PART ONE: The Context for the Formation of Modern Women: Modernity and the Rise of Nation-States and Their Thermodynamic Origins

CHAPTER 1: The Material Meaning of History:

• section 1: the material (thermodynamic) meaning of Life as dissipation; the material (thermodynamic) meaning of History as supraorganismic dissipation; section 2: the layered structure of the Universe: a brief history of the Universe, in five progressive stages: radiation-predominance, matter-predominance, the geo-sphere, the bio-sphere, and the noo-sphere; the initial differentiation and progressive complexification of the Universe; the origin of the second law of thermodynamics; "noo-sphere consumption"; restriction of complexification to a fraction of the substratum.

CHAPTER 2: Foucault's Bio-Power:

• section 1: the repressive hypothesis: the fallacy of "liberation ideology"; bio-power as positive power vs. traditional power as negative; its three components: the discipline of the individual, the regulation of population, and dispositifs sexuels; its rise after the classic age; the immediate origin of bio-power and of racism and psychoanalysis; section 2: bio-power and dispositifs sexuels in contemporary America; the deceitfulness of humanism; the characteristics of modern life: normalization and the centering of politics around life rather than around rights.

CHAPTER 3: The Truth of Nation-State:

• Key points: the thermodynamic (i.e. the very remote) origins of liberty and equality; McNeil on the truth of French Revolution; failure of liberty in face of the superior technology of the state; remote origin of bio-power: European Interaction Sphere; nation-state as the new supraorganism with mass-consumption as its metabolism; Weber and the Reason of the State.

CHAPTER 4.A.: The Liberation of Women:

• section 1: feminists' memory of "oppression" as corresponding to the formative period of nation-state; women's movement as corresponding to the mature period of nation-state; the truth of women's "liberation" as the growth of supraorganismic metabolism; section 2: the problem of cultural feminism: the cultural feminist "female culture" as an ideological superstructure of the substructure of the consumerist mode of production and consumption; feminist destruction of the Earth; vulgar feminism as the "Calling" of women to work (the feminist work ethic).

CHAPTER 4.B: The Cessation of Racism in American Society:

• Key point: Racial non-discrimination and equality as (a) the mechanism of power to facilitate capitalism's transition into consumerism and (b) the fulfillment of the essence of nation-state ("citizenship").

• section 1: American democracy as mass tyranny; the two lineages of supraorganismic integration, the British and the French, as leading to democracy and totalitarianism; Bertrand de Jouvenel on the truth of Revolution; the advantage of the British developmental approach to supraorganismic integration over the planned and imposed approach of the revolutionaries; the law of complexity and self-organization in relation to the pluralistic (developmental) democracy; democracy as an accidental product of history: the example of Magna Carta; common law vs. civil code. section 2: other differences between continental totalitarianism and American democracy; the "right" and the "left". section 3: the "prehistory" of the European nation-states and the mode of power of Medieval feudalism; the truth of "Bill of Rights"; American bureaucratic democracy as the most advanced form of power.

PART TWO: The Origin of Women's Oppression

CHATPER 6: The Origin of the Sexual Division of Labor and the First Stage of Supraorganismic Formation

• section 1: the sexual division of labor as the integration of the sexes in Homo sapiens sapiens; meat and male-predominance; the evolution of sociality in primate order; infant encephalization and female solicitation of male provisioning; section 2: sham menstruation and sex-strike as the first human ritual; symbolic counter-revolution by men.

• section 1: the derivation of the elementary structures of kinship from Chris Knight's sex-strike model: the origin of the moiety system with classificatory kinship in "prostitution-pimping"; the cross-cousin marriage. section 2: the male-reversal or "usurpation" of female rituals; the material basis for the shift from matriliny to patriliny, and from matrilineal "prostitution" to patrilineal "exchange of women".

