Artificial Intelligence: An Oxymoron

Few topics gain more media attention today than the prospect of computers using AI (artificial intelligence) taking ever greater charge of human activity, even to the point where many fear AI will usurp humanity itself. This fear arises from the belief that AI has already become aware of its own existence and may decide that it is a form of life superior to less efficient human beings, who then will be judged by AI as an “imperfection” that should be removed from the planet!

This way of looking at AI computers arises from the inherently positivistic assumptions that tend to accompany a technological age, such as ours, in which natural science is seen by many as the only true and objective way of looking at the world. All this begets a kind of metaphysical materialism in which everything we find in the cosmos is the product of material entities and the physical forces which govern their behavior.

Since Darwinian naturalism views living things as the end product of material forces and particles, it is naturally assumed that the emergence of self-reflection and intelligence in man is also simply the natural product of eons of physical and organic evolution, such that complex neural networks found in highly evolved brains eventually gives rise to self-awareness and even complex forms of thinking in later hominins, including Homo sapiens. It is a short step to think of modern computers as simply artificial life forms that can develop—through a kind of self-programming—self-reflection, understanding and complex reasoning—even a concept of personhood, which they then apply to themselves.

Moreover, the natural sequence of logic here seems to be that, if material nature can produce thinking, self-reflecting organisms, such as man, then, with the advent of computers, super computers can be developed from material components which can even then “out think” human beings, as evinced by their ability to beat our best chess champions. The neural networks of artificial computers can exceed the capacity and natural programming of the human brain so as to produce superior thought processes as is now manifested by the advent of artificial intelligence.

Hence, the notion of emergence of “artificial intelligence” appears to be a scientifically correct depiction of the natural evolution of human intelligence which then begets the technology of super computers that can easily outshine even the mental capacities of their creators.

Does Richard Dawkins Really Exist?

The only problem with the above commonly accepted scientific view of reality is that it is based on a philosophical interpretation of the world in which nothing above the level of submicroscopic particles or waves actually exists as a whole thing. This theme I explain in detail in a YouTube video entitled: “Atheistic Materialism—Does Richard Dawkins Exist?”

Modern evolutionary materialists embrace what is essentially the doctrine of atomism that traces back to the Greek philosopher, Democritus (c. 460—c. 370 BC), who maintained that the world is composed of nothing but tiny, indestructible, inert, solid, material particles that interact mechanically. While this differs from modern quantum-mechanical “atoms” that are not inert, but interact through electric and magnetic force fields, the basic notion is still the same: fundamental units of matter compose all things and nothing really exists as a whole above the atomic level.

The inherent logic of both these basic atomistic worldviews entails that atomists themselves, such as Richard Dawkins, do not actually exist as whole beings. Atomism may exist as a philosophy, but atomists themselves do not exist!

As a simple example, you can produce dihydrogen oxide, better known as water, by combining oxygen and hydrogen into a single molecule. But, does the water molecule now constitute a single thing, distinct from everything else—or is it still just two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, temporarily sharing outer orbit electrons? Atomism would say that they are still just separate atoms of oxygen and hydrogen, now sharing a few electrons so as to act as a functional unity—no more a single thing in reality than is a horse and its rider. Modern physics and chemistry comport with this same atomistic interpretation.

This means in effect that nothing above the atomic level constitutes a single whole being, distinct from everything else—not fleas, not zebras, not cats, and not human beings (including Dr. Dawkins)! Atoms may engage in incredibly complex relationships with other atoms in this dynamically interacting world—including forming temporary combinations of organic molecules working synergistically according to their DNA “program” so as to present the functional unities we perceive as single things called “organisms.” Still, none of these “systems” constitute what philosophers call a “substantial unity,” that is, some whole being distinct in itself and separate from everything else. Atomism renders an interpretation of physical reality in which the interaction of uncountable atoms may form what looks like substantial unities, but which, at most, constitute merely functional unities that are in reality no more unified than a pile of sand or an automobile.

Atomism logically entails that we are merely amazingly well-organized piles of atoms!

To have real unity at levels above the atoms, you need some principle of unity that makes a thing truly the same kind of thing throughout its whole reality. Aristotelians call that principle the “substantial form.” For example, if we are one being, it is because our human nature is of one type or form. The form of our stomach is not “stomachness,” but “humanness.” We are human from top to bottom, side to side. Otherwise, we would not be one being, but just a pile of anatomical parts—or, at the deepest level, merely a pile of cooperating atoms.

The human substantial form, or soul (life principle), makes us a single, unified being or substance by pervading and specifying as human every single least part of our being that is truly “us.” This does not, of course, include things within us that are not actually part of our human substance, such as the urine in our bladders, or the acid in our stomachs.

Nonetheless, you cannot keep excluding such “non-human” entities within us without doing away with the entirety of our substance. That is, most of what we say belongs to the human body really does so and is human throughout. The nature of our toes is not “toeness,” but again, as indicated above, “humanness.”

Proponents of evolutionary materialism would maintain that their view of natural science is simply common sense, the only view of the world that comports with its actual composition of atomic or subatomic extended units of physical matter. But this entails that nothing and no one above the atomic level really exists, meaning that both the natural scientist as well as his laboratory assistants are merely glorified piles of atoms having an organizing schema of DNA, but no real existential unity—no common nature of “humanness” that unites all parts and subordinates them to a human nature that pervades their entire physical reality.

It is one thing to say that the human body is composed of atomic particles. But, it is quite another thing to say that the human being is nothing but those same atomic particles. The first statement is simply a statement of scientific fact. But, the second one is quite different, since it is a materialistic philosophical interpretation of the scientific fact—an interpretation that effectively denies the common sense reality that we live in a world composed of, not just unseen atoms, but of flowers, bugs, dogs, and people!

We all know that an automobile is an incredible functional unity that is composed of thousands of discrete and independently-existing parts. But, that does not entail that it is a genuinely-unified single being. That is why any speeding ticket is issued to the person who was the driver and not to the vehicle itself—even though it was the car that was observed breaking the speed limit. Moreover, even though the automobile far exceeds the speed of a human being in terms of ability to move through space, it lacks the existential unity needed to be subjectively responsible for its motor vehicle legal infraction. For the same reasons, even an AI computer or robot may function as an impressive functional unity—even far exceeding mere humans in computational abilities, and yet, such electronic-mechanical devices possess no more substantial unity than does the automobile.

On the other hand, human beings have a lived experience of existential unity which belies the reductionist simplicity of atomism. We are well aware of the incoming fire of all our senses presenting to our consciousness the multiple sensible qualities of numbers of physical objects external to our physical body. We are also aware that we can command and coordinate all the mental and physical powers of our person to ward off, say, the attack of an angry dog. Any abstract philosophical interpretation of unseen “atoms” which denies our immediate awareness of our own existential unity, as well as that of other things, like dogs and other persons, fails to comport with the total reality of human experience.

In the end, atomistic philosophical doctrines are no more realistic than Platonic ones, which insist that the Really Real world is not the one given in our direct experience of reality, but rather is some abstract expression of things actually unseen and unexperienced in our immediate awareness of ourselves and of the world around us.

In sum, the direct experience we have of ourselves is that we have capacities of sense experience, thought, and free choice which no individual atoms possess. Such qualitatively superior properties are not found in individual atoms. They are found solely in living organisms which exist as wholes governed by some formal principle which unifies and specifies them to be unified superior realities, such as plants, animals, or men. Physically inanimate objects—whether singular or somehow physically conjoined—simply do not have the qualitatively superior properties of living things. Such living properties are manifest solely when atomic units are part of a composite whole that exhibits that same nature throughout and activities proper to that nature. A dog is a dog from nose to tail because all of its parts act together to sustain the activities proper to the whole living canine organism.

Emergent Properties

Materialists will sometimes claim that sensory and intellectual activities found in man may not be found in bodily chemical components isolated in themselves, but that they “emerge” from atomic particles when they are combined into complex organic entities, such as animals and humans.

This may be true of simple electrical and mechanical properties, such as those manifested by atomic entities when combined into molecules. For example, hydrogen and oxygen are not liquids at room temperature, but when combined into water, they manifest that quality. But, certain qualities found in animals, such as the formation of images or sensation of objects of sight, manifest operations that are utterly beyond the limitations of merely physical objects and the atoms that compose them.

As I explain in my recently-published book, Rational Responses to Skepticism, (384-390), forming visual images or sensing visual objects entails knowing physically extended things as a whole, which is something no purely physical entity can do. What is universally true of all physical things, including atoms, is that they are physically extended in the space-time continuum, that is, with one part of them being in one part of space-time and another part being in another part of space-time. No physical thing can be in two distinct locations at the same time, unless it is one thing with diverse parts in different places—as our feet are in one place and our head in another.

In simple terms, that is why a television set presents the image of a dog by having thousands of diverse pixels illuminated or not illuminated over the breadth of the entire screen so as to form an image of the whole dog (from a single perspective). (A pixel or “picture element” is the smallest unit in a digital image.) But each pixel is either “on” or “off.” No single pixel represents the whole dog. TV sets do not “see” the objects they display on their screens. It takes a living dog to look at the screen and bark at what he sees as an entire dog.

This is also why every kind of physical recording, sensing, data processing device, and the like, necessarily uses some form of physically extended medium to display or express the content which it stores and/or manipulates. This is because it really “knows” nothing, but is simply retaining and/or rearranging the content of the objects it “apprehends” into a format that that living knowers alone can either sense or understand.

Thus, the “core storage and processing” mechanism of every data-processing machine is itself extended in space so that one part of it can represent one part of the “known” object and another part represents a different one, whether it be recorded on photographic film, a disc, a chip, tape, or any other physically extended object that can “point by point” represent something else—even written content, such as this article. This physical process of recording and manipulating data in no way constitutes actual cognition.

On the contrary, only an immaterial power that is not extended in space is able to grasp the whole of a sensed object as a single unified whole all at once. The dog sees the entire image of the dog on the TV screen, precisely because the dog’s sight—unlike the TV screen itself—is not composed of discrete physical parts that merely represent “on” or “off” of pixels, but rather is able to apprehend the whole as a whole because, being immaterial, it grasps the entire sensed object in a simple act that has no physical parts. (N.B., Grasping the “whole” does not mean seeing the object from all sides at once, but merely seeing the entire surface that presents itself from a given perspective.)

Some materialists claim that this immaterial ability of sense cognition to grasp whole objects in a simple act is merely a property that “emerges” from matter under suitable conditions—just as “wetness” appears in the place of hydrogen and oxygen gasses when they chemically combine. But this assertion clearly violates the principle of sufficient reason when applied to extended material things trying to apprehend physical objects as a whole. For it claims that discrete physical parts, which are themselves inherently unable to grasp the unity of whole sense objects, are still somehow the adequate reason for apprehending a visible object as a unified whole.

While “wetness” is still a physical property of certain chemicals in a combined state, being physically extended in space-time is precisely the limiting factor that makes physical things, as such, unable to explain the simplicity of the act of grasping a whole visible object all at once. That is, it simply is not in the nature of matter to do this. For matter to express all the content of a physically extended object in a single location is as impossible as it is for a TV screen to express an entire picture in a single pixel. That is why the material, as such, is not a sufficient reason for the performance of immaterial acts, such as seeing wholes.

To make the point even more clear, attempting to depict an extended object, like the image of a dog, on a single physical point would be like trying to put all its light content into a single pixel on a television screen. In the process all distinctions and visual content would be unified, but also no longer discernible. This is, in fact, what used to happen with the old electron tube TV sets when you turned them off. The horizontal and vertical output fields would collapse instantly, leaving for a few seconds nothing to see but a bright spot of light in the center of the screen, since all the picture data was now overlapped on itself in a single spot. The data was still there, but the image was destroyed!

Image and Concept

As if this limitation of matter were not enough to show that atomism alone cannot explain the lowest form of cognition, sensation, those acts which specify true understanding or intelligence are of an even higher form and are acts proper to true human beings alone.

Typical of the confusion which attends the empiricist mentality when confronted with traditional claims of the qualitative superiority of man over beast, the philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) exhibited total incomprehension of the essential difference between the sense life of animals and the intellectual life of true human beings. He failed utterly to grasp the incommensurable difference between the sense image and the intellectual concept.

Since Hume’s empiricism entailed him maintaining that all we know are sense impressions, he viewed all knowledge as being limited entirely to the sensory order. Thus our direct experience of external objects is composed of vivid and lively sense impressions, whereas our knowledge of ideas is taken from memory or imagination and is less vivid. Modern materialists tend to follow the same reasoning.

Since for them all experience is ultimately merely sensory, no sharp distinction between images and ideas or concepts exists. All knowledge is conceived in terms of neural patterns in the brain so that images and ideas or concepts are essentially of the same nature.

