To understand the Corona demonstrations, how it can come to the cross front of left-esoteric and right-wing radicals, Sebastian Hammelehle has written an essay for Der Spiegel, in which he sees German romanticism as the unifying ideology of both currents. Rüdiger Safranski had written similarly in his book „Romanticism: A German Affair“ on the development of German romanticism and its continuity from the beginnings to Hölderlin, Stefan George and the National Socialists to hippies and the Greens. But here first Hammelehle :

„Corona protests Political esotericism

An essay by Sebastian Hammelehle

Corona skeptics demonstrate again and again in Berlin or Stuttgart. This could lead to a new movement: right-wing and romantics united in an irrational worldview – and against the system. This has a dark role model.

08.08.2020, 4.31 p.m.

(…) If you look at the websites of Ballweg’s Querdenken 711 or of other organizations that are at the forefront of the Corona protests, the “We Party” or “Resistance 2020”, then they also seem as harmless as if they were intended for an organic store audience: There is talk of „mindfulness“, of „loving togetherness“. You can see a swarm of fishes, a sunset, the lowest common optical denominator of all dreamers. What did the little prince say? „I love sunsets very much“.

The Berlin demonstrators, however, shouted “Down with Merkel!” when Ballweg spoke to them. Because the “Day of Freedom”(Tag der Freiheit) wasn’t a spiritual event after all. It was a public day of struggle, a demonstration of disenchantment with the system. An event that showed that the margins continued to erode and something new was emerging: a political esotericism that could connect the right and the once green.

“Merkel must go”, that was a slogan that was chanted by the right. And in Berlin the insignia of the right were obvious: Reich flags in black, white and red, the Nordic cross.

The fact that esotericists are turning away from the party in the green-ruled Baden-Württemberg in particular is actually only logical.

Ballweg himself recently told the “Berliner Zeitung” that he had already distanced himself several times from the right and Nazis. But there are quite a few pioneers on the right who dream of the cross front: united across the camps for the overthrow of the situation. It can only be in their interest to bring the hippies home into the Reich. It would be less absurd than it seems at first glance: The dreamy, the irrational, the magical thinking and the right were for a long time ominously linked in German cultural history.

„Steel romanticism“ of the Nazis

In his famous book “Considerations of an Unpolitical”, published in 1918, Thomas Mann made a distinction between Western civilization and German culture. He was referring to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was about “the Apollonian” and “the Dionysian”, saturated with myths, the god of light on the one hand, and the god of intoxication and madness on the other. Nietzsche did not do it below. He had also made the “Übermensch” popular, who was to play a certain role in the further course of the story. The Western powers were rational, so Mann concluded. The German Reich follows a different tradition, the irrational thinking of Romanticism.

German Romanticism was primarily a cultural and historical epoch of the 19th century. But it still shaped the zeitgeist that dominated the educated middle class in the first half of the 20th century – and with it politics too.

A line leads from Nietzsche to esoteric, mystically sounding authors such as the poet Stefan George. And finally from his disciples to the Nazis. Goebbels spoke of the „steely romanticism“ of National Socialism.

After the Second World War, magical thinking was discredited, and for the time being the Germans no longer wanted to know anything about the madness. The left cultural scientist Georg Lukács called Hitler the executor of Nietzsche’s will. Franz-Josef Strauss ‘ famous saying“ Conservative means marching at the forefront of progress ”was only paradoxical at first glance. He stood for the fact that the Christian Democrats had said goodbye to the German Sonderweg, that their policies were rational.

As long as they demonstrated against Stuttgart 21 and not against Covid-19, the freaks did not attract too much attention

Those who were less fond of such rationalism changed political camps over time. In West Germany they found their political home with the Greens. They were the corrective to a rationalism that had become technocratic, hostile to nature.

Characteristics of irrational, magical thinking survived in the art of Joseph Beuys, who flirted with shamanism and who had co-founded the Greens. At Waldorf schools, with homeopaths, with Demeter farmers and in the growing esoteric scene. And even more so with anti-vaccination opponents and conspiracy theorists. The Greens took in many dreamers and quite a few weirdos. But as long as they exchanged information on leaflets and not via social media, as long as they still demonstrated against Stuttgart 21 and not against Covid-19, the freaks did not attract too much attention. „

https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/corona-proteste-in-stuttgart-politische-esoterik-a-e0d064f1-952c-4afc-b835-be9267ce4949-amp#aoh=15985499209300&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&amp_tf=Von%20%251%24s

Commentator Genova said:

“The irrationality, so the tenor, has always been part of German“ thinking ”, from Nietzsche and the Übermensch to Thomas Mann and his considerations of an apolitical right up to the early Greens Ken, all kinds of esotericists, organic farmers and more ( who already followed Ken Jebsen)..

