This short philosophical exposition uncovers the key principles inherent in the mythic schema developed in “Afrikanerdom Technofascism.” I track the development of the mythic schema of Afrikanerdom Fascism in three documents produced throughout a century of the movement’s existence: 1. “Het Idealisme van Berkeley” (1905), the doctoral dissertation of D.F. Malan; who was the founding member of the Afrikaner Broederbond, an architect of Apartheid ideology and first Prime Minister of the Apartheid Regime; 2. the “1937 Technocracy Incorporated Manifesto,” which pulled from Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile’s conceptions of futurism and technocracy; and 3. Peter Thiel’s “The Education of a Libertarian” (2009), which serves as a manifesto for the technocratic vision of reconstructing the fundamental framework of political reality. In short, I am tracing the genealogical construction of a myth that became a pivotal motivating force in the production of 20th-century Apartheid state-building and 21st-century Silicon Valley-operated technofascism. This myth includes the ideas of Man and a society or bond of Brothers as the core organizing forces of political life and world-building action. This essay exposes how these myths have been imperative preconditions to the South African iteration of fascism.
“This is a Broer’s World”: Introducing the Problem
Readers are not typically conditioned to immediately perceive the gendered dimension of political or mythical Brotherhood, even when this idea is a motivating force in patriarchal schemas such as fascism. Philosophers like Hannah Arendt and Sylvia Wynter have made incredible strides in exposing the conceptual foundations and historical operations of political brotherhood and myth of Man respectively. However, the signifier Man in both Arendt and Wynter’s systems stands in for the universal category of Human. “Brotherhood” in Arendt’s critique collapses to the affinity and ethics of social association across the human spectrum, whereas Man in Wynter’s system is the ultimate reduction of colonial modernity’s dominant Humanisms. Instead, we should situate the myth and representation of brotherhood and Man to gendered and racialized men who use these configurations to extend and act upon their political interests. I situate Brotherhood and the mythic operations of Fascistic Man to white, South African-born/raised men, namely Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and Roelof Botha. These men, through their various ventures, have become a powerful conglomeration in their Silicon Valley-based but globally-facing technofascist project.
The practice of fascist brotherhood and the conception of Man, mostly propagated by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, are South African in origin. Hence, Peter Thiel’s outline of a corporatist, techno-driven, post-democratic society in “The Education of the Libertarian” should, in part, be traced to D.F. Malan’s philosophical works. Malan was a founding father of the Broederbond organization, a secret society that built associations with Hitler’s NAZI party and was responsible for the ideological and discursive construction of the Apartheid system. When translated to English, the Afrikaans term Broederbond means the association or bond of Brothers. The historian J.H.P. Serfontein states that the initial emblem of the Broederbond consisted of “a triangle as a sign of strength, enveloped by a circle as a sign of unity… this circle is embroidered with a cord as a sign of close bonds of brotherhood.” The cord in the Broederbond’s emblem resembled Mussolini’s symbolic construction of his fascist party. Mussolini founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimetnto in 1919, whereas the Broederbond was founded a year prior in 1918 under the moniker “Yong Afrikaners” and formalized in 1920 as a secret organization. Much like the Broederbond, Mussolini conceived of the ‘fasci’ as a bond of nationalist, young male combatants whose bond was etched in imperial history and blood. While the symbol of the fasci or brotherhood bond may have gained prominence in early twentieth-century fascist movements in Europe and settler colonies, it is an antiquated Latin construction.
The seventeenth and eighteenth century Italian philosopher of myth and language, Giambattista Vico, unraveled that the Latin symbol “Fasces” signified “the first heroic republics” founded by a “noble fealty of heroes who, although themselves sovereign, became subjects of the great sovereignty of regnant orders of the heroic age.” The nineteenth-century etymologist, F.E.J. Valpy, exposes that the term “Fasci” means “a bundle of wood, things” and denotes “a fastening together.” Mussolini saw his own reconstruction and reappropriation of the fasci mythic symbol as an elaboration of a new sort of post-war social contract etched in blood and the myth of heroism, “It binds the Fascisti legions; a sacred and intangible bond keeps close the faithful of the Littotio. It is a sacred bond of our dead. They are hundreds. Youths. Mature men.”
