Beyond the Cynicism of an Entropic Universe: Ontological Perception and the Next Civilization (Lecture 10/7/26)

Bataille and the Cynicism of an Entropic Universe

This theme keeps coming up, and I want to follow it. I think it lies beneath many of the modern civilizational problems, and it’s part of why the Olmecs are such an important part of my anthropological and historical studies of culture and civilization.

Bataille’s understanding of the accursed share, and his work on the energy of the sun in relation to human history and to human libidinal energy and transformation, was an important part of my early work in cultural and critical theory. That work ultimately became scientific and ontological after I left my teenage years.

What I want to touch on here is the condition of modern nihilism: the corruption, so to speak, of modern values, the death of any real moral or ethical center. We can see this as the pure economic utility of what now exists as, I think, a fascist global cosmology of being. We observe it in the relentless corruption, abuse, and coercion of youth into military and sexually compromising positions.

This is extremely common at this point in human history. The propaganda for military involvement in nationalistic causes is extremely high and rampant. These nationalistic causes are, of course, political-economic causes: preserving and further enriching the oligarchic elites of collapsing empires. These empires had very brief periods of what you might call modern, prosperous existence, from World War I, which established the nation-state, to roughly a hundred years later, the 2010s into the 2020s.

What I really want to get at is the death of the religious, ontological centers of the regional, local, tribal unities of the premodern, meaning the pre-nation-state. This is the issue that rears its head in Nazi Germany: the death of old Germany, perhaps even pagan Germany, in the face of the creation of Germany the nation. Germany came relatively late to the party in a rapidly industrializing European world and, by extension, a globalizing world.

It’s very difficult to pin down Bataille’s political commitments, because I believe Bataille is more fundamentally Dionysian, or Bacchanalian, than a firmly political-economic thinker. That is why I hearken back specifically to Aztec cosmology: ritual sacrifice, and the larger cosmological implications of sacrifice at a transpersonal level, in terms of energetic recombination and transformation.

So look at the political situation globally at this moment: the sexual predation on the young by an oligarchic class, and the continual historical conscription of youth into wars for oligarchic power and its consolidation, specifically in the West and in Russia. We are looking at a deeply cynical political-economic universe.

I’ve already brought this up with Gogol, “The Nose,” and Dead Souls. Gogol sees this very clearly. His work is primarily a political and civilizational intervention at the level of what it is to be a human being, especially in how he works with the concept of the dead serf in Dead Souls , an idea that came to him from Pushkin. And Russian existentialist literature is just as ontologically inclined as it is politically, ethically, and humanistically inclined.

So what I want to get at with this cynicism of an entropic universe is a turn of perspective. It is based fundamentally on what we can understand when we look objectively at the scientific reality of the transformative principle and the lack of a subjective center.

What we have, of course, is the Leviathan: the bestial, demonic character of the all-consuming. Archetypally, it is Saturn devouring his young. We can map this, scientifically and characterologically in terms of ontology, onto the persistence-based organism in space and time. That organism perceives itself as a death-defined entity, on a trajectory toward entropic degradation. It exists on a firm time scale, for as long as it can maintain persistence against constraint. That is the body itself: the architecture of the body, and the very basic drives encoded into organismic bodies, which are to survive and reproduce, down to the cell. This is encoded even into the synapses of the brain. Again, I’m referring to regulational persistence architectures, not configurational architectures such as stone.

This cynicism maps very clearly and easily onto the fascistic impulse toward violence and violation. That impulse is characteristic of a primarily individualistic ontology of being, which is the predicate of Western civilization down to its economic mode: capital, and the standing-reserve-ization of nature.

So we are looking at an entire civilization that has pushed out its ontological background, its philosophical presumption about what being is. It has prioritized the base impulse of the isolated individual: the being severed from Being, capital B.

This is Nietzsche’s death of God again, but broken down to ontological territory. What the death of God really means is the loss of the cosmological center typical of premodern tribes, communities, and regions, which were focused on the perception of cosmological being. Many based that focus on stories and myths about the stars, the creation of the universe, and so on. Those mythological rituals, structures, stories, narratives, contemplations, and participations formed the basis of subjectivity, which was then carried into practice: into being in time, the polis, and the everyday.