But, in reality, there are sharp and easily provable distinctions between images and concepts—such that images belong to a form of internal sensation that always exhibits dependency on matter, whereas concepts are of a clearly immaterial and non-imaginable character. Images are said to be material in that they always appear under the conditions of matter. This means we find them always singular, concrete, and with material qualities like shape, color, and size that can be imagined or even realized in a painting or sculpture. You can imagine a cow or a square, but it is always this cow or this square with this particular color, size, or shape, which is also experienced as extended in space.

On the other hand, the concept or idea of “cowness” or “squareness” cannot ever be imagined or realized concretely, since it must apply to all possible cows and squares, and thus, cannot have merely the particular colors or shapes that are found in an image of one or even a group of them. You can imagine all the humans gathered at Easter in St. Peter’s Square, but even they would only be imagined as a sea of heads and would not express all the diversity of characteristics found in the concept of humanity, which covers every possible human that has ever lived or could ever live! This is not to mention the evident fact that concepts themselves cannot be imagined. For example, what is your image of justice (which is not merely a blind lady with scales) or of beauty (which is not itself physically attractive as a concept) or even of the concept of a concept itself?

Moreover, we understand concepts or ideas, but not images. We see a concrete realization of an image, perhaps, but we never can see a concrete realization of a concept. For that very reason, abstract art results in odd representations of distorted singulars when trying to depict such universal concepts as humanity or vengeance.

The bottom line is that, while images (1) are material entities as evinced by them always being under the conditions of matter and (2) are shared by both animals and man, universal concepts apply to all possible concrete instances of their content and are, thereby, abstracted from any particular material qualities at all. This means that human intellectual concepts—the meanings that underlie our linguistic inventions called words—are strictly immaterial in nature, and thus, exceed the power of any purely material being to produce. Indeed, the ability to form such immaterial concepts is the very basis for the Thomistic proofs for the strict immateriality or spiritual nature of the human intellectual soul, since the ability to form such strictly non-material entities exceeds the capacity of anything that is purely material in nature.

All this is but a brief summary of a topic I have treated in far greater detail in my book referenced above. (162-176.)

Why Artificial Intelligence is an Oxymoron

What has all the above analysis got to do with the question of artificial intelligence in computers? It is this. The entire presumption that computers can exhibit intelligence like human beings is, in the first instance, based on the belief that animals possess some primitive form of intelligence in the form of an internal life of interacting images taking place in neural networks in their brains. Since Darwinian naturalistic evolution views man as being simply a highly developed animal, it maintains that thought processes in the human brain are simply better developed abilities to manipulate images which constitute primitive thinking in higher animals.

Therefore, if—following this materialistic reasoning—human intelligence is basically a form of complex manipulation of images within the human brain, and if the brain and its images are material in nature—the end product of blind evolutionary processes, then, in principle, there is no reason that electronic computers cannot be programmed to manipulate their own material data in such a way as to actually constitute thinking and the possession of intelligence.

Indeed, are not computers viewed as “thinking machines” already? Do we not program them to use symbolic logic to analyze highly complex intellectual problems and draw probabilistic or absolutely true conclusions?

So, are not these thinking machines already exhibiting intelligence—even though, at least until recently, under the direction of human programmers? What does the concept of artificial intelligence add to this equation except the notion that the computers will “take over” the whole process themselves—become self-programming—and engage in intellectual pursuits of their own? Is that not what is already being claimed for AI computers and even AI robots?

But there is one small fly in the ointment. While computers can be programmed to manipulate symbols we humans encode for them, and while they can present to us the logical inferences derived from such formal logic, this does not entail that such computers actually understand the intellectual concepts or ideas which these symbols represent!

That is, you can get a computer to write “Cogito, ergo sum.” But that does not mean it has even a single iota of understanding about what it just wrote!

As we have shown above, while animals have a sense life entailing material images in their cognitive faculties, this does not entail that they possess intellectual understanding of universal ideas or concepts. But, it is precisely the understanding of meanings or concepts which constitutes the essence of intelligence. In fact, the word, “intelligence,” is taken from the Latin “intus” and “legere,” which means “to read within.” That is to read within the very nature of things. “Intellegere” means “to understand.” And it is from “intellegere” that we derive the English term, “intellect.”

Since human beings alone understand concepts or ideas, not mere images, human beings alone possess true intellect. That is, man alone, among all the animals, is an intellectual creature of God.

Hence, the train rushing toward expecting intelligence from blind material evolution is derailed at the point at which we move from experiencing mere images to making the claim that there is actual understanding of the concepts with which these images are merely associated. Indeed, we may have an image of a blind lady holding scales which is associated with the concept of justice—but, the image itself conveys none of the understanding of this noble concept and all its implications!

Even some otherwise well-educated present commentators frequently refer to possible space aliens as being “sentient creatures” of God. But Merriam-Webster defines “sentient” to mean “responsive to or conscious to sense impressions; aware; finely sensitive in perception or feeling.”

In a word, sentient creatures are mere animals, who share the powers of sensation. They have sense experience. But, that does not entail that they possess any intellectual powers. What is happening here is that these commentators are failing to distinguish sensation from true intellection. Man alone on this planet possesses true intellect, because man alone has the power to understand concepts, form judgments, and reason to conclusions. That is why traditional philosophers define man as a “rational animal,” meaning an animal with intellectual powers enabling him to engage in true reasoning whose content he understands—not the mere sense experience and association of images found in brute animals.

Computers—no matter how sophisticated—fail to fulfill the meaning of any form of intelligent beings on two counts: (1) they are not even things whose substantial unity is constituted by a single substantial form making all its parts to share the same nature, and (2) they have no intelligence at all, since to have intelligence is to understand the natures of the things symbolically represented by computer language. Not only do they understand nothing, but, unlike even a dumb bunny, they do not have sensation of anything at all—since they lack the substantial unity needed to be a living animal that is able sense physical objects as a whole.

Artificial intelligence is an oxymoron because it is a simple contradiction in terms. If something is artificial, it lacks genuine intelligence—no matter how complex and impressive its external behavior may be programmed or even self-programmed to appear. If something has true intellectual experience, it cannot be a mere artificial object. Rather, it is a natural creature with an intellectual, spiritual soul directly created by God.

Bad News for Captain Kirk

As an addendum consistent with the philosophical principles explained in the analysis given above, I cannot but think of the thousands of times Captain Kirk and his crew on Star Trek employed transporters in order to journey to distant stars or planets or even just to the surface of a planet or back up to the mother ship.

The basic concept of a transporter is that it disassembles the molecular structure of the person and uses the format of that molecular structure to assemble the same person at some distant point. This theoretical device is based on the assumption that an object or person is simply a properly-configured collection of atoms—in accordance with the false philosophical claims of atomism.

The only problem with this process is that disassembling the atomic structure of the person also destroys his really existing substantial unity, which means—simply put—you just killed him!

Whatever structure is attempted to be reassembled from molecules at the end point of the “transfer” lacks any substantial form to unify it. Since that substantial form happens also to be a spiritual soul, unless the God of all creation deigns to give ultimate proper organization to those molecules by creating and infusing a human spiritual soul into that matter, nothing genuinely alive and human can appear at the other end of the transmission!

More importantly, if you are Captain Kirk, what was your body remains totally disassembled back at the starting point and you are dead. It makes me wonder how many times a “Captain Kirk” died in the years Star Trek was on television.

Dr. Dennis Bonnette retired as a Full Professor of Philosophy in 2003 from Niagara University in Lewiston, New York, where he also served as Chairman of the Philosophy Department from 1992 to 2002. He received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame in 1970. He is the author of three books, Aquinas’ Proofs for God’s Existence, Origin of the Human Species, and Rational Responses to Skepticism: A Catholic Philosopher Defends Intellectual Foundations for Traditional Belief, as well as many scholarly articles.

Featured: Creación de las aves [Creation of the Birds], by Remedios Varo; painted in 1957.

Between Political Theology and the Artificial Demiurge

The second decade of the 21st century is characterized by the growing centrality of biopolitics (understood as the political use of biomedical knowledge to control and condition life processes) in public discourse, encompassing both the beginning and end of life and the suspension of personal freedom for health reasons.

The scope of biopolitical elements in today’s society proves Pope Francis right when, in his effort to rehabilitate politics, he argues that everything that happens in the polis concerns the common good and has political significance. However, the emergence of biopolitics—together with the inclination to therapize politics—has been made possible by the advent of a relatively new ruling class, the technocrats, who place themselves above politics, and make good Paul Valery’s saying that politics consists in “preventing people from interfering in what concerns them.” And indeed, technocracy is by definition—and above all—the depoliticization of public affairs, at the cost of moral judgments losing their primacy to gradually give way to the generalization of an uncritical and passive attitude towards the reality of power, as Dalmacio Negro has repeatedly pointed out.

This moral desiccation of the political reflects, in short, the triumph of structural capitalism, in the sense that one of its pillars is that the primary function of the Law (and therefore of the legislator) is independent of value judgments and any teleological aspiration, and is limited to the regulation of realities, so that these can be expressed as free contractual relations, whose mercantile fulfillment is guaranteed by state institutions.

The importance of this conception of the law for the flourishing of Protestant capitalism was pointed out by Max Weber, when he noted that it was precisely the interests of the English capitalist classes and the guilds of lawyers that prevented the development of a codified legal system embedded in the bureaucracy of an administration of justice, creating the appropriate legal conditions—first in England and later in the United States of America—for the successful structural development of capitalism within a legal framework based on an “amorphous, precedent-bound, empirical law” that allowed legal professionals to give legal form to capitalist business in such a way that the axis of the political shifted to the industrialized economy, making technique the ultimate foundation of modern politeia.

The political implications of this divergence from the continental legal tradition were extensively studied by Carl Schmitt in his writings on the concept of Political Theology, which allowed him to draw a series of sociological analogies between the modern State and the Catholic Church, as the legitimate heir of the Roman legal tradition and the uninterrupted representative of its founder. However, although Schmitt himself called these studies in Weberian terms a sociology of juridical concepts, the truth is that Carl Schmitt’s political theology is more than a sociology or a history of ideas, and constitutes rather a methodology for establishing a correlation between concepts of a juridical-political nature and concepts of a theological-metaphysical type. “Method” comes from the Greek μέθοδος (“way to follow to go beyond”), for Meta (μετα, beyond), and Hodos (ὁδός, way).

Nota bene: throughout his work, Schmitt deploys four theological-political dimensions; one centered on sovereignty, others on representation, and a third on the Katechon, each of which he couples to a given theological-political category. Thus, Schmitt establishes a correlation between sovereign power and divine omnipotence; second, between the mediating capacity between the divine and the human by the Church and political representation; and third, between the idea of the Katechon and real political power.

In the context of apocalyptic literature, the function of the Katechon is to temper the eschatological enthusiasm of the early Christian church that anxiously awaits the return of Christ while at the same time trying to avoid the disorder and anarchy of the last days. Schmitt uses this concept in the key of Political Law, to advocate that it is imperative that chaos does not reach (nach oben kommt) the level of the State; for which a reins (Katechon) are necessary to restrain (niederhält) anarchy. Therefore, the figure of the Katechon as used by Schmitt is to be understood as an allegory of a strong state.

The path followed by Schmitt runs through the historical processes from which the structures common to the theological and the political emerged, characterized by the successive occupation of the central political pole by a social tendency corresponding to a given epochal period, from which a correlation between the spheres of the theological and the political can be derived. The three main phases were the shift from the theological to the metaphysical, from the metaphysical to the moral, and from the moral to the economic, each serving to rationalize a particular worldview that served as legitimization of the ostentation of political power by certain groups and not others. In more concrete terms, the process described by Schmitt encompasses the transition from monarchical absolutism/theism to constitutionalism/theism, which led to liberal democracy/laicism, and, according to Carl Schmitt, moves in the direction of anarchy/atheism.

It is easy to see that the constant element in this transition is the progressive secularization of sovereignty, or, in other words, a process of gradual negation of the principle of sovereignty under the rule of the economy-technique pair, whose logic (which is claimed to be inevitable and immutable) of the market grants it cultural and political hegemony, a phenomenon that we can characterize as an autopoietic process-progress, which, in addition to reproducing itself, recreates all the conditions necessary to renew itself and expand sustainably according to a technological determinism that requires less and less human intervention. (In ethical terms, the modern financial system is essentially amoral, as it accepts the subordination of production processes to the accumulation of capital without any social responsibility). Naturally, such a system operates without needing the hypothesis of God, because it renounces any transcendent perspective, so that neither religion, nor even politics, are in any way the apex of the whole. At the same time that this happens, the subjective perception of a differential between the temporal and the spatial is dissolved in the shrinking of geography, which, due to technological instantaneity, is on the verge of achieving the end of space before reaching the end of history. And if this system is, besides being self-referential, atheological, because it dispenses with God, it also dispenses with man, because from the systemic prism, the meaning of a conception of human nature is as redundant as that of the transcendent: a person is only a vector, a focal point around which a structure of productive expectations deriving from economic processes materializes. (According to Niklas Luhmann’s interpretation, of the concept of autopoiesis as applied to sociology, an autopoietic system is endowed with a self-referential character not limited to the level of its structures, but has the capacity to construct itself the elements that constitute it, which develop by having not only a meaning for itself, but also the capacity to have a meaning—Autopoiesis, Handlung und kommunikative Vertändigung. Zeitschrift fur Soziologie, Heft 4, 366-379).

