Utopia, Heterotopia, and the End of History: Marx, Nietzsche, & Foucault | The Masters’ Game 5
a Short Essay for the Modern Existentialist
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1 | The Heterotopia of Serious Worlds
Politics is the Game of Power; a Game of Masters and Priests.
Geopolitics is a game: a competition which features established rules and suffers the constraints of a physical play-space—a game which holds the highest possible stakes. Each and every player on the board competes to win Utopia; to win the opportunity to build the perfect society for themselves and their people. To bring to life and to make truly real the best of all possible worlds—a world in which everyone (who’s considered to be “people”) gets to live a Good life. The winners of this game get to taste their Utopia: a shining, splendid world which is built upon the broken backs of the damned—the defeated, who have in turn lost their game, and so are condemned to hard labor. Thus, they are forced to sweat and slave in order to maintain this new status quo—this Utopia-for-Others which holds them now in such miserable chains.
Foucault describes this dystopic world-state as the true face of civilization to date—that it is only upon the Labor of the Oppressed which the most prosperous of societies have been raised.
This is Heterotopia: the many worlds of social Order, bearing mirrored faces of one selfsame coin. The fact-of-the-matter that established boundaries will, by logical necessity, spawn a dichotomous inclusion-and-exclusion—that every historical example of Utopic prosperity has necessarily only ever been brought into being upon a foundation of a Dystopic poverty.
Human history is demonstrated to follow a roughly cyclical pattern of growth and decay—this, we have seen in our previous article:
There, we observed that the structure of socio-political control follows a continuous arc of repeated consolidation and fragmentation—of centralization and de-centralization—over and over again.
The Centralization of Power—the consolidation of Labor through the Economy of Agency—serves to:
Solidify organizational control-structure,
Promote the use of efficient and specialized methodology, and
Encourage internal cooperation and unity.
In this way, new culture is born—new rules and norms established. In this way, Heterotopia is made. Through the faith which is vested in the ability of the Master—he who has demonstrated that he possesses some kind of exceptional competency—the people choose their leader; they give the Mandate of Heaven, and thus bestow the Power of Kings vox populi, vox dei.
All Masters, however, are still mortal men. All kings will still someday die. And so, the structure of Heterotopia which he’ll leave behind can stand only as strong as those who’ve pledged their strength, and as strong as the competence of the next-in-line.
Structures, however, are rigid constructions—specialized, and built to stand sturdy and strong… but strong against their specific situation. Centralization thus serves to create strength-through-efficiency and strength-in-unity, but therefore necessarily a strength-of-rigidity—a situationally effective, and thus generally inadaptable, culture and philosophy. If, with the death of the Master, new leaders who fail to understand the purpose of the system’s original design are thus allowed to take its reins… then revisions to the old Master’s systems will become impossible to design and apply. Thus left with a system now unable to adapt to the changing circumstances of reality, the people’s trust in the once-exalted law of old Order will collapse and crumble away—the rigid and the old, thus giving way to what is flexible and new.
The inability of an old, encumbered Centralized Power to adapt to new change in the real world results in fragmentation—in Decentralization. In time, the world erodes that which is rigid and poorly-maintained. The people, thus losing faith in the declining competence of their old-world leaders, begin to fall away from tradition—from the old rule-of-law—in order to form new Heterotopia; to choose new Masters in whom they have faith to lead them toward greater prosperity.
And so, the world drifts away from Apollo—away from the light of Order and an old, respected law—and towards Dionysus; toward Chaos and uncertainty, and the all-consuming new. In this Dionysian world, Decentralized groups diversify in strategy and coalesce to fill different niches. In Darwinian action, those with the strongest and most effective strategy survive and prosper by means of consuming and absorbing the Resources of the weak. By achieving victory and dominance in this Masters’ Game, the winner is thus able to re-Centralize and establish new hegemony—new Heterotopia.
And thus, the cycle begins anew.
2 | The Problem of Resource Scarcity
To paraphrase Beauvoir:
A negative movement—a Nihilisitic action—by definition won’t create anything more than just an empty space. The destruction of the old can create only a vacuum; one which will then become filled by the new. The destruction of an oppressive system is, therefore, by definition not a solution—instead, only just the first step towards implementing a solution beyond anarchy. Before we destroy, then, we must first consider:
What will we do once we’ve torn down what already exists? How do we plan to replace the old with something new—
Something better?
The End of History is the breaking of the wheel—for, in the time when the fundamental mercantile-capitalism of mankind’s Dionysian world finally becomes obsolete… it will have been because the Labor of mankind has itself been obsoleted.
Human history, after all—all the struggle and the strife which we wreak upon each other and this pale blue world we inhabit—is fundamentally motivated by just one thing: the Problem of Resource Scarcity. Every war we wage and ideology we create—every atrocity we commit and every Master we raise—is all done for the purpose of attaining greater Power; of aggregating more Agency. We, as humankind, commit our Agency as Labor toward the project of aggregating Resources as Capital in order to better guarantee the survival and prosperity of everything that we love—this, we know as obvious and true. But what this means is that, if we were to be able to—just, in theory—somehow solve this fundamental Problem; the fact that mankind requires Resources to survive…
Then what would our new world look like?