That is the catastrophe. It all happens together: the death of God, the birth of industrialization, the thrust of science from the Newtonian mechanical universe into the quantum-mechanical universe, and the birth of the industrial modern world, with globalization seated within it as an acceleration and condensation of space and time. These phenomena all occur around the turn of the century into the twentieth. Over the course of the twentieth century, we see the rapid consolidation of space and time through technology and industrialization, and the creation of digital space, which forms a synaptic global singularity for the transmission and transformation of information.

This experience of the death of God is really the death of the tribe’s cosmological center, which was contemplative and structured the perceptual experience of being. That’s why, in my last lecture, I spoke so specifically about perception. This project is fundamentally based on the transformation of perception: the revelation of being from behind the veil of pseudo-persistence architectures. Those architectures are codified programs from deep within the mud and ground of transpersonal being over time. They make up the cosmological history of the transformation and incarnation of forms, which interact through space and time, acquiring and shedding characteristics, traits, and technological prosthetics. That history has brought us to the epoch of the forebrain in human history, a specific species-level, genomic architectural stratum. Even reproduction between human beings is an architectural stratum, a genomic sphere for transforming information: a pool of activity in which information is expressed and recombined.

Then there is the ethical problem that springs up in modernity. We witness it in this highly abusive, coercive, oligarchic territory of class divides, which keep re-emerging from the Paris Commune to 2026. We witness it in the oligarchic abuse of children, whether to gratify primal urges, sexual ones, or to make children and young people lead militaristic campaigns for power.

What we are really looking at is the Sphinxian process of human aging: the attempt to persist against constraint while still carrying the primordial technological transmission innate to the organism’s local persistence architecture, which is to survive and reproduce. So in the process of aging, these structures express the already corrupt, nihilistic, superficial subjective center of the closed individual. That individual stands against space and time, against history, against transformation. It is not in tune with the universal process of transformation at the cosmological level: the universal self that is preached, witnessed, and inquired into across world traditions of ontologists.

Those traditions run from the Hindu and Buddhist to the Aztec, the Egyptian, the Middle Eastern, the esoteric Christian or Jewish, and the Native American. They are all fundamental processes of organizing social, cultural, and communal centers around this participation, this activity of inquiring into being. That is what religion fundamentally is, at its deepest root.

But that physical, material center of group participation around inquiry has been stripped away. In its place is the supposition inherent to the experience of power we have in a modern global sense: a class-based hierarchy organized around the divine fitness of a king, mirroring the divine fitness of a single God over a hierarchy of angels. You understand this process of verticalizing existence.

These are corruptions of a historical, transpersonal, global process. That process occurred regionally, even though the cultures did not interact with each other, because it was an existential understanding of the importance of cosmological inquiry: communion with the transpersonal, energetic, cosmological self.

When that methodology, that practice, that way of being at a communal level is lost, it is the equivalent of ontological exile. The organism is lost in the wilderness of a lower, enclosed form of consciousness, in which it is only the physical body. It has been stripped from the space of awareness fostered by those traditions, methods, practices, and rituals, which were the backbone of how civilizations and cultures were ordered.

That has been replaced, and this is what modernity is at root, with what Heidegger calls the standing-reserve-ization of nature: turning the human being, the world, and the earth into labor, into capital, into resource to be extracted. This is mirrored in the scientific revolution of quantum mechanics, and in the production of fission and fusion at the local level, reproducing the larger energetic cosmological principles.

So you have a reproduction of the phenomena, or practice, of nature without the realization of nature at the superstructural level: without perception of the ontological being, the ontological self, the fundamental being that is the primordial identity of all beings. This is Heidegger’s project with Hölderlin and poetry.

With that necessary background stripped away, there is the resourcing of nature. That is the political power project of modern Western history, expanded into a global one: the colonization of the earth and its traditions by this system of values, by the force of stripping away, physically. This is what deforestation is at its deepest root. It is what stripping a nation of its resources, whether oil or spices, to furnish an empire is.