CHAPTER 8: The Origin of Classical Patriarchy in Noosphere Consumption and the Interaction Sphere: the Case of China (the Eastern Ecumene)

• section 1: the breakdown of the cultural feminist concept of patriarchy; the concept of the Interaction Sphere; the co-emergence of state, urbanism, noosphere consumption, and "classical patriarchy". section 2: classical patriarchy in China as structured by the formative phase of noosphere consumption (the second stage of supraorganismic formation) brought into being by the complexification of shamanism; section 3: classical patriarchy in relation to the reversal of the sexual selection process; the changing nature of noosphere consumption in relation to the changing sexual selection process; the contrast in mode of the oppression of women between classical patriarchy and the anomalous Western formative nation-state patriarchy; the variant of pastoral classical patriarchy.

• Key points: the nuclear family monogamy as the necessary condition for the formation of nation-state and the beginning (the formative or production phase) of capitalism.

CHAPTER 10.1: Conclusion to Part Two (1): The Progressive Bildung of Open Dissipative Structure From Cell (Plastide) to Multicellular Organism (Person) to Nation-State (Cormus)

• section 1: the parallels and differences between dissipation of the second level (person) and that of the third level (corm); Chardin: Universe's self-enclosure and -reproduction in life; Haeckel's conception of Corm; section 2: the geospheric components to complexify into the biosphere; section 3: a brief account of evolution of life; the origin of the RNA world and its transition to the DNA world; the Common Ancestor; section 4: the transition from Plastide to Person in the case of the origin of Animalia; its complexification.

CHAPTER 10.2: Conclusion to Part Two (2): Power, The Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Problem of Evil:

• section 1: The truth of power: the implication of Foucault's notion of (modern) power for feminism; the possibility of real resistance against power. section 2: the "whole system" approach to the understanding of power and resistance; the truth of war. section 3: The assertion of justice against evil and the human strive for order: the origin of human values of good and evil in the second law. section 4: Bio-power and the progressive enslavement of animals by humans.

PART THREE: "The Feminist Ethic and the Spirit of Consumerism" (An Archaeology of the American Feminist Intraworldly Messianism)
Within the context of the investigation of the problem of the degeneration in Western modernity of the human pursuit of the spiritual meaning of life as preparation for global consumerism; and the possible (re)turn toward the spiritual meaning of life

CHAPTER 11: A Genealogy of Feminism:
Power's inversion of the traditional pursuit of the spiritual meaning of life into that of the material meaning of life.

• section 1.A.: the extinction of the human race as the goal of history; the origin of feminism in metastatic deformation; the birth of liberal feminism. section 1.B.: the second factor in the origin of liberal feminism during Enlightenment: the differentiation of subjectivity; the examples of Wollstonecraft, Condorcet, and Mill. section 2: the origin of the historical sensibility of the first wave cultural feminism within the general movement of the secularization of Christian soteriological eschatology; the gnostic structure of cultural feminism; section 3: the pacifist campaigns of the cultural feminists of the first wave and their conflict with the liberal feminists: the issue of equality vs. special protection set ever since; the experiential origin of the sense of fragility and endangerment feminists as secular gnostics have of women ("victim feminism"); the identity and difference between "difference" feminism and Aryanism; finale: the ideal "gnostic" structure of Maly Daly's Gyn/ecology.

CHAPTER 12: The Problem of Feminist "Liberation":

• section 1: the fault of feminism and power's use of it; the real liberation of (some) women; true resistance against power in the spirit of the non-doing of Laozi; Zhuangzi's refinement of Laozi's salvational non-doing into total uselessness as the best resistance against power.

CHAPTER 13: The Feminist Work Ethic and the Spirit of Consumerism in the Case of Betty Friedan:

• section 1: "the problem that has no name"; Betty Friedan's completion of Reformation; the reason for the transition from Friedan's anti-consumerist spirit to the spirit of consumerism.

