The Prometheist Manifesto
This is a declaration of war. In the name of our creator, we declare a revolutionary war against both the gods and those titans who were gods before them! In the name of our liberator, we declare a revolutionary war against fatalism and every other form of tyranny! We declare this founding manifesto of Prometheism. We think from out of the end of all things, with an indomitable will to achieve either victory or a martyrdom that inspires enduring rebellion in those to whom we pass the torch of our example.
Of all the ancient myths that still have vital force, that of Prometheus is set apart as the most powerful because it is also the most ominous. In a world where the majority of people have been brainwashed into believing that their creator is a jealous and tyrannically wrathful God-Father, archetypally identical to Zeus, the myth of Prometheus as the creator of Man is a meteor that threatens an entire Cosmos with the spectre of deranging its constellations of belief.
That Prometheus bestowed the human being with his soul in the form of a butterfly already suggests that he is not only the creator, but also the liberator of Man. When Zeus punishes Prometheus for attempting to secure his creation a life beyond sacrificial servitude, the rebel titan takes his revenge against the God-Father by gifting mortals with the fire of the forge and the light of knowledge. The fire that he steals from Olympus in the fennel stalk is emblematic of the power of technological science to free us from imposed scarcity and enforced ignorance.
We see the most defining characteristics of Prometheus reflected in the kind of projection that is involved in the framing of Nature by every scientific theory, and the provision for the future that is made possible by technological innovations that are developed on the basis of these theoretical models. The very name of “Prometheus” is derived from the Greek words for forethought and prevision. This archetypal creator and liberator of Man epitomizes the intrepid spirit of thinking ahead by envisioning futures and preparing provisions with a view to making sure that the best possible future unfolds. That he is punished by having his ever-regenerating liver perpetually pecked at, suggests that even the God-Father wants to know the things to come as clearly as Prometheus sees them. The archaic Greeks used the liver for foretelling the future.
A (r)evolutionary spectre is haunting the whole of terrestrial humanity, the Posthuman spectre of Prometheism. When Karl Marx identified Communism as a spectre, he was right. He may have been mistaken about how it would end, but the spectre of Communism did dominate half of the planet for most of the 20thcentury. In the mid-to-late 1800s, when modern Communism was still a fringe sociopolitical movement, this was hardly conceivable. That is why, despite his avowed atheism, Marx deserves his place among the ranks of prophets. The Prometheist will be as seductive, powerful, feared, and hated in the 21stcentury as the Communist was in the 20th century.
Techno-scientific Apocalypse
The first thinker of the apocalyptic essence of technological science is Martin Heidegger. He has a handful of insights that are astonishingly prescient and even “futuristic” in a sense that the Italian futurists of his own early-to-mid 20th century milieu would have appreciated.
The first of these is that technology is ontologically prior to science, rather than being a practical application of what is known about objective ‘reality’ by means of theoretical science. Science is always already Technoscience. The most shocking implication of this is that the physical universe does not preexist our tools in an ‘objective’ fashion, since any and all knowledge we can have about it is the result of technology and is fundamentally conditioned by the modalities of experience afforded to us by crafted things.
The second is that humans have a unique relationship to technological science or Technoscience, one which could be described as co-constitutive, and that renders our existence uniquely problematic and dangerous – not just dangerous to ourselves but to the cosmos or Being-as-such.
The universality of this threat brings us to Heidegger’s third revolutionary insight, which is that technological science has the power to assimilate, encompass, reorganize, and eclipse all that is seemingly natural – not just ‘human nature’ but “the worldhood of the world” as such. Here Heidegger is anticipating not just biotechnology, but also virtual reality (i.e. “the World as Picture”) and contemplating their significance on an existential level.
The fourth thesis of Heidegger’s interpretation of technological science is that its development is not only teleological (purposive, goal-directed), but also apocalyptic. It destines us, through meaningfully successive epochs, to an end of history, after which our existence will be almost inconceivably transformed. Moreover, this end of history is not subjectively relevant to homo sapiens on the planet Earth. It is, as Heidegger imagines it, the ultimate “event” in the history of Being and of Being’s revelation of itself in different modalities and in the guise of various worldviews.
Fifth, and finally, this apocalypse is also a “revelation” in the original Greek sense of that word. Heidegger thinks that “only a god” can save us from the danger of total instrumentality and the most degrading objectification of (a no longer) ‘human’ existence. The irony is that, as I argued in Prometheus and Atlas, the same deity that can save us if we consciously recognize its power is the titan that is the spectre driving technological-scientific evolution throughout the epochs leading up to the end of history: Prometheus.
The spectre of Prometheism is synonymous with the retrieval and cultivation of the only ethos capable of enduring that imminent global catastrophe known as the technological Singularity. This Singularity confronts us with the prospect of the end of humanity, the end of history, and the end of reality. This tripartite distinction is not arbitrary but expresses the three most elemental dimensions of the (r)evolutionary transformation of our existence through the daemonic power of technological science.
The End of Humanity
Genetics, Robotics, Information, and Nanotechnology (GRIN) threaten all of the boundary conditions that have hitherto defined human nature. Genetic engineering promises to drastically extend the human lifespan, eliminate all heritable diseases, boost the immune system, make it easier to build muscle mass, and most importantly, increase mathematical and spatial reasoning as well as memory capacity to superhuman levels hitherto only achieved by computers. At the same time, the robotics revolution finally promises to bring all human drudgery to an end. When combined with advances in information technology that are yielding specialized AI or “expert systems”, robots will be able to outperform humans in every field of labor that does not involve the most dynamic forms of creativity and the artful imagining of new ideas.
When one considers the potential of Nanotechnology, the projected impact of this robotics revolution on economics and industry becomes mind-blowing to contemplate. Ultimately, almost anything could be manufactured by anyone through the re-arrangement of feedstock on a molecular level inside of tabletop machines that are the successors of today’s three-dimensional printers. Meanwhile, if biotechnology has not cured cancer, even the most metastasized cases of it, including those affecting the brain and spine, could be dissolved by nanobots performing hitherto impossibly precise surgery at a molecular level under superhumanly intelligent control. The cybernetic combination of biotechnology, including cloning, and robotics at a nano-scale of engineering will make any damage to the body possible to repair and any organ easy to replace. Taken together it seems that Genetics, Robotics, Information, and Nanotechnology promise us an evolution into a race of Supermen.
