revolutions in order to drastically renew the human composition, to renew the positions occupied by different classes of people, that is, they allow the coarser clay, which in the traditional order should be below, under the thin one, to go up so that it stands in the middle of this pyramid. Thus, there is an intensification of human processes, subtilization or improvement of the layers rising from below, mobilization of the global human resource. However, those who ruled humanity in its traditional guise remain in place and continue to rule the new society, only slightly modified and covered their presence. In other words, at all times, at all levels of development of productive forces, in traditional civilization, as well as in the era of postmodern and post-industrial, the same top rules, the same subject of domination, organizing alienation increasing from era to era. Moreover, it is important to understand that this elite has not only a spiritual and metaphorical, but also a through physical continuity, passing through the changing appearances of successive epochs.

This is how modern society is born. The triangle from the middle of the traditional hierarchy turns upside down and sinks to the bottom of the newly formed system, which is called modernity. Who was in that traditional triangle? Above — where the top of the triangle is the knights, in the middle of the triangle — merchants, at the base of the triangle — free citizens. What happens when this triangle is upside down and thrown down, pointing its apex into a subhuman dungeon? Where there were knights, there is a proletariat of diasporas, inhabitants of favelas in Harlems. With their medieval iron predecessors, who once belonged to the social top, this proletariat has one thing in common: the religious experience of violence, in the name of which they exist and endure the squalor and futility of their lives. These people, like knights, are ready to kill and die, and instinctively experience this readiness as the core of their religion. This proletariat of violence — lumpen chivalry of modern times — is a combustible material in the furnace of permanent forceful resistance that humanity has and will continue to provide to the System.

Above them, in this inverted triangle, is a layer of those who in traditional society corresponded to merchants. In recent times, in this inverted triangle that has passed down, former merchants are turning into organized crime. The merchants of the traditional society are adventurers, pioneers, intermediaries between the lands. There they pay tribute (today they would say “racket”) to the knights who collected money with an iron fist for the right to pass through their fiefs. In the newest system, these adventurers turn into an organized mafia that “skim off” from the favelas: recruits fighters and pushes drugs on their streets.

Finally, those who were free citizens in the traditional space, subordinate to merchants and, moreover, much lower than caste warriors, are today turning into a class of social servants, state employees: the police, various special services, social servants, everything that organizes the complex alloy of mass parts of civil society with a grassroots bureaucracy. State employees today embody the nervous system of a modern metropolis, they, as a rule, are close or merged with crime and, together with it, oppress the disenfranchised proletariat of the favelas — the “fallen knights”.

This is the situation of the middle triangle in the three rung ladder of the old hierarchy, which is now becoming the bottom layer of society. And what happens to that step, which in the past was at the bottom? It goes up to the place of the middle one, while also turning over: the base is above, the top is down. In the lower triangle of the past, at the top, were independent artisans, propping up a layer of free citizens hanging over them. Today they are becoming a declassed bohemia, which is class superior to the social state employees — the police, teachers, nurses, which we talked about above. From artisans, they inherit the spirit and style of marginal creativity, which, however, in modern society begin to perform the functions of high culture (artists, actors, writers, journalists).

Those who used to be in the middle of the lower triangle, small traders, are now located in the middle of the middle triangle — one might say in the mathematical center of the entire post-industrial hierarchy! — they form today the service sector, which includes, among other things, show business, which tightly controls the creative bohemia.

The most interesting transformation we have is with the inhabitants of the traditional bottom — servants, unskilled workers, peasants of all varieties. Today they occupy the upper part of the middle triangle (recall that since it is upside down, this is the base). They went from lackeys to corporate employees — yuppies. A huge number of meaningless inhabitants of meaningless offices — managers, office workers, secretaries and referents of all stripes — these are those whose spiritual ancestors were the lower servants. We emphasize here that we are not talking about traditional clerks, who both then and now represent a bureaucracy, but about the human fauna that is a parasitic layer within precisely the working part of the population. These parasites — the organizers of the office “air” — are those organic cells that make up the bodies of corporations, and corporations, as you know, do not produce anything by themselves, but only appropriate and capitalize the product made by someone and somewhere.

Finally, the highest triangle of the traditional society remains the highest triangle of the modern society, but it also turns over. In the traditional, as we remember, there was a king at the top, in the middle — the aristocracy, nomarchs, governors, etc., at the bottom — the apparatus, those same clerks. This is what it looks like upside down today. At the top — in the place of the king — clerks, the state apparatus, the ubiquitous bureaucracy. In the middle — instead of nomarchs and governors — political parties-brands, at the very bottom, where the top looks towards the corporations below — individual politicians, personal representatives of the nomenclature, who today represent that personal principle that in the past was realized only in figure of a monarch.