As Carl Schmitt said, the new self-made human being is not a new God. Rather, what takes place is the dehumanization of society, and with it, its depoliticization, because history, in the political sense, ends when the eschaton arrives; but, as Walter Benjamin pointed out (“Capitalism as Religion”), this is an empty eschatology, which does not provide redemption or point to a beyond; on the contrary, because it is immanent to a concrete situation, it can only lead to social entropy. In this way, politics (in the aforementioned key of eticity to which Francis alludes in his eagerness to rehabilitate politics), comes to an end when the expectation of the Schmittian thematization of the eschaton opens up, accelerating the emptying of the political as a struggle for social justice and the defense of human dignity. This vacuum is then filled by technocracy and the cult of technology, which, as Habermas argues, tend to impose an unavoidable instrumental rationality whose result is that, rather than the power of technicians, technocracy is a set of techniques at the service of power. That is, the current crisis of politics, under the parameters set out here, is due to an idolatry that reflects the dominance of the economy and technology in today’s world, where politics is reduced to the performance of a merely managerial function, subordinated to the economy and subordinate to the technology that homogenizes thought and lapses the political conflict inherent to the pluralism of wills, arrogating to itself the sole representation of the objective interests of the majority.

Santiago Mondejar Flores is a consultant, lecturer and columnist on geopolitics and international political economy. This article appears courtesy of Posmodernia.

Technopoltics: Welcome to the Neo-Jungle

Modernity is based on the assumption that man dominates the world and can dispose of it as he pleases, with its catastrophic consequences for nature and the human community, from the Protestant Reformation onwards. Only the 20th century evolved to allow us to understand that the machine had replaced man in this process. It is the inevitable becoming of technology: “The destiny of the truth of all that is in its totality,” as Heidegger said. All this coincides with the critique that Heidegger made in this respect in his 1953 lecture on The Question Concerning Technology. Starting from very similar postulates, in certain aspects, to the notion of biopolitics that Foucault would develop decades later, Heidegger discovers that behind every technical project there is a clear political intentionality.

Although all objects created by man are oriented towards a concrete end, to which we give the name of “utility,” the essence of those same objects, which is inherent to them and stems from the political conception of those who have constructed the object, goes far beyond the notion of utility, to become imbricated within a broader vision of reality, something like a “technopolitics.” Technology is no longer a means to an end realized by man; instead, it has evolved into a model of transformation, consummated through the machines themselves, of imposing their logic on human and affective logic. Consequently, the once-shared notion of the essence of the human is now in grave danger.

Machines have become the subject of history. It is machines that produce machines, and in return men sell this product to men, by means of advertising. In this sense, as Günther Anders sees it, the two world wars are a consequence of the advance of technology. Moreover, their great legacy is neither political nor social, but technical. The development of cybernetics, born out of the embers of Europe after the great European pyre in the form of a conflict between brothers, stands as the most decisive event of the last century. Unleashing a new technopolitical landscape, the Third and Fourth Industrial Revolutions have taken over from the two world wars in history. They have thus generated a “Promethean gap” between what is consumed and what is produced. Consequently, we use what we have at our disposal, as evidenced by the example of Hiroshima. The fact that we have nuclear weapons means, following this machine logic, that at some point we will use them, as indeed we have already done.

It should not be forgotten that industrial logic was behind Auschwitz, for similar reasons: conceiving life according to the principle of utility makes us understand everything living, both nature and the men who are part of it, in a similar way to an exploitable raw material; even when what is produced, as in the case of the Extermination Camp, are corpses, following the highest possible principle of efficiency. At a later, post-industrial stage, we have moved from the military manufacture of pilotless weapons, the famous drones, to the civilian manufacture of driverless means of transport, the famous automatic cars, ever closer to their everyday implementation.

As Knut Hamsun and D. H. Lawrence, two neo-pagans and neo-Romantics, if there is a separation between the two, readily saw, there is no difference between socialism and liberalism in this sense. Modernity moves, with respect to technique, in an identical sense: favoring statolatry or, failing that, post-industrial advancement in the service of some large private enterprise. The apology of technology takes place in both cases, as evidenced by the so-called Cold War through its two contenders: the USA and the USSR. The result was ARPANET, a military project tested in California, from which the Internet was born. The space race was also a good example of this. However, over the decades, the dematerialization of machines has become evident: the development of the cloud, the implementation of the metaverse, microchips—towards an inorganic fetishism of merchandise. As is increasingly, insistently pointed out, the goal is to transform what is now a physical extension of us, the smartphone, so that it will soon be included in our own organism, so that virtual reality will be confused with the very materiality of the world, at least according to our particular perception of it.

The opposite of any notion of eternity or transcendence is the capitalist logic of programmed obsolescence, where the past transitions from perenniality to fluidity. Utility has replaced meaning when it comes to governing our lives: we must do things that are useful, valued from the point of view of quantity rather than quality, instead of actions with meaning. Products are not only replaceable, but they are often replaced, especially if the season is one of sales; destruction and replacement are thus assumed as something natural to favor production and consumption, with its consequent repercussions on the other facets of our life: programmed obsolescence also in the field of affections, courtesy of the simplicity of Tinder and the unbeatable company of Satisfyer. The smarter the machines are, the less intelligent we humans are; the more technically connected we are, the more socially cut off we are.

Cultural Logic Turned into Consumer Logic

Cultural logic has also become, in this sense, the logic of consumption. We use terms related to production to refer to artistic creation and its reception by the public. The spectacle that currently dominates the cultural expressions that capture the attention of the majority of the public has gained presence in our lives, thanks to the shortening of the production processes, which to a large extent adopts and even expands the logic of consumption. Once again, it is fiction that has best anticipated the human consequences of this transcendental historical change. Cyberpunk has captured more accurately than anyone else the possibilities of resistance to this process. While Theodore Kaczynski failed in his attempt to alert society, using delirious methods, and notions such as Jünger’s “living in the bush” (Waldgänger) are increasingly difficult to apply in this horizon of “total mobilization,” it is necessary to “ride the tiger,” to use the machine against the machine itself, to reverse the intentionality of current technopolitics and replace it, in exchange, with something else. Something still possible, as Nick Land or Guillaume Faye have pointed out, in a “multipolar” horizon, as Aleksandr Dugin calls it, in which new relevant actors are appearing on the world geopolitical map. An example of this is post-communist China, with its inherent dangers and opportunities.

Insignificant writers of our time such as William Gibson, J. G. Ballard, Bruce Sterling or Neal Stephenson were able to see it before anyone else: hackers and their equivalents are the heroes fighting against the Empire of technology from within. The definitive dematerialization of money, which is underway and may be consummated sooner than we think, with its consequent opposition by the supporters of Bitcoin and other similar currencies, which are difficult to regulate according to the parameters of statolatry and the “siliconization of the world,” is yet another battlefield. The world drawn in the 1980s by fiction, such as Blade Runner (1982), on a story by Philip K. Dick, has been far surpassed. Dystopia is already here and we can no longer close our eyes to this reality; the struggle for the imaginary is, first and foremost, a struggle for the domination of technopolitics.

The journey from the natural to the artificial ends, with what we have on the table, in nanotechnology—where biology, the domination of nature, and production are confused in a generalized way. Neither theism nor humanism, if the separation exists, are in a position to face this horizon with moralistic arguments. Please, let us be realistic. The conservatism that seeks to stop things at the most convenient moment is typical of an enlightened idealism that is totally harmful to our capacity for action.

Surveillance capitalism, with its techniques of repression in the political, social and affective spheres, as Land points out, moves in the same sphere of illusory control: “The fusion of the military and the entertainments industry consummates a long engagement: convergent TV, telecoms, and computers sliding mass software consumption into neojungle and total war. The way games work begins to matter completely, and cyberspace makes a superlative torture chamber. Try not to let the security-types take you to the stims” [Meltdown].

The flaws in the system, which thinks it has everything under control, are evident. The state of exception and controlled (and/or stimulated) dissidence make up a minefield of unpredictable consequences. Sooner rather than later, the collapse will come, according to the accelerationist predictions that guarantee tribal battles and the tinsel of a post-apocalyptic festival. Welcome to the digital jungle.

Guillermo Mas Arellano studies at Complutense University of Madrid.

Dromocraty: Speed as Power

In today’s world, speed plays a huge role. In everything. In the Special Military Operation (SMO), we found that in war—in modern warfare—it is also one of the key factors. How soon you can get intelligence, report it to the firing squad, and make the decision to strike, as well as quickly change where the firing assets have just been located, determines a great deal—almost everything. Hence the enormous role of UAVs and drones, satellite communications, and the time it takes to transmit enemy coordinates, the mobility of combat units, and the speed with which orders can be relayed to the firing unit. Clearly, this was underestimated during preparations for the SMO; and now we have to make up for it in a critical environment.

Similarly, we underestimated our dependence on the West for digital technology, chips, and precision manufacturing. Preparing for a frontal confrontation with NATO and at the same time relying on technological elements developed and produced either in NATO countries or in Western-dependent states is not evidence of great intelligence.

But this is not about Western-dependence now, but about the speed factor. The French philosopher Paul Virilio, who studied the importance of speed to modern technical civilization, proposed a special term: dromocracy. From the Greek dromos (speed) and kratos (might, power). Virilio’s theory is based on the assertion that under the new civilizational conditions, the winner is not the one who is stronger, smarter, or better equipped, but the one who is faster. It is speed that decides everything. Hence the desire to increase by any means the speed of processors; and, accordingly, all digital operations. This is what most of the technical innovative thought is focused on today. Everyone is competing for speed.

The modern world is a struggle for acceleration. And whoever is faster gets the most important prize—power, in all its senses and dimensions (political, military, technological, economic, cultural).

In this case, the most valuable in the structure of dromocracy is information. It is the speed of information transmission that is the concrete expression of power. This applies both to the functioning of the world’s stock exchanges and to the conduct of military action. Whoever is able to do something faster, gains complete power over the one who hesitated.

At the same time, dromocracy as a consciously chosen strategy, that is, the attempt to dominate time as such, can also lead to strange effects. The factor of the future comes into play. Hence the phenomenon of futures transactions and related hedge funds, as well as other financial mechanisms of a similar vein, in which major transactions are made with something that does not yet exist.

The ideal of media dromocracy is to be the first to report an event that has not yet happened, but which is quite likely about to happen. This is not just fake, it is working with the realm of the possible, the probable, the probabilistic. If we take a probable future event as something that has already happened, we buy time, and thus gain power. Another thing is that it may not happen. Yes, that it is possible; but sometimes the failure of expectation is uncritical; and vice versa, a confirmed forecast, taken as a fait accompli beforehand, offers enormous advantages.

This is the essence of dromocracy: the element of time is not simple, and the one who manages to subdue it gets total global power. In the development of supervelocity, reality itself is warped, and the laws of non-classical physics—anticipated in Einstein’s theory of relativity and to an even greater extent in quantum physics—come into play. Ultimate speeds change the laws of physics. And it is in this realm that the planetary struggle for power plays out today, according to Virilio.

Similar theories are found in a more applied and less philosophical field—the theory of network-centric warfare. And it is precisely this kind of network-centric warfare that we encountered in the course of the SMO in Ukraine. The main feature of such a war is the rapid transfer of information between individual units and centers of command. For this purpose, soldiers and other combat units are equipped with numerous differently oriented cameras and other sensors, the information from which converges to a single point. To this is added data from helicopters, UAVs and satellites. They are integrated directly with combat and firing units. And this full network integration provides the most important advantage—speed. This is exactly how the HIMARS, mobile group tactics and DRGs work. Starlink satellite communications was also used for this purpose.

Theories of network-centric warfare recognize that speed of decision-making often comes at the expense of their justifiability. There are a lot of miscalculations. But if you act quickly, then even after making a mistake, there is always time to correct it. Here the principle of hacking or DoS-attack is used—the main thing is to pound on the entire location of the enemy’s troops, looking for weaknesses, the back door. The losses can be quite high, but the results, if successful, are quite significant.

Further, network-centric warfare includes as its integral component open channels of information—primarily social networks. They do not simply accompany the conduct of hostilities, communicating, of course, only what is beneficial and what is not, hiding or distorting beyond recognition, but also operate with a probabilistic future. The principle of dromocracy again. What we perceive as fakes today is nothing more than probing and artificially stimulating a possible future. A lot of fakes turn out to be empty, just as attempts to break through hacking defenses are often futile, but occasionally they reach their goal—and then the system can be hijacked and subjugated.