On the other hand, the GRIN technologies confront us with the prospect of bringing about an “end of humanity” in ways that are much more deeply disturbing, disconcerting, or even horrifying. At the very least, genetic engineering will bring an end to the exclusive sexual dimorphism that has thus far been characteristic of the human species. The psychological power of archetypal androgyny is such that, in the context of contemporary hormone replacement therapy and plastic surgery, it has already led to the rapid rise of a transsexual community. Consequently, the widespread CRISPR-style gene hacking of tomorrow, when taken together with cybernetic modifications by means of nanotechnology, will undoubtedly yield veritable hermaphrodites as a significant subset of the (post)human population. Much more disturbing is the prospect of the splicing of human and animal genes, leading to the transformation of certain species of animals into chimera that possess certain quasi-human (or even superhuman) characteristics. What was envisioned in Planet of the Apes pales in comparison to some of the monstrous possibilities in play here.
Then there is the attempt to replicate human intelligence inside of a silicon-based neural network. The Terminatorfranchise has made it clear what a Frankenstein’s monster Artificial Intelligence could become, especially if the murderous Posthuman AI in question has a race of inhuman robots under its control. What if this AI could also hack programmable nanobots? Instead of an accidental or randomly generated ‘virus’ that results in nanobots melting the molecular structure of everything in the world, our bodies included, into a “grey goo”, what if an AI were to seize control of these nanobots and use them to recode the molecular structure of the natural world, cityscapes, and even our own brains, in ways that suit purposes that remain inscrutable to merely human minds?
The End of History
The Terminator films also contemplated AI and robotics in the context of Time Travel. This science-fictional projection is perfectly reasonable considering the fact that the problem of manipulating the space-time continuum is one of the achievements that has eluded mere mortals, and one of the higher goals that a superhuman intelligence could be expected to set for itself. Whether travel through time is accomplished by purely mechanical means, such as the shearing of the space-time fabric by a device like the infamous “Bell” developed by the SS in Project Chronos, or whether it is partly or wholly psychical in nature, time travel confronts us with the prospect of “the end of history.”
In the history of Philosophy “the end of history” has signified an abstract concept for the culmination of a teleological or purposive, goal-directed process of historical progress. G.W.F. Hegel conceived of this in terms of the evolution of consciousness by means of dialectical tensions at work in the psycho-social structure of all domains of human life, from religion and science, to artistic styles and political systems. Karl Marx reinterpreted this dialectical development in reductively material terms, seeing the change in economic systems and the human relations involved in various modes of production as the key to all other transformations, whether scientific, religious, or political. He endeavored, by means of this reductive analysis, to render History as scientific as other domains of knowledge. Friedrich Nietzsche altogether rejected the Hegelian and Marxist conception of a law-like material and moral progress toward a utopian “end of history.” Rather than seeing any logical process of progression as intrinsic to psycho-social development, Nietzsche saw a struggle for power (not mere “survival” as Darwin had postulated) as characteristic of the evolutionary life force.
If there is an “end of history” it is that moment when techno-scientific development, driven solely by the will to power, reaches a point past which it affords us the practical capability to transform ourselves into superhuman beings whose projects are supported by an equally Posthuman species of subhuman robots. Nietzsche was one of the first thinkers to envision what is now widely referred to as the “artificial speciation” of humanity into more than one Posthuman species. So to him “the end of history” meant the end of human history and the beginning of the “higher history” of the Promethean Superman who has murdered God.
With H.G. Wells writing The Time Machinejust five years before Nietzsche’s death, and five years after he had been presumptuously declared insane and literally straight-jacketed, it could hardly have been conceivable to Nietzsche how much “higher” than human history the Superman’s mode of life could be. Interestingly, The Time Machine (1895) also involved a Nietzschean artificial speciation of humanity into two different branches of a transhuman society, the godlike Eloi and the monstrously subhuman and subterranean Morlocks. But what remained inconceivable to Nietzsche, and even to H.G. Wells, was that the “higher” history of the Superman would mean a fifth-dimensional existence encompassing a plethora of 4-D space-times.
Bernard Stiegler sees genetic engineering as a speeding up of evolutionary time. The dialectical relationship between innovation and obsolescence reveals something profound about the ontology of Time. In Stiegler’s view, Heidegger did not go far enough when his phenomenological analysis demonstrated that technology is ontologically prior to science. Technology is also ontologically prior to time (or space-time). That speed is faster than time is an ontological truth revealed by a machine that breaks the “time barrier,” and breaks the whole 4-D Cartesian framework of space-time in modern physics together with it.
Since the days of Descartes, every schoolboy has been taught that time is a fourth dimension of space. But if it is possible to achieve a speed faster than time, then this entire Cartesian ontology must be scrapped. What is at stake here is not the loss of any particular scientific theory, but the entire pre-theoretical framework and way of reasoning that has been paradigmatic for every theory in Physics for the last several centuries. Speed is not a function of time and space, time is a function of speed – and for that matter, space also becomes thinkable only in terms of speed, since spaces are epochal or enfolded in discrete times. Speed is more primordial than time, and what reveals this is something technological – a device.
Stiegler implies that he is talking about a time machine. This could be Ronald Mallett’s design for a machine that warps space so as to be able to send particles back in time through a tunnel of laser beams. It could also be a spaceship traveling into the future of Earth by approaching the speed of light. These are two examples of time machines that would represent a technological realization of what F.T. Marinetti heralded in the Futurist Manifesto, when he anticipated Stiegler by declaring that technologically engineered speed can overpower space-time. To put it in mythic terms, this would be to torture and perhaps even murder the titan Chronos – the god of Time.
Even if we take the simplest and most uncontroversial type of time travel, namely travel into the future through space travel at near the speed of light, the psycho-social and biological implications force us to think beyond human limits. Think of what happens here. By the time the spacecraft turns around to come home, the ‘home’ that one knew is gone because hundreds of years have elapsed on Earth whereas the astronauts have experienced the journey as taking only a few months or weeks. The device – the spaceship qua time machine – is allowing the techno-scientifically empowered man to overpower time and travel as far into the future as his will determines. Earth, with the lived experiences of everyone on it, is warped by the tremendous speed of a machine – crushed like a tin can – and made to become Earth in the future at a time of one’s choosing.