What happened to the nobility and priests, especially the latter, who in traditional society represented the fourth invisible point in each triangle, completing it to a virtual square? Genuine kings, who are still called kings to this day (and not their imitators for the human masses in the form of politicians) now stand above society, along with their closest aristocratic entourage. They, like the church separated from the state, although they continue to be mentioned in constitutions in many cases and symbolize sovereignty, are taken out of the area of ​​responsibility. The world nobility took into account the experience of regicides and after Charles I took up the construction of such a transcendent club of masters, the existence of which would be insured against any historical upheavals. As for the priests, today they form a completely closed ecumenical caste, the action of which no longer accompanies the immediate life of the triangles described above: this caste now serves as a bridge directly between the super-elite and the “Great Being”. Despite the fact that the entire society as such, although it remains an instrument for the alienation of the internal human resource, no longer bears the stamp of the general sacredness that was inherent in the “traditional world”. If the traditional society included a spiritual element that accompanied almost every layer that made it up, then the modern society simply turned into a clay golem.

Chapter 6. The Crisis of Alienation and the Problems of Global Progress

What is really happening? A huge number of yesterday’s peasants, farmers, servants, people of the lower stratum of life, today transformed into corporate employees, into yuppies who travel in suits, with laptops to offices, spend the required hours there, perform absolutely virtual unproductive actions, while engaging in a colossal number of human connections that determine them. They give off a huge amount of energy. This is not the energy of dragging stones, which can be easily measured in joules. This is the subtle energy of internal time, which is stored in the people of the bottom in a particularly, so to speak, powerful amount; when they move into the middle class, they become functionaries, included in countless social valences: they have to raise and educate their children, maintain secular relations, pay a huge amount of insurance and other deductions, participate in a mass of political, local, municipal and other initiatives, etc. Their life is like running a squirrel on a wheel. Their time is spent in dozens and hundreds of directions.

Thus, today’s society, due to the super-exploitation of the middle class, continues to “pay” with the second law of thermodynamics, with the cosmos, with the principle of cooling, with the principle of fate, time. However, these resources are coming to an end: although the “golden billion” has become a billion human squirrels running inside the wheels of meaningless time, there are approximately five billion people whose time flows in a regime close to traditional. They are poor and naked, earn by personal and at the same time rather primitive efforts the pennies that they need to maintain a fairly minimalist existence. In order to increase the stream of alienation emanating from these innumerable human bottoms, it is necessary to raise them to the level of development of the Western middle class. However, in order to turn the Chinese, Brazilians, Mexicans, Indians, Middle Easterners into Parisian and Washington yuppies in ties and briefcases, you need to invest huge free funds, which the meters of world order do not currently have at their disposal. The ruling classes have devoured these funds through the speculative economy, through futures, through deals based on technologies that have not yet been put into use and that are increasingly bogus. The upper classes, through sheer speculation, gobbled up those resources, due to which it would be possible to turn these free field hares running through the forest into such servants of society from which one can skim the foam.

What does real resources mean? In the seventeenth year, monarchical Russia consisted of about three million nobles and intellectuals, and one hundred and fifty million peasants. In twenty years, these one hundred and fifty million peasants in their large part were turned into workers, functionaries, party members, etc. They sat in local committees and party committees, spent their time, entered into social contacts, learned to read and write, there was energy that the Soviet Union selected and converted into various projects. In the atomic project, in the space project. Where did it all come from? This is a direct conversion of human energy. In order to turn in twenty years illiterate peasants into functionaries, city leaders, townsfolk with a secondary education, engineers, etc., from whom one could get a thousand times more than from old Russia, it was necessary to invest all the real funds that could be was found on the territory of the monarchical Empire. To snatch diamonds from the corsets of the princesses, to take away paintings from the Hermitage, to sell Raphael, to take away grain — everything that was real, everything was put into this project. And indeed, 20 years later, a completely different person walked across the territory of Russia, who walked in a tracksuit at a parade, waved a flag, participated in a sports contest, was a member of DOSAAF, and so on. And his grandfather or his dad with a giant beard was still picking the ground with a wooden plow.

But today there is no such money. Therefore, no one is going to raise, they decided to throw us off the ship of modernity and move on to the information society, which promises to become the most brutal police dictatorship in the history of mankind. In front of us is the prospect of a third society — we have already said about two, traditional and modern — information-virtual, where the former middle class will be turned into computer robots, into terminals of information flows. And five billion people will be thrown down into the desert, and if they try to rebel there, like in France, the space police on starships will cut them with laser beams from space. And this perspective is not a fantasy novel, it is what we face as the challenge of tomorrow. That is why today we — the proletariat, the diasporas — the knights of yesterday, who have become the new proletariat, must take care of our rights, our political and historical survival.

July 19, 2006

Translated from Russian language.