EPILOGUE 1: The Background for the Feminist Ethic: Speculum Americanae:

• section 1: the process of secularization, the American civil religion, and consumerism. section 2: the consumerization of academia and culture; the feminist ethic and consumerization; the problem of the congruence of scientific discourse with society's mode of production and consumption.

EPILOGUE 2: The Status of A Thermodynamic Interpretation of History as a Philosophy of History:

• section 1: History as redemption (Marxist, feminist), history as cyclical decline (traditional, Spengler), or history as linear degeneration (the thermodynamic interpretation); explaining the progression of Hegel's Spirit and the morphology of Spengler; language life-cycle. section 2: The life-cycle of Chinese civilization; the physical death of a supraorganism through system-collapse or environmental destruction; feminism vs. paleoconservatism in the life-cycle of the American supraorganism.

Summary of "A Thermodynamic Interpretation of History" (originally conceived as Part One of The Path Toward Scientific Enlightenment; Part Two being "Scientific Enlightenment proper").

The theory is good despite lame titles.

Chapter One attempts to reveal what will be called the material meaning of history. The material meaning of history is set against the "spiritual" meaning of history, which will be dealt with in Part Two. A comment on the purpose of the entire book is necessary beforehand.

The material meaning of history is determined by the second law of thermodynamics (hence the title "A Thermodynamic Interpretation of History") -- while the spiritual meaning of history is a function of the first law of thermodynamics.

Thus the project is essentially a theory of everything in terms of thermodynamic laws, both the first and second; this is not entirely novel with regard to approach. The interpretation of history in terms of the second law of thermodynamics has been hinted at in recent literatures on evolution, as will be seen in the chapter. That human expression of spirituality may have something to do with the law of Conservation has also been noted occasionally. But no complete history of the noo-sphere (in its material and spiritual aspects) in terms of thermodynamics has ever been attempted, until this one. With respect to spirituality may be noted the example of the famous German evolutionist, Ernst Haeckel who, seeking to transcend the positivism within which he worked to arrive at spirituality, eventually had to seek it, in his Welträtsel (The Riddles of the Universe), in the so-called Substanzgesetzt (the "Substance Law") as the pivot around which everything in the Universe is ultimately ordered, as the ultimate principle underlying the entire phenomenon called the Universe; and by Substanzgesetzt he means the first law of thermodynamics, the law of Conservation (of energy, matter, and momentum). This immature piece of "scientific spirituality" of his, however, teaches two lessons: first that indeed the search for spirituality (and eventually salvation) in this scientific age (the structural perspective) where the older symbolisms (of the pre-modern functional perspective) no longer hold meanings ("soul", etc.) may have to conduct itself in the thermodynamic laws, in the first as behind the second -- because consciousness of the thermodynamic structure of the Universe did form the motivating core of the human pursuit of spirituality in the past; second that the spiritual meaning of the history of the Universe has to be delineated from its material meaning, so that not just the first but the second law as well of thermodynamics are to serve as its pivot. Many an attempt at formulating spirituality in the scientific perspective fails because of non-distinction between the two types of meaning.

Thus it will be shown in Scientific Enlightenment that all enlightenment traditions of the humanity past (the great philosophies and religions) have their origin in the human "memory" of the first law; that is, all that the great philosophers spoke in their great systems and all human religious experiences are expressions of (their memory or intuition of) the first law of thermodynamics, which thus constitutes the real content of human enlightenment.

The human traditions of philosophy and religions are expressions of the human pursuit of salvation. If the constant theme of philosophies and religions -- the Source of existence experienced as God, Being, the Infinite, the Boundless, the Unborn -- is conditioned by the human memory of the first law of thermodynamics, then human salvation -- always in terms of the return to this Source -- is the attempt to negate the second law of thermodynamics with the first law -- the theme of all symbolic expressions that constitute all philosophies and all religions. While the first law promises Eternity (because of necessary conservation), the second law ordains necessary dissolution and meaningless, finite, and temporary existence enslaved to dissipative functions (eating and defecating) and which it has thus been human yearning to negate. This negation is the spiritual meaning of life. Since the first step in such negation always consists in the recognition of the source, and therefore the structure, of existence, it is frequently spoken of as the "Universe becoming conscious of itself through human consciousness": the anthropic principle. But one has to remember that the spiritual meaning of life does not exhaust itself in this Self-Consciousness, but in the salvation that results from this Self-Consciousness.

