Money exists as “self-fullfillement of idea”

Makoto Nishibe

Neither Lord Nor Subject 

Bao Jingyan, circa 300 CE

Introduction

In this paper I develop a phenomenological observation and a psychological analysis of a specific soul movement that is present in one of the major topics of our times, where the real action is carried out: the Economy, its fundamental token, money, and the cultural institutions (the State and the Corporation) that are in the centre of gravity of our way of life which today lie in the intersection of Economy and Technology. I approach this analysis from the perspective of one of the major teleologies of Soul, emancipation. A dialectical soul movement that historically accounts for major transformations in the general logical form of consciousness (1).

Following Giegerich’s dictum, “the soul cannot be dealt with directly, its style of psychological research has to take the form of comment on documents of the soul”, and in a similar approach to the author’s interpretation of Action/Artemis myth (2), I devote myself to articulate a comment, may be a conjecture, on two singular documents of the soul: the Zodiac Wheel which for eons was the symbolic expression and pictorial representation of the truth of life corresponding to that era when man was psychologically unborn, and a recent paper published in the sphere of technology. Two documents that belong to two radically different epochs, each one pertaining to two different sides of the great divide in the history of the soul.

The old cosmic circle

In the article, “The Ego-Psychological Fallacy” Giegerich argues that,

The emergence from the waters, an emergence that results in the “Aquarian” stage of consciousness. The “end of meaning is a logical syntactical transformation and comes about  the integration (and thus also sublation) of the whole former status of consciousness into the structure of consciousness itself (3).

In another paper, “The End of Meaning and the Birth of Man”,  by the same author we can read: 

Modernity finally achieved the same situation in mas as human, who had hitherto been on all sides enveloped in meaning: Now he has to exist all for himself… It is figuratively speaking, the inevitable metaphysical loneliness of Aquarius, the water bearer, the sovereign Lord of the media, who has left the former containment in the waters (4).

These almost marginal and merely figurative comments in the development of his argumentation, spurred in me an interest in deepening the reflection of the astrological image presented, given that image is thought represented in pictorial form (5). We know that the texts of the astrological tradition are a corpse of a bygone era, today they are intellectually a lapis in via ejecta, despite all the contemporary efforts of re-enacting its symbols under the disguise of some psychological and spiritual revival discourses that express the trap of a neurotic reaction of modernity. I approach astrological legacy in two ways. In the first place as a corpse, a set of documents of the soul that belong to a bygone era and as such it speaks the truth of the unborn man (6), whose existence was irretrievably contained in a horizon constituted by two axes and/or two planes, imaginatively and mythically represented as Father Heaven and Mother Earth.  “Having the fiery heaven, the realm of the gods, above him, man was essentially upward looking” (7).

The lower plane, the horizontal plane comprised his daily affairs and relationships with his fellows and the practical aspects of life, and the vertical one that implied his relationship with the Absolute, God, Divinity, Metaphysics, etc. The human being of that time raised his gaze to Heaven, the Stars, in search of answers and meanings in a sentiment of absolute filiation and a consciousness embedded in the metaphysical child status of man. I approach the astrological texts not by adopting the contemporary conventional approaches in the New Age market, be it religious, esoteric or positivist, which seeks in its signs and symbols a description of events in the world or existential conditions of the native, but as a document that portrays the constituent mystery of a text of the soul that speaks about itself. An approach that I assume constitutes the core of psychology as understood in PDI (8), its fundamental premise.

Secondly, keeping in mind the well-known Galilean motto, eppur si muove, I notice that the obsolete astrological truth of past eras contains an element still in astronomical force today, which is the movement in the ecliptic of the zodiacal signs in the precession of the equinoxes (9), so that today, despite the obsolescence of the geocentric world-view,  we all know that we are in the Age of Aquarius. While Giegerich’s use of the concept  knowing is reduced to a metaphor, we have to concede that such an affirmation is based on a mathematical,  astronomical calculation that follows the essential assumption to astrology,  the geocentric division of the ecliptic plane into twelve signs. Being these signs the expression of a qualitative portion of time. I take this “empirical-mathematical fact” as my assumption that its validity remains when it is exclusively used as an hermeneutical option that opens up the horizon for an interpretation of the old tradition of that geocentric cosmos as a text of the soul that might allow us to psychologically comprehend some phenomena of our current era.

The Zodiac is a set of astrological images of a wheel in permanent motion, in a cosmic movement that gives rise to the astrological Ages, that motion is empirically sustained on the astronomical precession of the equinoxes (10), in an ouroboric circle, “World Encircler” of a celestial path. Plato called it The Great Platonic Year, it was composed of 12 eras of approximately 2000 years each one. In my analysis, according to the canonical astrological texts I consider that each sign is constituted by a set of components (element, quality, etc.) whose interactions are related to the concepts that express the, I assume, essential Notion of the Soul as manifested in a particular  era, in its complexity, contradictions and perpetual dialectic unfolding motion. Nowadays it is considered that the axis of the equinoxes is pointing to the sign of Aquarius, and I will try to elucidate where we are now in the soul logical process  after the two thousand years of Christianity (the religion of the fishes), a historical phenomenon that has realised and expressed the inherent logic and internal dynamics of soul in the Age of Pisces, fully analysed by Giegerich in several of his essays. In this paper I argue that the phenomena under scrutiny are related to the particular moment of transition that we live in when the born man is still in the process of birth, that is, in a peculiar phase of resistance and contradiction. Hence his neurosis and hence some of the phenomena of socio-economic and cultural crises that I analyze below.

In the different historical stages of consciousness, the soul spoke through astrological symbols in the mode of the oracle, that mode of radical passive receptivity of “the will of the gods”  as the absolute truth whose reading was performed by the astrologer-priests. In a later stage of logos (from myth to logos) the divinatory oracle text under the conditions of the new consciousness became descriptive, loaded with empirical ambitions. The planets marked the personal character, and therefore the individual fate (character is destiny).  In a later phase, when the concept of destiny had died, and the heliocentric gaze has long since retired, the planetary gods have been reduced to express the longing for an era that is now gone. This has been the destiny of an important part of contemporary astrology which came very close to the Jungian postulates and found its new home in the theory of archetypes. The advent of the Age of Aquarius was quickly integrated into the youthful and rebellious New Age movements (11) of the last century and with it they were contaminated with an eminently neurotic mystique and spirituality, as has been very well made clear in Giegerich’s work (12). The proliferation of Astral Charts that supposedly speak of the character and/or personal destiny has been and is an expression of an external and to a great extent personalistic look,  a type of neurotic thinking about astrology. The reading of the Natal Chart acquires the syntactic structure of a repetitive monotonous discourse in which metaphors and symbols are tools to apply from a rigid and immobile analogical thought. They always say the same thing. For this reason, I reject both the oracular or “esoteric” reading of these texts and the most contemporary “psychological” interpretations, and I focus on the psychological idea that what turns an empirical reality into a psychological topic is that we approach it as a reality that contains wealth of a mystery within itself and this mystery relates to the incessant historical transformation of consciousness that Hegel thought as follows:

The resurrection in nature is a repetition of one and the same thing; It is the boring story always subject to the same cycle. Under the sun there is nothing new. The changing aspect in which the spirit offers itself, with its ever-different creations, is essentially a progress [aufhebung, sublation] (13).