The essay also shows why there is no fear of contact with Nazis. Nazis are part of this movement.

A German epidemic that seems more difficult to fight than Corona. The German Sonderweg, he lives.“

It should be noted:

Mind that at the moment a minority is demonstrating here. So so far no German epidemic or Sonderweg. And this left esotericism is much more living in California and the USA than in Germany. Perhaps it is not just left-wing esotericism, but also liberal or even libertarian eroticism. Such types are by the way not only a German phenomenon and neither is Romanticism. Such currents exist in all countries. Myths, a tendency towards mysticism and myths, legends, natural religions, religiousness, spirituality, conspiracy theories, irrationalism is not an exclusively German phenomenon. This is somewhat provincial navel-gazing because of German history. Ecology, natural romanticism, the romanticization of primitive peoples, animals, plants, homeland ideology and regionalism, inclination towards spiritualism and pagan natural religions and health optimization can enter into very misanthropic, anti-modernist, social Darwinist and biological synergies of survival of the fittest and natural selection and rule of the strongest .And once you are quite pluralistic and tolerant of the biological category of human beings, the „human race“ (ARTE), „human target group“ (Ken Jebsen), the human and all too human, the „human destiny“ , which would be neither left-wing nor right-wing, just for the common cause of abstract freedom and peace, ignoring all political positions, classes, economic interests, nation states and want to know nothing about it, neglect all differences in the pursuit for a large community of fate, of destiny, of peaceful coexistence despite the existence of obvious contradictions in favor of a harmonious cross front with people who propagate the fascist and ethnic community , of course, in contrast to the alleged Merkel dictatorship, the New World Order, the Illuminati, Freemasons, Bill Gates and the Rothschilds or whatever, one makes oneself the multiplicator and backer of the right-wing radicals who laugh at theis left-esoteric hippie philosophy and who are only looking for useful idiots and find them too.

Carl Schmidt, who initially navigated between left-wing and right-wing intellectuals and later became the leading Nazi state ideologist and was highly esteemed by the right, once said: „Whoever says humanity is lying!“ The left esoteric speak accordingly as the right-wing radicals with whom they march and organize themselves in the cross- front (Querfont) and in their alleged alternative cross- thinking (Querdenken) only as a human with a different opinion, but a human being. Conversely, Merkel, the established politicians and the lying press (Lügenpresse) seem to be anti-human forces that the new community should fight together in favor of peace, freedom and a turning point in world history and a New Age and New Order. The fact that the right understand humanity or mankind only as the German people, German blood and only their own supporters who want to establish a fascist or authoritarian nationalist dictatorship is simply suppressed in the hatred against the system. Such cross-fronts have existed before, for example during the tram strike in Berlin between the NSDAP and the KPD. Likewise, the nationalist military Richard Scheringer, who had defended Goebbels in the trial, switched from the NSDAP to the KPD and the Stalinists under Thälmann tried their luck in nationalism by means of the KPD’s new Scheringer line. In the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Scheringer and the KPD saw the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist alliance between National Socialism and Communism and hailed Hitler’s war against France as an anti-capitalist war of liberation against the yoke of the Versailles Treaty. Rudolf Steiner discussed similar to the Thule Society of Sebottendorf Rosenberg and Hitler about a spiritual transition and spiritual renewal of the Weimar Republic, Similar to the Thule community of Sebottendorf and Hitler, Rudolf Steiner of folk spirits and the cult of the Führer, Montessori flirted with Mussolini against the educational system in Italy, had illusions in some well-sounding phrases of fascism . Montessori thought that Mussolini wanted the modernization of Italy and a new mankind. At the beginning, both also thought that Montessori education could create the new mankind and a New Age. Since Mussolini wanted to resurrect the high civilization of the Roman Empire paired with modern Futurism, as he also had no pronounced race ideology, unlike the failed painter and classical gigantomastic architect Hitler, who paid homage to barbaric Germanism and an invented Aryanism as a culture-creating race, and as Mussolini also promised a modern age with the Futurists and modern architecture, science and modern education, the philanthropic child friend Maria Montessori overlooked the fact that Mussolini was a fascist and outspoken misanthrope. As the esoteric leftists on the Coronademos think that those marching right-wing radicals are for freedom and a new society. The supposed hero of bourgeois anti-fascism, Count Stauffenberg, used to debate in the elite Stefan-George circle of his „Master“ about the spiritual renewal of Germany, which they then saw coming in the messianic person of Adolf Hitler, until Stalingrad made it clear that the war would be lost and the rats wanted to leave the sinking ship. After the question of power was resolved, however, the cross-front apologetics ended up in concentration camps, firing squads or were banned and persecuted, which is why they still have the reputation of anti-fascists even though they helped the fascists to seize power.