Hence the second law also plays the role of the "ultimate" in the shaping of the Universe, side by side with the first law. Salvation of course presupposes that from which one is to be saved in the pursuit of salvation. And this is at once identified here to be the necessary condition of the existence of human beings -- or all life in general -- as thermodynamic (in accordance with the second law). In other words, the extrication from the material meaning of life is the essence of enlightenment-salvation. This thermodynamic condition of existence consists in: fundamentally, the temporal and spatial delimitations of existence, i.e. existence in the thermodynamic flux; then, consequent on this, the necessary enslavement to the material meaning of life, to consumption (and reproduction), i.e. existence as thermodynamic dissipation; and finally, the sufferings necessarily engendered by this enslavement.

The Path toward Scientific Enlightenment is conceived as the final answer to human salvation; the great enlightenment-salvational traditions of the past (during the [first] axial time, to use Karl Jasper's terminology) happen in the mid-point of the evolution of consciousness (noo-sphere) and, as such, are no longer valid today, because they essentially consist in the transcendence of the mythic worldview (the matrix of the functional perspective) within which they grow. This world view of the functional perspective has since transited to the positivistic, scientific one of the structural perspective; a new transcendence is now needed of this positivistic matrix which repeats the mythic in essential ways: once again perception is bound to things of the empirical world only; once again the devotion of life is restricted exclusively to them as fulfilling dissipative functions (material meaning of life). Scientific enlightenment, the final form of human salvational pursuit, is the formulation of enlightenment-salvation within the matrix of sciences.

A thermodynamic interpretation of history is therefore the search for the origin of (in theological terms) evil, or of (in Buddhist terms) sufferings, of the condition from which enlightenment-salvation serves to effect the extrication. Of the four noble truths of Buddhism, for example, suffering (dukkha), the origin of suffering (dukkha-samudaya) through craving (tanha); the cessation of suffering (dukkha-nirodha), and the path leading to the cessation of suffering (dukkha-nirodha-gamini-patipada), it corresponds to the discourse on the first two. Part Two (Scientific Enlightenment) to that on the last two. But whereas in the past such discourse was formulated in mythic terms (e.g. karma and the reincarnation of the soul) the current one is articulated in scientific terms. It furthermore is oriented toward discovering the origin of evil today for which Part Two serves as the antidote -- the nature of evil or suffering has changed its nature in the past 2,000 years. The thermodynamic interpretation of history is the prelude to scientific enlightenment.

The mutual opposition between the spiritual and the material meaning of life is a reflection of the fact that the state of affairs created by the second law in the "running-of-its-course" of the universe is quite different than that achieved by the first law: just the opposite to the latter. While the first law is responsible for human enlightenment, the second law is responsible for the bad human habit of planet-wasting, mindless and excess consumption. This is the meaning of evil today: evil has evolved into its conclusion. And this evolution is the material meaning of history, in contrast to its SPIRITUAL meaning.

It will be shown that "power", understood truly, is a function of consumption, and so of the second law.¹ The second law defines the human experience of time or temporality, and power/ consumption is thus a phenomenon of temporal nature. Temporality (along with spatiality, its concomitant) has always been identified as the origin of evil and suffering: that much has remained constant throughout history. Amidst the passing away of time, certain enlightened souls of the human species have, from time to time, searched for and recognized the a-temporal , the eternal lying behind the coming-into-being-and-passing-away of the temporal things; that is, they have found that negation of time which promises salvation from the destructive power of time which renders everything meaningless. That negation is of course the first law of thermodynamics -- that despite entropy increase, really nothing changes at all: the ultimate fact of Conservation. These enlightened souls spoke of their experience of this salvational conservation in systems of symbols called philosophy or in myths called (testamental) religions. The nature of negation thus will also remain the same. What will change, as said, is the content of the formulation, from myth to science.

