131. Transhumanism 9/28: The Manipulation

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Throughout history, we have witnessed numerous events that have taxed our decision-making abilities—for instance, during revolutions and wars that reshaped markets. However, we are also facing invisible digital shifts, such as the one we are experiencing at the beginning of the 21st century or the one that lies directly ahead of us. For this latter shift, there is no historical precedent. We must now decide whether we will remain a created sacredness—the image and identity of the One—or whether we will renounce the blessed attributes of our sacredness such as our free will, love of truth, order, and virtues. Will we instead accept and identify with a way of thinking dictated and shaped by the imperfect machines we produced? To put it more simply: will we remain human, or will we become humanoid robots?

We know that behind these machines stand those who no longer even call themselves human, but rather the directors of humanity—the owners of a machine-driven digital slave society; a power that exists in reality but remains unseen. This exercise of digital power is only possible because they have made us believe that we are not "created little gods." They have convinced us that we are incapable of making decisions and that we need someone/something else—such as machines—to make them for us. In other words: "Just trust the machines, outsource your decisions, and renounce the natural sacredness entrusted to you, including your fellow human beings." For the sake of our own comfort, we are encouraged to sink into materiality, compromise on a life shared with machines, and voluntarily surrender ourselves to that digital and financial power which prepares to take the place of the One in our lives and become our creator.

To understand the risks of our digital age, we must note that the exercise of power over the individual self—influence and persuasion—is not a new phenomenon. Aside from recent "hard" tools of manipulation, such as the revolutions of the 19th century and the wars of the 20th, we find "soft" tools of manipulation in 19th-century e.g. psychoanalysis and its impact on 20th-century materialistic, rational thinking, for example, in the socialism of Europe that was officially dismantled in the 90s. Let us not forget that in digital culture (which in reality does not exist) the materialistic thinking still flourish today. Those interested in creating transhuman societies—such as the owners of social media platforms—and those interested in psychoanalysis are members of the same non-pagan community that supports e.g. the digital citizenship, cashless payments and others. Several common elements can be discovered between the psychoanalysis associated with the Viennese neurologist Sigmund Freud and his colleague Carl Gustav Jung (deep psychology) and the digitalization of our age (e.g., the operation of social media platforms):

1. Both deal with analysis and interpretations: the essence of analysis is dismantling of facts, the collection of data gained from events and responses, the conversion of data into information, and its subsequent analysis (classification, grouping, etc.), leading finally to the drawing and utilization of conclusions. The difference between the two is that psychoanalysis intends to heal the sick individual, seeking to understand and interpret normal behaviour from the perspective of the sick patient. Conversely, digital operations—which push us toward individualization, alienation, narrow-mindedness, and purely rational thinking—make the healthy, universal human "sick" while the manipulator grows wealthy. Both procedures analyse the mind as the embodiment of the individual self (even though the word psyche means soul) and attempt to exert influence upon it. The psychoanalyst has the opportunity to peer into individual personalities so that, based on data and information provided by the patient, healing can begin and "spiritual misery" can be overcome.

According to Hajdu, the healing—or more precisely, the restoration and reconstruction—of the individual self manifests when, through either internal or external impulse, we become capable of dismantling that false reality, the pseudo-reality, which we have built over decades in our ignorance. Healing occurs when we no longer identify with the behavior dictated by our individual self. Freud interpreted the emergence of psychoanalysis as the unstoppable advancement of emotionless scientific materialism, and he believed his procedure would strike a blow to man's delusion of being an important being in the universe. Note: In this view, Freud was likely referring to the contents of the Communist Manifesto published by Karl Marx in 1848. His materialistic statement also suggests that there is no need for the "self" accepted by the bourgeois world; instead, another self must be revealed: the unconscious—that which is under the control of the rational mind (in today's terms, the individual self). When Freud rejects the self-governing "ego," he places the unconscious "self" into a collective consciousness (which we know today does not exist).

2. Joining destructive, de-sacralized views: several views exist that diminish both man's created sacredness and his sense of responsibility. For example, the aforementioned psychoanalysis accepted the Copernican worldview—that Earth is just one of many planets and has no central role in human life. It embraced Darwinian evolutionism, which posits that man is not the crown of creation but merely one of many animal species, and that the conscious self (the universal self) is not "master in its own house." Freud adopted this latter thought from Georg Simmel (author of The Philosophy of Money, published in 1900), which states that modern man is surrounded by so many impersonal things that he/she must draw ever closer to the idea of an anti-individualistic order of life. The question is whether foreign powers rule within the spiritual life of the individual, or if the soul is "master in its own house, or can at least assume harmony between its innermost life and that which it is forced to take in as impersonal content." Psychoanalysis showed precisely that "the ego is not master in its own house," and that there is no harmony between the various elements of the "self" (in today’s terms, the individual and universal self). This is the devaluation of the "self."

There were those who claimed that psychoanalysis revealed the possibility that it is worthwhile to go behind consciousness (this reasoning gave rise to the concept of the subconscious)—to "penetrate behind the subjectivity of meaning." Others believed that concepts such as repression and the unconscious articulate the unhappiness and alienation that are characteristic results of the functioning of modern capitalist bureaucracy. Many discovered elements of Marxist theory in the idea that a person's consciousness and their actual situation are in contradiction. J.P. Sartre, for instance—while not accepting Freud’s materialism—noted regarding the concepts of consciousness and the unconscious/subconscious introduced by Freud (interpreting the "self" as the ego) that they "develop within a given historical and social context." Today we know this statement is erroneous, as the "self" always signifies the universal self at the center, which exists beyond time, and not the pseudo-self, or individual self.