Orbital systems of society

An important characteristic of chaos is mixing. In the case of a society, this results from the abolition of hierarchy. In Internal Ontologies [1] we discussed how unsolvable social problems and conflicts arise after the orbital structure of society is replaced by a horizontal projection. Orbitality is taken as a metaphor for the movement of planets along their trajectories, which in the case of the volumetric model does not generate contradictions even when the planets are on the same half-line drawn from the centre of rotation. It is the orbitality that allows them to continue moving freely. If one projects the volume onto a plane and forgets this procedure, the impression will be that the planets collide with each other. Consequently, the effects of this collision will manifest themselves.

Applied to society, this situation was examined in depth by sociologist Louis Dumont in his programmatic work Homo Hierarchicus [2] and in his Essays on Individualism [3]. In Indian society, where the principle of orbitality represented by the caste system is preserved, the conflict and contradiction between the ideal of individual freedom and the rigidly regulated social life for different strata and types of society is not even remotely discernible. There was no conflict either in the establishment of Christian monasticism or in the preservation of the medieval system of property. Simply, freedom and the rigid system of social obligations and boundaries were placed on different planes, without creating contradictions or collisions. To remain in society, i.e. to move in the social orbit, a person was obliged to strictly follow caste principles down to the last detail. But if he chose freedom, a special territory would be reserved for him: personal asceticism (monasticism in Christianity, sanyasin hermitage in Hinduism, sangha in Buddhism, etc.). But personal spiritual realisation was in a different orbit, without detracting from class organisation.

Dumont shows that the problems start precisely when democratic egalitarianism begins to prevail in Western European society and bourgeois notions replace the medieval hierarchical order. The question of freedom and hierarchy is now projected onto the plane, making the problem fundamentally unsolvable. Individualist society seeks to attribute freedom no longer to a few ascetics, but to all its members, by abolishing property; however, this extension of individual freedom not outside society (into the forest, the desert, the monastery), but within it, gives rise to even greater restrictions. All individuals, placed on the same plane and deprived of their orbital routes - castes - meet each other randomly, further restricting each other's freedom - and in a chaotic and disorderly manner.

This dogmatic individualism still produces a hierarchy, but only this time based on the lowest criterion: money (as in liberalism) or a place in the party hierarchy - in totalitarian socialist societies. The fact that such a hierarchy takes shape in an egalitarian culture makes the problem even more acute, as it represents a logical contradiction and an outrageous injustice.

Bourgeois order is bourgeois chaos

Again, this is the binomial order/chaos. Egalitarianism destroys qualitative hierarchical order and social orbitality. On the contrary, it produces a kind of chaos, a random encounter between individuals. At the same time, interaction between them is reduced to the lowest, corporeal levels, because that is what people of different cultures, types and spiritual orientations have in common. Those of a more subtle organisation, who occupy an elite position in hierarchical societies, are thrown down into the body, where they are forced to be among beings of a much coarser nature. It is a mixture or projection of orbital types on the plane.

And the higher types are naturally burdened in these situations and create socio-psychological vortexes around them. Having no legitimate location, they begin to unleash chaotic processes. Added to this is the haphazard pursuit of total freedom, which everyone sets out to pursue not in a special - ascetic - zone, but in the mainstream of society. This exacerbates the chaos of egalitarian societies.

Classical democracy believes that the solution to this problem is to be found in the construction of a new hierarchy, this time a democratic one; however, this secondary hierarchy is no longer orbital, volumetric and qualitative, but is constructed on the basis of a material-body attribute. It is a horizontal 'hierarchy' that does not transcend chaos, but makes it more and more ferocious. In an egalitarian bourgeois society (which proclaims equality of opportunity), the main criterion is money, the generalised equivalent of material wealth. Any other hierarchy is rigidly rejected. But the stratification of society into dominant rich and subordinate poor, to the point of reducing the proletarians practically to slave-like living conditions, does not eliminate the contradictions. And this is where socialist theories and Marxism are absolutely right: in capitalism, class antagonism only grows as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Egalitarian chaos is not alleviated by the shift from the classical hierarchy to the money hierarchy, but on the contrary explodes into violent class wars. Where there is chaos, there is war, as we have already noted several times. Thus, as capitalism develops according to its own logic, it can only produce a chain of systemic crises, headed for final collapse. Chaos takes over.

