Because in certain pockets of the world we’ve become divorced from the idea that achievement is heavily impacted by factors outside our control, the modern secular analogy to religion is the industry that’s been created from Maslow’s idea of self-actualization as a supreme expression of human life. The anesthetization of inner turmoil has been married to outward success–not only will you feel better, but your performance will also be optimized. You have the power to live a rational life in service of others.
Much of it seems like a rehashing of the 60s’ human potential movement as a counter-cultural rebellion against mainstream psychology and organized religion. It’s not so much a religion as much as it is a psychological philosophy and framework that focuses on a particular set of values, but it’s meant to be followed obsessively and provide meaning in the same vein.
Some basic tenets: you should take responsibility for everything that happens to you. Deal with whatever crisis comes up and move on from it as cleanly as possible. You aren’t like those postmodern softies who need to obsessively control their outer environment and suppress free speech. Everything is based on merit. You square fully with the harshness of the world and you are going to triumph by making a lot of money (while working on something appropriately meaningful that addresses the human condition).
There are remarkable similarities between the principles currently in vogue and things taught by human potential-focused movements like est, Landmark Forum, neuro-linguistic programming, Tony Robbins seminars, Impact Training, Lifespring, Complete Centering, Scientology, etc. A lot of the parallels revolve around personal responsibility as freedom:
Jordan Peterson: “Every experience that you have had contains information. If you have fully processed the information in that experience, (1) its recollection will no longer produce negative emotion and (2) you have learned everything you need to know from it.”
Landmark: there’s a concept in the Landmark Forum called getting complete. To get complete means that you need to address what is “incomplete” with the other person, which is a fancy way of saying getting emotional closure. To complete, you take responsibility for what is incomplete and relinquish reside emotions, resentment, etc. and extending forgiveness the other person. If you do that, you are completely being responsible for your own life.
Scientology: to become clear is one of the major states practitioners strive to reach on their way up the Bridge to Total Freedom. The state of Clear is reached when a person becomes free of unwanted emotions or painful traumas not readily available to the conscious mind. By applying Dianetics, every single person can reach the state of Clear.
Stoicism: “When you are offended at any man’s fault, immediately turn to yourself and reflect in what matter you yourself have erred.”
Since we can no longer trust in a higher power to guide our lives and imbue it with meaning, we’ve turned to believing that the only way to control the external world is through mastery of the internal world. There’s a lashing out against the postmodernist renunciation of structure and meaning, a rampant nostalgia for the idea of meritocracy, excellence, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. The anecdote to emotional pain is inner calm and material success. It’s discipline, it’s not worrying about the things you have no control over, it’s letting go of the things that move you if they’re destructive to your life.
Believing that you are in control of all of your reactions and that controlling your reactions can radically affect the outer world is a good psychological trick on several levels: 1. It removes anguish over the “other” because everything is about you and your actions 2. It legitimately can catalyze action in people who might otherwise be paralyzed by a lack of meaning 3. It puts a focus on performance and hierarchy as a way to easily gauge success.
People are looking for an alternative to the confusion of being alive and not knowing why and what to do about it. Successfully selling a life philosophy gives you just about more influence and capital than anything else. But successful adoption of a life philosophy has little bearing on whether it’s true or not. From Simone de Beauvoir:
The serious man gets rid of his freedom by claiming to subordinate it to values which would be unconditioned. He imagines that the accession to these values likewise permanently confers value upon himself. Shielded with “rights,” he fulfills himself as a being who is escaping from the stress of existence. . . . [The serious man] chooses to live in an infantile world, but to the child the values are really given. The serious man must mask the movement by which he gives them to himself, like the mythomaniac who while reading a love-letter pretends to forget that she has sent it to herself.
We’re trying to be serious men. So much remains thematically the same between different belief systems: the hope of eternal life, a belief in (AGI-assisted) miracles, a sense of purpose and value. The problem is often not in the particularities what we believe, but how blindly we believe it: when we start thinking about a framework not as guidance for how to look for answers but rather what to answer, it devolves to ideology. Even ideologies that claim to promote curiosity and an environment for learning can end up enabling what James Carse calls “willful ignorance”: an intentional avoidance of knowledge and ways of thinking that contradict your religion. Believers like authority. Even people on the margins of modern political thought are drawn to ideological purity.
The problem with every ideology is that it’s ultimately reductionist: it reduces the world to one thing, and then explains the world in terms of just that one thing. It’s extremely useful because the world becomes simplified and you have something to tie yourself to emotionally, in this case internal and external performance. From the inside, a closed and consistent framework of truth looks more or less like joy.
In Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects, he introduces the concept of objects that are so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity. The examples he gives are as global warming, styrofoam, and radioactive plutonium. I think the concept can also apply to technology that is disruptive on such a large scale as to fundamentally alter our experience of living.