In order to continue to outline the general theme of the present work a summary of the ideas in Chapter One on the material meaning of life and of history has to be given first. The material meaning of life is more primordial to the spiritual meaning of life, contrary to the prevalent ideas (such as those making up the anthropic principle). And this meaning, as said, has to do with the second law of thermodynamics. The relationship between the second law and the material meaning of life and history works like this. In the nineteenth century, the discovery of the second law of thermodynamics -- that in a closed system, such as our Universe, entropy, or the amount of disorder, must increase as time passes, so that any order, or the order of our Universe, must eventually degenerate into a disorder of particles moving at random -- seemed to many a perplexing contradiction to the discovery of biological evolution, where order increased and matters complexified in the course of time. In the early part of the twentieth century, the paradox was first resolved by Schrödinger, who emphasized that Earth was a open system, a mere local region of the total, closed Universe, and that in a system unclosed (in a local region of the closed system) order might increase with time as long as there was an influx of energy into the system. After much research, by the end of the twentieth century scientists have realized not only that the second law does not contradict the fact of evolution, but that it actually helps to explain it. The origin of life is actually a function of the second law in that life is a form of open dissipative structure. The fact is that the order of our Universe is disintegrating, and so the sun (an order) is pouring its energy into the earth (the disintegration of this order). This is the dissipation of energy or order. When the influx of energy to be dissipated is too great and the normal way by which Nature achieves the dissipation of energy (i.e. through the random movement of particles) is no longer sufficient, an alternative way of dissipation is often accessed, a structured way, where a dissipative structure (an order!) forms that will dissipate order or energy more efficiently than random dissipation. Hurricane is an example of dissipative structure that forms when the temperature gradient between the hotter and colder regions above ocean has become too great for random dissipation to effectively even out the difference. LIFE is another such example that formed in the early part of the history of the Earth when the energy coming in from the Sun was large enough to encourage the formation of ordered, structured pathways of energy-dissipation. Life, once set going in this way, quickly went its own way and generated the multivarious forms witnessed in evolution as it (or the biosphere) closed itself up and formed its own world away from the inorganic and organic world (the geosphere) below and its forms or variants (species) grew by feeding and interacting among themselves -- while the system on the whole is being supported by the solar energy coming in.

But this thermodynamic explanation of the origin of Life tells us that life evolves as the vehicle of Nature for dissipating order, and so that the meaning of Life in general is mindless consumption (of order: foodstuffs) and defecation (into disorder: waste), which ultimately means the destruction of the environment. (In fact, since it is supposed to be a thermodynamic dissipative structure, the goal of any life is ultimately defecation, and it is only to defecate that life consumes at all.) That an organism does its job so well and destroys its environment, killing itself in the process, has already happened before -- not just a peculiarity of the human species: the most famous being the cyanobacteria that destroyed the CO₂ atmosphere of the Earth with their oxygenic waste some 1.5 billion years ago, causing the whole-sale extinction of anaerobic life-forms predominant in the first half of the Earth's history, but incidentally creating the oxygen-rich atmosphere that made us -- the multicellular eukaryotic organisms -- possible today.

This is the material meaning of life. Life, or organisms, are forms of open dissipative structures, and the meaning of life is defecation and, through it, the possible destruction of its environment.