The Philosophical Myth of Fascistic Man in South Africa—Three Constructions
In Het Idealisme van Berkeley, D.F. Malan, argued that Berkeley’s idealism contained the most comprehensive theory of reality. In the final chapter of his thesis, De Metaphysische Onderstellingen van Berkely’s Idealisme, Malan draws from George Berkeley’s Commonplace Book and his “Principles of Human Understanding” to produce his own idealist theory of reality and power.
Malan appropriates mythic concepts born of nineteenth-century idealism to fashion his own idea of how reality ought to be constructed. For Malan, political reality should be constructed with three principles in mind: the immovable and first causal principle of the sovereign’s dictations; the imperishable principle of an active system which processes the sovereign’s dictations; and contingent principle which produces, manipulates, and reconvenes material objects (including the nation-state as such) in accord to how the active system processes and impresses the dictates of the sovereign. At the end of his dissertation, Malan completes his myth by concluding that “the real is the universal and the universal is, insofar as it realizes itself in the microcosm, also the individual.” The last piece of Malan’s myth of reality lies in its ethics: the individual qua Man must model and perform the order of this triad metaphysics so that he becomes the “microcosmic” expression of what is “universally” true. Man is then the fourth and last principle of this metaphysical order. He is at once the ethic and the reifying principle which must act out the order through the performance of his personhood and materialize the “universal” order onto his physical plane, which for Malan and all other adherents of Afrikanerdom Fascism is “the promised land.” In short, Malan’s theory of idealism sets an important foundation for the Broer’s will.
The Technocracy Incorporated group shared Malan’s vision for a mechanistic or systemic process to facilitate the transmutation of information from a supreme body (the technocratic state or “technate”) to smaller bodies (its subjects). Unlike Malan, the myth-makers of Technocracy Incorporated replaced idealistic terms with technical terms such as “Technate” and “scientific operations.” The mythic schema of Technocracy Incorporated was introduced to South Africa in the 1950s by Joshua N. Haldeman, the paternal grandfather of Elon Musk. A 1933 Technocrats Magazine entry defines Technocracy as the “science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism to produce and distribute goods and services to the entire population of [the North American] continent. For the first time in human history, it will be done as a scientific, technical, and engineering problem. There will be no place for Politics or Politicians, Finance or Financiers, Rackets or Racketeers.”
The founder and editor of the magazine, Howard Scott, defined technocracy as a “method of scientific procedure in government.” The mythic schema developed by the North American technocrats, who were sympathizers of both Mussolini’s Fascism and South Africa’s Apartheid regime, retained the mythic principle of totalitarian unity developed by its sister movements. For the technocrats, the principle of unity should best be realized by the technate—a political superstructure that overcomes the state and instead expands itself across the continental terrain. The technocrat thus seeks to remodel the content of the theory of reality fashioned by earlier forms of fascist expression. For the technocrat, the sovereign is a continental technate which transcends all political demarcation. The active system is neither the “idealistic spirit” asserted by Malan nor the Roman and nationalist spirit asserted by Mussolini; it is instead the “technique through which man has turned the things of his environment to account.” More importantly, the technocrat surpasses the object-form of material substances as he transforms all materiality into “calculated data…This calculation is based upon the relentless, inevitable increase in the use of extraneous energy as a substitute for human labor.” Technocracy construes Man as a technological principle whose evolution should be traced through his technological innovations and mutations. Thus, ethics and the reifying principle dictate how Man should act in accord with the imperative to engineer his own society and to produce efficient systems to develop it. The technological vision of reality of the technocrat is maintained through the unification of four mythic principles: the technate post-state continental terrain; the technical systems which operate all of its social dictates; the reconvention of material substance into calculable data; and the technological re-inscription of ethics and thus the invention of the technological genre of Man.