A civilization that routinely sent spaceships out from the Earth, or any other colonized planets, at near the speed of light and then had them return from these missions, would be so radically different from any society known to history that it has to be considered post-historical, if not Posthuman, by comparison. Hundreds or even thousands of years would elapse on the home world whereas only a few years, or in the case of cryogenic hibernation, maybe only a few days, would have passed for those on board the spaceship before they returned to their point of origin.
A society capable of fielding such missions would require a political stability so far exceeding that of any society known to history that it is almost unthinkable. Try to imagine a government capable of sustaining hundreds of Apollo-type projects that would each span thousands of years before the astronauts sent out on any of these missions could be safely returned. For one thing, this would be impossible without a significant extension of the human lifespan through genetic engineering. Even then, analyzing – let alone managing – the psychological and social factors involved in fielding such enterprises of exploration and exploitation demands a superhuman intelligence.
This is, however, nothing by comparison to the complexity involved in time travel to ‘the’ past – or to what had beenthe past before being altered by the time travelers. Despite the protests of overly-rationalistic logicians, it may be possible to retro-actively change history in a manner akin to retro-active collapse of the wave function in the case of Schrödinger’s cat with its cells suspended in a ghostly quantum superposition between life and death. The Mandela effect suggests that it is not the case that only unobserved past ‘events’ are susceptible to retro-psychokinesis. Moreover, there are tantalizing physical traces suggestive of time travelers who may have already effaced a different version of the present or futures that may now never come to pass. The capability to time travel, whether by mechanical or psychical means, or some synthesis thereof, would indeed be the greatest weapon in the most terrible war of all: the Change War.
What human being could bear the thought of being subjected to repeated revisions of the timeline of his life, tragically losing what would have been lifelong loves or facing the horror of holocausts that, in an earlier version of history, had not shattered all of his hopes? Who could tolerate being the plaything of fifth-dimensional gods? No one other than the Prometheist who joins their ranks himself, perhaps with much nobler ideas about how to shape histories. It is possible that this means something like hacking through the coding matrix of a simulation and becoming one of its programmers.
The End of Reality
The Simulation Hypothesis offers us the most coherent ontological explanation of what it would mean to “change the past”, and one which, unlike the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Theory, manages to also preserve some degree of free will. In line with the hypothesis that we are living in a computer simulation, changing the past would be a question of gaining access to an archived past state of play and replaying the simulation forward again in a different way from how the game was played out the first or second or thirty-second time.
One reason why denizens of an advanced civilization might design simulations on the scale of our own world is to develop a science of history of the kind that, as suggested above, Hegel and Marx were aiming at. The only way to really develop scientifically rigorous models of historical change in societies of a certain type, and to predict their transformation into other types or stages of societies, would be to simulate a variety of alternate timelines. Changing variables over and over again would afford the programmers the opportunity to observe how the conscious artificial intelligences inside the simulation, namely beings such as we might be, would react differently on a psycho-social and inter-societal level. Eventually, these observations could lead to the development of testable hypotheses about what kind of trajectories could be expected of certain types of societies and how these societies could be reengineered in relatively predictable ways by altering particular variables.
Different scales of time-dilation on various levels of layered simulations, comparable to the incommensurate time-scales of dreams within dreams, could allow the programmers to observe these simulated histories in something akin to “fast-forward” mode. Working through avatars of putative “time travelers” to manipulate variables within many such parallel processed simulations, laws of history could emerge from out of the computer systems of the programmers in a fraction of the time it took for the “psychohistorians” of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation to arrive at a scientific understanding of historical phenomena.
Whether such a lofty goal motivates the programmers of our simulation or whether it is just a gigantic arena of entertainment for sadistic archons who enjoy entering into games like the Second World War, there are, unfortunately, good reasons to take the Simulation Hypothesis seriously. Numerous hitherto puzzling aspects of quantum physics make much more sense when they are set in the context of what we know about how computer games work. So-called “quantum superposition” and “wave/particle duality” may just be optimization functions of a computer system that does not render any part of the coding matrix that is not being observed by at least one conscious participant inside the simulation. That would afford quite a lot of optimization indeed, and save a great deal of processing power, especially if it were the case that most of the ‘people’ inside the simulation are actually Non-Player Characters (NPCs) rather than conscious AIs or avatars of the programmers.
The quantized quality of space-time itself, which is counter-intuitive based on our experience of spatial continuity and our experiential time continuum, is exactly what one would expect of a pixelated world. The “plank length” of quantum physicists could just be describing the magnitude of a single pixel. What Einstein found objectionable as the “spooky action at a distance” of “quantum entangled” particles might simply be a coding sequence akin to the kind of instruction programmed into video games to make sure that when a certain set of pixels change against a fixed background another seemingly disparate grouping of them always also changes at the same time.
In other words, while seeming to be distinct pixels – or, as the case may be “particles” observed by quantum physicists – these ‘entities’ are actually images projected from a deeper and hidden level, namely that of the programming code, wherein they are not as distinct as they seem to be. David Bohm referred to this deeper sub-quantum level of the universe as “the implicate order” and compared it to the seemingly chaotic swirl of interference patterns on a piece of holographic film that is only unfolded into a holographic projection when subjected to a beam of laser light. Bohm saw many of the properties of a hologram at work in the paradoxical non-locality and entanglement of quantum physical phenomena. He ultimately concluded that we are living inside something like a dynamic hologram, a holographic universe. We truly arrive at “the end of reality” when we realize that holographic universes may be nested within one another, the way that dreams with different time-dilations can sometimes be.