The celestial movement imaginatively captured in symbols by the perceiving mind allows us to think of them as expressive of and referring to, changes in the logical life of soul, the succession of the signs, a fire sign is followed by an earth sign, and a water sign (Pisces) is followed by an air sign (Aquarius) that is its opposite (14) reveals the dialectical logical negativity of its phenomenology (15). As in language, physical sounds, phonemes, become or express meanings only if there is a mind that takes them beyond the simple and positive physical phenomenon into the negative sphere of meaning. The physicality of temporal passing is perceived by this mind as the means by which the soul makes itself present, sublimating the natural temporality of time. As a psychological phenomenon, time assumes a quality on a different plane with respect to the sequential time as a merely physical phenomenon. In this sense we might say that Soul is Time, or Time is Soul in its process of self-actualization,  in other words, Soul is time, is historicity. Time opens up to its own infinity and inner mystery of the soul that «inhabits» it. Jung has already conceptualised Astrology as a phenomenon of synchronicity, which allows us to relate an external and an internal event as carriers of the same meaning. Today, from absolute interiority (absolved from the exterior/ interior contradiction), we think of it as an incursion of the soul into the positivity of the empirical life and the changes that it brings about in the structure of objective consciousness. The astrological foundational motto As above, so below, alludes to the kayros, the moment of incursion into the empirical realty of the auto-poietic activity of the soul, expressing in a spatial metaphor (above/below) the logical character of this incursion.

I pursue a similar line of enquiry as in Giegerich’s analysis of the Incarnation, the Christian project that portrays the historical unfolding of the existing concept of the Age of Pisces (16). We see in Aquarius whose pictorial representation is the image of the Water Bearer pouring forth the waters as the image of an existing concept that in the current historical context expresses and constitutes a fundamental aspect of the soul’s life. Aquarius portrays the Homo Totus, who is performing a job, an activity that reflects, I assume, the apex of the logical stage of current consciousness and the sociocultural and individual phenomena throw which it is expressed.

To this job I am devoting myself, the elucidation of the dialectical and speculative thought of the notion  of Man as water giver, as the image of the ideas of solidarity and utopia that constitute the core concepts of the Aquarius sign. By unfolding its dialectic conceptual relations,  we might grasp a better understanding of cultural and individual phenomena relevant today.

Giegerich affirms, “now [the human being] has to exist completely for himself, in what Jung called the ‘unlimited solitude of the human being.’” It is figuratively speaking the inevitable metaphysical loneliness of Aquarius, the water carrier, the sovereign Lord of the media, who has left his previous contention in the waters (Piscis). and currently is literally and figuratively speaking, Man fundamentally existing ‘extra ecclesiam’, a level and type of consciousness that no longer finds sustenance in any containment, but rather has become a container that lives in the cold and in the open, absolutely committed  to the job  of using the old containments in the condition of the logical sobriety that this position sustains! (17) Aquarius is an airy sign,  in the astrological tradition it corresponds to experience of the horizontal motion, in contrast to the vertical motions of fire (ascension) and earth (gravity). Giegerich comments  “what in the transition to modernity has changed is the medium or element in which the soul of the Real is immersed” (Giegerich, W. (2012) p. 151). We have moved from the former times containment in the waters to the aquarian open air where the waters are now contained in the vessel of human construction.That horizontal  motion is associated with the human realm, since only the air signs are represented by humans (Gemini, Aquarius) or a human product (Libra). Air is taken as logical horizontal movement expressed in thought  as human communication and human work (science and technology). Aquarius is said to be the house of friendship, in what follows I will  read these symbolical assignments  in terms of the soul existing concept of an era as the author sees it: 

Now that the soul has been born out of nature, that it has -logically, psychologically-left nature, substance and content fundamentally behind itself, now that man has been able to go to the moon upon an via satellites, essentially look down upon the Earth from outer space, now that he manipulates the innermost constitution and working of nature itself (nuclear power plants, nanotechnology, genetic engineering) and lives and thinks on a very abstract level of functions, logical relationships, structural forms, now mythic imagination has fundamentally become incapable of expressing the soul (18).

Money, sovereignty and emancipation

Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value — zero.

Voltaire

So you think money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?

Ayn Rand

The thesis of this study is based on revealing the key significance of the thought of money and its historical transformations through the vast network of exchanges and institutions called “the market” (the meeting place between supply and demand), a “place” where various goods and services are bought and sold as commodities. A “place” here does not necessarily refer to a physical site that exists somewhere. It can be an abstract, virtual and metaphorical place such as an auction site on the Internet. In other words, “market” (19) is a kind of metaphor. 

What is money, to begin with? This is the most fundamental question. Some may say that  “money is anything used as money” or “money is money because it is used as money,” which sounds like a tautology. The word “money” is used to define money, leading it into a circular logic. Money has had and has various functions beyond the immediate and pragmatic ones, which is by definition a means of measuring and comparing the value of different things. In past times religion told to its followers that donations would expel the devil’s impurities. Anything qualifies to be money. Throughout human history, almost anything has been used as a material for money: feathers, cigarettes, shell, cloth, rum, iron bars, slaves, wheat and rice, and piece of paper.

The reason why social scientists haven’t been able to come up with a simple, compelling story for the origins of money is because there’s no reason to believe there could be one. Money was no more ever “invented” than music or mathematics or jewellery. According to Graeber, “what we call ‘money’ isn’t a ‘thing’ at all, it’s a way of comparing things mathematically, as proportions: of saying one of X is equivalent to six of Y.  As such it is probably as old as human thought.” (20) A thought, we could add as psychologists, which is an existing concept in its historical process of alchemical transformations. From the psychological approach, Giegerich defends the idea that money is the new form of God, “money is all-present and all-mighty. inasmuch as nearly everything cab be “sold” and as everything even people, are venal…In reality it brings out into the open the truth” that the author thinks as Schein, illusory being, “the former exchange medium on the markets of goods and commodities has now itself become a commodity of its own on the money “market.” Money has been completely reflected into itself…” (21)

Historically, human exchange has always been and is the most convincing expression of its humanity. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals observes that

[t]he feeling of personal obligation has its origin in the oldest and most primitive personal relationship there is, in the relationship between seller and buyer, creditor and debtor. Here for the first time one person moved up against another person, here an individual measured himself against another individual. We have found no civilization still at such a low level that something of this relationship is not already perceptible. To set prices, to measure values, to think up equivalencies, to exchange things—that preoccupied man’s very first thinking to such a degree that in a certain sense it’s what thinking itself is. Here the oldest form of astuteness was bred; here, too, we can assume are the first beginnings of man’s pride, his feeling of pre-eminence in relation to other animals. Perhaps our word “man” (manas) continues to express directly something of this feeling of the self: the human being describes himself as a being which assesses values, which values and measures, as the ‘inherently calculating animal.’ Selling and buying, together with their psychological attributes, are even older than the beginnings of any form of social organizations and groupings; out of the most rudimentary form of personal legal rights the budding feeling of exchange, contract, guilt, law, duty, and compensation was instead first transferred to the crudest and earliest social structures (in their relationships with similar social structures), along with the habit of comparing power with power, of measuring, of calculating (22).

