The Hermetic Anti-State & The Invisible Church in The Wilderness
Anabaptist Futurism and Establishing a Global Christian Network-State
“God: an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” - Hermes
The Anti-State is The Leviathan’s transcendence, or the center of The State turned inside out. Through its centralization of power, its center has disappeared completely; it has swallowed everything. It is everywhere and nowhere at once.
Lines between centralization/decentralization blur into The One and The Many. This multiplicity of sub-cultures rotate around an Unknown Center, but that center is within every sub-culture that orbits it. The algorithmic phantoms of the Unknown Center animate the Hermetic State.
The collision of centeralization-decenteralization brings a Neo-Frontier, the 19th century returning from the future, and the Invisible Church of the Wilderness. In this post we will be examining this Hermetic State juxtaposed with the possibility of a global Christian Network-State, or “Anabaptist Futurism”.
The Hermetic Anti-State
The great Chain-Of-Being expressed in classical metaphysics, the vertical hierarchy to heaven, comes crashing down into the horizontal immanence of the Hermetic State. De’ Jouvenal depicts a political cosmology where the center of Power is in Permanent War with everything around it, looking for ways to expand itself. This power has expanded to infinity and swallowed its own distinctions.
The god of philosophy, being an abstraction or a “principle” (substance, prime mover etc.), becomes this unseen occulted force in the Techno-Hermetic State. “The Cloud” (data center) becomes its cybernetic dwelling place in a type of clandestine Hermetic-Platonism. Hermeticism contemplates the macrocosm and the microcosm (as above so below, etc.), but remains fluid and dynamic, adjusting to new conditions. This relationship of macrocosm-microcosm becomes real in the Hermetic State, the State reflects to us what we are and vice versa.
In this way, every person becomes a dissident against their own imagined center-of-power, which re-enforces their belief as righteous. One could say this is a modern Idol or the Beast’s mark on the forehead and right hand.
In classical ontology, all things naturally desire to move toward The Good, which is the center of everything. In the Hermetic Anti-State, “righteous dissidents for The Good” aren’t suppressed, but re-oriented toward unknown goals at the Unknown Center in a planetary alchemical process.
Media Ecology becomes Gangstalking, as personalized algorithms conspire to mold sub-cultures into bricks to a larger planetary pyramid, overseen by The Palantir. Decentralized intelligence agencies, decentralized secret societies, hierarchical subliminal messages, every person on Earth is recruited into The Lodge in a mosaic of overlapping micro-nations.
The concept of “Network State” is an example of this, defined as a “highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.”
The Leviathan is “pouring itself out” in historical stages from monarchy, to republic, and now to network-state. Ideas and tribes first incubate as digital nations in The Cloud before physically materializing on Earth. Mass proliferated 3-D printing technologies bring hyper-production, manufacturing past civilizations (Platonic Recollection). Meta-histories and meta-narratives clash, cyclical history and eschatological history (progressive history) meet again.
The expansion to everything-and-nothing, everywhere-and-nowhere brings the human consciousness to comprehend The Absolute, which is God-World-Man, or everything at once. This process brings us further toward a higher manifestation of The Beast and the New Heaven-Earth of Rev. 22 at the same time, both of which remain ultimately unthinkable.
The Invisible Church of the Wilderness
Now is the exit from Egypt into Exodus, or the neo-Frontier. Just as the center of power has transcended into The Cloud, so has The Church become Invisible. The New Reformation is the removal of the Beast’s old mark on the forehead and right hand, which is essentially a global and decentralized process, bringing the Body of Christ everywhere and nowhere at once; an Invisible Church in the Wilderness.
The Church has always been Invisible (Matt. 7:21-23), and this is further realized. The Hermetic State lays the infrastructure for The Body of Christ, which is the planetary baptism.
Anabaptist Futurism
The traditional notion of the ideal State, is a living organism represented by a monarch at the top. The State itself points to “heaven” with its ordered hierarchy descending from complexity to simplicity of duties to the bottom. This state forms around long-term bio-historical necessities like existential threats, shared language, and a binding religion. Christian History is essentially the liquidation or horizontal inversion of this form, the Hermetic State being its latest incarnation.
In this sense, The Anabaptists are from the future, as they have already transcended neoliberal rentier capitalism through their autonomous nations centered around production. The Amish (the most extreme sect of Anabaptists) are essentially cosmopolitan, as they belong to no static state; a theocratic tribe whose allegiance is to production, a model of a Network State. But the flaw with the Anabaptists, they do not follow The Great Commission (at least not outwardly), and do not deal with civic society at large.
Anabaptist sects (Amish, Mennonite, Hutterite) have the benefit of being the product of long-term existential pressure, from a heavily persecuted minority in Europe to cosmopolitan tribes with autonomous economic power. They are an “extreme” example, being isolationist. We are instead interested in transforming global civic society at large. An “Invisible Church of the Wilderness” would follow a different model.
The Great Commission is the main purpose of a Christian Network-State, but it would take cues from the Anabaptists by also focusing on economic production. The early church of Acts focused on its communal consumption, but not its communal production. From here we take Christ’s feeding of the 5,000 as the foundation for production. Concepts adjacent to “libertarian-communism”, or the economic ideals laid out in Deuteronomy-Leviticus may be relevant.
A global Christian Network-State would be one that produces an entirely different mode of existing.
In the days of the American frontier, missionaries were sent from competing Christian denominations to establish themselves as the dominant branch in the regions. 19th Century Populism was the most advanced thing happening on Earth at the time. The struggle between religious sects to win the people and own the future has lasting influence, as what was planted in the 19th century built the 20th century. Missionaries are required for the Great Commission of the 21st century Wilderness because all meaning structures are either collapsed or bloated on the neo-Frontier.
The old frontier was originally “wild” or Native territory outside of Puritan settlements, the new frontier is spiritual or economic walled gardens that need to be broken down and converted, baptized into the Body of Christ.
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