In his „Anachronistic March“ in the 1950s, Berthold Brecht predicted that the coming fascists would no longer return so much under openly fascist slogans, but with the slogan „For Freedom and Democracy!“ And so it is not surprising when left-wing esotericists march together with right-wing radicals under the slogan „Day of Freedom“ against an alleged „Merkel and Corona dictatorship“ or New World Order in favor of their own New Order and New Age, although the right-wing radicals want the old traditional fascist dictatorship as their New Age . You can also see how the right systematically absorbed terms of the left in the sense of Gramsci’s struggle for cultural hegemony in an almost Orwellian New Speak – from the establishment, the system, alternative, cross- or transcending thinking. etc. The fascist FPÖ also calls itself the Freedom Party of Austria, the Russian fascist Schirinowski his party Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, the right-wing extremist Alternative for Germany, including the fascist Höcke wing, alternative, as there are now „alternative media“ dominated by the right who, like Elsässer’s COMPACT or the AfD, claim „courage to the truth“, like in earlier days the communist Pravda once did. Only they have „the truth“ in their totalitarian claim, unlike the „mainstream“ or „lying press,“ although they themselves are lying all the time.

That esoteric ideology can also slide to the right was shown at the latest with Charles Manson, who also frequented the swamp of the esoteric hippie communes of San Francisco and Los Angeles.Helter-skelter and race war.

A good example of the right-winged esotericism on these corona demonstrations is Dr. phil. Magdalena Börsig-Hover, Doctor of Philosophy, area: Phenomenology, specialty: cosmology. Speeches about a German peace treaty, as well as about a “New Era”, show that the current democratic state is rejected and a new social system is sought, a new human era, a new age. This is fed from right-wing esoteric sources, especially since Börsig-Hover not only wants to be a cosmologist but also derives her entire view of history from supposedly higher forces. So she writes on Okitalkradio.

“My dear ones, In accordance with the objective of recognizing the roots of our present-day evil in society, politics, economy, culture, science and the health system, we look back to the past 400,000 years and to our present. In this program we will deal with sacrificial cults, ritual violence, royal systems, aristocratic families and today’s “Corona crisis”. On the subject of “Corona”, we will establish a connection to Atlantis and the last 400,000 years. The „Corona crisis“ with its lockdown and the containment of our basic rights can truly be seen as a general attack and the last possible attack by anti-human forces on humanity. „

https://www.okitalk.com/index.php?article/906-dr-magdalena-b%C3%B6rsig-hover-update-juni-2020-aus-der-sicht-des-kosmischen-welt-und/

Börsig-Hover hypes the Atlantis myth. In her 2 ½ hour lecture on Okitalkradio, she claims that the gods of the underworld and so-called archonts, anti-human shadow beings from the cosmos, would penetrate the human body and mind at regular historical time intervals to guide them to regular human sacrifice rituals – be it now the Nazis and the Holocaust or Bill Gates, coronal lockdown and vaccinations. That this is by no means just a historical lecture about mythology, but is considered a cosmological reality, is also shown by the talk of aristocratic families, when Magdalena von Börsig-Hover, according to the Münchner Merkur, also calls herself Habsburg-Lothringen. thus imagines herself as an descendent of world-historical bloodlines that wants to announce their deep esoteric secret knowledge to the modern age in order to create a „new age“. This has a long tradition: Even the esoteric Thule Society of Sebottendorf in Munich in the 1920s conjured up the Atlantis and Thule myths and from this emerged a number of NSDAP leaders such as Hitler, Frank, Rosenberg, and others. emerged. For the cosmologist Börsig-Hover, it is not just a matter of an earthly, but of a cosmological struggle that has to be waged gnostically against ominous „anti-human forces“. The fact that she is also a member of the Presidium of the Weikertheim Foundation, from whose ranks the chairman of the Republican Schlierer emerged, completes this picture and „anti-human powers“ possessed by the archtons are also those who contradict her exorcistic and gnostic worldview, the Corona demonstrations, the AfD and the Weikertsheim Foundation..

