The New Society

On our journey of discovery, we have gradually encountered in text and commentary a whole zoo of fascism species. The original Italian fascism, which with its violent arditi, anti-capitalist and anti-communist war veterans, was NOT in its origin the extended arm of capital against the working class. The radically ideological and genocidal Zionist fascism in Israel, which in word and deed easily relegates an envious Mussolini to second place. General Franco's Christian, conservative and anti-communist dictatorial fascism, which did not care for its own black shirt types.

Georgi Dimitrov's and John Heartfield's – Millionen stehen hinter mir – Hitler fascism, which BECAME the extended arm of capital against the working class. The authoritarian and highly repressive NATO fascism of the Greek colonels turned against communists, socialists and other decent people. General Pinochet's highly violent and experimental, neoliberal Milton Friedman fascism turned against trade unions, communists, socialists and other types critical of the USA.

A kind of omnibus fascism that recognizes fascism in all the deeds of Donald Trump and his Tech and Maga herd and balances right on the edge of Trump Deraignment Syndrome. Eric Weinstein's fascism, which calls the increasing bureaucratization, control and censorship in the EU soft fascism.

All of these have a recognizable fascist trait and a certain family resemblance, but also have so many differences that it is difficult to extract a common definition that can summarize all the animals in the garden of fascism. We are not in Karl Linnaeus' well-ordered and objective classification world, but in Ludwig Wittgenstein's fluid and subjective game world, where definitions are networks and language games, and everyone has an indisputable right to their own opinion. Which of course does not make it easier.

And it will not be easier when we now - perhaps - also have to accommodate a unicorn like the technofascism of the tech billionaires and Silicon Valley.

My AI calls the term technofascism “an emergent neologism that appears in step with the advance of digitalization”, which is to cover up the fact that the machine does not know where the term first appeared. On the other hand, it can tell that the now deceased American education professor and environmental activist Chet Bowers is one of the early users of the term. Also one of the most important.

And quite rightly, I did not know Bowers, but he is worth knowing, and perhaps we will meet again. You thus get a pretty good impression of what users mean by the term technofascism if, like me, you harvest and glean a little from Bowers’ important text ‘Is the Digital Revolution Sowing the Seeds of a Techno-Fascist Future? https://cabowers.net/pdf/Techno-Fascism.pdf

• Technofascism is characterized by the fact that more and more aspects of daily life become dependent on digital technologies, which increasingly subordinate human thoughts and behavior to the dictates of machines, which, due to the degree of efficiency of the machines, easily leads to oppressive systems that do not tolerate dissent.
• While the moral foundations of technofascism align with the values ​​of market capitalism and the progressive ideology of science that easily slips into scientism, its level of effectiveness and totalitarian potential can easily lead to oppressive systems that do not tolerate dissent, especially from those who criticize technofascism for its promotion of consumerism and the destruction of nature, culture, and cultural commons.
• The increased reliance on computer-mediated learning at all levels of education contributes to the conformity of thought required by the technofascist state.
• Lost are the narratives, often intergenerational, passed down through face-to-face and mentoring relationships, leaving students with the digitally mediated myths that serve the interests of the controlling elite of scientists, computer scientists, and engineers, corporate executives, and the military establishment.
• The primary characteristic of all fascist modernization movements is conformity in thought and behavior, which is controlled and controlled by total surveillance systems that track people's thoughts, behavior, and relationships.

Yes, yes, yes, but isn't it a stretch to even associate tech billionaires with fascism?

Yes, of course it is. But only until we think of our Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg's motto: "Move fast and break things." If one had to choose a motto for the original Ur-Fascism - the fascism of the Italian arditieri and futurists - one could not have chosen a better one.

But if we find in Zuckerberg's motto the essential and revolutionary ethos of fascism, and if the motto can also be used as a kind of touchstone of fascism that can separate the real thing from the fake gold, then the Silicon Valley icons end up in the first pile. Whatever the cost, they all celebrate a rapid and radical upheaval of the existing order in favor of Silicon Valley's brave new world.

If, furthermore, the most easily ascertainable contribution of technofascism is digitized surveillance, artificial intelligence, and automation with the aim of controlling, suppressing, and standardizing populations in a totalitarian manner, then Peter Thiel with his surveillance empire Palantir must of course become the first unicorn in our zoo.