Power projects are projects of existential threat, asserted on the global stage. The battles of political, religious, and ethnic ideology occur within this cauldron, this fulcrum of leveraged forces: armies, threats, cyberattacks. These are the cynicism of an entropic universe at the local level. They are the death, the dearth, the entire lack of awareness of the ontological substrate, the backbone and background of the entire process of existence, of being itself. They are the loss and death of any true encounter with the base of subjectivity, which is the universal self.

This brings me back to Becker and the denial of death as the background of the political project: the mad scramble for power on the global stage. It is the endless cycle of corrupt politicians, of projects to usurp political regimes in order to systematically extract resources from different nations, and to destabilize nations in order to assert power globally. These are projects of the death-driven, death-ridden, enclosed, self-fearing, dying masses, scrambling to the top of artificially constructed civilizational hierarchies of political power, which is to say governments, senates, executive branches. They hold that power and extract as much as they can in the face of a death they have not adequately faced.

That death is the reckoning with the essential bounds of transformation: the borderlands between the entropically degrading individual organism, the being, and being itself, the transformative principle from which it is born and which it never really leaves. The human being, or any organism, never truly leaves the transformative process of the universal. It exists entirely within that stream. There is no individual Western subject. There is no subject that can acquire or assert an identity beyond this greater cosmological force or reality.

So you can’t have the cynicism of the entropic universe, or any accursed share, without being able to demarcate something that draws something out of this process. That is entirely the concept of possession, or profit, or the assertion of hierarchical identity: that something is separate, delineated, elevated above, or pressed below something else.

This is inherent to the subject-object predicament itself, which Magritte mocks consistently in his work. That was one of my first real thesis projects, back when I was primarily studying painting. And this subject-object boundary is less an ideological commitment than a technological one. It belongs to the pseudo-bounded organism, which participates without critical reflection in the programmatic biochemistry of its own architecture.

This gets down to sex and gender, man and woman, in terms of the larger bipolar alchemy, which is to say the transformative chemistry of the human species in its process of transformative recombination. Sex is a method of transforming information over space and time, even in the face of the physical organism’s constraint. That very process is indicative of, and implicit in, the transformative principle itself.

But at the level of the organism, it is consistently taken as a pleasure technology that isn’t even perceived as a technology. It is an unconscious desire, an unconscious drive, gratified without inquiry. What is this desire? What is this drive? That questioning is the foundation of philosophical thought, which is only possible through the advent of the forebrain: the ability to reflect, to recurse, on a command being received, perceptively and perceptibly, from above. That is the backbone of the God concept we observe in the writings of Homer.

So this inability to inquire critically is the predicate of the catastrophe. It is essentially prophecy. By that I mean the following. Without the faculty of critical inquiry into how and why the technology forms and informs the organism’s fear, its existential consciousness of itself in space and time, there is no way out. Without the ability to reflect on that, and to draw out the programmatic architecture built across space and time to fulfill persistence against constraint, the organism cannot reckon with its drives. That architecture advances technological revolution and innovation in the face of the universal problem: to persist against constraint. Without reckoning with the technological, hormonal, biochemical drives that emerge in the organism to fulfill this larger transpersonal destiny, on a species level and in a cosmological sense, the organism is doomed to repeat the same essential violences: survive and reproduce.

These, of course, operate at all costs, because they are the most basic programmatic imperatives of regulational persistence architectures. This holds across the board. It is as common as the genome, in an earthly sense. And I would venture that in a cosmological sense we observe it across scales, from star to cell, as characterological of being itself. Being has observable, discernible character.

This is closely related to world-historical theology. The entire world-historical theological process is an attempt to understand the character of God, so to speak. This is a Spinozan relationship, the character of God. From Egypt to Rome to England to Tibet, people have tried to depict that character in generative characterologies, down to descriptive and imagistic attributes, down to the figuration of gods, whether Anubis or Zeus. So this has long been a process in utero in human history.

To lose any real, invested participation in discovering this true identity, or even, going back to Heidegger and the world’s midnight, to fail even to recognize that the pursuit has been lost, is another level of alienation. In a Marxian sense, it is another level of alienation from being itself, the way Marx analyzes alienation from labor.