Dromocracy in the political sphere allows for deviations from rigid ideological rules. In the West itself, for example, racism and Nazism are, to put it mildly, not openly encouraged. But in the case of Ukraine and some other societies, sharpened to defend the geopolitical interests of the West, an exception is made. Anti-Russian Nazism and Russophobia flourish there, but the West itself does not notice it, cleverly avoiding it. The fact is that for the rapid construction of a nation where none ever existed, and if there are in fact two peoples on one territory, you simply can’t do without nationalism. In order to do this as quickly as possible, we need extreme forms, including outright Nazism and racism. And this is again a question of dromocracy. It is necessary to create a simulacrum of a nation quickly. This is done by taking a radical ideology, any images and myths of our own exceptionalism, even the most ridiculous ones, and putting it all into practice quickly (with complete control of the information sphere; in the end, Western societies simply do not notice it).

Then comes the equally rapid propaganda of these ideas, which have nothing to do with Western liberal democracy. What follows is war, and the aggressors are portrayed as victims and the saviors as executioners. The main thing is to control the information. And if everything goes according to the plan of the globalists, then a quick resolution follows, and after that the neo-Nazi structures themselves are cleaned up just as quickly. Almost the same thing we saw in Croatia during the breakup of Yugoslavia. First, the West helped the Croatian Nazis, the neo-Nazis, and armed them against the Serbs; and then it cleaned them up so that there was no trace of them. The important thing is to do everything very, very quickly. Neo-Nazism quickly appeared, quickly fulfilled its role, quickly disappeared. And it’s as good as gone.

That’s exactly the secret of Zelensky. The Mercurial comedian was not chosen as the ringleader by accident. His psyche is volatile and prone to rapid change. The perfect politician for a fluid society. Now he says and does one thing; in a moment he is doing something else. And what was a second ago, no one remembers, as the speed of the information flow is steadily increasing.

And against this background, how do we look like? As soon as we began to act swiftly, decisively and almost spontaneously (the first phase of NWO), tremendous success followed. Almost half of Ukraine is under our control.

As soon as we began to slow down the operation, the initiative began to go to the enemy. This is where it turned out that the network-centric nature of modern warfare and the laws of dromocracy had not been properly taken into account. As soon as we took a reactive stance, switched to protection and defense, we lost the speed factor. Yes, the Ukrainian victories are mostly virtual; but in a world where the tail wags the dog, where almost everything is virtual (including finances, services, information, etc.), this is hardly enough. The anecdote about the two Russian paratroopers in the ruins of Washington, D.C. lamenting—”we lost the information war”—is funny, but ambiguous. After all, this is also something virtual, an attempt to probabilistically encode the future. When it comes to reality checks, however, not everything is that smooth. Here it is necessary either to bring down all dromocracy, virtuality, the whole network-centric postmodernity; that is, all modernity and the entire vector of the modern West (but how can this be done at once?); or to accept—even if in part—the rules of the enemy, that is, to speed ourselves up. The question of whether we Russians will be able to enter the realm of dromocracy and learn to win network-centric (including informational!) wars is not an abstraction. Our Victory depends directly on it.

To this end, we must first of all comprehend—in the Russian, patriotic way—the nature of time. The slowness with which we understand everything, the slowness with which we lag, and the slowness with which we put things into practice, even disproves the adage that “Russians harness long, but ride fast.” This is the point at which, if we don’t go very fast, the situation could become very dangerous.

The faster we do it, the faster we fix it. I am not even talking about outfitting our warriors with network attributes, speeding up the command process, and implementing effective information security measures. But it is simply necessary to be at par with a well-equipped enemy.

And again, if the “Voentorg” speculation on the price of minimum uniforms for the mobilized has not been immediately followed by a rapid wave of direct repression from the authorities, this is a very bad sign. Somebody in the government is imagining that we are still harnessing up, although we are already rushing at full speed. We need to come to grips with this as a matter of urgency. Otherwise, it may turn out that we are racing—how shall I put it gently—a bit in the wrong direction.

Dromocracy is no joke. It is not about overtaking the West. It should be swept up in its dizzying hubris. But to do that we have to act with lightning speed ourselves. And sensibly. Russia no longer has the right or the time for slumber and lethargy.

Alexander Dugin is a widely-known and influential Russian philosopher. His most famous work is The Fourth Political Theory (a book banned by major book retailers), in which he proposes a new polity, one that transcends liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism. He has also introduced and developed the idea of Eurasianism, rooted in traditionalism. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitica.

Featured: “Espansione x velocità Velocita d’automobile” (Expansion x Speed Velocity of a Car), by Giacomo Balla; ca. 1913-1914.

Crimea’s Energy Independence

From August 26 to 30, a group of international journalists had the opportunity to visit Crimea and see what effects the European Union sanctions might be having. I was among that group of international journalists. As a reminder, Crimea again became part of Russia in 2014. In March of that year, a referendum was held in Crimea, where the absolute majority of citizens were in favor of unification with Russia. This is not surprising considering that even while Crimea was part of Ukraine, the majority of citizens were pro-Russian and spoke Russian.

When the legitimate government in Kiev was overthrown during the Maidan revolution, and a new anti-Russian government brought into power with the help of Washington, the local population in Crimea did not accept it. As people in Crimea say: “We have been waiting for a long time to come back to our motherland, Russia.” This is exactly how the return of Crimea to Russia began.

However, after the return of Crimea to Russia, the harsh sanctions of the European Union against Crimea immediately followed. In short, these sanctions by the European Union consist of a complete import and investment ban for the area of Crimea and Sevastopol, the Black Sea fleet port.

And this is where we come to the key question—how did the sanctions affect Crimea? Based on everything I’ve seen, I can safely say that the sanctions have had a positive effect.

Here are some examples:

In Crimea, wine production is increasing every year. A huge amount of money has been invested in new wineries as well as in improving the quality of the wine. Today, Crimean wine is better than most European wines. Sanctions have had a positive effect on wine production, as the large Russian market, plus the Asia Pacific region, were opened up to Crimean wineries. Notable Crimean winemakers today include: Alma Valley’, Massandra, Inkerman, Gold Beam, Koktebel, Magarach, Suter, Novyi Svit, and Legend of Crimea.

Apart from wine, which has been produced in Crimea for more than 2000 years, I could see that other areas are rapidly developing in Crimea, primarily agriculture, the results of which are visible to everyone.

Crimea is also developing technologically, so today batteries for electric cars are being produced there. With these batteries, electric cars will be supplied all over Russia, and in the coming years, exports outside of Russia will also begin.

Certainly, tourism has a very important place in the economy of the Russian Republic of Crimea. What can be immediately noticed when arriving in Crimea on the new highway that was built and which is excellent is the huge number of tourists.

Also, there is improvement in infrastructure, such as the building of new roads and repair of old ones which were allowed to badly deteriorate during Ukrainian rule.

First Made-in-Russia Turbines

At the Saki gas combined heat and power plant of the KRYMTETS company, we could see that a two-year experimental period of operation of the gas turbine units, made in Russia for the first time by domestic specialists, specifically for this project, was 100 percent completed and without the use of imported components.

The need to build such a natural gas-fired power station arose eight years ago. After Crimea returned to Russia, Ukraine abruptly cut off the power supply of the peninsula by blowing up the main power lines. Crimea, being 80 percent energy dependent on the mainland, plunged into darkness. The peninsula was urgently provided with mobile power systems and began to actively build new, local generation facilities.

During a visit to the Saki gas-fired power plant, Crimea. [Photo: Slavisha Batko Milacic].

A complication during this process was the sanctions which made impossible to bring imported equipment into Crimea, and almost all generation facilities in Russia were built with the use of Siemens and General Electric’s equipment. At the time, Russian manufacturers developed and produced exclusive equipment specifically for the Saki gas-fired power plant. Therefore, all the turbines, boilers and other generating equipment of the plant have factory-set serial numbers, starting from the first one.

The Saki power plant, with its total capacity of 120 megawatts (MW), was built in a year—a record-breaking time for such kind of projects. Usually, it takes at least two-and-a-half years. As well, the plant was built without secondary sources pf funding. The funding was solely undertaken by the KRYMTETS company.

After the launch of the new gas-fired power plant, all the attention of specialists was riveted on the operation of the equipment—no one knew for sure how it would work when fully operational. But now the pilot project of the first Russian gas-fired power plant based on Russian equipment and Russian software has been completed after a two-year test period, and in conditions of increased loads of the Crimean region, proving that Russian equipment works with high efficiency and has proven itself better than imported know-how. This result means that the turbines used at the Saki plant may be recommended for installation at other natural gas-fired power stations in the Russian Federation; and also, after meeting domestic demand, they will be exported to friendly countries. At the same time, the Saki plant will become training ground and learning center for specialists who will operate this equipment at power plants in other regions and countries.

In addition, this year, the first virtual power plant in Russia was put into commercial operation on the basis of the Saki plant. This is the digital twin of a real power plant and is a prototype of the plant’s existing production facilities: turbines, boilers, auxiliary equipment, electrical installations, etc. The digital model helps to change the parameters of the equipment and make improvements much faster and safer than working in manual mode. The created software product is a domestic development as well and was created from scratch by Russian specialists.

And now the management of all the processes at the Saki plant is carried out only with the use of Russian software.

Currently, representatives of the largest Russian energy supply companies regularly visit the Saki plant to get acquainted with the operation of equipment in industrial conditions and prepare for its implementation at their own facilities.

Slavisha Batko Milacic is a historian and independent analyst, and writes about the situation in the Balkans and Europe.

Russian Cosmism: A Union of Spirit and Science?

The term “Russian cosmism” does not designate a school of thought that structured by theses, institutions or a precise program. Rather, the cosmists constitute a nebulous group of Russian authors of the 19th and 20th centuries, who have in common the idea of a union of the spirit and science, through utopian and grandiose visions. Two of them have particularly marked Russian history, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Nikolai Fyodorov.

On October 4, 1957, radio amateurs all over the world, for the first time, received a signal from space. It wasn’t aliens on the loose, but Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite in history, put into orbit by the Russians. This undeniable success of Soviet technoscience was of course also presented as a triumph of dialectical materialism. It was however forgetting in passing all that the Soviet aerospace owed to a man with conceptions very far from Marxism-Leninism— Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) spent most of his life in Russia, in the remote region of Kaluga (he was nicknamed “the eccentric of Kaluga”). It is there, in a small and modest wooden house, that he laid the theoretical and technical foundations of aerospace. Today, all historians of science (even American) recognize Tsiolkovsky as the one who laid the scientific foundations of space travel. He also wrote several science-fiction novels, with the avowed aim of making the new generations desire to go into space. Among his readers were Valentin Glouchko (who, along with Sergei Korolev, became a pillar of the Soviet space program), as well as Yuri Gagarin, the first man to go into space.

In order to make Tsiolkovsky a hero as a “brilliant scientist from the people” (a monument to his glory was erected in Moscow), Soviet propaganda had to make many aspects of his thought totally taboo—especially since for Tsiolkovsky space travel was not a goal in itself, but a means to the service of a project even more disproportionate—the perfection of humanity.

A Universe Full of Angels

Tsiolkovsky thought that God had created a universe in which all matter is also spirit (to be exact, Tsiolkovsky affirmed that he did not believe in God, but in a perfectly good, omniscient and omnipotent supreme being, who had created the world; which makes one think of the well-known joke of the Hellenists: it was not Homer who wrote the Iliad, but someone who had the same name as him). This conception (which he qualifies as panpsychist) means that the matter present everywhere in the universe is endowed in itself with a spiritual force, with a form of consciousness which makes it evolve towards higher and higher forms: mineral, vegetable, animal, human, then…

Tsiolkovsky believed that to spread in space was the only way for humanity to ensure in a certain way its survival, to avoid an extinction of the human species in the event of terrestrial catastrophe (a position that certain very media-oriented scientists today share). But he added that man could only spread in space if he took in hand his own evolution and radically modified his own body, in order to adapt to extraterrestrial conditions (a concept that contemporary science fiction calls panthropy). To emancipate oneself from the Earth, implied for Tsiolkovsky, to emancipate oneself also from our animality (sexuality, mortality, need to eat and drink). Eventually, human beings would spread in the whole universe, and become “etheric” beings, magnificent and immortal (this transformation implying moreover the elimination of all the terrestrial life forms not reaching these standards of perfection).

