(Italian version published at https://www.informazionecattolica.it/2024/08/25/lo-sterminio-della-nostra-umanita/)
If early-modern man sings joyful odes to a free world in the making, late or post-modern man realizes that the triumph of our freedom—of the free will of “enlightened” autonomous individuals—demands the extermination of our humanity and so the consolidation of a machine of dehumanization. The first crowning achievement in this direction was produced in Nazi Germany; the second, terminal one is being carried out today on a planetary scale. To establish a Kingdom of Ends, we must be all willing to “solve” the Human Problem of which the Jewish Problem serves as provisional signpost. The solution coincides with the over-human, or rather trans-human elimination of all that stands in the way of the Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens, as per Leni Reifenstahl), which is to say of “the will to power” (der Wille zur Macht, as per Nietzsche, unabashed prophet of the very soul the modern Enlightenment). The goal amounts to the universal affirmation of our autonomy beyond any authority that we do not create for ourselves. That includes both Nature and God—both Plato and the Bible. What is left ultimately? Affirmation for the sake of affirmation: a “Yes Man” who cannot say no, because saying no would be to betray his destiny. What is our destiny, our modern destiny? It is amor fati, embracing our future-oriented existence with all of our heart and soul and mind (after Matthew 22:37). There can be no future to hope for aside from our own becoming our future. Indeed, we must be our future (in 1985, we were still only “the world,” as per Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie).
Speech converts into a tweeting slogan when the future is now. Now is the time to “cancel” all that is not now, all that steps aside from or beyond our self-affirmation; all that questions the triumph of the now over death itself; all that doubts the machine that makes such a triumph not only possible, but eminently necessary. The machinery of modern reason—the Logic—that turns the now into our collective technological imperative.
It’s all or nothing, and nothing is no longer an option. We must therefore endure the present, its demands, no matter how “offensive” they might appear to us. The demands of freedom. But what does freedom, its triumph, demand of us? That we embrace our collective fate, that we be all-inclusive, that we raise our diversity to heavenly heights. The apotheosis of diversity: what is low must be established as supremely high. All-too-human failure must be converted into a divine-like success. Vice must be transformed into a blissful virtue. Only thus can we be our “true Self,” the Self in which all law is fully interiorized—compliments of the machine.
We are gods in the machine (dei in machinam): gods feeding into the machine, the very mechanical apparatus that divinizes us. The machine that crowns us, that fuels our self-confidence, telling us that “it’s all about me,” is no ordinary deus ex machina: it is the machine itself, the womb of all gods, telling us that we are those gods before whom past generations had slavishly bowed. A machine of empowerment that calls us to cherish freedom in the machine, rejecting all that is outside of the machine as radical evil (das radikal Böse, as per Immanuel Kant).
The overcoming of man, coinciding with the rise of the over-man—of the Übermensch—the one that has “crossed over,” the trans-man, is what modernity has always been about. A transition into the machine that Giacomo Leopardi could still warn us against in his satirical operette, but that we can no longer afford questioning. When in Rome behave like a Roman; when in Babel behave like a zombie.
All is permitted, everything goes, once God is dead, or once we all stand in the machine that fuels and is fueled by the apotheosis of our self-confidence, our being trans. The old Adam is over; at the End of History, the overman, the beyond-man, the trans-man incarnates the Gnostic reading of the Christian Gospel. We have entered the Parousia, compliments of the machine, the truth about all Gods. We have stepped into heaven by entering into the machine, realizing that it is each one of us that decides whether we are in heaven or in hell: it is our attitude that counts—strictly in the machine. The machine that has awakened us to an eternal truth: that life is a video-game in which “we get to choose” who or what we are, our identity, provided we follow the rules of the machine; provided we love the machine—with all our heart and soul and mind.
The machine has taught us that all “values” are virtual; that evil is simply failure to integrate in the machine; that what counts in life is not whether you believe in God or in the devil, but that you believe in something—anything—as long as you believe in the machine. For the machine is the great producer of dreams and everyone must learn to love dreams as the truth about what is real, what was once sought as eminently real. To awaken is to embrace dreams as ultimate reality. This is our Final Fantasy, in which the virtual is the real unmasked. Life as a video-game.