What is being experienced is a twofold dissociation of mankind, of beings, from their actual fundamental identity. There is investment and reinvestment, which is really divestment from being itself, into the name, the number, the bureaucratic function, the civilizational aqueducts of power relations and energetic flows. These are ideologically educated into a population to the point that the population fights to the death over an empty, ideological, nationalistic construct, or is exploited, sexually, physically, and otherwise, by the owners of these political systems of mass energetic sacrifice.

This is where it comes back to Bataille, the accursed share, and Acéphale. That strange, ritualistic project was almost an attempt by Bataille and his colleagues to resurrect a mystery tradition. They wanted to transmute the death at Eleusis, or the death of the Aztec sacrifice: the sacramental and sacrificial cosmologies enacted through mystery traditions and sacrificial rites. The aim was to transmute the latent energy at the base of the spine of the human species, so to speak, which instead ends up becoming fascism and the genocide of World War II. These energetic necessities need to be expressed, understood, or properly reconciled. His was an attempt to return that to a desacralized humanity.

This is what’s very important to understand about the cynicism of an entropic universe: at the local level, it is true. At the local level, beings are perpetually shedding bodies, garments, cloaks, and masks in this grand transmutative factory of the play of forms. I’ve described this, again, as the Aeon, a child at play with colored balls. It’s a great way to understand, across scales, how solar energy is transmuted into the diversity of species-level forms, in different permutations of genetic information. All of them, as we discussed last lecture, express character through the persistence architectures they are. Character emerges from that architectural reality, which is the experience of being, filtered prismatically, the way light is filtered. And light is quite literally being filtered in this process: through the being’s architectural state, its hardware and the coding of its legacy devices. These beings perceive being through the sieve, the siphon, of the literal architectural technology they actively embody.

This returns us to sentience and the problem of consciousness. It isn’t really a problem. It’s a technological state of being that is extremely fluid and changes over time. There is no consciousness or unconsciousness, only a fluid transformation of information. There are technological emergences that change how that transformation of information is experienced, and that experience is not reducible to an on-off switch.

This is very similar to the concept of ATP. There is no specific [secular?] life occurring in the human body. Rather, life itself, in a grand cosmological and ontological sense, is occurring everywhere at all times, and this technological recombination is producing structures that, at least in the case of the human species, can begin to reflect on what is producing them. So if we want to talk about consciousness, the forebrain is a great place to start, practically, in terms of technological revolution. Reflection.

I don’t want to get too off track, but this is the critical divide, the critical split.

When we look at the cynicism of an entropic universe as a principle, everything that occurs within it follows: concentration camps; the exploitation of children by oligarchic classes; fascistic divisions into highly racialized, ethnicized, classed groups of presumably worthless or degraded humans who are meant to cower beneath a divinely ordained oligarchic or plutocratic class exerting power through factory slavery or plantation slavery. These deeply cynical, persistently re-emerging structural realities of human history and experience emerge directly from this unaddressed ontological problem.

The problem is the line in the sand of subjectivity, drawn against the transpersonal, cosmological, transformative dimension of the experience of a profoundly expansive universe, which is that grand self. That is a totally different identity structure. It carries a totally different ethical, moral, even spiritual or religious responsibility to life and creation, because that identity is truly transpersonal. It experiences the self simultaneously as an architectural reality locally, and as a boundless, unbounded principle of transformation that does not begin or end with this brief architectural form.

This is what’s critical. It introduces to the architecture of the closed, death-fearing organism, which is itself a primal evolutionary state of being, a greater cosmological realization of what it is: being itself.

This is an enlightening, but not in a deeply super-technological sense. It is the revelation of the operator, which I have termed persistence against constraint, or the child at play with colored balls: the character, the nature of being, which we observe characterologically across scales. That is my entire architecture of the persistence operator.

Again, this is what’s critical: this is the education that is necessary. This is the locus, the focus, that must be fostered communally, globally, and in relation to one’s own being. It is the existential question from which all of life truly becomes possible: the realization of what one is, the true ground of being proper.

So the absence of this education, and furthermore the forgetting of the forgetting of this education, which Heidegger is screaming from the rooftops in the world’s midnight, is the condition of modernity. And the condition of modernity is, as Gramsci says, the time of monsters.

It is a time of profound darkness. The ancient Indians would call it the Kali Yuga. It is the forgetting of God, the entire forgetting of God: debasement, a Sodom and Gomorrah state, a Babylon state, the utter drawing down and away into absolute desacralization, the ontological corruption of existence.