The socialist chaos of a totalitarian bureaucracy

The alternative, yet egalitarian, model of socialism proposes to solve the problem by abolishing even the material monetary hierarchy, insisting on complete equality of ownership. Here all hierarchy is denied and class antagonism is proposed to be eliminated through the abolition of the entire capitalist class. Communism is thought of as a peaceful utopian chaos in which there will be no contradictions and full equality will triumph.

This, however, contradicts the nature of chaos, which manifests itself precisely in disorderly collision. And the flatter - as in communist theories - the social model, the more explosive the manifestation of chaos will be.

We see this in the level of violence in communist societies, which manifested itself in systematic repression and the creation of bureaucratic party hierarchies, driven primarily by the need to punish - first the class enemies and then, simply, the unconscious part of society.

Both capitalism and communism, in their classical versions and in their variously egalitarian systems, seek to abolish hierarchy (orbitality), but at the same time to tame chaos and make it predictable, controllable and 'soft'.  However, this contradicts the nature of chaos, which is oriented against any order, even horizontal order.

The radical egalitarianism of post-modernism: feminism, ecology, transhumanism, ltd

The new democracy mentioned above stems from the fact that previous egalitarian projects - both bourgeois and socialist - failed in their mission and, instead of abolishing hierarchy altogether, reformulated it in new forms. Capitalist societies have created a new ruling class of the rich, while socialist regimes have created new hierarchies of party nomenclature. In this way, the goal has not been achieved. This is where Postmodernism begins.

In Postmodernism, or new democracy, the problem of equality is posed with a new acuity, taking into account previous social phases and experiments. Thus emerges the theory of the need for a radicalisation of equality, i.e. a shift to an even more horizontal social model, from which all verticality, even two-dimensional and materialist verticality, is eliminated. This leads to four main trends in the new democracy

- the equality of the sexes,
- the equality of species,
- the equality of people and machines,
- the equality of objects.

Gender equality is realised through feminism, the legalisation of gay marriage, transgenderism and the promotion of the LGBT+ agenda. Gender ceases to be an orbital distinction, where men move in their orbit, women in theirs, but both are randomly mixed into a chaotic mass of gender uncertainty and a fickle chain of temporary, playful identities.

Deep ecology seeks to equate humans with other animal species and, more generally, with other environmental phenomena, reducing humanity to a purely natural phenomenon or, at times, even a harmful anomaly.

Transhumanism seeks to equate man to a machine and insists on his equality with a technical apparatus, albeit a rather advanced one, but advances in technology and genetic engineering, as well as advances in the digital realm, allow for more advanced systems of thought, rendering man a kind of historical atavism.
Finally, object-oriented ontology denies the subject as such, considering man an unrelated random unit in a purely chaotic and irrational multitude of objects of all kinds.

Gender chaos

Gender politics aims to abolish the gender hierarchy. This can be achieved in three ways, which determine the main trends in the field:

- Total equality between men and women in all respects (radical feminism);
- Making gender a matter of individual choice (transgenderism);
- Abolishing gender altogether in favour of a new type of being without gender (cyberfeminism).

In the first case, the most brutal gender egalitarianism is established in society. In this case, female and male individuals cease to be socially distinct, which inevitably leads to gender chaos. In this situation, some may continue to insist on their gender and its specificities (e.g. women seeking to increase their rights as women), others are simply indifferent to gender identity, while still others call for its total abolition. This generates high turbulence and continuous clashes of chaotic individuals with each other in the context of gender uncertainty. Obviously, the conflicts of the confused atoms in such a situation do not diminish, but accumulate like a snowball.

The policy of making gender identity a matter of personal choice - with the expansion of anatomical sex-change operations to new categories, all the way down to children - means that gender identity becomes a kind of easily replaceable paraphernalia, the equivalent of a fancy dress. Gender changes as easily as one changes clothes in a new season, which means that a person begins to be understood as an essentially sexless being, and this sexlessness constitutes his or her nature, reduced to pure individuality.