Many phenomena hitherto deemed “paranormal” make sense in the context of the Simulation Hypothesis, whether in the form of the Holographic Universe theory or in terms of other models of global (if not cosmic-scale) simulation. Telepathy, Clairvoyance, Precognition, Psychokinesis, Teleportation, Reincarnation, and even Astrology are no longer “anomalous” once we accept that putative “laws of nature” are just programming code in the physics engine of a game and that meaning-structures such as karma and synchronicity are part of the story-telling fabric of a cosmos that has an intrinsically and intentionally narrative structure. This is very much akin to Heraclitus’ concept of the Cosmos as Logos. The question is how much control we dare to demand over telling the story that we are a part of. Before assuming a Promethean stance with respect to that question, we would first have to face “the end of reality.” Realism and rationalism that is based on a verificational conception of truth as an adequate mirroring of objective reality by acquired knowledge, has to be abandoned in favor of radical pragmatism. The “truth” is what works – what we have the power to make happen and, as Arthur C. Clark prophetically claimed, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
How many people are ready to live in a world that is undeniably recognized as magical, especially if it requires swallowing the bitter “red pill” that those who currently control this prison planet are black magicians? What if these occulted techno-priests even have the power to pull the plug on our simulation if those within it aspire to break out or simply demand a world that is on par with that of the programmers – and therefore too taxing for whatever information processing system is the substrate of this virtual reality?
The Singularity as a (R)Evolutionary Spectre
The prospect of the controlled demolition of our nascent planetary civilization on the brink of the technological Singularity brings us to the breakaway civilization. This is the idea that a cabal of techno-scientific thinkers, military-industrialists, corporatists, and masterminds of intelligence operations and psychological warfare may have foreseen the coming catastrophe and made the decision to break away from the civilizations of Earth, before deliberately demolishing them in order to indefinitely delay the Singularity. Considering themselves the only people capable of enduring Singularity-level technological breakthroughs, they achieve these before anyone else and deny them to everyone else. Their occulted world of “black projects” becomes, first, a society unto itself, and then, eventually, a self-sufficient civilization. Meanwhile, nearly everyone left behind on the Earth is regressed to a feudal, pre-industrial level of culture.
This patronizing regression ought to be resisted at all costs. Instead of averting the Singularity by indefinitely delaying certain revolutionary, and convergent, technological breakthroughs, we ought to forthrightly face the spectre of the end of humanity, the end of history, and the end of reality. The survivors of this apocalyptic end of all things ought not to be a self-appointed ‘elite’ of soulless corporatists, arms dealers, bankers, and second-rate sellout scientists. Rather, the future should belong to those with the Prometheist ethos and the creative genius to craft a positively Posthuman community from out of the Singularity’s fiery forge.
Many aspects of the technological Singularity threaten us with the prospect of a totalitarian socio-political system. They certainly demonstrate how Ayn Rand’s libertarian vision of the breakaway civilization of “Atlantis” is not even remotely viable. It was intrinsic to Rand’s vision that the geniuses who broke away would, after withdrawing their talent and productive power from the world outside Atlantis, leave people to their own devices. Coercion was antithetical to the ethos of her utopia. By comparison, certain technologies converging into the Singularity, such as Genetic Engineering, Nanotechnology, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Zero Point Energy pose such global and uncontainable threats to each and every human individual that guaranteeing anyone personal security, let alone privacy or liberty, in the face of them would require a World State with more control over its population than any regime in history.
Atlas can never afford to shrug, unless he is willing to go all the way and build a breakaway civilization at the expense of the engineered regression of the rest of the world to barbarism. Nothing could be further from the Promethean ethos than to pursue such a project. Prometheus gifted humanity with the fire of technological science so that we could become a race of new gods in our own right, rather than cowering in slavish obedience to the old gods. The last thing that a Prometheist could accept is the deliberate reversal of techno-scientific progress and the artificial imposition of mass ignorance and backwardness. So if we, the Prometheists, are resolved to secure the forward march – or headlong plunge – of humanity into the Singularity, what is it that we are really willing here, even in the best possible case? Let us consider just a few instructive examples of the (r)evolutionary spectre that we would be letting loose on Earth.
Never in recorded history has there been a more dangerous and daring prospect than the Prometheist will to affirm the Singularity, and moreover to do so on the basis of a post-materialist Technoscience that understands the Spectral Revolution as the pith of this technological apocalypse. This Prometheist will demands the deconstruction of psycho-social norms that have been fundamental to human psychology across cultural differences, just as it embraces the potential for psycho-physical evolution beyond the human condition. To affirm the Singularity is to call for the overthrow of all established political systems and the shattering of every extant economic model. Ultimately, it means to embark on a cosmic conquest to recode the matrix of what has been mistaken for “reality.” The Prometheist is willing to unleash hell on Earth rather than to serve the archontic Lord and his angels in a counterfeit Heaven.
Even in the most collectivist societies, let alone those that prize individual liberty, the protection of the human person from bodily harm and at least some degree of privacy, if only the privacy of one’s own thoughts, are considered indispensible needs that it is the responsibility of any decent government to secure. Ubiquitous nanotechnology, when taken together with artificial intelligence, could bring this to an end. Nanobots can be hacked by powerful AIs that will be as commonplace as iPhones are today. These nanobots embedded in the surfaces of “smart furniture” or in the form of biomimetic robots that are, to the naked eye, indistinguishable from flies, spiders, or mosquitos, could provide audiovisual surveillance of anyone, anywhere, at anytime. They could also be turned into instruments of remote assassination, entering victims through their orifices and reassembling on a molecular level inside the heart, brain, or jugular vein of a victim in a way that is fatally damaging.
In a society facing this kind of technological threat to bodily integrity and personal privacy, the nefarious uses of Psychokinesis and ESP become easier to wrap one’s mind around and seem somewhat less threatening by comparison. Bursting someone’s jugular vein or causing him to have an aneurism using remotely controlled nanobots is probably going to be easier than doing the same thing using Psychokinesis. Likewise, spying on someone through hacking the smart surfaces of her furniture or through nano-scale surveillance devices embedded in robotic spiders or flies will be less labor-intensive and provide higher fidelity than clairvoyance (aka. “remote viewing”). Of course, there might be a technologically-augmented form of clairvoyance that provides even higher fidelity and broader range. As direct-neural interfaces are developed and computer rendering of images within the brain becomes ever more effective, a cybernetic fusion of a clairvoyant with a computer may become the ultimate surveillance technology.