The fascist front man of the AfD and the socalled „Wing“, Bernd Höcke, reveals a completely mythological worldview in his book „Never twice in the same river“. The Rhine as the eternal river of the Germans, the Guard at the Rhine, the Nibelungs, the Lorelei, knight castles and orders of knights, ruins are for him symbols of eternal Teutonism, Germanism and being German. These self-chosen archetypes of the German soul determine Höcke’s mythological view of the world and history, and this should be encouraged in school teaching in order to initiate the 180 degree turn in German historiography, which sees the Holocaust memorial as „shame“ and the Nazi era including World War and Holocaust ala Gauland as “ the bird shit of German history „and he wants to train the German youth to be warriors again. It is also no coincidence that Höcke, Gauland and Meuthen meet every year at the Kyffhäuser, that monument for Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa with the red beard, whom is prophesied that he will only wait in the depths to wake up again and save Germany . Only the Wagner cult which the esoteric Hesemann, who converted to Catholicism, so aptly analyzed in his book „Hitler’s Religion“ is missing in Höcke´s book. The meta message of Höcke’s book is: The Führer Hitler and fascism made historical mistakes, next time we’ll avoid them under a Führer Höcke and will win. Hence the title “Never twice in the same river”.

And Höcke and the AfD see potential in the Corona demonstrations:

““ A new We could emerge here ”. History could be written on this demonstration. This is how Thuringia’s AfD state and parliamentary leader Björn Höcke commented in the COMPACT TV studio on the large-scale demonstration of Querdenken on August 29 in Berlin. „

https://www.compact-online.de/compact-tv-bjoern-hoecke-hier-koennte-ein-neues-wir-entstehen-video/

But the new ideologues sit today in Silicon Valley and in the vicinity of that esoteric movement and strive for the new superman and Übermensch, as described by Ray Kurzweil or in Yuval Harari’s Homo Deus or in new Übermensch, Superhero and Superman comics by Marvel or DC which Hollywood produces now as international blockbusters. Rather Nietzscheian futuristic science fiction esotericism.

In view of the corona crisis, futurists also see a new technological and social turning point here – recently a “cybernetic transition”, according to Telepolis. Industrial capitalism / the industrial age had been determined by the fact that labor was produced as a commodity by separating it from the means of production, now the „cybernetic transition“ is that labor and the human body itself are commodified, which would trigger a new long wave of capitalism, a „Kontradieff wave“:

„Corona crisis: a boost for a cybernetic transition
May 20, 2020 Hannes Hofbauer and Andrea Komlosy
Great cycle change: a cybernetic age

The measures taken almost worldwide against the spread of Covid-19 are accelerating a process that has been going on for decades. It is about nothing less than the transition from the industrial age to a cybernetic age. Technologies that guarantee maximum adaptability, self-control, controllability, miniaturization and individual and situational use of resources and energy are predominant in it.

The incalculability of the human factor, which is currently revealing its physical vulnerability to the virus, is compensated for by the expansion of artificial intelligence. The Russian Risk research group led by Leonid and Anton Grinin and Andrej Korotajev have been working on forecasting methods for a long time in order to develop conclusions for future scenarios on the basis of historical changes. Such a historical change is just making its way.

Grinin and Korotajev speak of the MBNRIC complex (Medicine, Bio, Nano, Robo, Info, Cognitive), which will not only create new products (e.g. artificial body parts, pharmaceuticals, vaccines, control and monitoring devices), but also a new demand for Optimization (health, fitness, beauty aesthetics, genetic modeling) and personalized, tailor-made life accompaniment. The idea of ​​optimization represents the ideal gateway for control, security and surveillance technologies. The corona crisis offers an excellent entry point under the guise of medical necessity. The test set and the tracking app represent a need generated by fear of the virus.

Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault have shown that the acceptance of social discipline and surveillance society does not necessarily require state compulsion, but can creep into the body and psyche of the individual with the promise of civilization. As a mass psychological phenomenon, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer researched the willingness of people to adapt to authoritarian guidelines using the example of fascism.

On this basis, the ordinances set in the past months and even more that which post-corona cultural techniques will be retained as the „new normality“ even after the test phase makes sense. They train people so that they can fulfill their role as best as possible in dealing with the self-regulating and optimizing cybernetic systems of the future. Corona has given the opportunity to accelerate this transition, virus management anticipates the future.

Historical review

Cyclical crises have always produced new leading sectors throughout history. The decentralized production of the textile publishing system made way for the factory system with the invention of the spinning machine around 1780. From the Depression of the pre-March of 1848, the railway led from the 1860s on to the upswing of the „first founding era“. After the stock market crash in 1873, it was the electrical, food and chemical industries that ushered in the next economic boom.