If we are looking for someone to play the lead role as a technofascist, it almost has to be our old friend, Peter Thiel, the thin, arrogant, lonely and bullied boy from the uranium mining town who survived on basic programming, chess, Dungeons and Dragons and Tolkien's books, spun gold with his program PayPal, but also used money to finance his partner Elon Musk, whom he had just fired (those from South Africa have to stick together), partnered with Marc Andreessen in the freedom city projects (last in Greenland), and much, much more, and eventually owned and controlled so much as a tech investor that as the boss of the PayPal mafia he could tell Donald Trump that he should choose JD Vance as his vice president, whom Thiel himself had found, trained and financed.

But it is not just because he is the spider at the center of the web that PayPal has spun over Silicon Valley that Thiel is a candidate for a lead role. It is also because he is the founder and owner of the company Palantir, which can be seen as the very embodiment of the spirit of techno-fascism.
Palantir Technologies is named after the magical "seeing stones", Palantíri, from The Lord of the Rings, which allow their owners to see and observe distant events, but it is not as innocent as it sounds.

Palantir, which with a market value of 185 billion dollars is among the leaders in its market, provides advanced solutions for security management, counterterrorism and crime prevention to its customers, which include private companies, police authorities, military services and intelligence agencies worldwide.

It offers not only specialized tools for surveillance, information collection, data merging and intelligence analysis, but also operational solutions, including AI-based systems that assist in decision-making and military operations.

Palantir has developed systems that, using drones, satellites and other intelligence sources and the use of artificial intelligence, can find and analyze enemy targets and – “based on AI driven rules or manual inputs for human-in-the-loop control” – choose the right attacks. In this way, Palantir has helped both the Israeli and Ukrainian armies improve the precision and efficiency of their military operations.

But Palantir can offer more than that, it has also developed technology that can reach far into the future and offer “predictive policing”. That is, preventive police work that, using the analysis of big data and artificial intelligence, can predict crimes and identify criminals before they commit their crimes; and the fact that it can do that is absolutely fantastic!

With the smartest minds and the smartest solutions, which have also been thoroughly tested in practice in the theaters of war in the Middle East and Ukraine, it is clear that you can now find Palantir offices not only in Kiev, Tel Aviv and Denver, where the headquarters are located, but also in Munich, London and Paris.

Ja, selv på Philip Heymans Allé i Hellerup, Danmark, kan man finde et kontor, hvorfra Palantir løser opgaver for det danske politi med systemet POL-INTEL, der kan analysere store datamængder og hjælpe med til at identificere kriminalitetsmønstre, og for den danske droneproducent og defense contractor, Sky-Watch, som man hjælper med AI-teknologi, der kan forbedre militære realtidsoperationer og skabe stærkere situationsforståelse af slagmarken.

Som verden har udviklet sig på det sidste, siger det sig selv, at behovet for Sky-Watchs produkter har udviklet sig voldsomt, siden det lille danske dronefirma for femten år siden startede i Støvring med udvikling af små droner til overvågning af landbrugsafgrøder, høstbrande og inspektion af højtspændingsledninger.

Det samme kan siges om Palantir, hvis årlige omsætning steg fra 742 millioner dollars i 2019 til 2,8 milliarder dollars i 2024, og forventes at nå 3,5 milliarder dollars i 2025.

Det skadede heller ikke, at Silicon Valley flyttede ind i Det hvide Hus sammen med Donald Trump og Thiels føl JD Vance blev vicepræsident. Palantirs aktier steg med mere end 90 procent, da Trump blev genvalgt i november 2024.

Men der er endnu en grund til, at Peter Thiel kandiderer til en hovedrolle i teknofascistmanegen. Modsat vores uskyldige englebarn Elon Musk, er Peter nemlig ikke lige præcis enhver svigermors drøm, og her taler jeg ikke om hans homoseksualitet.

Like all young boys who have fallen in love with Ayn Rand, Peter Thiel started out as a newly-washed libertarian, “and I have remained true to the convictions of my teenage years, true to authentic human freedom as a prerequisite for the highest good,” he says in a biographical article, and he therefore remains against “confiscating taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of each individual,” he assures.

• INSERT: If you wonder about the latter, Peter Thiel is VERY concerned with his own mortality and has invested large sums in initiatives such as the Methuselah Foundation and the SENS Research Foundation, which are working with artificial intelligence to find solutions to slow down or reverse the aging process.
  
