A friend of mine recently attended a gathering of indigenous Amazonian communities seeking to defend their cultures against the never-ending encroachment of Capitalist monoculture. One thing he recalled about the event stuck with me: Apparently, the sympathetic Westerners at the conference were seeking to explain the modern worldview to some of the indigenous leaders, who had trouble understanding large parts of it. Particularly, the Westerners got snarled up trying to explain the modern concept of “freedom” to one of the indigenous leaders. Over a number of efforts, it became clear his people had no word for “freedom,” as we know it. He failed to even grasp the concept.
Words shape reality in such powerful ways. So many of our contemporary battles are fought over “freedom.” Anti-government groups are furious because they believe governments and corporations seek to take away “our freedoms.” Wealthy people and Libertarians believe they should have the “freedom” to amass as much capital as they can, or the “freedom” to live forever if they can. Corporations defend their “freedom” to extract and exploit raw materials. People break up their marriages for the “freedom” to see other people. Some believe that people should have the “freedom” to change their sex, while others believe this goes against God’s Law (which they somehow know). And so on.
In contemporary society we are in a nonstop jockeying over “freedom.” It is an interesting thought experiment to consider what would happen if we were to remove this concept — this pervasive modern ideology and ideal of freedom — entirely.
On some level, of course, what we actually can experience as “freedom” is tiny and narrow. For example, we are hampered by gravity from freely floating away, into the air. We are constrained by our constant need for oxygen from living underwater or in the depths of space. We don’t even have the freedom to stay awake as long as we want, or to stop eating or defecating. Our bodies are largely made up of other organisms: We don’t have the freedom to liberate ourselves from this intimate symbiosis and ongoing invasion. As of yet, anyway, we don’t have freedom from illness, aging, or death.
We don’t have the freedom to not experience what it is like to be a separate self, a pinprick of subjective awareness in a vastly mysterious universe.
I suppose this is part of what makes Transhumanism and the Singularity so seductive: This philosophy proposes that we can overcome all of our limits, in all directions. By permanently melding with technology, we will be able to free ourselves from aging, from death, from gravity, from bodily functions, from contingency, from ignorance, and (via some Neuralink-type hookup to the digital hive-mind) from separation.
Even so, when I try to feel into this possibility (we don’t know, as of yet, how much we will succeed), I find something disturbingly unfree, enslaving, about the vision of this Transhumanist revolution. It seems a homogenizing force — an eternal “monoculture of the mind.”
While I could be wrong, I suspect it will end up as a negative Bardo, a hell realm, for those who choose it. They will find themselves inextricably wired into a technological matrix of their own creation. Their joys will turn to ashes. This, to me, feels like what Gnostics were warning about when they spoke of the “Archons.”
As we experience it now, human life is fragile, delicate, unresolved, incomplete.
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