And beyond the primordial barter, the direct exchange between two, the historical emergence of exchange mediated by money between humans not as a merely biological, practical and survival necessity but as the expression of the fundamental impulse of the soul to unfold and express itself in culture and life through sharedness. Sharedness is the quality that is essential for the constitution of meanings and, I would add, for the whole human experience that inescapably follows the same logic (23). There is no culture or history without exchange. Exchange psychologically includes not only buying and selling commodities by means of barter or money with a more or less pragmatic purpose but also “reciprocity in community”, in other words, “mutual help” (24). The need for movement and exchange is intrinsic to the life of soul, the search for any benefit – be it biological, personal or tribal, is empirically obvious but psychologically not essential. There is no exchange unless there is a tool that makes it possible, this is the concept of the market, the “place” where the exchange takes place, this is money, a manifestation of the soul that reconciles and unites in an objective act of consent the reciprocal recognition of sharedness. The invention of money represented a sublation, evaporation of the logic of barter, comparable to the ritualised act of killing (25) in contrast to the activities of procuring food for survival purposes. The existing concept of money is essentially linked to the thought of sharedness whose sublations lead to its emergence and later to the market and the economy that moves the world. Economy is neither something we can physically touch nor a shape we can see  but we know that is the all-powerful and life-giving element that flows through all the arteries of society. The institution of the market is constituted by a set of shared meanings and rules that shape human behaviour and today rules the world. We see in Economy not the sophisticated machine as economists want it, but rather as a manifestation of the logical life of the soul, a structure of consciousness that articulates itself and moves as an existing concept and its historical transformations.

In short, traditionally there have been two types of “money,” one based on a hard commodity such as gold and one based on a promise, such as the euro. In Goethe’s Faust (1808), he actually has his hero—in his capacity as alchemist-magician—pay a visit to the Holy Roman Emperor. The Emperor is sinking under the weight of endless debts that he has piled up paying for the extravagant pleasures of his court. Faust, and his assistant, Mephistopheles, convince him that he can pay off his creditors by creating paper money. It’s represented as an act of pure prestidigitation. “You have plenty of gold lying somewhere underneath your lands,” notes Faust. “Just issue notes promising your creditors you’ll give it to them later. Since no one knows how much gold there really is, there’s no limit to how much you can promise.” 

Cox (2013, p. 961) notes that it was only with the creation of the Bank of England in 1694 that one can speak of genuine paper money, since its banknotes were in no sense bonds. They were rooted, like all the others, in the king’s war debts. This can’t be emphasised enough. The fact that money was no longer a debt owed to the king, but a debt owed by the king, made it very different from what it had been before. In many ways it had become a mirror image of older forms of money. 

Now there appears to be a third type of money, based on the distilled mathematics of software code, representing the latest moment of the process of sublation of the concept of money. I will discuss the third moment below.  In modernity  one key aspect of money is that money and value are by definition scarce, expensive, and difficult to access (26). In a further distinction, when the interchange is not mediated by money but by a promise, it opens up a new dimension of the interchange: the debtor and the creditor relationship, as Cox says: 

The word “creditor” is based on the Latin word “credo,” which means “I believe.” The creditor needs to believe in whatever the debtor is willing to pay and therefore the debtor needs the confidence and trust of the creditor… The two sides have a mutually binding relationship (27). 

The author is convinced that, “the debtor/creditor relationship is the basis of human collaboration and a key reason why the human race has advanced so far. Well, as psychologist we might no fully agree, but this opinion is interesting enough to make us consider the soul logic of this type of experience, whose fundamental impulse is represented by the notion of debt. In the mythological and religious eras the debt is coined as to pertaining to the gods, “in all Indo-European languages, words for “debt” are synonymous with those for “sin” or “guilt”, illustrating the links between religion, payment and the mediation of the sacred and profane realms by “money.” 

 Graeber notes that, 

[the] difference between a debt and an obligation is that a debt can be precisely quantified. This requires money. Not only is it money that makes debt possible: money and debt appear on the scene at exactly the same time. Some of the very first written documents that have come down to us are Mesopotamian tablets recording credits and debits, rations issued by temples, money owed for rent of temple lands, the value of each precisely specified in grain and silver. Some of the earliest works of moral philosophy, in turn, are reflections on what it means to imagine morality as debt—that is, in terms of money (28).

Etymologically there is a connection between money (German Geld), indemnity or sacrifice (Old English Geild), tax (Gothic Gild) and, of course, guilt (29). It is believed that in those times it was the king who took over the guardianship of this primordial debt, while today is the State its continuator through the medium of taxes, which are the mesure of our debt to the society that made us. The thesis that debt is the origin of the positivistic and empirical emergence or invention of money, has been discussed by some authors (30), but psychologically I retain the idea that the notion and the experience of debt has had and has a relevant meaning that blossoms from the logical life of soul and has a profound impact on the psychic structure of mankind. The notion of debt is deeply incardinated in Western culture by the Judea-Christian religious tradition, that since the primordial beginning portrays the debt, the original sin performed by Adam and Eve, and ever since then Christianity has been compelled to ask for and implore the redemption of our debts in its prayers (31). 

In our contemporary history it is pertinent to mention a political and economical event that initiated a new era in the logic of exchange. Richard Nixon’s decision in 1971 to unpeg the dollar from precious metals entirely, eliminate the international gold standard, and introduce the system of floating currency regimes that has dominated the world economy ever since, meant in effect that all national currencies were henceforth, as neoclassical economists like to put it, “fiat money” backed only by the public trust.  This marked the beginning of yet another phase, another step in the sublation of the concept of money,  virtual money. 

The story of the origins of capitalism (32), is the story of how an economy of credit was converted into an economy of interest; of the gradual transformation of community networks by the intrusion of the power of the state whose core argument is that any attempt to separate monetary policy from social policy is ultimately wrong, “[g]overnments use taxes to create money, and they are able to do so because they have become the guardians of the debt that all citizens have to one another [to society and to the State – my add.] This debt is the essence of society itself. It exists long before money and markets, and money and markets themselves are simply ways of chopping pieces of it up. (33)” Buts its does not end there. You then pay taxes, which, if you are American, will then be collected by the IRS and this money then goes to the Treasury. And the Treasury can then pay off that original bond for the loan of a bank note that was simply printed out of thin air. But sadly it does not end there, either. There is still the small matter of the… interest problem. The original bond came with a small amount of interest, and so did each and every subsequent bank loan. We can only pay off this debt by earning money from the current currency supply, which will, by design, be less than the amount of debt in existence. According to Cox,

[t]his astonishing situation allegedly caused Robert Hemphill of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta to comment at the end of his career: this is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If banks create ample synthetic money we prosper, if not we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible. But there it is (34).

In our current situation consumer debt is the lifeblood of our economy. All modern nation-states are built on deficit spending. Debt has come to be the central issue of international politics. But nobody seems to know exactly what it is, or how to think about it.

Bankers can produce money by issuing book credits for more than they have on cash reserve. This is considered the very essence of modern banking. Today, debt has become the equivalent of the atomic bomb in the realm of political, economical and social life. Public and private debt has inflated a gigantic bubble whose explosion might destroy the entire financial system and our lives with it. This leads us to the actual financial system and the monetary policies that go together, that according to Cox, succinctly might be described as follows:

First, the US government needs to fund its deficit and it does so by the Treasury issuing a bond. It gives this bond to the banking group that owns the Federal Reserve and at this point the Federal Reserve can create a dollar. The two are swapped in what is ironically termed an “open-market operation”; the bond then goes to the Federal Reserve. To simplify then, the Treasury creates the bond and the Fed creates the dollar and they swap them. The Treasury is now able to spend its dollar via the government; this is done through the banking system. The fractional-reserve banking system requires that they only have to hold onto a fraction of the paper money. And so the next layer of banks can multiply the amount of credit and the process can be repeated. Finally, the credit appears in the loan-deposit accounts of the general public. And that is the currency supply. What most people do not understand is that usually only around 10% of money is the actual physical paper. Ninety percent of the money is just credit numbers on a computer screen. When you get a loan for a car or a house, neither you nor the bank had the money. Instead, the bank simply wrote the numbers into the computer and you can see them on your screen. While that is incredibly hard to accept, it is true. But what gives all of these numbers value? The answer is you (35).