  And Thiel really believes that eternal life awaits us thanks to the development of artificial intelligence. Until the breakthrough comes, however, he has just twelve days to be on the safe side! - has obtained New Zealand citizenship so he can build a large, luxurious 'Doomsday Prepper' complex in a remote wilderness area on New Zealand's South Island. But of course, the project has been blocked by some eco-activists for the time being.

BUT, BUT, BUT, Thiel continues, "I must admit that over the past two decades I have radically changed my mind about how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."

Ugh! But that's what happens when you hang out with Curtis Yarvin and the dark elves too much.

“The higher your IQ, the more pessimistic you became about free-market politics—capitalism is simply not that popular with the masses,” Thiel says, adding, “The 1920s were the last decade in American history when you could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the massive increase in welfare recipients and the expansion of the vote to women—two constituencies notoriously tough on libertarians—have made the concept of ‘capitalist democracy’ a contradiction in terms.”

Yes, it’s not easy being a signature geek and a libertarian, but Thiel doesn’t despair:

“I don’t despair because I no longer believe that politics is the way forward… [because] unlike in the political world, in the world of technology, individual choice can still be all-important. The fate of our world may depend on the efforts of a single person building or expanding the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”

And this Wagnerian Parsifal behavior Thiel then embarks on.

But why does Thiel no longer believe in politics? Well, the moment of clarity, the TURNING POINT, came, according to Thiel, when the rational world collapsed with the towers on September 11, 2001, “where a very small number of people were able to inflict unprecedented levels of damage and death” and thus demonstrated that a few fanatics can overthrow our Western civilization.

In a lecture he gave in his ‘Computer Science 183: Startup’ course, when he was an early teacher at Stanford, Thiel called the turning point a Strauss moment, which is very well chosen, since you can both hear the Strauss fanfare – dae-dae-dae-da-da – and see the killer monkey throw the bone into the air and become a human.

“The awareness of the West’s vulnerability demanded a new compromise,” he says, “and this new compromise inexorably demanded more security at the expense of freedom.”

Of course, that goes without saying. But it also required a total reassessment of the ideas about man that were born with the Enlightenment's belief in human reason, human progress, and society as a rational contract between free individuals, as taught by John Locke, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant.

Like the Enlightenment thinkers of the time, in their optimism they had forgotten the question of the true and universal nature of man and society, which the thinkers of antiquity had never let go of.

Thiel derives the true nature of man and society from his admired French teacher at Stanford, René Girard, and his mimetic theory of society, which briefly states that man is by nature imitative and has a desire to resemble others, which leads to jealousy and violence that can ultimately only be controlled by the group choosing a scapegoat to kill.
Thiel describes the theory this way:

“Murder is the secret origin of all religious and political institutions, and is remembered and transformed in the form of myth. The scapegoat, perceived as the primary source of conflict and disorder, had to die in order for there to be peace. By violence, violence was brought to an end, and society was born. But because society rests on the belief in its own order and justice, the basic act of violence must be concealed—by the myth that the murdered victim was really guilty. Thus, violence is embedded in the heart of society; myth is merely a discourse that is fleeting in relation to violence. Myth sanctifies violence in the basic murder: myth tells us that the violence was justified because the victim was really guilty and, at least in the context of archaic cultures, really powerful. Myths transform the murdered scapegoats into gods, and religious rituals reenact the basic murder through the sacrifice of human or animal substitutes, thereby creating a kind of peace that always mixed with a certain amount of violence. The central role of sacrifice was so great that those who managed to postpone or avoid execution became objects of veneration. Every king is a kind of living god, and therein lies the true origin of monarchy.”

Some will probably scratch their heads and say, what a bunch of nonsense, but I bring the long quote here in order to be able to give an instructive warning.

The understanding we have of the origin and nature of man and society, which we have inherited from the Enlightenment and its aftermath, be it from Adam Smith or Karl Marx, is, if not grossly wrong, then at least completely inadequate, and it does not help to supplement it with Darwin's natural selection.

Sigmund Freud is right when he says that one must delve deep into the archaic past world, from which the human mind and religious myths come, to find the true nature and origin of man and society. Which is not to say that Freud is right in his theory of parricide, which, incidentally, is not so much reminiscent of Girard's.

This does not mean that the secret of man is religious, it can of course only be material and biological; it is the secret of religiosity that is human, as Ludwig Feuerbach famously pointed out. The secret of humanity, on the other hand, is so profound that up to now we have had myths to work with.