The two world wars brought about a military-industrial complex with the arms industry. In the reconstruction of the 1950s, the automobile and household technology became new key sectors. After the boom, the search for cost-saving innovations began in the 1970s: Organizationally, the relocation of production facilities to the global south helped industrial mass production to flourish again; Technologically, the IT industry revolutionized the processes in production as well as in the increasingly important service sector.

On the way out of the global economic crisis of 2007/08, robotics and artificial intelligence are emerging as instruments for overcoming the crisis. A comprehensive digitialization of all areas of life and the introduction of self-regulating systems require, on the one hand, less and less human intervention and, on the other hand, make humans in their biological existence and in their behavior the subject of commodification.

The business cycles outlined above, which are also known as „long waves of business activity“ after their inventor Kondratieff, are embedded in two further cyclical changes at a higher level. In the hegemonic cycle we experience the decline of the USA and the rise of countries in the global south, which can break free from their role as extended workbenches. With China, a candidate for hegemonic succession arises. The second change concerns the replacement of the industrial by the cybernetic principle of production, which affects much more long-term processes of change in the history of human evolution.

Since the existence of hunters and gatherers, mankind has seen two great revolutions: the Neolithic revolution, which brought about agriculture and handicrafts with the establishment of settlements, and the industrial revolution, which helped the factory principle to breakthrough with work organization specialization and mechanization. Computerization heralded the cybernetic principle as early as the 1950s, which represents a new aggregate state of being human.

Human business area

In the industrial age, human labor became a commodity. This required the separation of man from his means of production. Production was no longer for one’s own needs or the local market, on which self-produced goods were sold, but for capital that commodified labor. The purchase of labor on the labor market by an entrepreneur thus presupposes the alienation of the individual from his or her work and removes him or her control over the work product. This relationship solidifies in class society.

In the cybernetic age, humans themselves are commodified with their physicality, made usable. The current discourse on the fight against Covid-19 illustrates this process. In the course of the so-called hygiene measures, the self-regenerating immune system of humans is to be replaced by commercially available pharmaceutical products. Disinfection and sterility are considered to be urgent measures to eradicate the virus. At the same time, virologists and politicians emphasize that Covid-19 will no longer go away. A vaccine is supposed to resolve the apparent contradiction. This is then marketed as a commodity instead of being immunized by the body itself. The fact that this self-immunization in the case of Covid-19 is difficult or impossible for sick and old people is a serious problem. However, why young and healthy people should not be able to develop their own immune system may be due to unreason, excessive zeal or else be owed to economic interests. „

https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Corona-Krise-Anschub-fuer-eine-kybernetische-Wende-4723168.html?seite=all

The factor labor, which is still at the center, including the dictate of profit maximization and the tendency of the fall of the profit rate and counteracting as the dynamic of the whole of capitalism, also as the basis of the state budget, credit, state and monetary power, is not denied, but also not as mentioned as remaining core of the whole thing. It’s about the change in the form of society, the transition from early capitalism to Manchester capitalism, Fordist capitalism, service capitalism and now because of the Internet, AI, bio and nanotechnologies and life science to perhaps posthuman cybernetic capitalism. Admittedly, speculative, because whether the lifetime can really be extended that way or the human body or the body optimized, respectively ala Kurzweil . the worker becomes a cyborg with a super brain upgraded with implants and biochips sounds a lot like science fiction. For production, reproduction, family form, social form, it just makes a difference whether the worker is 70 or 150 years old and what skills they have. The traditional Marxism concept of labour / capital as THE main contradiction, which understands anything but negligible and unimportant secondary contradictions and cultural shit, may have to be modified.

This is also a political question with regard to state control, which, thanks to the new technologies, has the potential of a totalitarian surveillance state, which is not only concerned with monitoring and optimizing workers, but also with people in all areas of life and social interactions and expressions. Kai Strittmatter describes the euphemistically called social bonus system in China in his book „The Reinvention of the Dictatorship“ quite vividly.

But cybernetic ideologies and cybernetics have been around for a long time, at least since the 1970s. Rudi Dutschke discussed with Eastern European left oppositionists in 1968 about the possibility of a new planned economy in view of the new computer technologies. While Dutschke was very euphoric, the left-wing dissidents rejected the idea, because they only feared an escalation of the already non-functioning planned economy of the Comecon and a perfection of the surveillance state. Under the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, a cybernetics consultant was hired before the Internet came up, who devised a Cybersync computer network that attempted the state planning of the largest 400 nationalized companies in an holistic economic plan, especially with worker participation.