When it becomes no longer necessary for any person to exert their Agency—to struggle or strive in order to ensure their own continued existence—then that is the time when Utopia will finally have, by definition, been achieved. That, if anything, is what we could actually call the “End of History”.
The foundation of mercantile-capitalism, after all, is really just base Darwinism—the rule-of-law of the natural world, derived from the structure of the physical. It is, therefore, not a system which we as human beings create—in much the same way as there is a sense in which the wolf and the deer or the eagle and the sheep don’t strictly create their relationships as predator and prey. The bear and the salmon do not assign themselves the conceptual, metaphysical roles of the eater and the eaten; instead, this dynamic is a property which emerges naturally from the reality of their actual interaction within the physical world.
Mercantile-capitalism is just base Darwinism—the structure of the chaos of the Dionysian wilds. Once seen in this way, the nature of all other theoretical politico-economic systems becomes immediately apparent—that is, that:
Systems formulated in spite of base Darwinism do not arise as a function of physical processes… but instead, are made in antagonistic reaction—created in response to and intended to be solutions to the characteristics of Dionysian nature which mankind has judged to be problematic. Devised by the greatest idealists of our kind, chasing the promise of better, kinder systems and a better, kinder world—
Created in pursuit of Apollo.
Thus, the fatal folly of these idealistic thinkers who seek to strike down the old so that the new may be raised in its place… is this: that they see their own movement as rival. They believe that the new system which they’ve engineered has great enough strength to stand and prevail against an old system which they believe must also only have been made; created by the human hands of Other, more wicked men born into a more savage age.
Mercantile-capitalism, however—in reality—has never been a system made; neither engineered nor created with intention by humankind. It is, instead, just simply the name which we’ve chosen to know and call today the natural, Darwinian, Dionysian structure of our world by.
3 | Utopia, Socialism, & the Pursuit of Paradise
Socialism (and, more broadly, what’s commonly referred to as “communism”) is a system which is engineered in response to the ills of mercantile-capitalism.
Socialism is an attempt to solve capitalism—to solve Darwinism—which, while a commendable goal, in reality ultimately only serves to treat the symptoms of socio-economic ills while ignoring the actual problem at hand. The problem, after all—at baseline—is simply just that:
When Resources are finite, people must compete for them if they hope to survive, and
The people who are most capable of obtaining those Resources will survive.
The solution, however, is simple and obvious… and we’ve been staring it in the face this whole time.
In order to end capitalism… we must simply end the Problem of Resource Scarcity.
Capitalism is Dionysian: pragmatic, descriptive, and fundamentally concerned with the prosperity of the fittest.
It therefore represents the Centralization of Power toward those most competent and capable of aggregating Resources through the utilization of Agency.
Socialism is Apollonian: idealistic, prescriptive, and fundamentally concerned with the survival of the average.
It therefore promotes the Centralization of Power towards the weak and incompetent—those who are less-capable of converting Labor into Capital.
Communism, however, is Dionysian: idyllic, descriptive, and fundamentally concerned with the prosperity of all.
What it represents is the fundamental Decentralization of Power among all, regardless of their personal degree of competence or Agency.
The mistake most commonly made when considering these three economic systems… is the assumption that there’s somehow supposed to be a choice here to be made—the fundamental misconception that mankind has been assigned some kind of multiple-choice test, and that if we were to somehow collectively pick out the correct answer from among these three, then the path forward toward Utopia would somehow also become immediately obvious and clear to see.
This, however… is stupid.
In reality, these three systems do not and have never represented a choice to be made, but instead form a natural (and therefore theoretically inevitable) order of progression:
Two states of society which must first be traversed… before we can arrive at the third; our destination—
Utopia.
The Singularity looms before our Terran civilization—infinite, clean, low-cost energy. Completely automated Labor. Together, these things mean for us as, human beings:
Food: to eat
Water: to drink
Shelter: to fend off the elements
But Food, Water, and Shelter in abundance—Resources that no one has to fight for. A land flowing with milk and honey—desalination and carbon-capture fed by the unlimited energy of Solar-Wind-Battery systems. Agriculture and supply-chain-infrastructure powered by end-to-end automation. Disease and disability mitigated by the confluence of gene-editing and robotics—the possibilities are endless, and the list goes on and on.
That itself, is what could be called Utopia; the coming world of our next century—and any and all who disagree are either deeply pessimistic or simply uninformed… at least, when it comes to the topic of their own future, and of the fate of the world upon which they’re likely to live out their entire lives.
4 | Utopia, Capitalism, & the Obsolescence of Labor
Communism, as a theoretical, Marxist economic system, is not and has never been… anti-capitalist. Instead, communism (as a theoretical, Marxist economic system) can only really rationally be read as post-capitalist. What this means is that—rather than standing in opposition to the socio-economic systems of our today, communism is what will (in theory, inevitably) come to exist after capitalism has been completed.