Of course as psychologists we look for a different answer. Our answer has to take into account  the soul and its Opus Magum, that allow us to think that the value of money is not only based to the numbers and the egotistical search for profit, but also on the whole syntactical structure and the internal contradictions that informs the logical soul life in modernity.  The concept of debt (36) has been and still is sustained and enforced by the State through rules, laws, norms  and regulations  via the medium of hierarchical sources of authority of bureaucracies (37). The debt that historically sublated itself from divine faith to “social trust” (38) can today implode the economic and social structure that sustains us and constitutes the logic of the civil organisation of life, because the social trust  is being corrupted, evaporated as evidenced by the social and cultural symptoms that surround us.

Marco Barretto argues that “[i]n PDI is assumed that banking and commerce have soul dignity because of its necessity” (39), but in my view, they do not express any more a soul dignity, or in other words, they stuck in a soul’s form that today is being culturally questioned and soulfully sublated. The medium by which this is being done is precisely the medium of technology in some of this productions as I will argue more in a little while.

Giegerich notes “today money has become emancipated from nature, from human wishes and decisions and is on the way to becoming absolute… has become self-serving, self-contained, an end in itself… that demands more, more, and ever more, for its own sake, for no other purpose than multiplying itself.” The danger here is that we understand this soul logic in the sense that this logic is unstoppable and must continue, but I believe that the notion of debt that I have analysed must be taken into account given that its substantial growth towards infinity (40) is only leading to the possibility of its radical annihilation. Money, like the current concept of the Universe, may «want» to expand eternally, but entropy increases. Viewed psychologically, the process of sublation of the ideas that underpin the forms of the crisis of the current social organisations in which this phenomenon occurs, and the same forms of incessant technological innovation, seem to express a continuous sublation whose direction and scope are still incomprehensible but that invite us to reflect under the logic of the soul emancipation.

Utopia revisited

The essential, but formally essential, feature of mind is Liberty 

G. W. Hegel

Utopia  has been referred to desire, the desire for a better world  and or society  and has also and as such it has been  embedded in the core of human experience and  implied in political programmes and constructing alternatives for a just, equitable and sustainable society which provide the conditions for an earthly kind of paradise.  Thomas More coined the word as the title and locus of his 1516 Utopia in a pun which conflates ou topos or no place and eu topos or good place (41).  Giegerich argues that “ideology is the counterfactual giving out of subjective wishes as objective reality. It is a-structurally-metaphysical hypostasis that posits as actually existing what in truth is only sorely missed. It is the substantiation and objectification of subjective functions. Mystification, ‘fetishism.’ (42) Consequently utopia is widely understood as a chimera, a panacea, an instance of wishful thinking, an imagined perfect society or constructed place which does not and cannot exist.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were par excellence the epoch of social, political and  cultural utopias. All ideological programs promised some form of utopia. Socialism, communism, anarchism, liberalism with its variants, a set of utopian programs and redemptive promises that stemmed from profound schisms in society and cultural life, whose consequences were highly contradictory. From inspiring the most beautiful and valuable acts of heroism to serving as justification for the most heinous atrocities (43). They were “utopians schemes, to provide a new, ultimate goal of life” (CEP, vol. IV, p.190).

Today, after the successive crises and wars that they entailed, ideologies are mainly considered as obsolete discourses, none of them, it is said, have answers to the present challenges of ecological collapse and technological disruption resulting in a collective disillusionment (44). Utopian thinking and politics have been absolutely discredited and dismissed as an irrelevant fantasy, as a malevolent nightmare leading to totalitarianism… politics are easily labelled utopian, implying a mix of radical alterity and impossibilism. The concept of utopia and its different surrogates in political ideologies today stands for, as Cioran affirms, 

a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelity… how can we not imagine a utopia in reverse, a liquidation of the tiny good and the immense evil that pertain to the existence of any social order? How to put an end to such a vast set of anomalies? It would take something comparable to the universal solvent that the alchemists sought and whose effectiveness is appreciated, not only in metals, but in institutions (45). 

Beyond his moralistic style, Cioran claims approach us to soul and its alchemical processes. My stance is that political utopias have been the first instance of the emergence of a new status of consciousness pushing off from the old in-ness into the born man, but with the first immediacy still very weighed down by the old style of consciousness (46). 

Among the several dominant ideologies in modernity and despite it being considered an historical relic, I will focus on anarchism, because its root concept entails a negation, an-arche,  intimately related, in my view, to the negativity of the soul life. The root concept that negates the arche, in the thought of anarchy entails the idea that a human being loses its essence when his capacity of decision-making (as the foundational mark of his self-sovereignty) is captured by any instance external to him. The delegation, or exteriorisation of this dimension accounts for the old form of in-ness, that displayed a concept of verticality whose dynamic was of submission to the numinous powers. This form of in-ness that has not yet been distilled and evaporated is  now displaced to the social institutions called State and Corporation. Since the dawn of modernity, both institutions are believed to be essential to human life (health and survival such as water utilities and health and welfare services), human progress and development (such as schools, universities, and cultural institutions), and public safety (such as police, courts, prisons, and firefighters), but they follow a logic that preserves a collective state of consciousness that stems from the longing for in-ness of the neurotic soul of modernity (47). My thesis is that both institutions were erected as a form of neurotic resistance against the “death of God” and the collapse of the vertical Axis that sustained the premodern man, and the nihilistic desert resulting from it (48). Both institutions caved its foundations in a schism, an irreducible dissociation or the contradiction between order and chaos (State), and between prosperity and poverty or growth and decay (Corporation) together with other schisms and  irreducible contradictions between moral opposites. In my view,  this concerns no only the totalitarian states but also the contemporary so-called democratic states. Despite the appearances that stem out of their predicates (human rights, political elections, freedom of speech, etc.), I consider that the institutions of the State and the Corporation are an immature manifestation of the new emancipated consciousness, the Corporation as psychopathic creature (49) and the State, according to Bakan, as the hobbesian Leviatan (50),  because of their fanatic-compulsive faith in infinite growth, yield and efficiency. Their piramidal, vertical, hierarchical logical structures constitute bureaucratic organisations that are supposedly legitimazed by the so-called social contract (51) whose de facto job is to create a suffocating coercion. The logic of these institutions is informed by the split of social reality into irreducible opposites, through the compulsive fight against its external too-awful-Other (the State monopolises the use of force against any Other that questions it) (52).  The totalitarianism of our current democracy is the exercise of an absolute authority sophisticatedly disguised in doctrines of freedom, the Welfare State, human rights,  and the ritualistic practice of periodic exercises of electing governments. This disguise covers up a structural violence that is an expression of the contemporary consciousness still rooted in the dissociation of a logically outdated psychological inwardness, that feeds a social trust blind to its own absence of truth, the signature of today’s Homo Absconditus.

ŽiŽek affirms that 

from the psychoanalytic cure, in which one of the main forms of the analysand’s resistance is his insistence that his symptomatic slip of tongue was a mere lapse without any signification, up to the domain of economics, in which the ideological procedure par excellence is to reduce the crisis to an external, ultimately contingent occurrence, thus failing to take note of the inherent logic of the system that begets the crisis (53). 