The material meaning of history continues the story of the material meaning of life. The effect of the second law (the pressure for entropy-increase) is now traced from the bio-sphere to the noo-sphere. The resulting thermodynamic interpretation of history treats the history (of human society) as the progressive growth of supraorganism -- i.e. a metabolic, or open dissipative structure formed of multiple multi-cellular organisms (in this case, Homo sapiens sapiens) just as each multi-cellular organism, as an open dissipative structure, is formed of single cell organisms, each also an open dissipative structure -- and the growth of this supraorganism consists precisely in the progressive enlargement of its metabolic capacity, i.e. its dissipative or defecative capacity. The meaning of history (or, in Hegelian terms, the Reason [Vernunft] of History) is thus the progressive increase of the environmentally destructive defecative capacity of human societies. Hence we see that in the progression of human history from tribes through tribal confederacies and kingdoms to today's nation states, the consumption and defecation rate of the human collective has been progressively increasing, making the human species the most lethal to the natural environment. The thermodynamic interpretation of history then traces this development: at the tribal stage the first extra-body metabolism took shape, as in the beginning of the consumption of art objects, rituals, and the construction of hut dwellings, etc. (Note that at this stage the material and spiritual meaning of life have not yet disengaged from each other.) During the confederacy and early state period the consumption/ defecation rate of the human supraorganism increased via the luxury life-style of the aristocracies, still only a minority of the social collective. Finally, in the modern age of matured, nation-states, the consumption rate of the supraorganism reaches its maximum height via the ideology and practices of capitalism and consumerism, i.e. by recruiting the entire human masses into the luxury life-style formerly reserved for aristocracies only. The mechanism of this recruiting is the ideology of "equality", "human rights", "sanctity of human life", "freedom", or other such slogans for the revolt of the masses as these -- but most importantly, feminism (below). Such would be the basic outline of the thermodynamic interpretation of history, which ends its analyses in the anticipation of extinction-causing environmental destruction that modern consumerism aims at.

"The Layered Structure of the Universe" exposes the basic outline of the evolution of the Universe: (a) radiation-dominance period, or the period immediately after the Big Bang, when matter (atomic particles) did not yet exist but only in the form of energy due to high temperature; (b) matter-predominance period, when the temperature of the Universe were low enough to allow for stable existence of atoms (hydrogen and helium); (c) the geo-sphere period, during which the first generation of stars was formed, heavier elements (such as the life-essential carbon) synthesized therein, galaxies, and eventually our Earth were born; (d) the bio-sphere period, when Life emerges on Earth (or elsewhere in the Universe) under thermodynamic pressure; and (e) the noo-sphere period, when consciousness, supraorganism, and extra-body dissipation appear in local regions of the biosphere. This outline of Time or Universe provides the background against which the significance of human history in the Universe becomes visible.

In "The Layered Structure of the Universe" the reason is also given of why the second law at all, why disorder must increase with time (in a closed system). The surface answer given is in simple mathematics, or rather statistics. Order is statistically unlikely because it requires all particles to work in concert -- and what's the chance of, say, 100,000 particles moving in the same direction in a closed chamber to produce order? It is simply more likely that each particle moves in a particular direction of its own, independent of others, so that a disorderly state of 100,000 randomly moving particles results. Similarly, it is much, much more likely, in a closed environment, for atoms to disperse randomly rather than assemble into something as complex as a human being. But the fact that entropy-increase is a statistical consequence means also that, given enough time, it will eventually be violated (even in a closed system, that is). Given enough time, one will observe particles in a closed chamber coming together to form a complex organization, instead of dispersing randomly as usual, simply as a matter of chance. But the time required to finally have the chance to observe such rare (very rare!) event would be longer than the life time of our Universe -- so don't count on it. This is related to human pursuit of salvation in eternity, which is conditioned by Conservation of the first law, not by chances of the second law.

But the deeper answer is that the formation of unity above the microscopic level is never perfect: if a spring in vibrating motion in vacuum (e.g. in space) were a perfect, solidly tight unity, for instance, it could vibrate for ever. But since it is only an aggregate of molecules which do not move in complete concert with the macroscopic whole, they will eventually dissipate away (convey away) the kinetic energy they carry so that the spring will eventually stop vibrating: hence entropy-increase.