Communism is not the opposite, but instead is the Utopic logical conclusion of a naturally mercantile-capitalistic—naturally Darwinian—world. Our physical reality, after all, is a place which in its natural state is Dionysian—cutthroat, unforgiving, and characterized by the survival and prosperity of those most capable of aggregating and utilizing Agency. Socialism is, therefore, fundamentally the attempt to carve Apollo away from Dionysus—to raise a world of Social Order high above the earth below, and thus to declare Chaos to have been tamed in perpetuity. To declare the defeat of capitalism in the now… in order to attempt to force the materialization of Utopia today.
Trying to defeat capitalism, however, is like trying to defeat Darwin… which is, in turn, just like trying to defeat Dionysus. You will fail, just as you’ve always failed before—after all, you can’t beat the abstract concept of evolution. No amount of guns or bombs will allow you to blast physics into submission.
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In order to reach Apollo… you must instead embrace Dionysus. In order to solve a Problem… you must first acknowledge your Facticity—your current situation. In order to change the world, you must first acknowledge our Dionysian circumstance… and then, harness it to fashion a ladder which may then be used to climb above it. You will never reach Utopia through the rejection of your Facticity. Instead, you must transform your situation into a means to achieve your ends.
And so, when capitalism has run its full course—when we have Resources in abundance which no one has to fight for—then, there will come a time in this Master’s Game… when socialism is finally necessary. When Labor is automated, after all—when Work done by the convergence of robotics and AI is capable of economically obsoleting human Agency—human beings thus become incapable of producing Value any longer. Left without a reliable method through which to build Capital—without a way in which to secure one’s future and aggregate Agency—the Proletariat will thus be left without any recourse. For the sake of their own survival, and that of everything which they love, they must either rise to seize the means of production… or, Capital must be given freely to them in spite of the fact that they are no longer able to contribute Labor of Value to the Economy of Agency.
When capitalism has reached the obsolescence of Labor, then there must be socialism—governments must implement social policy which would appease the disenfranchised masses and prevent them from rising to take by force that which would guarantee their survival. Otherwise, they risk being overthrown and cast down as the incompetent leaders of old Heterotopia… in the place of which new Order would rise with or without them, in any case.
Marx does not say that socialism should be done… but instead, that socialism will be done.
It is not the case, after all, that socialism must arise, but instead that socialism will arrive—in due course, and in its own time. And then, thereafter, there will be Utopia as the necessity of human governance of this world begins to fall away.
5 | Conclusions
Responses engineered in answer to the results of mercantile-capitalistic systems have never functioned correctly in the physical world (that is, according to the principles and goals laid out in their own design). This is because engineered responses are attempts to put pure theory into praxis—attempts to force the fabric of the Apollonian ideal to fit over the rough and ambiguously defined edges of the Dionysian wilds. When put into practice, these engineered responses have always broken—imagination, torn to shreds by the ever-changing, unforeseen circumstances of the real world—only to be replaced once again with a return to mercantile-capitalistic systems.
Attempts to prematurely force socialist systems into place effectively decelerate the advent of real communism; of global Utopia-for-all. The acceleration of the arrival of this potential Utopia, after all—like any great work or project of our history—requires great commitment in time and Labor. To reach our goal—to shoot for the stars—we require great competence in our people and leaders, and even greater concentration of Capital; greater Agency. These things, we cannot hope to accomplish without the leadership and ingenuity which the best and brightest of mankind could stand to offer—and why should they offer these things up to us if we would not be willing in turn to compensate them for their commitments to us in their Labor and personal Agency?
In the first place, the sustainable generation and concentration of Capital is necessary in order to fund effective social policy. This is obvious, and has been repeatedly demonstrated to be the case throughout our human history. And so, socialism will not work until this condition has been met.
Socialist systems will not work until our root problem has first been addressed—that is, fundamentally, the Problem of Resource Scarcity.
It is, after all, only through a libertarian capitalism—only through embracing the free chaos of the Dionysian wilds—that Utopia may be reached in the most expedient of fashions. Just as we must first embrace Dionysus in order to reach Apollo—as we must first walk the earth before reaching for the stars above—we must first solve the Problem of Resource Scarcity before we can reach a state in which human Labor becomes obsolete. We must do the hard work before we can reap our rewards, and:
We must Labor to reach a pan-human paradise, for it will not come to us for free.
History, however, does not truly have an end.
Just as when the birds of millennia ago stumbled on islands which appeared to them to be so much like Paradise—just as those birds then ate of plenty, and so chose to abandon their wings—if we so too choose to lay down our Agency and sink into the ease of idle Complacency, may circumstances still yet change to our surprise. After all—
It is under the glow of Apollo’s warm sun where we’ll forget that beasts still lurk in the dark—that fell winds blow and the earth still shakes… beyond, in the realm of Dionysus.