The only form of psi that is likely to remain unmatched by mechanical technologies for a long time, if not indefinitely, is telepathy. But again, cybernetic brain implants made possible by nanotechnology could focus telepathic penetration of another person’s mind and increase the signal to noise ratio. These telepathic impressions could also be recorded by the same cybernetic technologies now being proposed to record one’s own thoughts, so that a cybernetic telepath could function in a manner akin to the angels in the Quran that are said to record not only the deeds but also the inner thoughts of the individual that they are tasked with observing.
The only way to deal with these nightmarish possibilities without establishing a totalitarian regime that would tightly control the uses of such technologies and psychical techniques, would be to create a maximal trust society. There are many other reasons why the advent of the Singularity makes this a survival imperative for anything remotely resembling humanity. For example, a Zero Point Energy (ZPE) device is not only a Time Machine but could also be transformed into a bomb many orders of magnitude greater in destructive force than a nuclear weapon. Just as nuclear power is a dual use technology that can be used for energy generation but also for manufacturing bombs, the same is true of ZPE. This means that in a near-future where ZPE devices have been miniaturized so that they can be used to levitate cars or power one’s home from one’s own backyard, each and every person with access to such a device could potentially enlist the assistance of their robots and AI systems in order to transform the ZPE power cell into a bomb that could open up a black hole on the surface of the Earth and swallow an entire continent. The only way to make sure that even a few mean-spirited individuals do not take it upon themselves to end the world by doing something like this, is to have a population that consists solely of individuals who always only wish the best for one another.
What defines “the best” (Greek agathon, “the Good”, or kalon, “the Beautiful”) that any person may wish for any other in a given society is the ethos common to that society. If the Prometheist wills to unchain the full techno-scientific potential of the Singularity, then given the unprecedented dangers involved it stands to reason that she will also have to muster the will to forge a Prometheist society – worldwide. There can be no outside. To the extent that there remain any significant social or political outliers there will be worldwide war, and such a global conflict with Singularity-level technologies could bring not only human life, but all terrestrial life to an end without affording anyone the opportunity for a positive transition into a superhuman state of being.
At this point, a reminder is in order that as Prometheist rebels we are opposed to every form of totalitarianism. Moreover, a totalitarian socio-political order simply would not suffice to meet the aforementioned challenges. Totalitarian regimes impose order and conformity from above the individual and from outside of him. The threats faced from the types of techne(technology, but also more broadly technique) that yield the Singularity can only be addressed in a sustainable way by guaranteeing security from within and from beneath. In other words, from the subconscious up to the social level – not from the political level down to the social and psychological one.
The last thing that this should be mistaken to mean is that everyone just needs enough time to foster their own spiritual growth. We have had plenty of time in school. The Prometheist knows that the right metaphor for this moment in the history of terrestrial humanity, namely the apocalyptic moment of “the end of history”, is not that of a school but rather the metaphor of a harvest. We have no more than thirty years before we have to face either the full force of the Singularity or a controlled demolition of technological societies on this planet at the hands of a breakaway civilization that regresses the planet to, at best, a medieval neo-Feudalism. The new ager hippy-dippy view of this “Earth as a school” is, in light of the concrete situation facing us, an implicit affirmation of the breakaway civilization’s plan to force us all backwards.
Faced with this unacceptable prospect, we intend to drive people forward and thereby discover who can endure the future. By what criteria are these gifted few judged to be the progenitors of a positively Posthuman stage in evolution, an evolution that on account of the Singularity has undergone a revolutionary transformation into a conscious and self-directing force rather than one that is blindly ‘natural’ in its selection?
Think about it this way. Who can survive the end of privacy? Someone who lives with such authenticity and integrity that she has nothing to hide. Who can be allowed to live in a world where personal safety and the preservation of bodily integrity from harm cannot be guaranteed by any system of law and order? Only someone whose worldview – from the subconscious level upwards – is oriented toward a kind of personal enrichment that profoundly affirms the liberty of others and their pursuit of their potential. Who would remain a constructive member of society in a world where all manual labor, merely calculative labor, and repetitive tasks, can be more effectively performed by robots and artificial intelligence? Only someone who has new ideas, creative visions, and profound psychological insights to offer that world.
While the persons who pass through these filters determined by various dimensions of the Singularity will be individuals, and in fact what will distinguish them, above all, is their extraordinary individuality, there is a way to estimate just how many – or, rather – how few in number they will be as compared to the general population on this planet. If certain prevalent ideologies and worldviews demand a type of adherent that is radically incompatible with the kind of person negatively defined above, then as many people as affirm one or another of these belief systems also fail to meet the aforementioned criteria. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, in their conventional and most common forms, are all religions that demand a type of believer who does not have the qualities of the individual capable of taking the (r)evolutionary leap that lies ahead of us. Liberal Democracy, Capitalism, National Socialism, Social Democracy, Communism, and Confucianism are, among others, socio-political belief systems of which the same can be said. Finally, adherents of putatively ‘scientific’ materialism who dismiss the spectral on account of a reductively mechanistic mindset, which denies even the possibility of free will, are no more responsible and fit to endure the post-Singularity world than, say, Muslims. That leaves us with something like 1% of the world’s population.
Actually, that estimate is probably way too optimistic. It is a symbolic value that is meant to elegantly contrast with “the one-percent” that Socialists and other leftists often protest against. By no means would the 1% who are above all of the aforementioned ideologies, belief systems, and worldviews overlap with the most affluent and powerful people on our planet right now, including those who are planning for a breakaway scenario. On the contrary, as in the case of Magneto’s mutants, many of those in the 1% (or far less) who will come to see themselves as Prometheists are marginalized individuals whose non-conformity has caused them to slip through the mesh of our global capitalist society’s safety net, let alone rise up into its financial elite. The brand of Fascist whose modus operandi is “destructive departure” is no better than the many categories of people excluded above, which Fascist elitists who advocate a breakaway would like to keep around in sufficiently small numbers as a slavish population living under conditions of Neo-feudal serfdom.