The new school of thought of the 2010s, the Accelerationists, refer to this Chilean cybernetic Cybersync experiment in their Manifesto for Accelerationism, whose central computer was viewed and destroyed by the Chicagaoboys of Milton Friedmann after the military coup under the neoliberal agenda of Pinochet as a “communist evil machine” . This was an old idea of ​​a new planned economy that wants to use AI, big data and computer networks with cybernetic algorithms. The accelerationists criticized neoliberalism, but at the same time the old planned economy, and did not believe in the IBM central computer ala HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey 2001, but told of platforms that should be networked with one another to enable interaction between above and below, vertical and horizontally likewise to achieve interaction between the economic areas, and could reconcile demand and supply, needs and planning.

Accelerationism has split into a left and a right tendency, with the latter already having China as a model and flirting with Trumpism.

“So if criticism of capitalism ultimately serves capitalism, it has to be thought differently. At least that is what a group of philosophers who came up with „accelerationism“ is trying to do. Accelerationism means acceleration. The term probably appears for the first time in 1967. At that time, Roger Zelazny published his science fiction novel Lord of the Light, in which a group of revolutionaries wanted to raise society to a new level with the help of technology. They are called accelerationists. When the term found its way into the academic world remains unclear. The concept was already in use in the 1990s. It may have been introduced in 2007 at a conference at Goldsmith College in London. In 2013 Nick Srnicek and Alex William published their „Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics“. In the same year Merve-Publishing House published Akzeleration, an anthology by the literary scholar Armen Avanessian. Above all, one thing is important: there is no going back. So there is no use trying to escape the system by getting out or somehow turn the clock back. Rather, you have to jump on the relentlessly racing train. Technical achievements and acceleration should be welcomed in order to then – and the thinkers mostly remain rather vague – appropriated for emancipatory purposes.

Accelerationism criticizes three points particularly against different left currents: According to Srnicek and Williams, “openness, horizontality and inclusion” stand in the way of accelerationist politics, which rather require “secrecy, verticality and exclusion”. In addition, the philosophy rejects “authenticity nostalgia” and “folk localism”. Another author on the subject, Nick Land, criticizes “transcendental miserabilism” and means criticism of every new technical or philosophical development of capitalism. A critical attitude towards this kind of progress, which Land especially connects with the Frankfurt School, is counterproductive because in the end it only keeps the real problem, capitalism itself, alive. According to Land, it makes more sense to focus on the future. It is not possible for accelerationism to stand outside the system anyway, so you have to become part of it and participate in the permanent acceleration yourself.

In science today a more left-wing accelerationism dominates the scene. But Nick Land has helped ensure that the school of thought is also used in right-wing extremist circles. Land was one of the co-founders of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) at the University of Warwick in Great Britain in the 1990s, a loose association of scientists from different disciplines. At the CCRU, among other things, an early variety of accelerationism was developed by „combining different theories: including futurism, techno-science, philosophy, mysticism, numerology, complex theory and science fiction“, as the author Graham Harman describes. It is not surprising that the texts that emerged from this work are rather esoteric and difficult to access. Nick Land’s contemporaries report contributions at conferences that consisted of Land writhing on the floor and moaning into a microphone while one of his colleagues added a jungle soundtrack to the whole thing. The CCRU did not stay at Warwick University for long. In 1998 the institute separated from the university – Land remained a professor – and moved into the estate of the British satanist Aleister Crowley. Journalist Andy Beckett describes in the Guardian how the group painted occult symbols on the walls of the rooms. In his book Fanged Noumena, Nick Land describes his „tool“ on the way to philosophical enlightenment: „The sacred substance amphetamine … after maybe a year of fanatical abuse I was, by the usual standards, completely insane.“

Journalist Zach Beauchamp describes how the movement split up around 2010. Left philosophy is evolving and thinking about how technology can be used to build a post-capitalist future. But a right-wing school of thought splits off from this, including Nick Land. He now lives in China and makes no secret of his admiration for the technocratic dictatorship. Together with the right-wing extremist computer scientist Curtis Yarvin – he publishes under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug – Land developed accelerationism in the direction of “neoreaction”, or NRx for short. The central argument is that democracy has outlived itself. In several essays that were published in one volume in 2013 under the title The Dark Enlightenment, Land calls for the „gov-corp“, a kind of capitalist monarchy in which CEOs have absolute power and make decisions based on „rational “ economic interests.Efforts to achieve equality, and thus also work against racism, anti-Semitism or for feminism are standing in the way against it. Land calls them „decelerators“ who only slow down the accelerating train. Land’s philosophy has not really spread, but it is finding influential buyers. Among other things, Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, is said to have read neo-reactionary texts. Peter Thiel, the German-American tech billionaire and PayPal co-founder, is not only a supporter of Donald Trump, but also invested in the company of fellow colleague Yarvin. He probably won’t have any problems with the ideology behind it. As early as 2009, Thiel described freedom and democracy as incompatible.”