What has happened to the autonomy of the early-modern “individual self”? It is still there, though now we know it is virtual, which is to say that it is the product of the machine. All is real virtually. But what about the machine? The machine is fate itself, the imperative to dream. Nothing in itself, but a logic, the New Word, the digital one that tells us to love our dreams, not by seeking good dreams as opposed to bad ones, but by loving dreaming itself; because dreaming as such is good. The only nightmare is the cessation of dreams: life outside of the machine.
The discourse of earlier ages cannot be more than an echo of our own tweeting. An ultimately tediously prosaic version of our own poetry. We have learned to simplify the prolixity of the past by converting it into a sound bit, an interjection, a flash that tells us that we are here now and that this is all that counts.
If in earlier, pre-Cartesian ages the self (the ego or “I”) had remained a mask of underlying problems, today the only problems are surface or technical ones. The underlying has been or is being thoroughly digitized in the machine. The machine that is supposedly reducing us to digital entities; the machine that is turning us into numbers. Not merely bearers of numbers, but the numbers themselves, as Dr. Joseph Mengele would readily concede.
The over or trans-man is no mere mask of a true face, but the true face itself, in the machine. He, or rather it is the truth about the First and Second Adam alike. It is the polyfemic bearer of pronouns, or rather the living pronoun, the one behind which no one stands. The self-referential, stand-up pronoun replaces the old thing itself, the res ipsa. We have “demythologized” or “de-essentialized” the pronoun, setting it free from the myth of any substantive Other. A “gender fluid” pronoun emerges that, as Heraclitus’s river, is ever-changing and this, as always, thanks to the machine.
We are free as fluid pronouns: free from all fear, from all sense of shame, from thought itself. Unless what is meant by thought is an over-thought, a trans-thought, or a mechanical echo of thought. Perhaps a pretension of thought? If so, then a good one, for in our virtual world pretension is being itself. “To be or not to be, this used to be the question”. “Not to be” or seeming is all that counts, now. As long as we all believe, or even successfully pretend to believe, all will be fine. Do not ask what we believe in. That would be an inappropriate question. No more should you ask about what we believe in, than you should ask about the meaning of the freedom we invoke. For the meaning is determined and is the machine which allows us to tweet, to be sure, no longer full-fledged odes à la Beethoven, but all that really counts or is supposed to count, today, namely ephemeral signs of approval or disapproval, as digital thumbs-up or down, in either case signs of attention: for we must be all attentive to the cause that is the machine as apocalyptic theatre.
When all is said and done, the freedom we invoke as trans-humans belongs to the machine, our machine. All else is mere license, revocable at any given moment by the mechanical logic that is supposed to replace or be providence divine. We have been led to see ourselves as pure egos, “ghosts in the machine,” without noticing that it was the machine that was leading us to begin with—a modern logic of which our tangible machines are but an “objective” shadow. Did Descartes not teach us that “I think therefore I am”? We affirm our being as the ones who think, but we do so in and compliments of a mechanistic logic. “I am told I am the one who thinks, therefore I am in the machine”. If mind is properly in the machine, then why, nay how, ask as regards what is outside of the machine or its logic?
It was the logic of the machine or a mechanistic logic that determined thought within the limits of a modern, autonomous ego, promising it freedom unbound, without highlighting the fine print in our contract: that unlimited freedom would be possible only within the machine. As a serpent in Eden, the machine hid in darkness—in the shadow of the understanding, to project a knowledge cut off from its living source. So that a new life could be established on entirely artificial grounds: life based on its own shadow; as a Babelic deity built on the death or absence of God.
Here we stand, today, in a Tower bespeaking the absence of God, the Tower that feeds off of that absence to mask its own unreality. Thought itself signed a “social contract” to certify itself as an Enlightened, now “woke” Self. The Faustian price to pay for newly gained certainty? Thought’s confinement under the empire of the machine, of the shadow of thought itself. Seeking salvation in its own absence, thought had inadvertently emptied itself out into the project of building its own trap, wherein it is currently flattering itself unto utter oblivion.
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