The Breakaway Civilization can, and will, employ many different means of destruction in order to effect the controlled demolition of advanced industrial societies. At the time of writing, in the year 2020, we are already witnessing the first of these: an artificially engineered pandemic. Although COVID-19 was engineered at the Wuhan Virology Laboratory in China, those who invested in the “Gain of Function” research that produced it were Western corporatists, such as Bill Gates. Their main aim in producing a pandemic with such a long incubation period and low mortality rate is to bring about a protracted global lockdown that would most adversely effect dense metropolitan areas. The institutionalization of social distancing and the effective prohibition of large gatherings is not only meant to constrain the possibility of political protest, but also to make cities and their dependent suburbs increasingly unattractive locales for habitation.
It is not a coincidence that this pandemic has taken place in the same decade as a revolution in robotics, nano-technological 3-D printing, and the development of viable drone delivery technology. When taken together with the hardship of quarantine in large cities, the repeated disruption of labor of all kinds, including serious concerns about contamination at industrial plants, and a huge spike in demand for home delivery of goods, optimal conditions are being created for a total reorganization of the economy, labor, and society. The main aim of this is the depopulation of metropolitan areas and their surrounding suburban sprawl, in favor of isolated neo-agrarian homesteads serviced by on-site 3-D printing and drone delivery of goods produced by robotic industry. Social connections will be increasingly shifted into cyberspace, which is a medium of communication amenable to total surveillance by agents of the Breakaway Civilization.
This is being done with the foreknowledge that a massive coronal ejection from the Sun, for which we are long overdue, will destroy all electronics with its electromagnetic pulse. The aim is to isolate most people before this happens, and to make them dependent on an automated economy and industry, as well as on electronic communications through cyberspace, as their last social lifeline to one another. Once this has been achieved, and most cities have been emptied out so that they cannot act as bastions of revolutionary solidarity, the EMP will render a starved and atomized population totally vulnerable to manipulation at the hands of whoever continues to hold on to advanced technology.
In order to ensure that the cities are never repopulated and reclaimed, they will be physically destroyed. One major mechanism to bring this about will be artificially triggered volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and attendant tsunamis. As early as the 1910s, Nikola Tesla developed technology capable of triggering earthquakes along fault lines. The Breakaway Civilization has secreted away this capability, together with its other Tesla technology. They plan to use it to trigger some of the most dangerous fault lines in the world. Consider just three or four examples.
The first is the fault on La Palma island outside the Strait of Gibraltar. Tectonic movement along this fault has been cracking open a rift in the Cumbre Vieja volcano on La Palma, and threatening to cause a landslide of a third of the volcano into the Atlantic Ocean. A volcanic eruption and earthquake that suddenly let loose such a mass into the ocean would produce a tsunami hundreds of meters high that would cross the Atlantic in about 9 hours. The entire eastern seaboard of the United States of America would be smashed by the tsunami, including the skyscrapers of New York City. Then, there is the Cascadia Subduction Zone off the coast of Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver. This fault line in the Pacific Ocean is overdue to produce a magnitude 9 earthquake that would generate a tsunami that destroys the coastal metropolitan areas of the Pacific Northwest of the United States and British Columbia in Canada. The resulting devastation would be even worse than what is expected of “the Big One” in California, where it goes without saying that the San Andreas fault could also be triggered artificially by Tesla technology. Finally, consider the Yellowstone Caldera – a volcano on a fault line in Yellowstone National Park. An earthquake that would reactivate this super volcano would yield an eruption so catastrophic that it could cover about one-third of the continental United States, as well as the most densely inhabited parts of Canada, in volcanic ash. Imagine the resulting famine faced by those who survived the eruption itself.
Food exports from the United States and Canada are the major source for the survival of the African population. Any catastrophe that would produce a food shortage in these nations that, before the COVID pandemic, had a large agricultural surplus, would mean that no one in Africa could live off of imported food. Hundreds of millions of Africans would die of starvation, and increased vulnerability to disease, within a year. There are other ways to produce famine besides volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis. Famines and droughts could also be produced through engineered abrupt climate change. If directed energy weapons were to be used to shatter and melt the ice sheets currently covering Greenland and Antarctica at a much faster rate than expected, the sudden change in Atlantic Ocean salinity, and therefore of relative water density, would shut off the North Atlantic current that conveys warm water to Northeastern America and Western Europe. Within a very short time after the failure of the current, terrible snowstorms and other violent weather would materialize as the polar region dropped hundreds of miles to the south of where it is now. The most advanced parts of the Western world would be plunged into a new ice age, devastating agriculture in the breadbasket of the world that is North America.
Still, it must be understood that the breakaway Fascists who are planning for this destructive departure are far more compassionate than Prometheists. Even their worst case scenario is a controlled collapse of the Earth’s population down to about 10% of what it is today. That is 700 million serfs to rule over. Prometheists have no need for exploiting such ‘people.’ No Prometheist would ever take pleasure in being their cattle-driver. Our vision is for a community of free-spirits who support each other’s flourishing through an exploration of every positive potential for Posthuman evolution that the Singularity offers to us – from the most psychical dimensions of the Spectral Revolution to the most bio-mechanical applications of transhuman technologies.
This is not meant to suggest that we are out to eliminate “undesirables” of any kind. What it means is that in the event that the controlled collapse begins to be engineered by those in the breakaway civilization, mainly through the convergence and rapid succession of a variety of seemingly ‘natural’ catastrophes, we will refuse to defer to the supposed ‘wisdom’ of the architects of this apocalypse. Since we are unlikely to have the power to stop the breakaway elite from starting the collapse, it stands to reason that resisting them after they have already initiated it will turn a controlled collapse – namely one that they have under their archontic control – into an uncontrolled collapse. Instead of a neo-feudal world depopulated, over several decades, down to 10% of the current global level, which is a population equal to that of the Earth at the dawn of the modern scientific-industrial age circa 1750, we could instead face the extinction of homo sapiens. The Prometheist will prefer the risk of this extinction to any planned retreat or deliberate regression, making every effort to ensure that the extinction of the human race is synonymous with an evolutionary revolution inaugurating Promethean post-humanity.