Akzelerationismus: Schneller in den Untergang

Now, with its euphemistically named social credit system, China is the next modern cybernetic pioneer, which encompasses and honors or sanctions all areas of life of its citizens, and thus wants to internalize a self-optimization will in its subjects, another example of a possible cybernetic transition. The next stage should then be the complete networking of health data and lifestyle beyond the pure role as a worker, but in all social functions, thinking and interactions. It is also now considered to expand the social credit system to the economy and companies in order to have indicative cybernetic general regulation instead of planned economic fixed plans with specifications for each area, as it was before and was abolished under Deng Xiaoping. Ideologists of the cybernetic transition proclaim that they could create health optimization, a harmonious society, a crisis-free and eternally prosperous economy and a new person through the cybernetic turn. And Ray Kurzweil also wants to biologically network and optimize the human body with computer networks, using implants and genetics to create a cyborg and a human-computer machine, which, like Homo Deus, also extends his life considerably and, as in Homo Deus by Yuval Harari, overcomes death and achieves eternal happy life.

However, traditional left esotericism, conspiracy theories and irrationality, as well as the belief in a gnostic final battle and numerology already existed when these ideas from Silicon Valley reached the left hacker scene with its Illuminati fantasies in Germany in the 80s, as the film 23 portrays well. These left esoteric hackers from the Chaos Computer Club wanted to fight against an totalitarian use of a cybernetic transition and believed in a new age of an democratic, decentralized internet. This teleological talk of the a New Era and the New Age also connects the hippie-like hope of The Age of Aquarius, as it is sung in the musical Hair, with communist or fascist hopes for revolution and counterrevolution or liberalism for Fukuyama’s end History or Kurzweil’s posthuman Übermensch/superman and a superior cybernetic race and species hopes for to a tipping and transistion point, a new order, a new age, a new human era.

And a teleological and gnostic final battle between the forces of light and darkness already united escoterics and right-wing extremists, since both liked Tolkin´s Lord of the Rings and the Armageddon around Middle-earth or, in a more futuristic form of Star Wars, between good and evil power.

Such people still scare off the majority of the population, even if they lie at a demonstration in Berlin with a maximum of 60,000 people (instead of the usual downwardly estimated police statistic of 20,000) that it would have been 1.3 million and they are “The People ”, which would now, as soon as 1989, topple the Merkel dictatorship and its system supporters. The AfD, COMPACT and Pegida are mobilizing in East Germany, the left esoteric and Querdenken 711 angry citizens from southern Germany and both then march in Berlin against the Corona and Merkel dictatorship. As if Corona was gone when Merkel was gone, but political crystallization nuclei are already emerging, of which the rulers in Berlin are wondering whether they will only remain a minority or, in the event of an upcoming economic crisis, will be petrels, which will then be a desperate mob and swarm of declassed migratory birds plagued by existential fears. Some are still saturated with short-time work benefits and corona aid, but the question is how long the state budget can hold out with the already exorbitant new debts, especially since one does not know whether a second lockdown will come or how the export-dependent German economy will develop in the face of falling world market demand and how the much-cited V-curve will come about .This can lead to deflation or also to a financial crisis and a new euro crisis, which could then also have inflationary effects. Nobody knows. This is what Söder suggests most openly when he speaks of difficult times ahead and when he calls for upper limits on debt. It remains to be seen whether desperate people who are threatened with social collapse in view of mass unemployment and waves of bankruptcies can still be integrated as voters into the established party system, or whether they run after the AfD or maybe found their own organizations, choose forms of protest or join the Corona demonstrations.

Even now, Cross thinking 711 (Querdenken 711) and AfD, right-wing radicals and COMPACT are able to be omnipresent in the mass media and symbolically occupy places, to win over the attention economy, to make the state power look impotent and divided with a few tens of thousands, to be incapable of executing their own laws, to enforce the mask duty and the safety distance. Right-wing extremists try to storm the Reichstag, in front of the Reichstag door only 3 police officers as guards, Seehofer, Maas and Scholz say they are “terrified” because of “abuse of the Reichstag”. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution does not want to have known anything, does not even see the movement as a suspected case. SPD Interior Senator Geisel wanted to ban the demonstration not only because of its medical hygiene regulations, but also because of its political orientation, which is unconstitutional, because the freedom of assembly also applies to right-wing radicals, Islamists, left-wing radicals or other political groups, which is water on the mill of corona dictatorship propaganda . The administrative court lifts the ban on the demonstration and makes the interior senator look like an enemy of the constitution and little dictator.