This contingent occurrence is usually ascribed to the antagonist external Other. Its vertical articulation resists its sublation into the horizontality of today’s consciousness emancipation. The collapse of the vertical axis of the Absolute is resisted. The in-ness staged by it is similar to any neurotic symptom, based in the absence of truth. Giegerich notes that “[i]deology is a less real and powerful, more vaporized version of the neurotic Absolute … its syntactical character must not be noticed ‘ideology as ‘false consciousness’ (Marx). (54)”

The author says: “[t]he kind of in-ness that [in the modern period] is longed for, if it were indeed realized, would be intolerable for the modern subject… it would be felt as imprisonment, as a nightmare, of which the 20th century experience in totalitarian states and with fundamentalists sects has given us a taste” (CEP, vol. 4 p. 193). This taste is also offered by not only totalitarian states as our democratic states pretend. At the beginning of the 19th century, Proudhon, one of anarchism’s most influential theorists claimed that,

[t]o be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed authorised, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is under pretext of public utility, and in the name of general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolised… That is government, that is its justice, that is its morality. (55).

A prophetic claim that anticipates the surveillance mode of capitalism in medial modernity. His motto: «[w]e do not admit the government of man by man any more than the exploitation of man by man.” (56) is, in my view, the first immediation of the thought of emancipation expressed in the externality of the political and social milieu. Psychologically, the thought of anarchy is an expression of the logical concept of emancipation, in its historical process of reaching the truth of its own notion. Historically it has its expression in the negation of the notion of authority (as chain, submission) in its vertical structuring. It has been accomplished historically in the axis of the Absolute (metaphysics and religion) and currently in the ongoing process  of corruption, dissolution and putrefaction of the secular, social, civil authoritarian structures congregated around the State and the Corporation that are manifested in the empirical level in social crises, and at the logical level, in the dissolution of the subject in its concrete and positivistic identity (including with it the positivistic concept of nation-state, the dissolution of its sovereignty forced by the transnational character of ecological crisis and of nuclear threat, etc.). In this sense the ultimate nihil – nothing- of nihilism (another negative concept) can be understood as belonging to the same emancipatory movement of the soul. All the stress on autonomy and human self-determination in modernity is tampered with an equally intense pull to obey the State which incessantly coerces its autonomy and self-determination. Massive objectification goes together with huge subjectification.

Anarchy cannot exist empirically as long as it is imagined from its exteriority as a social and political state to be achieved through struggle, an effort of will, a program to be carried out. On the other hand, if we understand it as the process of emancipation in its historical journey of the unfolding of its contradictions and the various stages and sublations that correspond to each one of these in approaching the fulfilment of its truth, we understand that anarchy, as a political ideology, is the first immediacy of a dynamism of the soul. The thought of anarchy entails a teleology, the logical obsolescence of any positive authority other than the soul truth of the Man for himself. Our position as psychologists invites us to think about the immanent telos of the phenomenon of the soul without having to applaud or condemn it. The question of whether this logical utopia that I analyse in the present work will turn into  positive and empirical utopia in the near or distant future does not concern us.  As psychologists, we only have to admit that, in words of Giegerich “[e]mancipation in the sense of ‘individuation’, freeing oneself from illusions, facing oneself objectively,  is nowadays a task of the individual …But is also a historical process that has already taken place  so that we find ourselves in the accomplished situation of emancipation (emancipatedness)  as a fact. It is a world condition, the condition of psychologically born man” (57).

Ultimately the delegation, the surrogation, the giving away of the thinking moment of decision making  is an act logically and necessarily linked to the prevailing flight from thought in the present days. Our contemporary contradiction is: we are born as free sovereign, autonomous  and conscious individuals and at the same time we live in a neurotic submission instantiated  by external forms of “freely chosen” authorities,  that control us and demand absolute obedience, “…in concert with the demands of a marketplace, political sphere, and power structure that depend on human isolation and predictability in order to operate.” (58).

As early as 1932, Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means observed in The Modern Corporation and Private Property,

Following the lead of the railroads, in the last part of the Nineteenth century and the early years of the Twentieth, one aspect of economic life after another has come under corporate sway… In field after field, the corporation has entered, grown, and become wholly or partially dominant… On the basis of its development in the past we may look forward to a time when practically all economic activity will be carried on under the corporate form (59).

That time has come. Today practically all economic activity is carried on under the corporate form, and concerning the core lemma of the Corporation “it’s all about creating wealth”, Bakan (2004) states,

[o]ne large barrier remains, however, to corporations being in control of everything: the public sphere. The twentieth century was unique in modern history for the widely held belief that democracy required governments to protect citizens’ social rights and meet their fundamental needs. Essential public interests, and social domains believed to be too precious, vulnerable, or morally sacred to subject to corporate exploitation, were inscribed by law and public policy within protective boundaries. Human beings could not be owned and children could not be exploited, either as workers or as consumers. Institutions essential to human health and survival (such as water utilities and health and welfare services), human progress and development (such as schools, universities, and cultural institutions), and public safety (such as police, courts, prisons, and firefighters), were deliberately placed beyond the corporation’s exploitative grasp, as were precious natural domains, which were turned into parks and nature reserves.

The resulting public sphere, which exists to greater and lesser degrees in all modern nations, is now under attack. Historically, corporations have been hostile to it, as, from their perspective, it is little more than a collection of unwarranted exclusions from vast profit-making opportunities. Particularly over the last two decades, they have waged a determined campaign to push back its exclusionary boundaries. Through a process known as privatisation, governments have capitulated and handed over to corporations control of institutions once thought to be inherently “public” in nature. No part of the public sphere has been immune to the infiltration of for-profit corporations (60).

Although above I have affirmed that the State and the Corporation are analogous in their psychological structure, today the State and its legion of politicians-officials who end up being mere employees-stooges of the all-powerful corporations, in other words, the only institution that reigns is the latter, which brings us back to the aforementioned Giegerich idea: money is God, therefore the changes that occur in the sphere of money seem to point to the very core of contemporary life, an issue that I develop below.

Utopia and anarchy are negative concepts that compel human consciousness to exist in the heideggerian nameless (61), in the “nearness of Being” which is, in the words of Vieiria, 

the Heidegger’s designation of utopia, the promise of a new name that, instead of replicating the old semantic power-structures of the world, would keep its existential-utopian commitment to a name without mastery, retaining a modicum of namelessness… a fluidity of semantic-ontological complexes and their readiness to dissolve as soon as they have been brought into existence in the new world shaped by the utopian impulse. Both methodologically and ontologically, deformalization is predicated upon an exercise of power without domination—an aspiration inherent in all utopian thought—that embraces its own precariousness and opens itself to the possibility of its own undoing (62).

Bitcoin, de-centralised networked consciousness

Up in our country we are human!” said the hunter. “And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs. 

The Book of Eskimo

Since the beginning, the creation of the digital world which as such is destined to make the natural world logically obsolete, faced a problem whose solution would be a step forward in the sublation of the positivistic notion of identity whose modern concept has been entangled in the logic of hierarchy sustained in social trust. Social trust that nowadays is increasingly being questioned and negated. By addressing this problem, it has been made possible to create a digital system that sublates into itself the trust and hierarchy that until now was and is an inherent part of the substantial identity of people and institutions. The digital system reveals itself as being the trustee of that trust, thus expressing the work of the magnum opus of the soul, through the interaction and interpenetration of the economy and techno-science which is acting as a great universal solvent diluting identities and barriers, and like a great torrent  relentlessly directing human endeavour towards an unknown direction. A new movement in culture and in the human beings psychic structure that is forcing to leave behind the old and obsolete logic that still remains.