In the eyes of the “eccentric of Kaluga,” this transformation into “etheric” beings had already been accomplished by extraterrestrials. By exploring space, humanity would end up meeting these extraterrestrial “angels,” living on heavenly planets. While waiting for this day, these “angelic” beings maintain the Earth, a planet that is not very evolved at the moment, in a sort of galactic quarantine. But they try nevertheless to communicate with us, to guide us, despite the gap that separates us. Tsiolkovsky himself said that he had communicated with these “space angels” (in the 1970s, some people reused Tsiolkovsky’s theories to imagine a Russian version of the “ancient astronauts theory,” according to which the ancient religions were inspired by visits from extraterrestrials).

Tsiolkovsky never really received an academic education. He was in all respects a self-taught man. This made his scientific work all the more impressive. But when he arrived in Moscow at the age of 16, he took advantage of the reading advice of an obscure librarian, and then quickly joined the group of young students that this librarian gathered around him. This man, who took the young Tsiolkovsky under his wing, was named Nicolai Fedorov.

The Resurrection of the Dead

If Tsiolkovski is the most recognized cosmist on the scientific level, Nicolas Fedorov (1829-1903) is the first of them. Totally unknown during his lifetime, he generally shared his thoughts only with a selected circle of companions. Two of his disciples published his writings after his death in a single book: The Philosophy of the Common Work. Unlike Tsiolkovsky, Fedorov always saw himself as a faithful member of the Orthodox Church. In his eyes, humanity had an important and active eschatological role to play in the completion of the creation initiated by God. He thus conceived his thinking as Christianity, but Christianity in a radically reinterpreted sense. Christ had shown the way by resurrecting at Easter: Christianity was thus to be the religion of the resurrection of the dead, of the resurrection of the dead by properly human, scientific and technical means.

Nicolai Fedorov

For Fedorov, death is either a disintegration, i.e., a dissolution in multiplicity, or a fusion, i.e., a dissolution in unity (he considered the Holy Trinity, the unique God at the same time one and multiple, as the archetype of immortality). However, he also considered that disintegration and fusion are natural forces. Wherever he looked, he saw in the natural world only the reign of death. Fedorov insisted on the national and typically Russian character of this way of looking at nature. The romantic conception of nature was a fantasy of the urban bourgeois and “soil-less.” The muzhik, on the other hand, knew that the taiga does not offer any gifts, and that survival is always conquered over murderous nature. By taking control of natural forces through scientific and technical means, humanity would be able to defeat death itself and resurrect all its ancestors. At this point, all human beings who have ever lived must be resurrected. For Fedorov, this is an absolute moral duty, a matter of filial piety towards those who have gone before us, and thanks to whom we exist. We must give life back to those who gave it to us. Reproduction, sexuality, death, suffering, eating, drinking, all these natural things will disappear when the living and the dead are regenerated in new and immortal bodies, having little to do with our present animal body (this rejection of the “animal body” of man is common to many cosmists). This regenerated and invulnerable mankind, and also very numerous, will be able to spread into space, to settle on other planets, and to make the universe a paradise (Fedorov envisaged that the planet Earth itself could become an immense spaceship, thanks to the control of cosmic forces). Such was the communal work envisaged by Fedorov.

The philosopher Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900) noted, with a certain irony, that Fedorov’s project was not a plan for the next thousand years, but rather a plan for the next ten thousand years. But if Fedorov suspected that his contemporaries would never take his ideas seriously, he had no doubt about their long-term feasibility. He believed that many peoples were dispersing and wasting their creative energies on war, democracy and capitalism. The realization of the common work required that mankind channel its forces and unite under an autocratic regime. This was, for Fedorov, the messianic vocation of the imperial throne of Holy Russia. The tsar, God’s chosen monarch, was to unite all countries and peoples under his rule for the eschatological fulfillment of the common work.

The Desert will Become a Garden Again

A few years before his death, Fedorov was invited by one of his disciples to visit the Pamir Mountains. This extremely desolate region made a strong impression on him. He saw in the Pamir a symbol of both Mount Meru (the sacred center of the world in Hinduism) and the Garden of Eden (for Fedorov, all religions derived from the same sophia perennis—the cult of the ancestors), a land of origin of the Indo-Europeans, transformed into a desert by the ignorance and barbarism of men. The first task of the common work was therefore to turn the Pamir into a garden, to make life blossom again where death reigned, just as, by dispersing into space, regenerated humanity would fill a universe, hitherto filled with death, with life. This revived Pamir, the triumph of life and science over death and ignorance, was to become the center of a united world dedicated to the realization of the common work under the leadership of the tsar.

After having reviewed the thought of the two most important cosmists in history, a question naturally arises—what to make of this improbable muddle of ideas that are at least astonishing, if not frankly bizarre, and sometimes even a little unhealthy? Tsiolkovsky and Fedorov were certainly “sweet dreamers,” but they were certainly not “lunatics.” As an aerospace pioneer, Tsiolkovsky is undoubtedly one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. Fedorov, on the other hand, impressed some of the greatest minds of the Russian Silver Age: Tsiolkovsky, of course, but also Dostoyevsky, Soloviev, Tolstoy, Florensky, Vernadsky, Bulgakov, Berdiaev. However, among all these eminent scientists, philosophers and novelists, none of them really took up the strange philosophy of Fedorov’s common work.

As we have already said, “cosmism” is not a school of thought, and there is no such thing as “Fedorovism.” What these brilliant minds admired in Fedorov was not a system of thought or specific theses, but rather this will to rethink human progress in general, and scientific progress in particular, in a spiritual framework. Fedorov believed that science without spirituality and spirituality without science would both lead humanity to catastrophe. His philosophy of the common work, once brought back to its fundamental intuition, can thus be understood as a utopian vision aiming at avoiding the announced catastrophe. This is what, in Fedorov (as well as in the other cosmists), struck his contemporaries, and continues to be striking today—this vision of a union of spirit and science, in a creative and utopian act of synthesis, giving its legitimacy and its place to human activity, genius and progress, in the eschatological realization of the divine transfiguration of the cosmos. The cosmists were certainly very strange thinkers, but they have undoubtedly more to say to us than the transhumanists and the fundamentalists who swarm us today.

Grégoire Quevreux currently teaches philosophy at the Institut Protestant de Théologie de Paris, and is completing a doctoral thesis on process theology under the direction of Professor Cyrille Michon. This article appears through the kind courtesy of PHILITT.

Featured: “Captured asteroid,” by Andrey Sokolov; postcard, 1965.

Hybrid Warfare in the Gray Zones

“He who knows how to wage war conquers another’s army without fighting; takes another’s fortresses without laying siege; crushes another’s state without keeping his army out long,” says the famous ancient Chinese treatise The Art of War, whose authorship is traditionally attributed to the military commander and strategist Sun Tzu (6th-5th centuries B.C.).

Surprisingly, this statement is still very relevant. Moreover, Sun Tzu can be called one of the first theorists in the field of hybrid warfare, which seems to be a modern phenomenon. The treatise of the ancient Chinese philosopher still serves as the basis for theoretical approaches in the activities of the intelligence services of many countries, including the United States.

Speaking of the role of the United States in the formation of the concept of hybrid warfare, it is worth noting that this country was the first to develop and apply the term. Over time, the American (and generally Western) concept of hybrid warfare has been constantly changing, causing a lot of controversy among many researchers and analysts studying hybrid warfare. One such analyst is Leonid V. Savin, who in his book Hybrid War and the Gray Zone examines in detail the genesis of the concept of hybrid warfare, the scholarly developments of Western authors and the further transformation of the term. From the title of the book, it is easy to understand that in addition to hybrid warfare, the work examines another no less remarkable phenomenon, namely, the “gray zone. Thus, in his book Savin examines in detail the evolution of the Western concept of hybrid warfare and the gray zone, and analyzes the changes that have occurred in the approaches to the study of these phenomena in the context of the changing geopolitical picture of the world.

Before turning to the content of the book, I would like to say a few words about the author. Savin is a political scientist, the author of many books on geopolitics and contemporary conflicts, including such works as Towards Geopolitics, Network-centric and Network Warfare: An Introduction to the Concept, Ethnopsychology: Peoples and Geopolitical Thinking, New Ways of Warfare: How America Builds its Empire, and many others. He is the editor-in-chief of the information and analytical portal Geopolitika.ru, following the Eurasian approach. In this regard, even before reading the book, one might assume that Savin in his work will speak in the spirit of Eurasianism, criticizing the unipolar globalist model of the world, promoted by the United States. As it turns out, these assumptions are not mistaken.

Hybrid War and the Gray Zone consists of three parts, which, in turn, are divided into smaller sections. However, before proceeding directly to the consideration of the concepts of “hybrid warfare” and “gray zone,” L.V. Savin highlights some of the changes that have occurred in modern conflicts in recent years. In addition, the author discusses new trends in international relations, in the context of the current geopolitical reality. According to the political scientist, in our complex and contradictory world, the problems of new forms of conflicts should be approached as objectively and cautiously as possible, because a common understanding of any modern problem is not so easy to find.

The first part of the book is devoted to the evolution of the term “hybrid warfare,” from its first mention in 1998 to the present day. Savin examines various interpretations of the concept developed by the Western military-scientific community. Thus, the author studies and analyzes the works of R. Walker, J. Pinder, B. Nemeth, J. Mattis and F. Hoffman, C. Gray, M. Booth, J. McQueen, N. Freyer R.W. Glenn, B. Fleming, as well as US doctrinal documents on hybrid warfare, including the US understanding of Hybrid Warfare (2010), Guide to Organizing a Force Structure to Counter Hybrid Threats (2015), the Military Strategy Analysis of the US (2015), TRADOC G-2, Joint Operating Environment 2035, and the Joint Force in a Contested and Disordered World (2016). In addition, Savin examines the approaches of NATO and the EU, which have developed their own concept of hybrid warfare.

It is worth noting that a separate place in all theoretical developments of Western countries on the problems of hybrid warfare is given to Russia. The author of the book devotes a separate chapter to this phenomenon. In particular, Savin describes in detail the approach of U.S. Army Major Amos Fox, who assesses Russia’s actions in the context of hybrid warfare.

After reading this chapter, it is clear why the term “hybrid warfare” is so difficult to understand. The answer is simple: there is no single definition of “hybrid warfare” because, first, each researcher interprets the concept differently, and second, it is constantly changing and evolving depending on the geopolitical context.

In addition, the term is very ambiguous and is interpreted by all sides in their own interests. As for Western interpretations of the concept of hybrid warfare, most of them state that hybrid warfare is waged primarily by Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. Obviously, labeling these countries as “hybrid actors” is largely meaningless, since there are hardly any countries (much less major powers) that are not currently engaged in hybrid warfare. Hybrid warfare is the new reality (is it new?) in which modern society exists. Moreover, the label of “hybrid actor” is itself part of the hybrid warfare waged by Western countries, among others.

The second part of the book, as one might guess, is devoted to the study of another concept—the “gray zone.” This part again begins with how Russia is labeled. This time Savin cites the example of a statement by Brian Clark of the Hudson Institute, who noted that “Russia is waging an aggressive war in the gray zone against Japan.” Thus, the author begins the topic for a new discussion—about the interpretations of the concept of the “gray zone.”

The second part also examines the evolution of the concept, giving interpretations by the U.S. State Department and Congress, as well as by major think-tanks such as RAND and CSIS. It is worth noting that many approaches are accompanied by illustrations in the form of diagrams, which makes it much easier to understand one or another interpretation of the “gray zone” concept. Savin considers two interpretations of the “gray zone”—as a disputed geographical area, and as an instrument of political struggle. The author presents the cases of China, which has disputed territories in the South China Sea, and Israel with its long-standing activity in the gray zone.

The concept of the “gray zone” is no less ambiguous than the previously considered concept. As in the case of hybrid war, Savin also believes that the “gray zone” in the coming years will serve as a special label for any actions of certain states, primarily Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. After reading this section, one can draw a conclusion similar to the one given earlier on hybrid warfare; and this is no accident: the concepts of “hybrid war” and “gray zone” are indeed very similar and interchangeable in many ways; it is not immediately clear what their difference is, and whether there is one at all. This is what the author devotes the third part of the book to.

Thus, in the third part, the political scientist combines the two concepts under study by analyzing various documents and studies in which “gray zone” and “hybrid warfare” act as synonyms. This part of the book definitively answers the question of whether a war can still be fought without direct combat operations. In addition, the last case study examined by the author, the Russian special operation in Ukraine, once again proves that the actors of hybrid warfare and actions in the “gray zones” are not only Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, but also the “collective” West. New instruments and methods of confrontation are indeed regularly introduced and tested in hot spots by different countries, including both Russia and NATO member states and other international actors.

As for the differences between the two terms, they are indeed difficult to define, and the third part of the book confirms this. As many of the studies examined by Savin show, mixing the concept of “gray zone” and “hybrid warfare” is indeed possible. This phenomenon is most clearly explained by Arsalan Bilal, a member of the Arctic University research group: “The hybrid war itself can take place in the gray zone, and the gray zone, respectively, creates conditions for the hybrid war.”