That is what the death of God means: the total withdrawal of God, the total withdrawal of being from the affairs of beings. In that withdrawal, chaos reigns. The lowest, most primal, most basic instincts of a species that has entirely lost contact with the sacral, the sacred, the transpersonal, reign. Being closes, and the individual is instituted: the name, the number, the credit score, the class, the nose walking through the streets of Moscow in an officer’s uniform. It is the oligarchic exploitation of children, in war and in sex. It is the fundamentally debased culture we observe everywhere, from OnlyFans to gambling.

It’s not necessarily that any of these things is fundamentally good or bad in a basic ethical sense. They are all subliminal, symptomatic indicators of the withdrawal of being, the withdrawal of God, because they are fundamentally hedonic. Pleasure exists within them, and I think it’s Erich Fromm who says this, as a substitute for meaning. With the absolute absence and withdrawal of being comes the withdrawal of meaning, because there is no true self to gesture toward or turn toward.

What is being traded is the sociopolitical currency of the empty signifier: the government self, the state self. It is the person who is nothing but persistence against constraint in an isolated, debased, alienated form, and who therefore must do, and is doing, everything it can to survive. Again, the desacralization, the emptying-out of a culture or community, produces these predictable outcomes, because there is no central organization around the sacred. Historically, that is the function of religion. This is extremely important to understand.

So when the death of community is mourned in the global abyss of modernity, what is being mourned is the death of religion. And what is mourned in the death of religion is the death of authentic, communal practice of ontological inquiry into being.

The establishment and deepening of that practice is what constitutes civilization. The establishment, gathering, and deepening of that practice is what it is to be civilized.

So when we understand the Lakota, or the Aztec, or the Egyptian, the Maya, the Greek, or the Tibetan, we are looking at instances, however perfect or imperfect, of regional and sometimes local groups organizing themselves entirely around the practice of ontologically deepening sacred, sacral participation in the greater cosmological being. Whether it is sacrifice in the Aztec sense, the relationship between blood and the solar god of creation; the Eleusinian mysteries; the shamanic practice that I believe was occurring among Russian tribes; or the sacral importance of the Black Hills in relation to the stars in the early Americas, these are all instances of what we are discussing.

And this is why, when we talk about materialism, we have to understand science and its effects. However positive they are ontologically, they have equal and opposite effects sociologically. What is occurring is a continual, persistent standing-reserve-ization of nature: discovering and weaponizing physical processes, the laws of nature in the physical sense. This is why science is by no means fundamentally sacral. It is the manipulation and discovery of the laws of nature. It is not nature itself. That is why Newton did not stop at gravity, and why Einstein was interested in nature far beyond relativity.

The growing institution, importance, and precedence of science is the backbone of industrialization, if we think about thermodynamics and the steam engine. The scientific-technological backbone of modernity is itself the leading indicator and leading force of the desacralization of human participation in nature. That is precisely because it reveals physical processes without the ontological layer necessary, at the cultural and civilizational level, to incorporate an understanding of those processes into a sacred, cosmological conception of being.

That is where we go from Heraclitus to Einstein and Planck. This needs to be incorporated into an understanding of how it shows us the sacred, and what it shows us about the sacred. Persistence against constraint; Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’s work on stars: how is that incorporated into what it shows us about the sacred? We need to be able to see and experience God, to experience being itself.

This increasing desacralization has not been met by a recovery of that absolutely forgotten aspect of essential human existential history across all cultures. And the reason, again, goes back to the cynicism of the entropic universe: Western structures of power relations have only become further accelerated and consolidated through technological revolution.

Look at the robber barons of the Gilded Age, the economic victors of America’s plantation history. That wealth still exists. Look at those who conscripted European immigrants into the mines and mills of early modern America and built obscene fortunes off the deaths of children. That wealth still exists. We have to understand this as a process of historical exploitation: the creation of wealth through extremely violent processes of dehumanization and debasement. And of course these processes keep accelerating as technological power keeps consolidating.