(To be fair, Marx himself discovered this while reading in the library of the British Museum, abruptly stopped writing further on the second and third volumes of Capital and began extensive ethnological studies, but just as he had made a good start, he died.)

This is not to say that Girard is right with his Lord of the Flies-like theory, but that one is only fooling oneself if one simply rejects archaic material instead of showing it the respect it truly deserves.

The fall of the towers showed precisely to Peter Thiel that we have not shown archaic material the respect it deserves. We have far overestimated the intellectual side of human nature, which emphasizes rationality and order, and forgotten the side of deep instincts and emotions, which breeds anarchy and chaos.

In ancient times, people were very aware of the opposition between these sides and worked with them in the form of the myths of the orderly Apollo and the disorderly Dionysus. Later, scholars – and therefore Thiel in his teaching – used the conceptual pair Athens and Jerusalem when they had to talk about the opposition between intellect and emotion, knowledge and faith, realization and revelation. One could therefore perhaps say that because Athens in our time has ignored Jerusalem, Jerusalem fought back and overthrew the towers. (Some conspiracy theorists would say - literally.)

To support his now gloomy and pessimistic view of human nature, Thiel also includes Carl Schmitt, the Nazi legal philosopher from the Third Reich, whom all political science courses are so enthusiastic about because he comes up with a simple and easy-to-understand definition of the political.
Politics is essentially about the friend-enemy distinction and about constantly designating an enemy, says Carl Schmitt, which aligns very well with Girard and, unfortunately, also with our experiences from our own political reality.

But Carl Schmitt has another famous theory that points to a kind of solution. He says that sovereignty lies with the one who can declare a ceasefire; and that the sovereign – the ruler – as above politics, has the right to make sovereign decisions outside of politics, autocratically outside of democracy.

Here one naturally thinks of the Hitler era, when Der Führer, as the sovereign, maintained a ceasefire between the always rival and warring factions of his movement and issued sovereign decisions, which the legal philosopher Schmitt then legitimized with his highly learned writings.

But then you also think about our own reality, where the hostility is now spreading in all directions like an uncontrollable wildfire, and where Donald Trump is trying to enforce power as sovereign by dictating a ceasefire, for the time being in vain, and the whole thing is becoming more and more chaotic, while poor Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the lone voice of reason, flies around from TV screen to TV screen like an increasingly desperate Apollo.

Niels, you're rambling, aren't you done soon?

Yes, yes, I'll stop now; you've had your hand up for a long time, would you like to say something?

Yes, the Strauss that Thiel is talking about is not the Nietzsche - and Also Sprach Zarathustra - Strauss who made the music for Stanley Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey and for the fanfare where the monkey swung the bone.

Isn't that right?

No, the one Thiel is talking about is the philosopher Leo Strauss, not the composer Richard Strauss.

Leo?

Yes, Leo Strauss.

Argh!

And my hand starts shaking...

At the university in the ever-windy Chicago, two Jewish professors worked for many years, who became extraordinarily important to millions of people. One in complete obscurity, the other with full fanfare.

The latter was the economist Milton Friedman, whose primitive neoliberalism was supposed to dismantle the social - or social democratic - contract that capital and labor had entered into as a class compromise at the end of the Second World War. Strongly recommended by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and strongly supported by the IMF and sometimes by whatever was stronger, neoliberalism soon spread like wildfire in the West and its surroundings. It was such a great success that it was more than well-deserved when a proud Milton was able to receive the 'Sveriges Riksbanks Pris in Ekonomisk Vetenskap till Alfred Nobels Minne' from the Swedish king in 1976.

The other Chicago professor was the political philosopher Leo Strauss, whom few people have heard of, and with good reason, because he was almost incomprehensible to ordinary mortals; For example, here is what Peter Thiel tells his students:

“The political philosopher Leo Strauss attempted to resolve the central paradox of the postmodern world [the Athens/Jerusalem schism]. The challenge of this task is reflected in the difficulty of Strauss’s own writings, which are unbearably obscurantist to the uninitiated. A representative and not entirely random passage may serve as an illustration: ‘The unity of knowledge and the communication of knowledge can also be compared to the combination of man and horse, but not to a centaur.’”

Here, however, we will keep it simple, and this is easiest done by drawing a portrait.

Leo grew up in a conservative Jewish home in Prussian Hesse-Nassau, where the family had run a business selling agricultural implements and livestock for several generations. He managed to become a student and was drafted just before the end of World War I, but he stayed long enough for the war experiences to determine that he would rather study political philosophy than sell cows, harnesses, and self-tie.