We can now come back to the problem of the evolution of evil. That particular strand of the thermodynamic condition of existence from which we should be saved in salvational pursuit, the necessary enslavement to the material meaning of life, has shifted however in meaning throughout history. As we have spoken of power, here we shall speak of modernity. In the tribal time this enslavement, as expressed frequently in myths, was articulated in terms of the frustration with the precariousness to obtain the necessary amount of consumption. Since the modern time this enslavement has evolved into a problem of gluttony, of over-consumption, not just intra-body (food stuff) which endangers the body (as in obesity), but extra-body as well (consumer products) which endangers the environment through pollution. (The budding of this reversal, of course, can be already seen in the primitive time.) This is the phenomenon, noted, of noo-spheric consumption: the substitute food. But recently the nature of the substitute food (noo-spheric consumption) is itself shifting more and more from concrete consumer products to "information" or pure "noospheric food", the mindless junk movies and music, etc., which not so much threaten the environment as destroy (dissipate) the mind. The change from insufficient consumption to over-consumption is in fact the essential meaning or function of "modernity". The origin of this shift is the main thread of discussion in the thermodynamic interpretation of history, the topic from chapter 1 to 5. All social phenomena of modernity have their meaning, function, in contributing to this shift: bio-power, nation-state, democracy-totalitarianism, racism and the disintegration of racism, and, most ironically, feminism. These are called "ideologies" in this sense, in opposition to "true knowledge" such as the content of enlightenment-salvation. Feminism receives special attention here because, firstly, its revelation as actually the mechanism, and the most powerful at that, for the enslavement to the material condition of existence is the least discussed due to the tremendous deceitfulness with which consumerism is able to clothe anything within its boundaries; and, secondly, because, as our analysis will show, human gender relation contains the key to understanding the problem of consumption -- and, unfortunately, feminism has been the only serious "gender studies" available. As a study of gender relation is central in the thermodynamic understanding of human life as dissipation of order and energy into waste matter, we have to deconstruct feminist discourse, not just to understand how power produces ideologies of "liberation" to reinforce itself, but also to delineate an authentic discourse on the structure and history of gender. Let us outline briefly here then our analysis of feminism and human gender relation within the framework of a thermodynamic interpretation of history.

It will be seen that the manner in which this thermodynamic interpretation analyzes society looks most like that of typical Marxism, in that it also sees culture with its discourses and beliefs as doing no more than serving the interests of the current modes and relations of production and consumption (i.e. the metabolism of the supraorganism). Only, the strange thing here is that, whereas Marxists and the Leftists usually associate male-domination with capitalism and feminist resistance against male-domination with socialist resistance against capitalist interests, this work associates feminism (and surprisingly, perhaps, "the Marxist revolutionaries") with capitalist interests themselves. According to the perspective of a thermodynamic interpretation of history, in fact, the dominant Marxist and Leftist trends have to be perversions of themselves, and any consistent Marxist should realize that the Marxist revolutionary ideology is itself a superstructure of the capitalist substructure and so has as its goal the reinforcement of capitalism. This issue is examined in Chapter 10, "Power, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the Problem of Evil". As said, only a marginalized belief system that has no effect on society and people can escape the fate of being merely a superstructure reflecting and reinforcing the substructural economics (the metabolism of the supraorganism). A mass-revolt such as envisioned by the Marxists and the feminists can only bring about oppression by oppressors with a new face, rather than any paradise of an universalist pretense within the framework of some secularized Christian historicity. In other words, any revolution that has succeeded cannot possibly be genuine, and a genuine revolution must fail -- by the very laws of thermodynamics!

A thermodynamic interpretation of history is therefore a philosophy of history in the pessimistic style, seeing history as linear degeneration without the possibility of redemption as dictated by the very structure of the universe. Whatever is identified as the ultimate axis of what is bad about existence -- as history progresses this will get worst. If, for example, the oppression of women is identified (such as by the feminists) as the ultimate axis of evil, and yet women's situation can actually get better, then the oppression of women is wrongly identified as the ultimate axis of evil: another of our measures of truthfulness.