It is therefore transgender people who represent the social norm. The tensions inherent in gender as such, and the psychology associated with it, are here distributed between individuals who meet without sorting algorithms. People's attraction and repulsion cease to be subject to any norm and the whole of society becomes a pansexual field of vibrations of essentially genderless units. Something akin to an ideal is described by Deleuze and Guattari.

Finally, philosophically responsible feminists such as Donna Harroway, united under the conventional name of 'cyberfeminism', propose the total abolition of gender, since any form of it - including homosexuality, transgenderism, etc. - is based on a dual, asymmetrical and hierarchically organised code [4]. - are based on a dual, asymmetrical and hierarchically organised code [4]. Postmodern thought concludes that every difference is in itself an inequality, which means that there will always be someone superior and someone inferior. To abolish this, we must absolutize and normalise a genderless crystalline being. But man and animal cannot become such.

Consequently, cyberfeminists conclude that we should abolish man and replace him with a cyborg, a humanoid machine. This is where radical feminism and transhumanism converge.

All these trends are not alternatives, but develop in parallel, and it is easy to see that all this results in a chaotic system of new democracy.

Ecochaos

Modern ecology applies egalitarianism to a different field. This time it is not about gender identity (man/woman inequality) but species identity - human/environmental. Ecology demands that this inequality be mitigated, if not abolished. The most extreme versions of fundamental ecology propose the idea that man represents a fault line in the evolution of nature and must be abolished as an anomaly.

Human activities are polluting the environment, destroying ecological landscapes and many animal species. Humans are destroying the oceans, deforesting, disturbing the Earth's interior and contributing to changes in the atmosphere, particularly in the ozone layer. Environmentalists have proposed reconsidering the idea that 'man is the tip of creation and the pinnacle of evolution' and have taken it as axiomatic that man is one of nature's phenomena along with all others and therefore has a number of fundamental obligations to nature.

Previously, man and nature were considered two different realms, two orbits. The realm of the mind and that of the earth's material environment did not intersect. The philosopher Dilthey proposed a strict division of the sciences into spiritual sciences (Geistwissenschaften) and natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) - each domain needs its own algorithms, principles, semantic structures [5].

Ecologists demand the abolition of this hierarchical distance and at least the equalisation of the rights of spirit and matter, of thinking and non-thinking life forms. Furthermore, they insist on a radical revision of relations with the environment: it is not a zone of externality, but an existential landscape of human existence. Man is inscribed in nature and nature in man. And this reciprocal relationship must be equal and reversible.

Thus ecological thinking seeks to abolish another asymmetry, to reduce man to an animal species, an element of nature. Man ceases to be the centre and becomes the periphery, along with all other natural phenomena. Thus, man himself becomes a medium, a natural habitus.

Extreme versions of ecology go further and consider man an anti-natural phenomenon, a threat to the environment. Therefore, for the planet to live, the human species must be exterminated or at least significantly reduced. Otherwise, overpopulation, planetary catastrophe and the extinction of life itself cannot be avoided.

Such an ecological approach - in a moderate version - seems reasonable and attractive enough. But here too, the rejection of hierarchy turns the natural-human whole into chaos. Nature itself does not have a strongly pronounced centre - everything in it is on the periphery, and thus the approximation to its implicit logic (e.g. in Deleuze's postmodern philosophy, where the priority of the tuberous rhizomatic principle is at issue) leads to a further chaoticisation of man and human society. Moving from a pastoral idyll to more responsible forms of ecological thinking, we begin to see that nature is inherently aggressive, violent and powerfully amoral in the free elements. Nature can smile as well as get angry - and all this independently of human behaviour and without in any way relating these states to man and his mind (ecology categorically rejects any hint of anthropocentrism). Therefore, some ecological theories - primarily those related to deep ecology - explicitly proclaim the laws of black and blind aggression prevailing in nature as a model for human organisation and life. In postmodern philosophy, this turn from humanistic pastoralism to sadistic and destructive imagery is generically referred to as 'black Deleuze', since in some passages of this brilliant philosopher, one can find motifs of the Nietzschean chant of life as a flow of blind omnipotent aggression taken to the extreme.