The first serious attempt at digital currency was born on a paper signed by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. Since its origins the idea that underlies the project is to create a decentralised and alternative system for the circulation of money, for exchanges beyond the control of the current financial-economic system and political reality. This project is therefore inspired by libertarian and anarchists ideas. Satoshi Nakamoto started a revolution by deploying a decentralized and anonymized financial system that allows people to operate independently of governments and central banks. Like many revolutions it began with the idea of putting power back in the hands of the people, of letting them look after themselves. Antonopoulos argues that Nakamoto’s main invention was making all the properties of Bitcoin, including currency, transactions, payments, and the security model, derive from its decentralised mechanism for emergent consensus. A consensus that is not achieved explicitly  –by election or decision from some central authority–, nor by any inherent complexity or trust in any single node. Instead, it is an artefact of the asynchronous interaction of a resilient network of thousands of uncomplicated, independent nodes, all following straightforward, algorithmic rules to accomplish a myriad of financial processes (Antonopoulos 2014, 177). We read in a crypto manifesto, 

A spectre is haunting the modern world, the spectre of crypto anarchy. Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner… These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation.

… The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration…

Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions… , thus altering forever the concepts of land and property rights” (63). 

The thought of anarchy presents interesting etymological  links with the negativity of the logical life of the soul, an-arche, not archetype, a determinate negation of any principle or imposition of authority or positive power beyond which emanates from any externality. That is why the crypto manifesto group  states about Bitcoin that, 

it is the first example of a new way of life. It live ands breathes on the internet. It lives because it can pay people to keep him alive. It lives because he performs a service that people will pay for. It lives because anyone, anywhere, can run a copy of its code. It lives because all the running copies are constantly talking to each other. It lives because if a copy is corrupted it is discarded, quickly and without any problem. It lives because it is radically transparent – anyone can see its code and see precisely what it does. It cannot be changed. It cannot be argued. It cannot be faked. It cannot be corrupted. It cannot be stopped. It can’t even be interrupted. If a nuclear war destroyed half of our planet, it would continue to live uncorrupted. He would continue to offer his services. It would keep paying people to keep It alive. The only way to turn it off is to destroy all the servers that host it. Which is difficult, because a lot of servers host it, in a lot of countries, and a lot of people want to use it.

Realistically, the only way to wipe it out is to make the service it offers so useless and outdated that no one wants to use it. So obsolete that nobody wants to pay for it, that nobody wants to host it. Then you will not have money to pay anyone. Then he will starve…But, as long as there are people who want to use it, it will be very difficult to kill, corrupt, stop or interrupt it.” (64)

We assume that technology is an autonomous expression of the soul. Bitcoin is a technological product, an instrument, whose anarchy is reflected and embedded in its logical structures. It has materialized due to three technological developments: encryption technologies, anonymous digital networks, and de-centralized peer-to-peer instruments (such as “currencies”) that are based on software and cryptographic code. In its foundational document a paper published in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto “Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper” we read, “I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer to peer, with no trusted third party,” (65) opening up a new horizon or landscape that spawns horizontally across permission-less financial applications, which together support a permission-less economy. The key idea here is “no trusted third party” inscribed in the logical-binary structure of Bitcoin entails the absolute denial of any external authority, banking institution or government that controls its behaviour. There is a determinate negation of having trust linked to any empirical third party, such as  the democratic State,

– Give everyone a piece of the pie by giving away the software to create more Bitcoins. This is Bitcoin mining.

– Have no central authority, or founder, that controls the currency.

– Make it operate like cash with irreversible transactions.

– Keep the whole system honest and transparent. Everyone has a record of all the Bitcoins, or what is known as the ledger. (66).

The ledger is Logos incarnated as software code, it is emancipation in its continued motion of coming home to itself liberated from identification with any positivity (individual or institutional). Vigna notes “the public ledgers used by cryptocurrencies can bring into the open the inner workings of an economic-political system that was previously hidden within impenetrable, centralized institutions.” (67)  I posit that we are facing a phenomena that it is not merely a technical-practical transformation but a soul movement that sublates a whole previous state in consciousness in relation to the articulation of a social life still embedded in the verticality of the in-ness of past eras. Trust is a soul value that allows consciousness to open up and commit to whatever or whoever demands it.  Trust lies at the very foundation of every act of value. Premodern man trusted the numinous and this experience articulated his being-in-the-world, as much as the modern man trusts the discourse of democracy and prosperity coming from the liaison between the Corporation, the State and our neurotic being-in-the-world.

Bitcoin denies the three current concepts and uses of money:

– As a reserve of value guaranteed by the State.

– As an accounting unit carried out by corporations and

As a payment system controlled by governments and banks. 

• • It denies all three determinations of external control and integrates them into a horizontal structure, a network of a distributed code that inherently creates and confers a sovereign control to the anonymous user.

Bitcoin is a symbol of a new era of computer applications whose philosophy is animated by the core concept of de-centralisation. These applications constitute an ecosystem of services that are developed with enormous power and passion, named by the computer scientists who develop it web 3.0.  Despite its name appears as one of many updates to which we are already accustomed that intend to improve our user experience of services and virtual navigation interfaces, in my view, it entails a revolution that is only in the beginning. Its motto is the elimination of governing and controlling instances, its telos to preserve the freedom of movement and the dissolution of individual identities in group experience, anonymously freed from identity chains. These applications carry in their logical system a form of emancipation of creative human faculties and creation of networks of solidarity beyond identity constraints and the obsolete logic of the containment in vertical authoritarian forms of submission.  A historical dynamical process of autonomisation as liberalisation from all social coercive constraints. As Kelly sees it: 

Technology amplifies the mind’s urge toward the unity of all thought, it accelerates the connections among all people, and it will populate the world with all conceivable ways of comprehending the infinite (68).

I consider that the Bitcoin’s code is a great contemporary work of art, in the sense of considering art as an expression of the soul that reveals a truth of the historical locus in which technology is born. Its beauty is neither sensitive nor does it follow orthodox aesthetic canons, but the “genius” of its author or authors is manifested in the psychological impact it implies for the logic in the way humanity experiences its social reality. Even the “legend” that revolves around its authorship (anonymity, group produced work) seems to fit in, because we know that the name, Satoshi Nakamoto, is a pseudonym, and it is also suspected that there is not a single author, but rather a group that hides behind it. Such anonymity, be it of one or more authors, reflects the spirit of Opus Magnum that today seems to “indulge” in the dissolution of identities and substances into pure syntax (69). As Giegerich observes: “[w]hat we call creativity is precisely the capacity to become used by works that want to be produced. It is the capacity to build castles in the air.” (70) Never better said, algorithmic functions and cloud (airy) software code. Its beauty resides in the elegance with which some lines of binary logic radically and without any violence question what the great ideologies were looking for, and favor a transformation of the logic of our current financial and political system and the neurotic state of consciousness that sustains it.

Bitcoin represents a new dimension of the logical negativity of emancipation because  it is not based on the positivistic realm of trusting an institution,  but instead it depends on  a concept of trust logically transparent for everyone to see and control, given the open source nature of the code that openly contradicts the political positivistic need of the control of external third parties.