There must have been other experiences, too, for Leo also became a Zionist, even of the reformed [radical] variety of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who wanted to colonize Palestine with arms in hand and, as mentioned earlier, had his own militant youth movement.

Which fits well with Leo becoming an enthusiastic wanderer in the German Wandervogel movement, where idealistic middle-class youth in the first decades of the century, as a reaction to industrialization and the materialism of modern life, sought to revive a more natural and simple lifestyle by hiking in nature, sleeping under the stars, playing the guitar and singing folk songs around the campfire.

The movement, which we often think of today as proto-fascist, split over time into several directions, some of which became increasingly anti-Semitic. Leo was certainly part of the branch reserved for members who wanted to manifest their Jewish identity through symbols and traditions. Blau-Weiss was named after the colors on the edge of the Jewish prayer shawl.

When Leo got tired of walking and singing Hava Nagila by the campfire, he began to study seriously, really seriously. In Marburg he studied under the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen. In Hamburg he studied under the symbolic cultural philosopher Ernst Cassirer. In Freiburg he studied under the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and the fundamental ontologist Martin Heidegger, and also listened to the hermeneutic Hans-Georg Gadamer.
It's pretty crazy, it's practically all the luminaries of continental philosophy. But then Leo was also set to receive a Rockefeller scholarship so that he could study medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy in Paris, and another so that he could study the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes in Cambridge.

At that time, Hitler had come to power in Germany, so Leo chose to emigrate to the United States instead of returning home. Which was wise; his mother, father and family did not survive the Nazi genocide.

It is a story that Strauss unfortunately shares with many of the Jewish intellectuals who managed to emigrate in time, so where does his enormous influence come from?

Well, it comes via the group of neoconservative students and followers that he gathered around him in Chicago.

No, Leo Strauss was not the father of neoconservatism. As previously mentioned, it was founded by Irving Kristol and intellectual Jewish Trotskyists from New York who decided to change their color from red to blue after the war. On the other hand, it would not be wrong to say that Strauss subsequently became the Godfather of the neoconservatives, the sage who, like another Yoda, quietly gathered his best neoconservative Jedi warriors around his lectern.

Let us just mention his perhaps most important Jedi, Paul Wolfowitz, also known as the Prince of Darkness, who from Strauss's seminar room became first ambassador to Indonesia, then Dick Cheney's deputy defense secretary and the architect of the neoconservative strategy that led to the invasion of Iraq, from which neither the Middle East nor the United States has since recovered, and which cost upwards of a million lives, then president of the World Bank, and finally a deep thinker who thought thoughts in various neoconservative American think tanks.

Or let us mention Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan's Project for the New American Century, which was to secure the world domination of the United States (including Israel), determined American foreign policy for three decades and laid waste to large parts of the Levant from Libya to Syria. The project can rightly be called Straussian. Bill was the son of Irving Kristol, who is considered the founder of neoconservatism and subsequently became a fervent advocate of Strauss’s ideas, and Bill, like his father, became a dedicated Straussian himself. Robert Kagan was the son of Donald Kagan, a historian and classical scholar who was part of the inner Straussian circle, and Robert, like his father, also became a dedicated Straussian.

Robert also married Victoria Nuland, who, as US Deputy Secretary of State and responsible for Ukraine, put into practice the ideas that her husband conceived in his theoretical books. And do we really need to say more?

No, horror and horror. So that’s why the mention of Leo Strauss in the last chapter made your hand shake?

No, not really, it was something else.

Leo Strauss was a conservative philosopher who, like his great conservative philosopher predecessor, the Greek aristocrat Plato, believed that there is a natural and God-given order in the world. Yes, in fact, exactly the order that Plato describes as a social pyramid in the work The Republic.

At the top of the social pyramid is a small exclusive elite of philosophers and rulers who possess wisdom and reason, and they must of course decide. Plato calls them the gold. Curtis Yarvin calls them elves.

At the bottom of the social pyramid is a huge class of workers, craftsmen, farmers and merchants. Their minds are not for the intellectual, but are filled with desires and material needs. Their role in the world order is to produce and provide for the material and economic foundation of society. Plato calls them the iron – in some texts the bronze. Curtis Yarvin calls them hobbits.

