We are seeing the beginning of an interesting development, which also follows by accident, I think, the script made by Nietzsche for the political and cultural development of a future society.

What is happening is that society is naturally, and organically dividing itself into two types of human. It is almost going to be like “two types of species”, as Nietzsche suggests.

The two types will have two entirely different orientations to reality.

One large part — the lower structure — will view reality as being morally defined and experienced. The smaller part of humanity will view reality as having a fundamental political meaning and reference point.

In a way, I think we are already evolving two different languages (with different symbolic meanings) as we break away from each other irrevocably.

Those who view the world in primary moral terms will increasingly become concerned with perfecting their souls, with monitoring and policing others to make them abide by their morality, and also with ideas of an afterlife or at least peace on this Earth.

By contradistinction, those who view themselves and others in a manner that involves an understanding of power relations will adapt more and more to their role as leaders and masters of this Earth. Their evolving use of language will enable them to speak to others who think in the same way. But the barrier in communication between the two groups in society will become too strong for it to be breached, even with the best of intent.

Think about it. Without the intensification and spread of social media, the masses could not have achieved this severance from their masters or cultural influencers all by themselves. But the cost will be heavy. They are already reverting to traditional religious values and stamping out higher culture. Those who see this happening should allow the process to continue to take place until it has been fully completed.

He wouldn’t like it too much. Because Hegel was trying to use historical events to show a progressive movement toward reason and rationality in the human universe, but Bataille, like Marx, considers that Hegel has built his paradigm precisely upside down. This has particular ramifications in the psychological sense.

For Bataille conformity to reason binds us in identities that make us lose subjective emotional life and autonomy. This is because in the process of gaining mastery over something, we are in fact mastered by it. Putting it differently, self-discipline, which should lead to self-mastery, becomes ingrained, to the point that one cannot act differently. Therefore the only route to freedom is not “upwards” toward greater self-mastery, but downwards, toward the immediacy of experience, known as “immanence”.

I doubt that Hegel would have made much sense of this, not only because of his intellectual Christianity, which is expressed as a philosophical idealism, but because Hegel was also from another century.

Bataille, like other 20th Century philosophers, for instance the Frankfurt School, noticed that life had become more an more mechanized, in a way that allowed less expression for individual personality or free choices. To conform to the social and economic systems that exist would mean to become impersonal. While Hegel saw that submission to existing systems was rational and necessary, even though it involved sacrifice, Bataille saw that the sacrifice made only produced an impersonal “excess” of value for the system. It did not enoble a person to submit, but rather made them part of something that was inherently profane — the economic system of production.

For Bataille, the residual sense of what he called the “sacred” was in not having to submit to the economic system, for example on weekends or holidays. During these times, a psychological ritual of destruction is enacted, which involves a symbolic destruction of some of the accumulated “excess” of the production mills. By contrast, for Hegel one did one’s sacred duty by playing one’s role in the system, and not by destroying (“consuming”) what the system produced in its excess.

Moreover Bataille was a philosophical materialist, although not of the normal sort. He thought that material existence had more to it than something simply mechanical or deterministic. To the contrary, material existence could be volatile and very interesting. (This is where Bataille descends into esoteric doctrines, such as ‘base materialism’.)

Hegel would not have made very much sense of Bataille’s solution to power relations in the 20th Century world.