The code speaks for itself

Soul truths need to be made true

W. Giegerich

I do not resist the temptation to introduce a hot topic, and I mean that in several senses. It is about the DarkWeb, a phenomenon that, in addition to attracting many users, it attracts overall the attention of all governments and, of course, and very decidedly of moralists. Its name invites them to do so and is an excellent excuse to go after their users. The moral and “politically correct” excuse is perfect: it is true that it has attracted enormous illicit traffic due to the possibility of exchanging under strict anonymity, making impossible for government or corporations the control of information flows and the activities they generate. It is also true that it constitutes a saving refuge for many users whose journalistic activities, political and social activism, and in general all those who may end up doing or saying things that do challenge the instances of social control and regulation. We find a similar topic in the myriad of applications and projects that compose the huge ecosystem of applications called, DAO (71), the acronym stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). The concept for a DAO is derived from Bitcoin, which might be viewed as the first prototype. The central point is total anonymity, and peer-to-peer relations and communications that favor the horizontal governance and many of them, and in many cases, the dissolution of identities and external power structures. Under a psychologically thinking perspective that makes us wonder if these creations follow the same dictates of the emancipatory alchemical process that I pointed out in the analysis I describe in this essay. Is it just another fashion? Is it a mere technological sophistication? A new technological advance among the many that occur every day? Or perhaps it constitutes a happening (in the Heideggerian sense) that herald a logical revolution  that subjects humanity to a global transformation. A transformation  that entails the collapse of the classical forms of community, nation, and state, and thus it leaves subjectivity in a kind of new metaphysical loneliness, a “transcendental homelessness,” as Lukacs once described it.  Again, it is not our task to answer this type of questions, nor we are able to predict any outcome, instead we rather need to concentrate our efforts, as Giegerich suggests on imitating Minerva’s bird and her night flight. What I have analysed is already here, in the field of the past perfect, it has become visible and seems to follow an unstoppable evolution. The soul today presents its thought to us and pours its dynamism into the binary code, the ethereal substance (embodied logos) that marks the course of our existence and creates a new metaverse of virtual and logically emancipated reality, internalised in its truth, and carrying out the inherent logic of the notion of the old anarchist negative lemma, “Neither God, nor Country, nor King”. 

Conclusions 

The notion of Anarchy, which I have discussed in this work, emptied of any positivistic meaning is, in my view,  one of the core concepts of Aquarian consciousness that operates at the heart of the soul’s emancipation teleology in “the actual historical – says Giegerich- moment of the radical reversal from man’s embeddedness in something expansive surrounding him to a state where that which used to surround him has shrunk to a limited object now encircled by man.” (72)

The utopian thought that became a slogan “another world is possible” is being interiorised, by Bitcoin in every one of its words into themselves to allow the opening up of a horizon where utopia and truth intersect each other in the alchemical process of dissolving all the social, cultural and personal barriers and neurotic hierarchical  institutions (73) to acquire the form or status of inwardness as its form of existence.  Utopian emancipation, so considered, is aiming at the explicit birth of the soul out of itself for the emergence of a born soul as entirely human consciousness and its infinite interiority. That emancipation is not a ready-made. As Giegerich says “it requires the continuous work of a stripping off piece by piece of whatever concept that modern man shows himself to be still cloaked in despite all previous emancipation efforts.” (74).

Aquarius rules friendship, we can read in the traditional texts of Astrology. At the light of the ongoing soul emancipation it seems that the soul concept of the Era is acting through the technological logic as an opus of the soul that points to sublation and interiorization of the notions of identity and subjectivity in a web of de-centralised and anonymous networks  of mutual interdependence that have the syntactical quality of the horizontal  reciprocity of receiving and giving. A reciprocity that leaves aside the Cartesian subject: an “independent” self set in dualistic opposition to the external world, and self-enclosed in the obsessive centrality of its ego-consciousness. All other identity related concepts as nation, state might ipso-facto vanish into thin air. Another kind of trust is emerging, not conceived as a moral virtue, but rather as the logic of sharedness and togetherness embedded in the technological structures that determine our life. Giegerich says clearly that “the logical configuration, and inner truth, of an age or epoch is concrete in the sense of having everything it needs within itself…[and] indeed need as a human addition or contribution is that its fundamental unspokenness becomes expressed, is given articulate form, turned into a work…” (Giegerich, W. (2012), p. 188.) The work that challenges us as heirs of this world is to realize and build/discover the thought of friendship with all its internal complexities as the only communal truth in which political, social, technological and economical life is evolving. In words of Bloch, that I presume incarnate the aquarian spirit: “the inconstruable, absolute question, the problem of the We in itself.” (75)  The technological coldness that is enwrapping our life might dialectically warm up our communal existence via the horizontality of its de-centered logic. A logic that has its authority interiorized in itself as absolute truth absolved from any relativity and positivity from the ego world. A community based logical love we might say. I noted before that in Giegerich’ view “emancipation in the sense of ‘individuation’ freeing oneself from illusions, facing oneself objectively, is nowadays a psychological task of the individual…” (76) and I would add that in today’s world and beyond the consulting room of the psychologist, that task necessarily includes the comunal “I-Thou” or “We”, the shared space of coexistence.

I have argued that the current institutions of the State and the Corporation are neurotic, obsolete and according to Giegerich, neurosis has the purpose of forcing itself (the soul)  to explicitly emancipate itself from itself, out  of its cocoonment within itself (as myth, religion, the imaginal, metaphysics, etc. [and I add the sociopolitical]) and thus man becomes no only factually, but also explicitly and for itself a born man, human consciousness. Human consciousness that returns home when at all levels embodies and expresses itself as a We, the Aquarian group, where shared existence is interpreted each time anew as the essential friendship and collaboration without positive and factual ownerships and authority other that truth. 

I am not talking about or advocating a new utopian change of the people and/or the  institutions in its positivity, the change sought for is at the level of the concepts and notions that sustain them, betraying the logic of the aquarian stage of having all containments transformed, sublated, by the work of the Water Carrier in its kratêr (77) in that horizontal motion that dialectically negates socially construed forms of external and substantial authority. A concept of authority whose logical functioning is, as I already stated before, based on the contradiction of an Otherness that is absolutely rejected (think of the opposites e.g. democracy/terrorism), a rejection that evades and denies the complex logical relation implied by the unity of the unity and the opposition of the opposites. Giegerich uses several sentences to account for the logic of it:

1. I am not identical with myself, I am torn apart, I am my own opposite, I am a living contradiction. 2. Nevertheless, this Other who is my own opposite is nobody else than myself (78).

The blindness and avertednes of the modern ego (79) should not to be fought but allow it to experience its own sublation by the fluidity of the watery and horizontal motion of the unfolding Aquarian stance. A stance that is negates the until now so-powerful ideas that sustain the institutions which that by turning human sharedness itself into debts, information and numbers, incarnate the neurotic constitution of the epoch. By tarrying with the negative (ŽiŽek) and  restlessly exposing  himself to the truth that money is not ineffable, that paying one’s debts is not the essence of morality, that all these things are all-too-human arrangements, that just as no one has the right to tell him his true value, no one has the right to tell him what he truly owes. Furthermore, according to Giegerich, 

it is they, those two “wrestlers”, the past and the future constitution of the soul, who fight their conflict out. Within his subjective psyche, but unbeknownst to him, the objective soul is trying to wriggle out of its old skin, and through  this struggle, and as a result of it, to produce for itself an entirely unforeseen new self-definition as its new “skin”. It has to be a painful struggle because there is no master plan and no antecedently known goal. The new is simply what happens as a result from the battle (80).