Between the two levels is a middle level of guardians or warriors, who we can appropriately supplement with priests, courtiers, ministers and officials, whose role is to protect the state and social order. Plato calls them the silver.

Curtis Yarvin does not call them anything, but one must assume that the guardian class consists either of hobbits who have shown themselves to be particularly meritorious and have been upgraded to middle-management hobbits, or of elves who have gone wrong and therefore have had to be tamely demoted - or alternatively become dark elves and condemned to lurk on street corners, giving foul speech and planning rebellions.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the Age of Chivalry and the Feudal Age, everyone agreed that this pyramid was God-given and eternal, but that changed when overseas trade and piracy created a new class that, with wind in its hair and foam in its beard, celebrated the freedom, creativity and ability to ascend the individual, and in rapid succession, first the Italian Renaissance, then Dutch humanism and finally the French and English Enlightenment, put the social pyramid under such tremendous pressure that it finally began to crack, and the hobbits began to believe that their time had finally come.

What were the elves to do now? Well, if they were to maintain their privileges without envious hobbits coming after them with scythes and planks, and - oh, horror and horror! - that actually happened in some places, then of course they had to keep hidden that they still believed wholeheartedly in the pyramid. If they wanted to avoid the hobbits' haymakers and torches, they had to turn good looks into bad luck, use formal speech, not reveal their true intentions, but speak according to the crowd's mouth.

In short, maintain a huge double-entry bookkeeping system, but not a double-entry bookkeeping system like the clever accounting system that the bankers in Florence had invented in the 13th century; on the contrary, a covert double-entry bookkeeping system, where the open book told a completely different story than the closed one.

That all minorities who feel potentially threatened by their surroundings must maintain such covert double-entry bookkeeping for their own safety is of course both trivial and common knowledge.

There are plenty of examples, but we only need to think of the homosexuals who in my youth had to hide their true identity in the closet and only open up to like-minded people. Or the Jewish minority, who had learned from centuries of diaspora experience that outside the ghetto walls, whether physical or merely mental, one had to be less open with one's thoughts than inside.

The homosexual experience was not Leo's, but the Jewish one certainly was. Not only acquired from his own and his family's everyday life, but also passed down by wise family members and rabbis over hundreds of years. And this explains why precisely the covert double-entry bookkeeping was able to create for Leo Strauss an exemplary academic career as a professor of political philosophy in Chicago.

According to Strauss, many thinkers throughout history – especially in times of political oppression or ideological control – have had to hide their most radical or true thoughts between the lines in order to avoid persecution. An intelligent reader who realized this could thus gain access to the real message that the author dreamed of conveying, but which at the same time had to be hidden from the general public.

Strauss's specialty therefore became reading the great central political works in world history – Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Politics, Machiavelli's The Prince, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed – and demonstrating that the texts had two layers.

On the surface, an exoteric layer that anyone could immediately understand, intended for the hobbits. But underneath, between the lines, for the initiate who understands the code, a hidden esoteric layer that contains the great and eternal truths.

Peter Thiel, who agreed with Strauss in many ways and saw the pyramid as the ideal hierarchical organizational form for tech startups and therefore also for society, explains it this way:

“Uncontrolled philosophizing poses great risks for philosophers, because even in the most liberal or open-minded regimes, certain deeply problematic truths exist. Strauss is convinced that he is not the first to have discovered or rediscovered these truths. The great writers and philosophers of the past also knew about these questions, but to protect themselves from persecution, these thinkers used an ‘esoteric’ style of writing, in which their ‘literature is addressed, not to all readers, but only to trustworthy and intelligent readers.’”

Here, one imagines Strauss at the lectern surrounded by his most intelligent and trustworthy students, while together they pick apart the old texts to look for the hidden messages, maybe even smoke a pipe, and it could hardly be more cozy.

But only until you remember that Leo Strauss became the Godfather of the neoconservatives. Then his teaching suddenly becomes not just a nerdy literature course in reading between the lines, but also a study in the art of keeping one's intentions hidden from the general public, a lesson in speaking with two tongues, and a course in justifying lies and deception when great truths and higher goals are at stake.

The esoteric is thereby inevitably transformed into a secret cabal, where one now sees in one's mind a small cluster of men with their collars turned up, who, bent towards each other, sit and whisper. And even though they may still be smoking pipes, the sight is both unpleasant and frightening, and not just because one feels left out.

And that's why you freaked out, Niels, when Leo Strauss was mentioned by Peter Thiel?