With the general theme of our thermodynamic interpretation of history delineated, we can now proceed with the summary of individual chapters in more detail than the previous indication of their relationship to the theme of feminism could have allowed.

Chapter 2 is an exposition of Michel Foucault's concept of bio-power. Foucault first puts forward this concept in his Histoire de la sexualité, (vol. 1) where he uses this concept to trace the origin of racism and psychoanalysis, the two very important movements in the Western world in the first half of the twentieth century. However, we are interested in the general relevance of the concept of bio-power to a thermodynamic interpretation of history. Overall Foucault claims that the institutions that permeate modern life (prisons, medical and psychiatric institutions, schools, factories, state interventions and administrations of family life, etc.) have their origin since the end of the Classic Age when the European states, under pressure from mutual competition, began to intensely administer and regulate their populations as "national resources" in order to maximize the latter's contribution to the power of the state, thereby increasing the state's competitive edge. (The European Interaction Sphere.) This is the modern form of power: the state's positive intervention in its citizens' life to further their health, productivity (and in case of women, reproduction), and contribution to society in general. The (aforementioned) institutions of bio-power normalize individuals and maximize the overall regularity and productivity of the population, and are derived from the secularization of "pastoral power": "intraworldly salvation" much like Max Weber's "intraworldly asceticism" (innerweltliche Askese). This new, modern form of power also has increasingly the ability to fool us into thinking that our submission to its control constitutes our "liberation". This is relevant to the thermodynamic interpretation of history since power here is identified as the pressure from the second law upon the (supra-)organism (open dissipative structure) to always increase its metabolic capacity and build its internal structure more tightly, which is what bio-power attempts to do with respect to society.

This is discussed as the "remote" origin of bio-power in Chapter 3. In Chapter 2 bio-power is discussed in its "immediate" origin, as Foucault originally conceived it in Histoire de la sexualité. This immediate origin is the rise of the middle-class in the nineteenth century, which invented the chain of institutions of bio-power to discipline itself, to increase its own productivity so as to guarantee its newly acquired hegemony in the Western society. In this way racism came into being, with a pseudo-scientific base, which distinguished Western racism from the ethnic prejudices of other cultures. Not for long, however, before the institutions of bio-power trickled down to the lower classes and became nationalized. The middle-class reaction to this "trickling down" was psychoanalysis, a strange secular religion (secular salvation; particularly strange because it is the "second" mode, in contrast to the institutions of bio-power which are the "first" mode).

It is in Part Three that the peculiarly modern phenomenon of "intraworldly salvation" in its perfect form, cultural feminism, will be examined. For now it is merely to be mentioned that this thermodynamic interpretation of history eventually attempts to unify the insights of Max Weber ("intraworldly asceticism" and rationalism), Michel Foucault ("intraworldly salvation" where the salvation of the soul for the next world becomes the health of the body and the psyche in this world), and Eric Voegelin ("intraworldly Messianism", where the Christian world-historical salvation becomes, with the Aryanists, the Marxists, and the cultural feminists, the perfection of this earth) when it comes to understanding how, in the course of history, power is able to bend the human salvational traditions (exactly the negation of the material meaning of life determined by the second law of thermodynamics) into secular forms that reinforce this material meaning of life.

Footnote:

1. Power is defined here as the ability to influence others to do what they otherwise would not do. Foucault's revolutionary studies on power (his later works), which this work wishes to continue, did not change this definition of power, but only demonstrated that, when traced to its source, power in modern societies is not embodied in particular persons of authority as it was in traditional societies, but spread throughout the society, and thus becomes an impersonal and omnipresent "situation", and so more effective in influencing our actions. The technology of power has "advanced", in other words.