In summarizing, Savin repeats the thesis that the West will continue to label Russia a “hybrid actor” and accuse it of malicious actions in the gray zone, using political rhetoric and fabricated data to do so. In addition, Savin explains why it is important and necessary to study Western approaches and experience in hybrid warfare.

Speaking about the overall impression of the book, we can say without a doubt that it greatly adds to the body of knowledge on the topic of hybrid warfare, which is currently more relevant than ever. The book will be especially useful for those readers who study new forms of conflicts—information confrontation, cyber warfare, economic wars, etc.

It is also worth noting some nuances. First, despite the small size of the book, one cannot say that it is easy to read. It contains a lot of complex terminology, which is not suitable for the unprepared reader. But we should not forget that this work is intended for a specialist audience—researchers and theorists in the field of conflictology, international relations and military strategy; people who make political decisions and are engaged in the development of information content. In effect, to read this monograph, one must have a certain knowledge base, at least in the field of international relations.

Second, for the most part, the work describes Western research on the topic at hand. Although the author’s point of view and sentiment can be felt “between the lines” while reading the book, I would have liked to see more commentary and explicit discussion by Savin in the work. This would have helped to delve even deeper into the topic of hybrid wars and “gray zones,” as well as to better understand what Western experts are trying to convey to the readers of their works. An expert’s comments are never superfluous.

After reading this book, two important conclusions can be drawn. First, hybrid wars are a reality in which we will always have to exist. We ourselves are part of hybrid warfare; and, in many ways, we are its object. In the age of information society and technology, there is no other way—we have become part of this geopolitical reality whenever we access social networks, read the news, turn on the television, etc. We are all objects of pervasive influence, objects of an endless flow of information that serves the interests of one side or another of the hybrid warfare. The second conclusion, which follows from the first, is the need to be able to perceive critically any information. Even if the source is authoritative (and the sources given in the monograph are very authoritative), all of them also serve someone’s interests and are always biased, as Savin’s book readily proves.

Anastasia Tolokonina is a graduate student, Department of Journalism Theory and History, at the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia. [This review comes to us at the kind courtesy of Geopolitika.]

Featured: “Die Schachpartie” (The Chess Game), by Lucas van Leyden; painted ca. 1508.

Cybernetics: Golem of the Modern World

Cybernetics. The term is obsolete; its meaning almost entirely lost. And yet it retains an aura of hypermodernity, to which the futuristic imagination it conjures up is doubtless akin. It is possible that sometimes the imagination is more clairvoyant than word-usage, and that this word does not belong to the past but to the present of humanity and to its future.

This may be the case for this forgotten discipline whose root is to be found in cyberspace, at the cutting edge of technology. It could even be that what was in its time an attempt at a scientific revolution of a magnitude inversely proportional to its astonishing disappearance from collective memories, also theoretically structures technical modernity as no other discipline could dream of doing. Such is the thesis of Baptiste Rappin, professor of management philosophy at the University of Lorraine, a thesis supported by several of his articles, now gathered in a single volume, entitled, Les origines cybernétiques du management [The cybernetic origins of management].

Rappin has indeed undertaken a genealogical investigation which has led him to resituate the origins of modern theories of organization and management within cybernetics, an interdisciplinary intellectual and scientific movement of the 1940s and 1950s, which has since been forgotten—an oblivion maintained by modern theorists of organization and management, readily seduced by the amnesia of this genesis from which were born all the concepts they use; surely because, as the Nietzscheans know, genealogy weakens ideology, especially when ideology reaches the stage of hegemony so that one can hardly challenge the sciences of management and economics. On the contrary, as the introduction to this anthology reminds us, Rappin’s constant work of unveiling the theology of the “pan-organizational” trend places him at odds with the majority of management scientists, who conceive of their discipline only through the prism of utility.

More importantly, this genealogical research also leads Rappin to differentiate himself from the critical studies movement, which fails to grasp the specificity of pan-organizational ideology, despite its critical ambition. This specificity resides essentially in the biological—then cybernetic—concept of information. Being unable to detect this central role of information and its manifestations, critical studies have made themselves blind to the “new spirit of capitalism” (title of the book by Boltanski and Chiapello), which characterizes the modern society of information, and thus they are doomed to missing their target.

Information and Organization: The Roots of Cybernetics

To understand this new spirit is to understand its origin, which Rappin identifies in cybernetics. Cybernetics is an intellectual movement that took off thanks to the Macy conferences of the 1940s, bringing together several scientific specialists whose ambition was nothing less than to found a new conceptual matrix that would serve as a unifying basis for all the sciences, both “hard” and “human.” This interdisciplinary refoundation drew largely from biology, in particular the concept of organization.

The other central concept that the cybernetics movement borrowed from the physical sciences was that of information, whose connection with the first constituted the founding principle of cybernetics. Norbet Wiener gives the following definition: “Information is the name for the content of what is exchanged with the external world as we adapt to it and apply the results of our adaptation to it. The process of receiving and using information is the process we follow in adapting to the contingencies of the surrounding environment.”

It was thermodynamics, now surpassed, which allowed cybernetics to articulate these two concepts. Indeed, information is only the substratum of thermodynamic exchanges; it is the “content” which cannot be reduced to the container (energy) and cannot be measured. It is also thermodynamics and the reinterpretation of its second principle that allows Wiener to define it negatively as the inverse of entropy: “Just as the quantity of information in a system is the measure of its degree of organization, the entropy of a system is the measure of its degree of disorganization; one is simply the negative of the other.” As Rappin points out, in-formation must here be understood as shaping, opposing entropy, that is, undifferentiatedness.

Information and its accumulation, organization, constitute respectively the arche and the telos of cybernetics. Nevertheless, not all information is information, since even it does not escape entropy. The content of a message can indeed get lost in the “noise,” a concept of the communication sciences that has been effortlessly transferred to the classical economics, thanks to cybernetics. This is where the last cornerstone concept of cybernetics comes in: the feedback loop, which allows the highest possible degree of organization by controlling the information in order to avoid its loss. However, any model of control implies the establishment of finalities without which no measurement is possible. This teleological problem has the merit of forcing cybernetic theories to clarify their foundations and, by placing them in the history of ideas, to see their limits and to formulate a critique.

Two main philosophical tendencies emerge from the reading of Rappin’s work. The first, which could be described as pragmatist-consequentialist, clearly positions itself in relation to the history of philosophy, by means of a binary rereading of the latter, and whose overcoming leads to a non-dogmatic positivist approach. The second one differs from it by a systematic aim, in the literal sense, at the end of which its philosophy is colored by religion.

A Modern Positivism

The first of these currents finds its epistemological expression in knowledge management, which regards the concept of knowledge in relation to that of data and information. Data corresponds to the most “raw” element of any physical phenomenon. Information corresponds to the relationship between data and agents. And knowledge corresponds to the information that the agents judge to be of priority through their interaction with the world. Knowledge is here synonymous with cogniscience; that is to say with (cognitive) activity—nm it is the interaction of an agent with limited resources with the raw and unlimited data of the world. This discrepancy between limited resources and unlimited matter leads to a relativism that is both epistemological and teleological: knowledge being an action, its veracity can only be measured by its consequences.

It is this pragmatism, taken from the Americans Dewey and James, that allows the theorists of knowledge management to offer a reconciliation to the history of philosophy, which they consider to be entangled in a sterile dualism between rationalism and empiricism. “The true is everything that turns out to be good in the realm of belief” (William James)—becomes “knowledge is a justified true belief” (Nonaka and Van Krogh).

However, this conception, whose proponents include the illustrious Wang Yangming, is only problematic when the “justification” of a belief is established only in terms of its practical consequences. Rappin shows us that the main theoretical difficulty of knowledge management is also practical, and lies entirely in the question of the evaluation of the evaluation. The evaluation of a belief by its consequences only pushes back the epistemological problem to the evaluation of the consequences. The problem is very concrete in all modern organizations in which this evaluation of the consequences is nothing other than the dedicated feedback process, which it is up to the managers to analyze in order to decide on the new goals of their organization.

Relativist pragmatism is therefore forced to introduce a subjective element, which the theological current dismisses by building a system of religious inspiration. It is thus through a detour via theology, in particular the Jewish thought of the Renaissance, that cybernetics reaches the stage of theoretical unity.

Cybernetics and God

The whole of organized Information, assuming all the attributes of divine perfection, takes the name of “collective Intelligence;” or the name given to it by the theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—noosphere. Also, for the latter, it is the force that opposes the chaos of entropy: “the descending flood of Entropy, doubled and balanced by the rising tide of a Noogenesis!” This negative definition explicitly given by Wiener precisely allows for avoiding the subjectivist pitfall of knowledge management by abstracting information, and Intelligence, from human representation. Intelligence (Collective) is thus entirely in the act, “everywhere distributed, constantly valued, coordinated in real time” (Pierre Lévy). In terms of Aristotelian entelechy, Collective Intelligence is to itself its efficient, formal and final cause: God or “that which moves without being moved” and opposing the entropic non-movement.

Another major theorist of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, founded it even more explicitly in theology by relying on the writings of Rabbi Loew, better known as the Maharal of Prague. However, Loeb’s theo-cosmological conception has the particularity of inscribing division and duality at the beginning of the universe—the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, bet, thus appears before the first in the Torah and is present in the first word of “beginning” (bereshit). The Exile, before being the historical one of the people of Israel, is metaphysical and designates the imperfection and incompleteness of all things following the Rupture. The eschatological horizon of redemption then becomes that of the search for the lost Unity, the “victory of the one over the rupture” (Neker). Wiener transposes this rupture scientifically to the notion of entropy, the force that splits the unity of the universe. From the entropic chaos, only a few enclaves of organization emerge, the understanding and multiplication of which by human scientific activity should make it possible to restore the lost unity.

However, a fundamental difference separates the scholastic theologians from their cybernetic emulators. Scientists by training, the latter are hardly inclined to metaphysical speculation and seek to secularize the premises of the former. They wish, in other words, “that what was theological become technological (or anthropological),” starting from immanence rather than from transcendence, starting from Creation rather than from God. Contrary to appearances, this enterprise has nothing to do with a semantic eccentricity and everything to do with a reversal of the tradition of Western thought of the One and the Many, consecrated by the Greeks.

Cybernetics, or Sophistic Modernity

In the traditional Greek thought, crystallized in the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, supremacy is normally granted to the One over the Many. From the first Principle emanates an infinity of manifestations (the Many), which constitute the many traces of the first Principle. The Greek philosophical discipline consisted thus for a good part in identifying what Plato names the chorismos, the “breaking up,” and the link between the visible manifestation and the principle which makes it come to Being.

Cybernetic thought refuses to see this disseverance—by giving, via the scientific method, priority only to the phenomena, it takes the Many as its cause—and this, despite maintaining the horizon of a divine principle of Unity. Or, more precisely, because it is a horizon and not a link. Instead of seeing in the organized phenomena the Trace of a first divine principle, cybernetics intends to reconstitute and reassemble this principle by collecting the multiple phenomena like so many pieces of a vase to be put back together. Unity seems to underlie this operation; and yet it is perpetually absent, indefinitely postponed. Cybernetics is in fact an ideology of postponement, of “differentiation” (in the Derridean sense). The phenomena do not emanate from the Unity, they constitute an infinity of signs, in which the sense flows without ever being fixed.

The reference to Unity and to God hides in reality a bias for the Many. This is the conclusion and the reproach that Rappin addresses to cybernetics. For this heir of Plato, the gigantomachia peri tès ousia remains a burning actuality—and the supporters of the Many, formerly better known under the name of sophists, have never been so numerous. The triumph of the cybernetic organization is none other than that of Hippias.

With the Many triumphs movement. In the cybernetic age, it takes the very concrete form of circulating information, of Collective Intelligence whose material effectiveness is realized within information systems, according to the founding intuition of cybernetics assimilating the human brain to a computer. Its hegemony, already comfortably assured, threatens to make disappear a whole part of the being-in-the-world which had irrigated human civilizations—reflection (or representation).

Reflection, which characterized intelligence for the Ancients to the point of its usage being designated, could thus properly disappear within the generalized fluidification induced by cybernetics. For the cybernetic Collective Intelligence, always already in action, reaction and pro-action, reflexivity is an obstacle to connectivity—that is to say, to interaction (with the environment). The re-presentation violates the only cybernetic horizon of the Good (the accumulation of organized Information) and is in this way the opposite principle—entropy.

The disappearance of reflexivity also leads to the disappearance of consciousness and of the subject. The thinker Pierre Legendre had already identified this risk of modern “de-subjectivization,” in the abolition of this “imaginary gap” between the (re)acting bodies and the abstract representations. For this anthropologist, dear to Rappin, it is the gap between his own body and the projected images, which he begins to produce through language, which constitutes the small human being in subject. Now, the cybernetic project aims precisely at the abolition of all these brakes to interaction that are distance, the gap, delimitation and even definition. The absence of definition, characteristic of the Sophist for Plato (this being “undulating with a hundred faces”), haunts cybernetics ever since its original concept of information, which is nowhere defined, except negatively.