No, I freaked out because Leo Strauss was mentioned by Peter Thiel. When the name was mentioned, it suddenly occurred to me that we ourselves might very well be victims of a Straussian deception. That through the many chapters we might have merely been poking around in the colorful exoteric surface layer that entertains the good guys and other plebeians, while what is really going on in the esoteric underground has remained hidden from us.

We here in our group know better than so many other hobbits that we live in a world of deception and double-dealing, of smoke and mirrors, of unprecedented propaganda and misinformation, but we are still hobbits, so how can we believe that we ourselves can avoid becoming victims of the deception?

Just as we have torn a veil from the statue, there is another veil; just as we have opened a door, there is a room with new doors; and when in the series we have made Peter Thiel the great spider and the Wizard of Oz, how can we believe that there are not greater wizards than Thiel hiding behind the curtain?

Yes, actually the name Strauss made me remember a YouTube video where an insider was asked if Peter Thiel was the big boss, and smilingly replied, no, it was someone whose name the questioner didn't even know.

All of this may sound terribly depressing, dark and gloomy, okay, but a warning is in order. There is far too much that we don't know, and there are some who don't think we should know either.

As the attentive reader will have noticed, the study has long since begun to wear on the undersigned. There have been clear signs of wear and tear, such as incorrect numbering of the chapters and incorrectly placed pictures, also traces of dragging in the form of pauses and longer and longer chapters, and at the end even a hint of defeatism and wavering in faith.

Is it because the last steps up the stairs to Møns Klint, as most have experienced, are always by far the longest and heaviest? Yes, but not only that.

Is it because the world situation has now become so unmanageable, chaotic and changing so rapidly that it has become impossible for a chronicler to keep up? Yes, but not only that.

Is it because age weighs heavily? Yes, of course, I am the same age as Trump, but not only that. This is primarily because the material itself weighs heavier and heavier.

In the first chapter I talked about Alice's journey down the rabbit hole, but the land is no longer the colorful and festive Wonderland, where the caterpillar smokes a hookah and asks philosophical questions, while the cat smiles without a cat. It all still seems unreal, absurd and comical, but in a bizarre and malignant way that surpasses imagination, so that a satirist has nothing to work with.

There is nothing to laugh about; it is not a land for children and childlike souls, and as several commentators have long expressed, it has become, on the contrary, a gloomy and threatening land, becoming more and more evil and frightening. And the worst thing is, of course, that this is the land of the future that we are rapidly entering.

We started the investigation to try to find out where we are heading, but I can't see any good places.
The journey into the future has of course only just begun, but if I had to make a preliminary report here, I would probably have said something along these lines.

In the short term, the future has become utterly dark and unpredictable. Whether Donald Trump's newly started trade wars will collapse the world economy into chaos and drag us Europeans along with it, no one knows today. A safe prediction is of course that gigantic fortunes in the self-created chaos will change hands from those who already have too little to those who already have far too much. As happened the other day, when the insiders had a party, and as has always happened in such critical situations. But the fact that inequality will accelerate further is hardly a bright spot in the darkness.

One cannot help but feel for the poor MAGAs, who will now have to pay a very expensive bill for their dreams. One also dares not think about how it could be possible that Trump's dramatic trade war against China with giant tariff bombs will not eventually lead to a real war with real bombs, as is usually the case in world history in such situations.

And one dares not even think about the consequences of such a war. Which of the two rival factions in Trump's administration will ultimately run away with power is also completely unpredictable at this point. Right now, it seems that the peace faction has the upper hand, and that the United States is on its way out of the Ukraine war that it itself created, and which, due to the sanctions and the many billions in support for Kiev, has cost Europe, not least, an infinite amount of money economically and soon also socially.

If the Ukraine war is really coming to an end, and the risk of a nuclear war between Russia and the United States has thus diminished, that is of course good news. Even though our European leadership class calls Trump a traitor and, blue in the face with hysteria, screams that war is better than peace, and the Danish prime minister is on the front page of newspapers all over the world for the same reason.

But will the Ukraine war end? I am personally convinced that Trump would rather be a brutal businessman than a warmonger, but is it really likely that the neoconservative faction in the US administration will simply give up power after the neoconservatives have ruled American foreign policy for half a century, and are backed by far greater economic muscle than even Elon Musk can mobilize?

But perhaps a deal has been struck so that the peace faction will have peace in Ukraine if the neoconservatives and Israel-firsters in return get the war against Iran that they have always wanted. Trump has just threatened to bomb Iran to pieces if the Iranians do not follow the American dictate.