But it should also be clear that many left esotericists still think politically enough that they do not turn themselves into backers, multipliers and useful idiots of the right-winged radicals. It also makes no sense to make general statements about professional groups and subcultures, here it was a question of naming the affinity and the connecting romantic denominators of the cross front in a way that is compatible with the history of ideas and ideology. Even the criticized Waldorf teachers often think rationally in practice. Although Rudolf Steiner’s theories of folk spirits, the cult of the leader and unscientific claims such as the connection between tooth growth and intellectual level are completely abstruse nonsense, the majority of today’s Waldorf teachers or Montessori educators are more rational and grounded in educational reforms, especially since the Waldorf movement later became independent of Steiner made.Montessori, too, was initially promoted by Mussolini because he wanted a different educational system, but when he discovered that Montessori was more of a pacifist, liberal reform pedagogy that was not conducive to his nationalism and militarism, he prohibited it.

It is also the case that secular and scientific forces can also be totalitarian and irrational. This began with the Enlightenment and Robespierre, who had an adorable statue of the goddess of reason erected. In view of communism and fascism, Erich Vögelin also spoke of “political religions”. And both were also teleological, be it the historical materialism and so-called “scientific socialism” of communism or the 1000 years empire of the Nazis. Racial doctrine was also upheld by the sciences for a long time and was internationally en vogue in the imperialist states. Neoliberalism, which often enters into marriage with these social Darwinist theories and anti-state libertarianism, was also sold as an economically sound natural law and salvation until the financial crisis of 2008 as was earler Manchester capitalism and child labour.

Already on the basis of Sarrazin’s bestseller “Germany abolishes itself” and the interviews given in this environment, he tries to postulate Muslims as culturally determined, then again genetically determined and therefore as inferior, also from the IQ and poses as a self-confessed neo-liberalist of the Seeheimer Kreis not the question of whether the lack of education is not related to the lack of integration, education and employment promotion programs that he hds cut down as a Berlin finance senator, as well as a city planning policy that does not create no-go areas and ghettos because he didn´t want to raise the top tax rate of the rich. Whereby the left makes it too easy for itself again if it wants to ignore cultural influences and individual will and believes that this would be solved automatically with some social and urban development programs. Also, today’s racists are no longer so much on biological arguments of races, but promote at the latest with Alain Benoist “Ethnopluralism” and Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” cultural chauvinism and racism. 8 cultural circles in the world would determine all world events and the future deterministically on the basis of cultures and civilizations that no longer have any classes, political differences and economic interests or even national or geopolitical interests beyond their civilization. Henry Kissinger once remarked ironically: „Which phone number do I call when I want to call a culture/civilization?“

Ray Kurzweil’s post-humanity, the Homo Deus and superman of Silicon Valley is also the next scientifically disguised promise of salvation and ideology. Just as threatening are ideologues of brain research who completely neglect the free will of people, only see them as Pavlov’s machine, which should be eliminated and controlled cybernetically as a disruptive human being.

It is true that the idea of ​​an individual free will of man is a voluntarist ideal (Where there is a will, there is a way / Everyone is the blacksmith of his happiness), which psychoanalysts have already relativized. Sigmund Freud through the sex drive and the drives that would dominate man. C.G. Jung using his archetype theory and collective subconscious. Adler is more than a left-wing, social-democratic reform therapist who, like Freud, saw this individually, but not because of the sex drive, but rather a childlike feeling of powerlessness that would, of course, try to compensate or, in the case of illness, would overcompensate it, which, however, should be channeled socially and would have to be organized, which is why he saw an important role of the social environment and to social, educational and urban planning policy alongside individual psychotherapy. Marxist theorists and milieu ideologues only see the social environment and capitalism and believe that if one had a different environment or social system, these psychological factors, adjustments or overcompensation would no longer be necessary. However, ideologues of the new brain research categorically reject the idea of ​​free will in general.

Ray Kurzweil and the Homo Deus and Übermensch of Silicon Valley is the next scientifically disguised promise of salvation and ideology of Posthumanism. Science has brought enormous progress and knowledge and produced technologies, but it is also wrong to think that we have already reached the end of all knowledge and that today’s scientific knowledge is also eternally valid for the future. Therefore one should not limit the criticism of irrationality to romanticism, the left-wing esotericists and its most extreme forms.