Growing up, my political beliefs were more or less shaped by neoliberalism and third wave feminism. In recent years those frameworks seemed in many ways inadequate to diagnose and deal with what is happening around us: human beings have more or less become neurolivestock for corporations like Google, Facebook, etc--your personal information is taken from you, and you are rewarded with short-term conveniences like targeted ads but your long-term prospects are gradually reduced because you have less privacy, less freedom. We live in an operating system set up by “the accelerating triad of war, capitalism and emergent AI,” distracted by “libidinal- and reality-engineering, advertising, branding, media, the happiness industry.”
In the 1970 Albert Toffler wrote Future Shock. He defines the term as the social paralysis induced by rapid technological change. According to Charles Stross, his “working hypothesis to explain the 21st century is that the Tofflers underestimated how pervasive future shock would be. I think somewhere in the range from 15-30% of our fellow hairless primates are currently in the grip of future shock, to some degree. Symptoms include despair, anxiety, depression, disorientation, paranoia, and a desperate search for certainty in lives that are experiencing unpleasant and uninvited change. It's no surprise that anyone who can offer dogmatic absolute answers is popular, or that the paranoid style is again ascendant in American politics, or that religious certainty is more attractive to many than the nuanced complexities of scientific debate.”
I’ve been thinking lately about accelerationism, which is influenced by Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, and in its modern incarnation came from texts that Nick Land began producing in the 1980s when he was involved with Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. The CCRU argued that the institutions like government, academia and the established sciences more or less slow progress down, and to break out we need to encourage “an accelerated culture” where new ideas could flourish. In a lot of ways, the accelerationism of that period (before Land had an amphetamine-induced breakdown and started spouting alt-right ideas) connects with a belief in Silicon Valley that markets need to be fast-moving and tech must be disruptive. Accelerationism “goes against conservatism, traditional socialism, social democracy, environmentalism, protectionism, populism, nationalism, localism and all the other ideologies that have sought to moderate or reverse the already hugely disruptive, seemingly runaway pace of change in the modern world.” I don’t necessarily espouse accelerationism as desirable, but it seems in many ways a prescient diagnosis of where we’re heading.
We are moving towards a post-industrial society: even skilled workers will lose value with the advent of robots that are sophisticated enough to provide medical procedures, sophisticated enough to program. There are technologies that are coming that will drastically alter what it means to be human: gene editing, brain computer interfaces, AGI. I don’t think anyone disputes that, but we’re all collectively unprepared to deal with it politically and philosophically. We are moving towards a world dominated by high-tech capitalism, post-liberal humanism. For better or worse, it is moving towards us.
We need cliches to help us to adjust to a world transformed by future shock. I think individualism--being tough, being rational, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps--seems to people like a way to regain control over the present moment, which is defined by radical change and a loss of control over information. But to me it kind of feels like saying that being a good surfer is going to help you in a tsunami. A sense of agency might be pleasant in an individual life, but we live among networks that require a large number of people who participate in them to generate value but have the effect of centralizing wealth and power. We live on a dying planet, in a society that’s been transformed--and will be transformed--by hyperobjects that are difficult to predict and difficult to control.
Being on the cusp of a seminal moment is exciting in a lot of ways. Questions that seem interesting to me:
1. How do you expect a society to orient itself politically and philosophically when there is not anymore a stable baseline for what to expect in our lifetimes economically, technologically and otherwise?
2. It’s good and comforting to believe that we function autonomously and take responsibility for ourselves, but how do we reconcile that with knowing (I’m cribbing Foucault) that the individual is the product of power and that language, in the form that we interface with it in the media, is not made to believe but to be obeyed? I.e. as Chomsky says, “mass media amuses, entertains, and informs, and inculcates individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society.” Is it possible to avoid conflating the comfort of feeling like rational actors with actually pursuing independent thought? Which leads naturally into
3. Is there any way to bridge that gap between what we know to be true and our relative inability to generalize it? As Jared Leoner describes, the hacker attitude is often approximately this: “Open up your life to the ’net, all you ordinary people. The world is about to become transparent and that transparency will be the beginning of a golden age. Sharing is good. However, encrypt your life like crazy. Use VPN, etc. Only the smartest people can make no sound in the digital forest.” What are the most effective ways to go from “I believe something to be true (i.e. privacy matters) and will live my life in accordance with it” to “I will also convince other people that this belief is true?” If you believe, which I somewhat do, that people are motivated mostly what what they find emotionally appealing and choose values using that as the primary criterion, the answer might very literally be to design and sell an ideology whose tenets consist of the things that you believe to be true. Which is, of course, a separate thing from successfully convincing people that they should care about what is actually true, separate from ideology.
“The individual is no longer rooted in society as a tree in a forest, rather he is comparable to the passenger in a rapidly moving vehicle whose name may be Titanic, but also Leviathan. As long as the weather holds and the outlook is pleasant, he will scarcely notice the curtailment of his freedom. He may even be filled with optimism and with the consciousness of power produced by the sense of speed. But all this changes when the fiery volcanic islands and icebergs emerge on the horizon. Then not only will technology claim a right to dominate fields other than the procurement of comfort, but at the same time the lack of freedom will become apparent–be it in the victory of elemental forces or in the fact that individuals who have remained strong acquire the means to exercise absolute power.”
- Ernest Junger, Forest Passage