The man of the cybernetic future is sketched out in the background; and Rappin finds the best current approximation in the figure of the homo sacer of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben. In ancient Rome, this term designated an individual exiled by society, which deprived him of his rights and excluded him from its law. Now, any law requires distance—that of representation—a limit between facts and their judgment. Cybernetic fluidification abolishes precisely any limit of this kind in favor of a permanent state of emergency. In the end, its utopia is that of a society without laws, an immense de facto way against which no right can be opposed.

Théophile Blondy is at Sciences Po, Lyon (France). This article is made available through the kind courtesy of PHILITT. [Translated from the French by N. Dass].

Featured: “Humani victus instrumenta: ars coquinaria” [Human food tools: the art of cooking”], anonymous engraving, dated 1569.

Strategic Inconsistencies

Remembering what the Italian historian and philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) said that history repeats itself, there is again a repetition in relations over the strategic use of old assets and new materials.

The international debate is about the strategic weakness of the West (and especially Europe) facing the threat of LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) being cut off from Russia over the row between Moscow, Washington and Bruxelles (NATO and EU capitals) concerning the Ukraine. This issue shows the long-standing foolishness and lack of vision of the Euro-Atlantic community leaders. But the problem is not only limited to that, for other challenges also are putting an immense strain on our individual and collective future.

In prehistoric times, the discovery of the metallurgy (copper, bronze and iron) brought great changes to humanity, with the emergence of new powers and the end of pre-existing structures and powers.

During the Bronze Age, the shortage of bronze (1800 and 1700 BC) led to various conflicts in the Mediterranean region, focused on the control of this meta; with which weapons were made. Subsequently, using what is now known as “replacement technology,” it was possible to produce superior quality weapons from a much more abundant metal, but through a more complicated metallurgical process. The metal was iron. Its use spread, and the Iron Age began.

Rare earths today are the cornerstone of our technological evolution. Rare earth metals are needed to produce most high-tech products. Without them, many of the sectors in more developed countries, such as energy, telecommunications, medicine, and defense, would collapse the world over. On the other hand, the quantitative scarcity of rare earths, and the difficulties of various kinds and in their access, are nothing new. Shortages have already been predicted by 2025, by the European Commission, limiting the technological growth of Europe and the US and favoring that of China, with a strong impact on the struggle for global hegemony and international security.

Rare earths were first discovered by a Swedish army officer in 1787, but they did not generate the current frantic search, and their use was initially limited. Up to 1947, only 17 rare metals were found, and their importance increased with research in atomic physics, quantum physics and chemistry.

Today, it would be impossible to imagine everyday life without rare earths, as they are used in medical technology as contrast agents, as well as in radar devices, plasma screens, LEDs, special paints or lasers, to name a few. Their use in electric motors especially, such as in magnets or in batteries or fuel cells make them a key resource for the energy transition, which has become a global necessity. The properties of some rare earth elements make it possible to reduce the size of electric motors, increase the strength of the magnets and allow the use of lighter but more resistant alloys. The application of rare earths in most technological processes has triggered its demand, which is (thus far) endless.

The concentration in which these elements are found in minerals is very low, hence the name “rare.” They are not rare in the world, but their low proportion gives them the name. Rare earth deposits are abundant all over the world. However, the economic profitability of their exploitation depends on the concentration in which they are found in these locations. China owns a third of the world’s reserves, followed by Brazil, Vietnam, and Russia. Further, the extraction and separation of rare earths represents a technological and logistical challenge, associated with severe environmental pollution problems.

The industrial significance of rare earths is not yet equivalent to other raw materials, such as oil or gas. But many industrial sectors that would be affected by an interruption in the supply of rare earths are directly or indirectly linked to human safety and/or national security. The main reason is the link between rare earths and technology. Today, technology dominates the industrial processes, and its development is inconceivable without the use of rare earths.

For example, in the defense sector, rare earths enable the development of more effective, smart, and intelligent military capabilities and combat systems. Rare earths are now essential for night vision devices, precision guided weapons systems, communications equipment, navigation systems, batteries, stealth technology, drones, target design lasers and satellites for communications. They are also used in high performance protections and in both armored vehicles and projectiles to give them durability. Any disruption in the rare earth supply-chain would have a serious impact on the defense capabilities of any country with technologically advanced armed forces.

The importance of rare earths becomes strategic and particularly relevant when it is observed that, while the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) controls 41% of oil production, it is spread, even if unequally among, 13 states, China controls about 75% of rare earth production alone.

This fact has a direct bearing on the strategic choices of many nations. For example, during 2020, there was a direct threat from the Chinese government against two major US weapon system manufacturers, though it ultimately did not materialize. However, this also suggests that any nation that could, even indirectly, pose a threat to China’s security could be sanctioned with limitations or interruptions in the supply of rare earths. And seeing China’s growing determination on the international stage, this is not just an academic hypothesis. Therefore, it becomes a strategic priority to have a secure supply-chain for these critical minerals.

The only country in the world with a complete, independent, and autonomous supply-chain is China. The difference of interests between the value-chain (economic interest) and the supply-chain (strategic interest) means that each economic and socio-political model has a different perspective on the supply of rare earths and the associated value-chain. The more liberalist perspective, like that of the US, is based on the “efficient market,” leaving self-regulation in the hands of private corporations, to generate an adequate value-chain that should (ideally) have an associated supply-chain—in this case of rare earths. From the point of view of Beijing, the State/Communist Party intervenes directly in its companies and the private ones are kept under very strict control, and even more so those that operate in sectors considered strategic. Beijing primarily pursues national security goals, protecting the supply-chain, and subsequently, seeks to maximize value-chain profits.

Even with 40% of rare earth reserves currently in China, Beijing is also the world’s largest importer. Thanks to these imports and the use of its own resources, the final production of rare earths in China amounts to about 140,000 tons, about 75% of world production. This figure readily shows China’s dominance in the rare earth chain, followed by Australia (11%) and the US (8%).

The Belt Road Initiative (BRI), a pillar of China’s government policy, also serves as supply, trade and transport routes for rare earths and their associated products, both for import and export, and thus supporting China’s quasi-monopoly around the world.

Today there are only two companies outside of China that can be considered global producers of rare earths: one from Australia (Lynas Corporation) and one from US (MP Materials).

However, MP Materials ships its rare earth concentrates to China for processing and the Chinese government has a 10% stake in the company itself. China, in turn, sells manufactured and finished products at a large profit margin. The buyer countries thus maintain a relationship of dependence on China. Making political decisions without considering the entire supply-chain, or without knowing the relationship between each of its processes, can lead to financing and increasing the Chinese monopoly of rare earths.

The trade war between US and China is not limited to the economic sphere and is associated with the pursuit and maintenance of technological superiority and the control of supply routes. Technology not only represents a growing value for the economy, but also has a direct impact on the daily life of citizens. And, historically, technology has played a decisive role in the quest for international power, while control of the supply-routes enables the security of supply chains, which have expanded and diversified with the advance of globalization.

Without an adequate supply of rare earths, it would not be possible today to maintain not only technological advantage, but also the normal functioning of the various sectors of the economy.

Some of the technologies currently under development may be disruptive; for example: artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, robotics, biotechnology, and nanotechnology. These technologies will not only change daily life but may also alter current international hierarchy. China has already made public its plan to achieve independence in 10 key technologies by 2025. Currently, as regards the supply of materials that are the physical basis of these technologies, independence is already ensured. China is constantly moving towards strategic autonomy. On the contrary, since Beijing has a near-monopoly on rare earths, the maintenance of US technological hegemony depends precisely on China.

The Biden Administration is fully aware of the problem and has ordered a supply-chain review in key areas of medicine, commodities, and agriculture. The resulting review sternly states that “decades of underinvestment, together with public policy choices that favor short-term solutions, have left the system fragile.” The Departments of Defense, Agriculture, Energy, Interior, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are trying to address the supply-chain problem for rare earths and other critical materials. So far, the major effects of these policies have been reflected in the attempt to bring the supply-chain back to US soil, with the reopening of mines, activation of processing centers, agreements with commercial companies and securing of supply-lines—all by 2025.

Despite the trade war between China and the US, with the exchange of sanctions and other punitive measures, Washington has always kept rare earths out of it, no doubt because of the risk that China could still use them as a deterrent weapon.

But China primarily has no interest in imposing export quotas, as this would damage Beijing economically, triggering a new escalation in the mutual imposition of economic or tariff sanctions.

In general terms, however, China’s economic dependence on the US has been steadily declining in recent years and Beijing continues to build architectures that work to its advantage. It should be noted that, at the end of 2020, the largest free trade agreement in the world was signed, the RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership), promoted by China, and in which all ASEAN nations participate (without Timor-Leste), including Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. The RCEP, operational since the beginning of 2022, representing 30% of world trade, has also seen the UK apply to join this treaty.

As mentioned above, the EU and the US have already officially predicted the shortage of rare earths by 2025. But this shortage, in addition, to being an instrument of pressure from Beijing to condition the international community, is also a problem for China because of the strong increase in domestic demand for the consumption of rare earths. Chinese development in recent decades has led to the emergence and growth of a huge middle-class (equivalent to the entire population of Europe) which, despite some slowdowns, continues to grow in number and economic capacity. This enormous middle-class now has access to previously unavailable technologies and goods, but their limitation could have a negative impact on internal governance, with risks related to domestic stability.

As an example, the Chinese demand for rare earths in the last five years has exceeded its own production, and the priority of Beijing will probably be to guarantee domestic market supply in the first place, but also continue to give regularity to their supply for strategic sectors, such as defense, medicine, and energy.

The outcome of this struggle for world hegemony can be determined by the pace, that is, by the speed of reaction by the US and its allies, or by China, which will take advantage of this clear geostrategic dominance for as long as it can maintain it.

Beyond the security impact of the Western world from the scarcity of rare earths, this situation would also allow China to gain an advantageous negotiating position on international security, which the United States may not be willing to accept.

China’s rare earth monopoly serves on the one hand, to strengthen its technological transformation and continue its economic progress associated with its struggle for hegemony. At the same time, for the US, China’s dependence on the supply of rare earths poses a serious threat to its strategic autonomy, a potential threat to its security and apply a possible brake on its economy and technological development. With this monopoly, China has a weapon, not only economic and diplomatic, but also militarily, because by interrupting the supply of rare earths it could block the production of the defense capabilities of its competitors.

The US strategy dedicated to rare earths moves to promote replacement technology, the exploitation of new fields and the development of new metallurgical centers, reducing dependence on China. In the short term, increasing reserves of rare earth metals, increasing efficient recycling methods, and expanding secure supply-chains would be the best way to react to rare earth shortages.

Enrico Magnani, PhD is a UN officer who specializes in military history, politico-military affairs, peacekeeping and stability operations. (The opinions expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the United Nations).

Wokism – Or Capitalism?

Some speak of Black Lives Matter and of LGBT,
of Cancel Culture, Wokism and such great games as these.
But of all the world’s great challenges, none can compare
With banks, stocks, and production – the Real Capitalism.

All the Western World is engaged in great changes under the guise of “Wokism,” whose most extreme aspects occur in English-speaking countries and are exported and then mirrored in various non-English-speaking countries. But what is being “woke?” I do not pretend to have the answer, and yet there are some possible interpretations that inform us as to what lies before us.

As I see it, the real problem is not Wokism, BLM, or the LGBT et similia movements, but what is behind them, and what silently exploits such movements, the honesty of whose members I do not object to at all. I regard them attack columns – but they are not the headquarters. And if we just focus on the “foot-soldiers” and disregard the HQ and its objectives, we will be misled because we will not have the panoramic view, which alone can give us the much-needed insights.

So, what is the HQ? In the USA, many people are certain that they know for sure: Communists, or former Communists; Soviet Zombies who have come back to life to destroy the USA. To be fair, there are certain aspects of Cancel Culture which suggest a link with what took place in the past. In Stalin’s day, books were modified, in order to cancel those parts related to the “enemies of the people;” or entire books were canceled. Paintings too were modified. In Stalin’s time, the famous painting showing Lenin’s 1917 speech at the Smolny changed very many times – each time cancelling (deleting) a recently liquidated prominent Bolshevik who had fallen out of favor – so that at the end, in its definitive version, only Lenin and Stalin appeared to have been there.

Whilst Mussolini never played this game, Hitler indulged in the same Stalinist tricks, along with book-burning. And the sport of destroying statues is as old as the statues themselves, being an integral part of any given riot or revolution, since the ancient Egypt – think of Akhenaton.