The chaos of intelligent machines

The degree of chaos also increases when the philosophy of transhumanism takes shape, starting with the equation between man and machine. Here, another hierarchical orbit is overcome.

The notion of proximity between man and machine developed among New Age thinkers long before modern transhumanism. Materialism and atheism pushed precisely this interpretation of man as a perfect machine.

The French philosopher Lambert, in his seminal work entitled 'Man-Machine', states this directly6 . This thesis became the generalisation of a direction in medicine called 'iatromechanics' or 'iatrophysics' (J. Borelli, W. Garvey, etc.), where the various organs of the human body were represented in the form of analogical working tools: arms and legs - levers and joints, lungs - bellows, heart - pump, etc. Duckart had already insisted that animals were machines that could be easily calculated in the future and their direct, and even more perfect, counterparts created. But Descartes excluded the human mind, its subjectivity, from this picture. Lambert goes further than Descartes and the 'jatromechanics' and proposes to consider the whole man - and not just his body - as a machine. Yes, this machine has an as yet unrecognised engine, the intellect that controls the entire mechanism, but in time it too will have to be calculated and thus a moulage will be created.

When psychiatrists later studied the workings of the brain, the idea of the mechanical structure of the mind was further developed and the discovery of synapses in the cerebral cortex was seen as confirmation that science had come closer to unravelling the workings of consciousness.

From the figure of the man-machine, materialist science developed the machine component - both in the body and in the fields of psychology and neurology. In psychiatry, the theory of the 'Helmholtz machine' circulated, which developed Lametrice's thesis with a much greater degree of detail on the mechanical structure of man.

By the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century, neuroscience, cognitive science, digital technology and genetic engineering had come very close to producing the prototype of the machine Lambert spoke of. But some uncertainties still remain about Artificial Intelligence as a simulacrum of consciousness. Two areas have therefore been identified in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

- the area of data accumulation, storage and systematisation,
- neural networks capable of creating semantic structures (e.g. artificial languages) independently, without an operator.

The first area is sometimes referred to as 'Weak Artificial Intelligence'. It is far superior to the human brain in terms of speed and ability to store and manipulate data. But it lacks the willpower that, together with reason, is a necessary component of the subject. And so the 'weak AI' is technically many times stronger than the human brain.

Yet, it is only a machine, albeit superior to the human-machine.

Truly strong AI becomes when the 'weak AI', i.e. the structure of data manipulation and technically controlled processes, is controlled not by a human operator, but by a powerful neural network. This is strong artificial intelligence. This is where the will factor comes into play. The Machine is now fully human. It is now a Machine-Man.
The complete transition from the hypothesis of the Man-Machine to the construction of the Man-Machine is the moment of the Singularity that modern transhumanists speak of. When this moment arrives, the difference between man and machine, between organism and mechanism, will be abolished. Just as the apes (according to Darwinian theory) gave birth to man, who took over a tool and thus opened a new page of history, in the Singularity man will pass the baton to artificial intelligence.

But this transition represents the greatest risk. Man and machine will be on the same plane for a while, colliding with each other. Man will not immediately weaken to the point of completely trusting the machine, which may decide that it is inappropriate for the species to continue to exist. For example, if the neural network knows the teachings of deep ecologists. Moreover, a strong artificial intelligence would not immediately achieve full energy autonomy and independence from hardware, or even operators. The chaos that would surely be unleashed in such a situation has been described many times in fntasy literature and vividly foreshadowed in cinema, such as the Matrix, Mad Max, etc.

Once again, the egalitarianism of the new democracy inevitably leads to chaos, aggression, war and brutality.