A contemporary proponent of this movement, Peter Thiel, has redefined some of the key mythic principles of the technocratic vision of reality. In his 2009 blog post, “The Education of the Libertarian,” Thiel subtly reemphasized the first mythic principle of the technocratic movement: to abolish politics and the nation-state as we know them for a larger technological order of governance. He asserts that he “no longer believes that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task of the libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms—from the totalitarian and the fundamental catastrophe to the unthinking demos.” To facilitate the technocratic transcendence of politics, Thiel ushers in a system of the technological replacement of what he sees as outdated political infrastructures. For Thiel, the second mythic principle of the systematic transmutation of dictates from the technate to smaller bodies must now take the form of a processional structure that seeks to displace the political infrastructure with the technological infrastructure. This enables him to reconstitute “the calculatable data,” thereby reconstructing material substance in the earlier technocratic mythos into an economy of data that contains three commercial substrates. The first is the cyberspace industry, which has been successfully monopolized by Thiel’s associates and co-founders of the digital-finance company, PayPal. For Thiel, the monopolization of cyberspace networks is imperative for the establishment of his vision of the “new world” mythos because “by starting a new Internet business, an entrepreneur may create a new world. The hope of the Internet is that these new worlds will impact and force change on the existing social and political order.” The second substrate of a data-driven material world is the colonization of outer-space. On this, Thiel states that since “the vast reaches of outer space represent a limitless frontier, they also represent a limitless possibility for escape from world politics.” The final substrate is the colonization of the oceans through “seasteading.” Thiel reconceives the fourth mythic principle, which concerns the ethic of Man, by constructing a hybrid and tragic genre of Man that sees the new mutation of the human as “a deadly race between politics and technology.” Unlike his predecessors, Thiel does not provide a set of prescriptions to guide the actions and materialization of his version of Man. Instead, he centralizes the entire ethical code on a singular expression of Man, whose Atlassian task bears likeness to the singularity of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. On this task, Thiel states, “The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”
In all, Thiel reconstructs the mythic principles fashioned by the Technocracy Incorporated group to establish his own technofascist vision of reality. These mythic principles stipulate the imperative to: (1) to transcend politics as we know it, and (2) to usher in technological systems that will replace political infrastructure sine qua non with digital infrastructures. For this to succeed, Thiel seeks to reconstitute the material world as a digital economy in which market commodities are replaced by data; to do so, he has directed his efforts toward monopolizing the digital market. More importantly, the monopolization of the digital market enables him to fashion a new world out of the internet, which, for him, is an experiment of how politics may be transcended. (3) Finally, Thiel reconstitutes Man as a “deadly” hybrid formation of political and technological elements. This principle of Man lacks a positive ethics and is thus not encoded with an imperative of how to perform and materialize his fictitious identity. This deadly hybrid of politico-techno Man is therefore emptied of any basic ethical content; this subject is, in a word, ethically dead. In this reconstruction of the technofascist vision of reality, Thiel at once reconstitutes Mussolini’s corporatism, Afrikaner manifest destiny, and Technocracy’s post-politics technate. He is, then, in real time inventing the 21st-century formula of Afrikanerdom technofascism in front of our very eyes.
The South African case of Afrikanerdom Fascism demonstrates that the movement mutates at various historical points by reconstituting the contents of its mythic principles. Every new attempt at reconstitution aids the movement in bolstering its vision of reality and building components of that reality in new “frontiers” (to use Thiel’s word). Like the colonial project, the fascist project is primarily invested in inventing and building new worlds. In both cases, it is important to first recognize them as reality-building assignments for critical Decolonial theorists to fashion an effective deconstruction of these mythic and imperial inventions.
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Ayabulela Y. Mhlahlo
Ayabulela Y. Mhlahlo is a 4th-year PhD candidate in the Philosophy Department at the University of Connecticut-Storrs. She's earned two previous MAs in African literature (Wits University) and Political Studies (University of Cape Town). She is primarily interested in Philosophy of Myth, Decolonial Philosophy, Africana Philosophy, Critical Theory, and History of Ideas. She studies the relationship between mythic production and the construction of social reality in colonial environments, with a special interest in South Africa. In her spare time, she enjoys weightlifting, snorkeling in the ocean, stargazing and enjoying various forms of artistic production.