Of course, one does not dare to think about the consequences of a war with Iran either. There is a lot in general that one does not dare to think about. I have not mentioned the heartbreaking genocide in Gaza, which continues and continues without anyone other than the Houthis in Yemen being able to do anything, and is therefore of course also being bombed by the Americans.

Even our own government, in word and deed, more or less openly supports the genocidalists, so one can only despair and ask, what has really happened to our small country? And one can only repeat the question when Denmark has now become among the very frontrunners in demanding that the war continue in Ukraine until Russia is defeated, and has promised to send Danish troops when the French, the English and the Baltics move in shortly, as they are now planning in meeting after meeting.

It is as if the madness is spreading, and the European leadership class, like lemmings with electroshock, is speeding over the abyss. And the most terrible thing is that this is not an exaggeration at all.

In the medium term, the future is much more predictable, although no less dark. Even if the neoconservatives were to win in the US, and Elon Musk and his smart boys were to be put on the back burner, which I consider more than likely, the tech billionaires' program, which we have been entertained with in this series, will be implemented both in the US and, with very little delay, in Europe.

Both the breakup into zones of oligarchic corporate control and technofeudalism, and the rollout of Silicon Valley's brave new technology world with the pervasive control and technofascism that almost inevitably follow, leading to the democratic decay that Weisman called soft fascism, and which is already well underway. In ancient times, the hobbits would have eventually rebelled, but whether that is possible anymore with Palantir on guard is questionable.

A special chapter will of course be the rollout of artificial intelligence and robotics. One would have to be as naive and gullible as Elon Musk if one really believes that the intelligent machines that can soon surpass and replace humans in most tasks will be a blessing without limits for humanity. It will be a shock without equal, economically, socially, morally and psychologically. But someone will of course find a niche to survive in, yes, maybe even thrive in.

If we finally raise our eyes and look even further out, we will most likely be faced with the greatest disaster in the form of climate change, which, man-made or not, will turn life on Earth upside down, and where even Peter Thiel in his prepper bunker in New Zealand will not be able to find a niche to hide in.

If climate science is right, we are actually left with only two options, which, although they both seem crazy, cannot be rejected because they are the only ones. One is to stubbornly insist that climate science CANNOT be right. The other is to look for Weisman's Jewish family, so that from the family's Passover meal you can learn when it is time to leave, and then buy a ticket for Elon Musk's space trip to Mars.

Now, however, I am NOT going to make a preliminary report. And LUCKILY. Because if you are losing hope and faith in the future, you must NOT show it, you owe it to future generations. It is a good, old rule that people who, like Moses' donkey, are not going to enter the promised land of the future anyway, do not speak pessimistically about the future. If they do not have anything good and hopeful to say, they must keep their mouths shut.

So we do that. And stop.

Stop?

Yes, I have had enough.

But, hello, you can't just stop. You have to come up with some kind of concluding summary, you owe it to the faithful who have dragged themselves along this far.

Do I?

Yes, absolutely.

Okay, of course you don't want to let down the good friends who have read along, but I don't have to either. I have been lucky enough - helped by a knowledgeable commentary - to find someone who draws the lines much better than I would be able to do myself. And in Danish, too. So I highly recommend reading his fine summary here, as a conclusion to our investigation:

https://www.oplysning.org/skakmat-tekno ... del-1.html

Unfortunately, Erik Wikström's account is not exactly encouraging reading either. He himself writes that he hopes that his account is a conspiracy theory and not a theory about a conspiracy.

A conspiracy theory finds the cat by connecting the dots, and perhaps with other choices one could have drawn a rabbit. In this case, however, the cat is so convincingly similar to the same facts that we have listed in the series that the feline wild animal is worryingly similar to reality.

But it is Easter, and the message of Easter is that one should not give up hope, so chin up! as they once said. Thank you for your support and for the many nice and kind comments!

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ADVICE

The study has raised some questions of a psychological-professional nature along the way, which I personally have a great interest in, and which I therefore want to see if I can unfold for others. There will therefore possibly be a follow-up to our study with a continued numbering.

We are COMPLETELY done with politics, good riddance, but that does not prevent us from trying to make a PROFESSIONAL long jump with our POLITICAL marathon as a run-up. But now we'll see, for now Oslo is waiting with an espresso martini on the way.