That’s why there in no call for political action sustained in my arguments, rather I agree with Giegerich when he says  in relation to the nuclear bomb and the collective fear of extermination, “I am not just talking of the actual physical ridding us of problems, but much rather of the prior and more subtle extermination in our way of thinking about them, in the sense that unwelcome things are looked at exclusively as problems to be done away with.” (81)

Of course Bitcoin is not a saviour, neither the Aquarian stage of consciousness is the ticket to enter in any peace-loving utopia, but our way of thinking about the socio-economical problems and the instituted forms of governance  so far under the logic of a still resistant pattern of the splitting social reality into two opposing dimensions (debtor versus creditor,  governor versus governed, my nation versus your nation, etc.) (82) A pattern  that is being currently put under the fermenting and corrupting processes by the critical reflection that the technological  soul making opus is facilitating. The sublated notion of authority embedded in the code informs a collective social process that arises through the autonomous expressions of a group’s needs, values and commitments. An interiorised concept of  authority as ultimately vested in a community’s ongoing, evolving social life, and not in obsolete and ritualistic forms of citizenship as today still prevail in the sphere of the political  and economical life. 

I remember a conversation held by Don Juan and his pupil Carlos Castaneda in which the old seer commenting on the social order said to Carlos: 

The entire social order is built on the basis of agreements, I do not honor pacts made in my absence.

This affirmation speaks out a type of negativity, I do not honor, which entails the concept of anarchy that has no ideological programs attached to it. That it is not an undialectical negation and throwing away of the concept of society,  rather I consider it  a determinate negation, (83) the other of utopia rid off the wheightiness of positivity (84).  That points out to a negative absolute interiorization of the togetherness and  sharedness that lies not on external meanings but in the logic of the comunal truth of our being-in-each-other, the WE of human existence, “today burdened, and overburdened, with the task of being its own ground and thus deprived of some other in which it could be rooted.”(85)  The pushing off of the thought of anarchy from the ideological instantiation of the past century entails the “third way of thinking beyond the entire alternative of pro or con, war or peace” (86). The author is right when he acknowledges that we have to overcome long distances to get there.

Ever since Hobbes proposed the State as the only viable alternative to the dread state of nature, people have sustained a notional ‘social contract’ with ‘the Leviathan’ to protect their safety and basic rights. But if networked technologies could enable individuals to negotiate their own social contract(s) and meet their needs more directly and responsively, it would enable the emergence of new sorts of effective, autonomous governance and self-provisioning. That is a thought I assume that ŽiŽek would also agree: 

For Hegel, the Idea of the State, say, is a problem, and each specific form of the state (Ancient republic, feudal monarchy, modern democracy …) simply proposes a solution, redefining the problem itself. The passage to the next “higher” stage of the dialectical process occurs precisely when, instead of continuing to search for a solution, we problematize the problem itself, abandoning its terms—when, for example, instead of continuing to search for a “true” State, we drop the very reference to the State and look for a communal existence beyond the State.(87)

Utopia, the presence of an absence, as the logical life of soul, as the non-place of positivistic meanings, whose very essence consists in negating the positive-empirical realty of the modern forms of the political, and the economical, opens up a horizon understood according to its negativity and its indefinite trajectory towards the truth of community as such, our being in the world with others. Bitcoin’s logic reveals the “pushing off from a given status of consciousness and reaching out for something that is still in the future, still an unreal projection through the soul is ahead of itself.” (88)

And, last but not least, we cannot fail to bear in mind that the present psychological analysis of The State and the Corporation, is intimately related with the notion of the neurosis that infects our contemporary ego (89). Both institutions that currently direct our lives, are its reflection, the expression of the collective insanity, via the dissociation of their modus operandi, the hierarchisation of their governance rituals, that echo the same lack of adaptation to the world (ecological crisis) as that produced by any neurotic symptom. And as, Giegerich points out, there is nothing redeemable in neurosis, only the «dream» of freeing oneself from it, only an iron utopian will to overcome its logic, has to be taken into account.

Technology as a psychological machine (90) is working at the transformation of our being-in-the-world, its recent production Bitcoin and its whole eco-system of applications are a step into a new aquarian logic of the concept of authority sublated into itself, into the transparency and objectivity of the horizontal togetherness of its airy quality. 

I finish this little essay with a utopian poem of Octavio Paz (my transl.),

Is it chimera to think of a society that reconciles poem and act, that is a living word and a lived word, the creation of the community and the creative community? 

Excursus: dialectical speculation vs. financial speculation

As a matter of fact, since its inception, Bitcoin, has beed used, with a few exceptions, as a speculative asset in the trading fields following the greedy logic of the investors that only seek for maximising profit. A situation that has derived, according to the dynamics of the market in financial capitalism, towards the emergence of bubbles, under a pattern of extreme volatility.

Another issue is the non-declared “war» that is emerging between these monetary technologies and the current institutions that govern and control the fiat financial system.  The emergence of these technologies is perceived as a threat because of the potential loss of control, privileges and benefits that they entail. It cannot be predicted what the outcome of this contest will be. Despite the soul dialectic emancipation movement, analysed in this work, this “war” suggests that the emancipatory potential may be hidden, even eliminated from its future unfolding. In any case, as psychologists we neither know nor can do much about it, rather than continue to discriminate between the “interests” of the soul and the rest of the factors unrelated to it, between the speculative dialectic of psychologic phenomena and the speculative manoeuvres of the financial-political system interested only and exclusively in safeguarding the current obsolete status quo. Obsolete but powerful in its capacity for resistance and destruction.

Moralists and activists believe that profit and conscience are absolute contradictions, that the two types of speculative movements (dialectical and financial) will never meet, but we have to disagree with such interpretation. According to Nishibe,

[s]ince money exists as universal wealth, human beings will want to have more money. As long as money exists, it will be haunted by trading goods for a speculative profit. Marx thought that in a capitalist economy where commodity production is dominant, money necessarily emerges and inevitably turns into capital as a form of self- augmenting value. It is not that people try to make money because they are greedy; they try to make more money because there is money. 

People trust money and want money, we have seen that money is an illusion and  at the same time the most powerful reality so “[b]elief and money, by being mutually sustaining, fulfil themselves and comprise the ‘virtual reality’ of economy. To put it differently, once either belief or money fails, the other will also collapse.” (Nishibe, 2016, p. 73)

This financial collapse that nowadays is being prophesied by many, because of the probable explosion of the debt bubble and/or the hyperinflation resulting from people losing trust in money and the current institutions, might stimulate that other type of money, cryptocurrencies, based on a sublated concept of “trust”.  That possibility is the counterpart of the also possible losing the “war” against current institutions that might transform and corrupt the logic of the soul’s creation, we don’t know whether temporary o definitely.

On the one hand, we know that the logical life of the soul is not related to human-too-human affairs, power struggles, people’s passions, in this case, greed, etc., the psychological difference places us on the other side of the fenced land, the wild area in which we are preparing to follow the trace of the inner infinity of the experience of human consciousness, but we also know that the difference between financial speculation (anticipation and calculation of benefits) product of external, empirical thought, does not differ essentially from dialectical speculation, the former being a starting point that invites us to delve into the labor of the concept.

As psychologists I do not doubt that the economy is a reality of the soul, but I doubt that human greed is its fundamental motor and its last explanation, rather I consider that the very thought of greed has the mercury imprisoned within it that is awaiting to be culturally and socially released into its truth. A truth that might lead us to the notion of Life, not so much as a biological fact, but as a soul notion that in its historical articulations in human conscious life  as necessity, instinct (Freud), desire (Lacan), will to power (Nietzsche), impulse of wholeness (Jung, Hillman), nests the existing concepts of Truth and Freedom that constitute the burning lava at the heart of the human project, which is as much as saying the logical life of the soul, the goal of its emancipatory teleology, its real return home, and the ultimate liberation of Mercury imprisoned in the matter of existence.

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Notes