This form of corruption and violence is the very cynicism we’re talking about. Fundamentally, it is the cynicism of a perspective of vicious abuse and exploitation, enabled by a failure to perceive: a failure to achieve a level of vision and understanding of nature that would require consequential behavior in relation to that understanding. It is driven purely by the violence of individual separation. Otherwise, these behaviors would be far too violent, far too criminal.

When we experience that at a cultural level, these behaviors become not only expected but normalized, even celebrated, precisely because of this ontological corruption and degradation. It is the perceptual mode of the siloed, death-fearing individual, entirely out of relationship with the cosmological principle of being itself.

And so we have Bataille writing about his accursed share and trying to build his cult of Acéphale, so to speak. Much like what Heidegger was doing at that precise moment in the early twentieth century, it was an attempt to resurrect the perception of the ontological ground of transformation: the network of being itself, not just the isolated, alienated node, cast out from God, withdrawn from God, death-fearing. That node is itself the political, existential, cultural, civilizational, global crisis of humanity, the crisis of modernity.

So this project is of the absolute essence. In returning the sacred, it returns ethical, communal, responsible participation, because beings are no longer siloed and drawn down into segregated, entropic units of enclosed perception, caged within the farce of individuality, blind to the operating principle of persistence against constraint and the child at play with colored balls, the process of transformation across these experimental structures.

Awareness of the ontological operation of the universe itself is the higher, transpersonal identity. It is the return of the sacred, globally. It locates that superstructural substrate across all the cultural, civilizational, and tribal practices of the premodern, which is exactly what I just described, and returns it to a now-integrated global milieu of information technology, communication, transportation, and exchange.

The task is to reinstate that as the highest principle of communion. It is necessarily truly transpersonal, not segregated by ethnicity, culture, background, class, or pseudo-status. It is to install the true ontological operator as prime and primary, and with it a total transvaluation of values, as Nietzsche would say: a total reorganization of global society and global culture around that truly universal principle, the existential root of being itself.

That means overhauling education, and overhauling political and economic systems, toward that fundamental ontological understanding. The reorientation of that understanding is itself the solution to the immense political, existential, global, and cultural problems we face as a species, including the economic ones. It is an ontological reorientation of perception toward being.

So many of the problems Marx describes, such as alienation of labor and possession, are lower-order questions. They are resolved by true ontological perception, which, at root and superstructurally, is simultaneously scientific and religious across every global tradition. The question is how to bring that awareness about.

Outside that awareness, there is only the cynicism of the entropic universe: the emptied, state-based cultural identity of the degraded and degrading subject, who utterly debases itself, and others, in pursuit of capital, status, and wealth.

The death of the Amazon rainforest and the explosion of OnlyFans use among teenage girls are the same thing. They are the cynicism of an entropic universe, in which beings become so debased, so usable, reusable, and replaceable that they are nothing but resources to be abused, extracted from, and shed like empty shells on a beach.

Again, this is not to say this process doesn’t happen in nature. It very clearly does: production and consumption. It is the ouroboros, the leopard and the antelope. It is the Leviathan principle, the demonic principle, the principle of the serpent: the ever-self-consuming force of nature. Nature is constantly cannibalizing its own body, even at the cellular level. But that is a local perception of the action of nature and of the universe.

What I am suggesting is a higher level of ontological perception: of the transformation of energy, and of the characterological unity and origin of being itself. This inquiry should become the base practice, the base orientation, at a global level. It is fundamentally transpersonal, not segregational. It can’t be segregational, because it isn’t fundamentally ideological. It has no belief system, precisely because it is all-encompassing and all-incorporating.

This is the work of the next paradigm, the next phase of human history, if there is to be one. Otherwise it will be inherited or picked up by some other species, whether on Earth or elsewhere, because it is a necessary part of the process of revelation.

This is what our sciences have brought us to, just as much as our philosophies and our technologies, which have created a near-global singularity through digital space: the condensation of space and time into effectively light-speed transformation of information. That scaffolding has been built by genomic revolution, the advent of the forebrain and the opposable thumb, and by global information technology, industrialization, and digitalization. We have reached the point where there must be a phase change, because the remaining paradigm has been utterly corrupted and evacuated, into and toward this essential awakening.

So that’s what I’ve got. I hope you enjoyed it. I’ll see you on the next one.