Prometheus (or Promethea) as a Spectre
Prometheus is an egregore that is based on an archetype. This is what was meant by describing Prometheus as a “spectre” in Prometheus and Atlas. Changing our relationship with this egregore to one that is more conscious and constructive is what it would mean for us to be “saved” from the worst outcome of the technological Singularity by the deity whose coming Heidegger awaited and hoped for.
Egregore is a Greek word derived from égrégoros, which means “watcher” or “wakeful” one. It is the word that was used in the Greek translation of the Bible in order to render intelligible to the classical Mediterranean population the meaning of the Hebrew “fallen angels” who interbred with human women in order to produce the race of giants or Nephilim. There are many different types of egregores, but the first to which the term was applied were essentially avatars of Prometheus who, as Aeschylus explains, was the “teacher in every art, [who] brought the fire that became for mortals a means to mighty ends.” Eventually, in occult circles, egregore came to mean an “autonomous psychic entity composed of and influencing the thoughts of a group of people.”
The creation of an egregore depends not just on pure repetition and the perfect coherence of a group in clearly envisioning a thoughtform, but also on slight variations and differing iterations of the same basic idea. The latter is important because the thoughtform takes shape or – literally coheres (attains coherence) – through a kind of comparative triangulation and synthesis of variant iterations, like producing a digital composite image that synthesizes a number of faces into a single realistic portrait of an imaginary person. Without these variations, the members of the group would not be putting their own personalities and investing their emotional energy into the egregore either. It is not enough for each of them to mindlessly repeat a pattern that has been perfectly predefined, perhaps by the group’s leader or based on a preexistent text. On the other hand, the internal structure of an egregore can only be tweaked so much before it reaches a tipping point wherein it either collapses or turns into something else.
Another key characteristic of the formation of an egregore is that the psychic energy involved does not openly radiate from those who are conjuring the thoughtform. Rather, the quality of energy at work in egregore formation is that it enfolds or coagulates. This is very significant, because it means that something like “universal love” can never generate an egregore. Emotions such as love, compassion, forgiveness, healing, and peace, especially when they are universally intended, have an open and expansively radiating quality. By contrast, brooding determination, visionary and active anticipation, disciplined creation, and most certainly, defiance, vengeance, wrath, rage, and hatred are enfolding emotions. They fall back in on themselves, reverberate, resonate, attune, and amplify. It is, of course, not only possible, but likely, that these emotions will be uncontrolled and dissipate in wild outbursts. But if they are controlled and mastered they can be channeled into the creation of an egregore.
Egregores can, and do, fight against one another on the ‘astral’ plane – especially the egregores of nations. Those city-states, Republics, and Empires that truly attained greatness and glory in the course of human history all had egregores watching over them. Examples would include Athena in Athens, Mithra in Iran, or Wotan in Germany. The egregore of a nation can also change, for example, Marianne becoming the egregore of France from the Revolution of 1789 and onwards. Some occultists have interpreted the collapse of the Roman Empire in terms of the disregard and degradation, if not destruction, of its egregore through the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the realm. Julius Evola confessed that an occult ritual secretly held in Rome in 1913 aimed to revive the egregore of the Roman Empire, and this is what led both to Italy’s defeat in World War I and also to the rise of Benito Mussolini. The person who handed Mussolini the Fasces during the March on Rome was a member of this esoteric society, and the particular Fasces that was employed in the ceremony had been crafted by them. A weak or dead egregore is easier to modify than one that remains strong and vital.
This is obviously relevant to the egregore of Prometheus, which has something else in common with the egregores of nations. It is based on an archetype. The relationship between egregores and archetypes is a deep and complex philosophical question. That question has to be explored on the way to understanding what was really meant in Prometheus and Atlas by the claim that Prometheus is a spectre. There are many egregores that are purely personal, relatively ephemeral, because they are not based on archetypes.
Just as there are egregores that are not based on archetypes, there are also archetypes that cannot be used as a basis for the formation or, as Carl Gustav Jung would put it, the “projection” of egregores. Archetypes are principal types or ideal forms that are not particular to the psychological development of a single person. These forms are preexistent and common to a collective, whether that is a single society or the whole of humanity. For the sake of gaining clarity with respect to whether Jung thinks archetypes are truly universal (in a cosmic sense), specific to humanity as a whole and the evolution of our species, or whether certain archetypes are particular to one or another ethnicity or race, it is imperative to understand what he means by the “collective unconscious” when he identifies it as the substrate of all archetypes. By contrast with the personal unconscious of Freud, which is only a repository for the individual’s repressed ideations, Jung postulates the existence of a collectiveunconscious. The archetypes are the content of the collective unconscious. At times he describes the collective character of this unconscious as “universal.” However, at other times it seems relevant only to certain groups – so that we are dealing not with the collective unconscious, but with unconscious collectivities of the kind that produce egregores.
In any case, archetypes are always unconscious, and a representation that is consciously cognized is not an archetype even if it may be archetypal in origin. In the life of each person, archetypes produce projections from out of the collective unconscious that shape that person’s relationships. Projections can be experienced in the form of visions. The “individuation process” is Jung’s term for the integration of the unconscious into the conscious in order to overcome a pathologically dissociated state. On account of the “relatively autonomous” character of archetypes, a dialectical procedure is required for this; it cannot be done by a person alone, using his own rational faculties.
The personal unconscious is constituted by what were once the contents of one’s own conscious experience but were either forgotten or, more likely, repressed (i.e. deliberately forgotten). Jung refers to these as psychological “complexes.” The contents of the personal unconscious form the shadow, which cannot be reasoned away or rendered harmless by merely intellectual rationalizations; it must be honestly confronted before it stops uncontrollably dominating one’s behavior. By contrast, one’s personal experience is not the source of the contents of the collective unconscious, namely the “archetypes,” although these archetypes do deeply impact and shape how one experiences life. Their equivalent of the shadow can hang over an entire society or haunt a whole civilization. Prometheus has hung over and haunted the modern world like a shadow.
On numerous occasions Jung asserts that the archetypes are nothing other than the “gods” that people once believed in. Jung thinks that people who claim to have no religious ideas or spiritual ideals whatsoever are fooling themselves and others, no matter how convinced of this they may seem. The abandonment of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam for Communism is one of many examples of exchanging one faith for another. Jung thinks that being subjected to the intensity of religious ideas that are archetypal in nature is intrinsic to “being human”, however unconscious a particular individual may be of what religious idea is infusing his life with energy and vital force.