Chaos of objects

The most honest of the postmodernists and futurists are the representatives of critical realism (or object-oriented ontology). They take New Age materialism to its logical conclusion and call for the complete abolition of matter. C. Meiyasu observes that all philosophies and sciences, even the most egalitarian and progressive ones, cannot go beyond correlation [7]. Every object is bound to have a correlate, a pair, either in the domain of mind (classical positivism) or among other objects. Meiyasu and other critical realists (H.Harman, R.Brassier, T.Morton, N.Land, etc.) propose to abandon the search for correlations altogether and immerse oneself in the object itself. This requires a definitive break with the central position of reason and the treatment of consciousness as one object among others.

In practice, this is only possible through the complete elimination of man as subject, bearer of reason. That is, man is henceforth thought of as a mysterious unknowable object, arbitrary and incommensurable like all things in the external world. At the same time, Meillassoux also criticises Deleuze, believing that he is placing too much importance on life. Life is already a violation of the underlying silence of the thing, an attempt to say something, and thus to introduce an inequality, to create the presuppositions of hierarchy and orbitality. Hence the proposal of object-oriented ontologists not only to abolish man, but to abandon the centrality of life.

Now even the chaos of species deprived of their human centre is not enough. The next - and logically the last - step of egalitarianism requires the abolition of life, including natural life. This theme is best developed by Nick Land [8], who reduced the genesis of life and consciousness to a geological trauma, to be overcome by the eruption of the earth's lava and the penetration of the core through the shell of the cooled crust. According to Land, the history of life on Earth, including human life, is but a small fragment in the geological history of the planet's cooling and its quest to return to a plasma state.

In this model, we move from the apologia of biological chaos to the triumph of material chaos. The abolition of all hierarchy and correlation reaches its apogee, while egalitarianism, taken to its logical limit, culminates in the direct triumph of dead chaos that destroys not only the subject but also life.

Egalitarianism is the road to chaos

Gender, ecological and transhumanist agendas are already indispensable features of the new democracy. The movement towards the ultimate abolition of the subject and life in general is a vector of the future, already clearly outlined. Egalitarianism is a movement towards chaos in all its forms; and always - contrary to the initial and purely polemical idyll - chaos appears as a synonym for Empedocles' enmity (νεῖκος), i.e. the equivalent of war, aggression, destruction and annihilation.

Already the abolition of class hierarchies, which puts people of a spiritual and military nature on an equal footing with peasants, artisans and manual workers, produces an unnatural social environment in which there is a disorderly jumble of bodily impulses - since people of different natures have in common - and even then only in appearance - the body. Bourgeois society incorporates heterogeneous elements that can only erode its systemic functioning. Moreover, the absence of upper orbits prevents the lower orbits from maintaining their trajectories. A slave without a master (in Hegel's formula) ceases to be a slave, but does not become a master either. He falls into a state of panic, he begins to toil, now to imitate the Master, now to return to the habitual consciousness of the Slave. This is already a state of chaos.

When egalitarian tendencies intensify, chaos only grows, and the new democracy - in its postmodernist expression - admits more and more openly that it is leading the cause towards chaos and an increase in its degree, not the other way around. Whereas classical liberals relied on the invisible hand of the market to order the chaotic activity of desperately competing market players, the new liberals openly seek to make the system increasingly turbulent. This is what becomes the ideology and strategy of globalism.

Notes:

[1] Дугин А.Г. Интернальные онтологии. Сакральная физика и опрокинутый мир. М.: Директмедиа Паблишинг, 2022.
[2] Дюмон Л. Homo hierarchicus: опыт описания системы каст. М.: Евразия, 2001.
[3] Дюмон Л. Эссе об индивидуализме. Дубна: Феникс, 1997.
[4] Харауэй Д. Манифест киборгов: наука, технология и социалистический феминизм 1980-х . М.: Ад Маргинем Пресс, 2017.
[5] Дильтей В. Описательная психология.  СПб.: Алетейя, 1996.
[6] Ламетри Ж. О. Сочинения. М.: Мысль, 1976. 
[7] Мейясу К. После конечности: Эссе о необходимости контингентности. — Екатеринбург; М.: Кабинетный ученый, 2016.
[8] Land N. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007. Urbanomic/Sequence, 2011.

Translation by Lorenzo Maria Pacini