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What can I know (if trust in knowledge has been lost)? | 31 legitimates power, has therefore failed: it is again power - i.e., operability, effectivity, saleability, being known, etc. — that legitimates truth. The Late Modern — postmodern — state of our civilisation bears a striking resemblance in this as well to that of the Early Modern period: if truth is not the final source of the legitimacy of power, then power has to again be the final argument in the matter of truth. And what of power itself? On what does it rely? The personality cult of uncontrollable authorities again replaces power justified by its supposed reasonableness. ‘Their unworldly legitimation is ensured by the media, which “builds up” their personality and generates a religious devotion towards them. ‘The transcendent (i.e., unchangeable by human will) state of affairs is visualised by an electronic stage world of baroque pomp that creates the illusion of boundlessness. The deceptive appearance of interactivity promises a total identification with the spectacle, but we can only reach the world of virtual beings one hundred times as real as the spectator via extasy and self-surrender. This too is baroque: the “true” postmodern artist, when they is not striving to make an impression that tempts man and God in its extremities, is bombarding the limits of what can even be said with self-torturing consistency. Sensuality and iconoclasm, overdriven speculation and calculated technological trickery — all the excuses and artifices of the new avant-garde which proclaims itself as after-modern, beyond-artistic and even post-humanist are mannerist to their core. And does not the triumphal path of all-defeating but self-contradictory reason relate the whole spirit of our age to the seventeenth century? Wealth has utterly broken away from the economy, i.e., from the production of goods. Let us finally admit that the putative connection between the two was merely the short-lived selfish dream of the Third Order! Today only formally speaking can one call “financial” the transactions of pure power, which form the one source of true wealth (and which nullify the activity of the “producers” with a stroke of the pen): the owner of the greater fortune prevails over the lesser. Here too, the ultima ratio regnum, of course, only surfaces if absolutely necessary, for instance if someone is unable to rationally comprehend the expediency of the rules of the game, which automatically and effortlessly guarantee the impoverishment of the poor and the enrichment of the rich. The ruling elite enforces its abstract superiority in by no means bloodless number wars. This superiority ensures their right to the exclusive enjoyment of the entirety of the goods of the world. Power is the sole source of wealth: free disposal over the service, bodies and souls