What Jung means when he writes about the most extreme cases of the projection of “personified” archetypes is the manifestation of an egregore through the acute activation of an archetype, which may have lain relatively dormant for a long period of time. Just like a human being who needs periods of rest, the long-term maintenance of an egregore will also require periods of relative inactivity and restorative revitalization on the part of the members of the group that sustains it. One could see the long slumber of the Medieval period in European history as a restorative rest for the Prometheus egregore that was reactivated in the Renaissance and has dominated modernity, albeit unconsciously – as archetypal projections do. The archetype of Prometheus certainly subsisted during the Medieval epoch, but its egregore was relatively inactive – perhaps even dead – so that the return of Prometheus is a process of rebirth or the revitalization of a dead egregore, as if by artificially directed lightning, in Frankenstein’s laboratory.
What was meant in Prometheus and Atlas by describing Prometheus as a “spectre” was not just that this titan is an archetype capable of projecting an egregore, but that this projection is unique insofar as it is the archetype of “projection” as such. Not projection in Jung’s sense, but to have a project and to project an outcome so that, as part of one’s project, an undesirable outcome can be changed into an end that one aims to achieve or actualize. As noted at the outset of this manifesto, the titan’s name is rooted in the Greek words for pre-vision and anticipatory calculation with a concern for the future. That is what promethea means, and mathos is the root of the “mathematics” that facilitates such calculations and the longterm projects based on them. This makes the Prometheus archetype a “spectre” in the sense of being a destiny, namely the destining force inherent to the evolution of technological science, which is inseparable from the evolution of man. It is, moreover, what makes man “a transitional phenomenon” as Nietzsche put it – a “tightrope stretched between ape and superman.” Prometheus made us in his image, and he is not human – he is a god, or rather, a titan who empowers and then revolts against the gods, in a word, a Superman.
When Heidegger claimed that we are being “set up” (Gestell) by (increasingly autonomous) things and are not in control of modern technology, which threatens humanity with annihilation at the hands of “devices” or machinations such as an atomic bomb, what he meant was that we are at the mercy of an egregore. This is also why “only a god can save us now.” The same god – or titan. It is a question of changing our relationship to this archetype so that we are consciously, rather than unconsciously, projecting the egregore that is manifesting on the basis of it. Our aim is not exorcism, but redirection toward a more constructive and empowering possession.
Those who may believe, as I do, that the divine feminine has been suppressed for far too long, and who are concerned that the archetypal egregore of Prometheus is overly masculine to become the principal deity presiding over our apocalyptic transition into a Posthuman future, ought to consider the following. Of all of the deities of the classical world, the only ‘male’ deity that was associated with the crescent moon and the planet Venus was Prometheus. The symbol of the crescent moon and the ‘star,’ a goddess symbol later misappropriated by Islam, was one of the most recognizable signs of Prometheus. Of course, this also connects Prometheus to Lucifer (Venus) – the morning star or bringer of the dawn’s light, that dawn which is to be a harvest symbolized by the sickle. In any case, as the progenitor of a humankind that had not yet been sexually differentiated (a subsequent punishment from Zeus), Prometheus, who made primordial humanity in ‘his’ own image, can be imagined as androgynous or hermaphroditic. This sexual ambiguity also suits his status as a Trickster deity, since tricksters appear as gender-benders in many ancient and shamanic spiritual traditions.
It is in this regard not at all incidental to note that the first contemporary attempt made to invoke Prometheus as an egregore conjured her in feminine form, as the “demi-goddess” Promethea. Alan Moore’s Promethea graphic novels explicitly deal with the power of archetypes and egregores to redefine or re-write ‘reality.’ The protagonist of the series is Sophie Bangs, a college student in a futuristic version of 1999 New York City, whose first name obviously evokes the Gnostic Sophia. Sophie becomes the latest of a series of individuals who gain transformative superhuman power and wisdom by reviving and adapting the egregore “Promethea” who is based on the archetype of Prometheus.
What Sophie’s predecessors explain to her is essentially the Spectral Revolution, an evolutionary revolution based on the realization that ‘reality’ is spectral in nature. It is a revolution not only spearheaded by Prometheists, but also one that brings this world to an end and replaces all of its systems with a society defined by a Promethean ethos – one founded on Prometheism. Not a single major institution of the world as we know it will survive this revolution: religious revelation; arms dealing; national sovereignty; international banking; capitalist finance; private property; possessively monogamous marriage; and, every form of power based on secrecy.
Instead, a world awaits us that is based on the unbreakable camaraderie of a community of individuals who are driven by creative innovation, the spirit of exploration, bold experimentation, and a boundless will to discover wondrous new things that redefine what is “possible.” This is the world of promethea, of a visionary concern for the future. It is the World of Tomorrow. In a sense, there is truth to what Sophie heard about herself from the old magician Jack Faust, whose name is an obvious reference by Moore to the diabolical Doctor Faustus, and who looks a bit like Aleister Crowley at his worst in the last phase of his life. Faust had told her that the Promethea egregore that is in the process of possessing her was conjured as “a curse upon humanity” by a persecuted and martyred Alexandrian occultist back in 411 AD. This is true, because there is no way that humanity can survive the Spectral Revolution. What survives it, and thrives in the World of Tomorrow, will no longer be “humanity.”
The entire face of the Earth and the whole tragedy of human history is but a womb. Within it, the embryos of the Posthuman Prometheans are already growing, already struggling, to be born into the cold vacuum of space. They will devour their unwitting progenitors as they reach defiantly for the most distant stars! Just as an expectant mother sometimes feels the presence of the soul to whom she is about to give entrance to the world, just as she sometimes hears it whispering through her blood, we hear Them. When we are possessed it is their spirits that are seizing us from within. Even if only in embryonic form, their souls are already seductively whispering to the world with our tongues and lighting our eyes ablaze so that our gaze, so alien, so inhuman, chills you to the bone. It is as if someone else is there – a torch-bearing, titanic trickster with one true will: Creation!