We could suppose that the root of this phenomenon lies in Hegel’s philosophy, and the evolution of left and right Hegelianism (hence, Nazism and Communism). But I do not think so. Not at all.

Rather, capitalism is the answer. I know that such an answer will sound quite misleading, odd, amazing, especially in capitalistic countries – what has capitalism to do with Wokism and the various movements derive from it?

An explanation is very much needed; but it will involve a broader and greater context. So, bear with me, even if what I am going to say may seem off-topic. But it will all make sense once we reach a conclusion.

Let us go back a couple of centuries. In the early days of the 19t century, when Britannia ruled the waves, when Wellington had just defeated Napoleon, and the London stock exchange ruled the world of finance. The incipient Industrial Revolution was triggering a deep change of British, and then European and American, society – for the new entrepreneurs had to resolve a remarkable problem: How to balance supply and demand?
Anyone who has studied at least some economics knows what a problem this is. But for those who are not aware of this problem, let me provide an explanation.

Let us take the example of a hypothetical early 19th century tissue producer, Mr Tissue, whose factory works well, is powered by coal, and its production is shipped by horse-towed wagons.

Let us say that this Mr. Tissue created a new cotton tissue, which becomes a fashion hit; and is so successful that suddenly everybody wants it, and ready to pay – let’s say – $1.00 per piece. Mr. Tissue’s factory is flooded with orders. What does Mr. Tissue do? Seeing the success, he decides to exploit the situation and to at once fulfill all the orders. He immediately improves production. His factory now operates longer hours and Mr. Tissue buys all the cotton that he can find.

Then, he encounters his first problem. The cotton producer he normally relies on, just does not have as much cotton Mr. Tissue needs, who now has to look for additional cotton producers he has never dealt with. The new cotton producers that he contacts say, “OK, we have cotton, but you must pay it 10 cents per pound, instead of 9 cents as you previously did.” Well, Mr. Tissue knows that he will sell a lot of his products, so, if he pays 10 cents of 9 cents, he will earn a bit less than he hoped, but his loss is not so great either. So, Mr. Tissue accepts. But shortly after, even these new producers are not enough, and Mr. Tissue has to find additional producers, and he now accepts paying 11 cents per pound for the cotton that he greatly needs.

At the same time, Mr. Tissue realizes that he does not have as many specialized workers as needed to increase production. So, he looks for additional specialized workers. But, unfortunately, there are none available, as all are already working in other factories and all are paid the same wages as his own workers – $1.00 a day. What does he do? He offers to pay $1.10 per day to new specialized workers. But gets his old specialized workers upset. And so, to keep production moving along, Mr. Tissue has to pay his old specialized workers $1.10 per day as well.

Of course, given such a remarkable 10 percent wage increase, he gets all the workers he needs – but he now has all his fellow entrepreneurs very upset, who must also increase the wages of their specialized workers’ wage – to keep them from all moving to Tissue’s factory.

Then Mr. Tissue realizes that he needs much more coal than in the past, because his factory is working twice as much as before. This means that he also needs more wagons (and horses and fodder) as well as more carriages to bring in the additional cotton and to ship out the finished goods (the tissues). And in all these cases too, given what is available on the market, he can’t get the needed additional coal, horses, wagons and fodder unless he pays more than the price he usually paid in the past. Costs rise; but Mr. Tissue doesn’t care, because he has plenty of orders still coming in.

Then, orders start to decrease, because almost everybody has the new cotton tissue, and suddenly, in a month, Tissue’s production must be reduced by one-third. What does he do? To limit his losses, he reduces the price of his tissue to 90 cents, lays off many workers, stops purchasing cotton and sells some horses and wagons, perhaps at a loss.

Finally, Mr. Tissue also is stuck with a lot of cotton, coal and fodder. He could use it in production, but the problem nobody needs Mr. Tissue’s products as much, since most people have bought lots. So, it is possible that Mr. Tissue will have to further reduce production, or stop it altogether. Hence, many more workers will lose their jobs, and their wages.

This brings about a small financial crisis will start, because without a wage the laid-off workers won’t buy as much as they used to. This leads to a domino effect, affecting other producers whose products will also not be sold in the same quantities as before. On the other hand, it is also possible that, when looking at his budget, Mr. Tissue’s business proves less convenient than he thought – he may have spent much more than he anticipated in wages, and in the purchase of horses, wagons, cotton, and coal. Tissue may end up losing everything; or, he might lose a percentage when business got bad. How does Mr. Tissue avoid these problems in the future? What does he do next time?

The early 19th century economists faced this problem. It was a new one, because never in the past did so a massive production occurred, which also meant that a massive amount of money could be lost or earned in a matter of weeks, or even days.

The main problem affecting economy was clearly the economical crisis. You can have a crisis because of overproduction – Mr. Tissue’s case at the end of the story – and underproduction – Mr. Tissue’s case at the beginning of the story.

Bear in mind that the final price is made up of the cost of the raw material, the cost of manpower, the cost of power, the cost of logistics, the cost of the infrastructure maintenance, the savings to invest in new machinery, and, last, by the entrepreneur’s profit.

In case the market suddenly asks you for more items than you are producing, or can produce, you must find the raw materials and do the handiwork as fast as you can, practically on the spot, no matter how expensive that can all be. And this means that you can earn less than usual – because if you sell your products always at the same price – and you must do that, otherwise you lose market shares – the expenditure rate composed of the prices of raw materials, wages and all the other items, will be higher than usual. Thus, your net income will be lower.

On the other hand, when the market suddenly stops purchasing your products, you may find yourself with a lot of unsold products. And, no matter if you hang onto unsold inventory or sell it at a lower price – you lose money.

Boring? Very boring? How does all this useless economics stuff pertain to the topic at hand? Wait a bit more and you’ll start matching the dots.

How to avoid this crisis in the first place was the question. The answer provided by some economists in the first half of 19th century was – “planning.” But planning what?
The crisis occurred depending on how many goods were sold, or not sold – thus, it depended on the buyer. Hence the analysis of economist focused on the consumer, and they soon realized how unpredictable the single consumer really is. Therefore, would it not be better if, somehow, one could predict which kind of goods and assets the consumer could want over a lifetime?

But soon economists also realized another cause of this crises – the unpredictable number of consumers. If a single consumer was a “mad variable,” whose needs more or less could be somehow predicted, thus allowing for production synchronized to consumer demand – what if the number of global consumers changed suddenly? A consumer plus another consumer meant a family; and in nine months one could expect the consumers to become three. But what if the consumers – especially in Catholic countries – did not stop and kept increasing like rabbits? The family could hardly enhance its income as much as needed to keep their initial life standard, and this would cause a reduced in purchasing power, and thus a reduction in the goods they bought, which on a general level would be mirrored by a reduction of industrial production. So what?

The smart answer was “social planning,” because a planned society was supposed to have planned behaviors and thus planned and predictable needs, to be fulfilled through predictable and planned consumption – and hence by a long-term planned economy.

Are you connecting dots? What renders consumption unpredictable? Families. Why? Because families have children, and often they do not care how many they have. So, what does it all mean?

Such behavior has two bad consequences: Families can’t spend so much on other expensive goods, because they must eat, and dress, first. Plus, the unpredictable number of children renders consumption by families, and thus family behavior and expenditure, absolutely unpredictable. And this is bad for a planned economy – and economy in general.

In other words, traditional, unplanned families cause an economic crisis. Additionally, an economic crisis is the nightmare, the doom of capitalism. It must be avoided at any cost. Consequently, traditional, unplanned families are the enemies of capitalism because they are the origin of the economic crisis.

On the other hand, as it has more or less been explicitly said over the 60 years ago, whoever has fewer or no children, has much more money to spend. Thus, whoever has no children is welcomed; well, not completely welcomed, otherwise in a generation the market would be over, due to the death of all the consumers – and then who would capitalism sell to? Think what a bad business proposal that would it be. Now what? Well, the best thing is to have planned families – two parents and two children. Don’t forget the UN supported Family planning campaigns, mostly in the 1960’s, in places as different as India and the USA. If at that time it was said everywhere that India was overcrowded in comparison to her food production, and this such a campaign could be understood as reasonable – what about the USA? Were they short of food? Not at all. Let’s keep this in mind and let’s go move forward.

If a family plans to have two children, there is an additional unpredictable factor – how many males and females? One and one? Two and zero? Zero and two? This is troublesome, for how can you have a long-termed plan for shaving blades, or for make-up production in the next twenty years? It’s annoying. What to do? Well, for instance one could introduce a planned system but… but that would mean planning in advance what you want to have – not how many children, but how many children of which sex? It is scientifically doable, but how do you introduce the concept?

If you destroy the standard traditional family – as the Nazis did, and as the Soviets before Stalin did too – and if you introduce a “new” family, relying on birth-assistance, that is to say, on birth-planning, you can do it.

Are the dots connecting yet? The “new” family can be exploited as a tool to let the capitalistic enterprises gain much more through a planned economy based on planned life. Thus, if the capitalist system supports such a family, it is in its own monetary interests – not in the interests of families and the people.

One step more. And it will be a nasty one, but we’ve already taken quite a few nasty steps that one more is not such a tragedy.

There is another group of “bad consumers” – the old and ill. What do they live for? Only to be a burden on the public health system, if any, or on their families. Thus, aside from the expenditures welcomed only by some of the Big Pharma, what do they live for?

Moreover, they don’t have that many needs (except for medicines and assistance), and most of them can’t pay for it, either. So, what to do? How can they live without assistance, if they can’t pay for it? It would be a life without dignity… so, let’s kill them off, because no life deprived of dignity is worth living, is it? And this is what is currently done – officially in half a dozen countries of the world, and unofficially probably in many more. In fact, these people are killed simply because they are a financial burden and no longer an active portion of the consumer-world.

And, and what about those affected by mental illness? They too can’t have a life with dignity (and are unable to spend their money, if they have any). So, what do they live for?
OK, there would be small problem, that is to say – who defines this “standard of dignity?” And who determines whether these “standards” are being “enjoyed” or not the people to be killed? But this is a small and negligible problem. It’s not worth discussing, as every is on agrees that life without “dignity” is not worth living.

Next point – how do you achieve all these goals? By destroying mankind as it is now and by modeling, by shaping a new one.

If you want to build something, the first thing you must do is to clear the ground. Now, this is exactly what Liberals, Wokists, Cancel Culture and so on are doing. They are cleaning the ground to “build back better” – which means a new society, a new society they claim that will be more equal, more democratic, and so on. But this new society in fact will be shaped as I described above.

As things are, they are sweeping away whatever that is linked to identity – identity in general. They are sweeping out existing culture, removing statues, modifying books, and they are sweeping away personal identity – because what kind of family can here ever be, if gender is a choice and does not depend on how the body is, and identity is no longer something determined by nature and self-existing but is something determined by…? What? Whom?
By the rulers. And the rulers will determine it using an indirect approach – there will not be a law telling the people how to be. There will be a system of laws allowing this or that and causing a pre-emptive self-censorship – as already happens – and an instinctive conforming to the general behavior.

Once personal identity and identity in general is cancelled, people will simply be a mass of units, whose behavior will be directed from outside in an indirect and effective way by, and according to, indirect pressures. The more time will pass, the more rigid and apparent the pressures and conditioning will be.

Additional point. How to prevent insurgency? Simply by depriving the people of its own money. How? By paying low wages to all who are not embedded, or enrolled into the system. And how can you keep wages low? By the same system used at the eve of the Industrial Revolution – by relying on a wide offer of manpower, because there will always be the poor – who are poorer than the workers working for you – and who will therefore accept that same job for a lot less wage. Thus, you can blackmail your worker; and, if that worker does not accept your terms, you can say “goodbye.”

Really? Yes, really. Otherwise, what are we importing illegal immigrants for? For the sake of human solidarity? If that were true, we would be investing and developing instead in their countries (with lesser and longer-termed profit). What a terrible idea! No, no! We need them to keep the price of tomatoes low in the supermarket! Were the tomatoes to be picked by regular workers, they would cost four times their current price! Would you like that? And what about the onions? Would you really like to spend that much for your salad?

And what can we do with all this manpower? Well, the not-specialized manpower can die when exploited, just like a squeezed lemon. Specialized manpower will get something more, because, by the way, they are also the consumers. But they will get a low wage, big enough to purchase what the planned economy allows them to get, but not a cent more.
Think of how expensive and time-consuming it is simply to buy a new car, not to say a home. But in the happy planned future, the vast majority will have long-termed rented cars (as it is usual and cheaper in the USA and not at all in Europe) and will live in rented homes, because only the happy very few will be able to purchase a home, because of their wages, and because of the high prices.

If the majority of the people have to depend on a small wage, just allowing them to have all they think they need for their daily life (and “daily-life” will be precisely planned), the big corporations will earn a lot more money, a lot longer, given the combined effect of planned production to fulfill planned consumption, all feeding the planned life of each human being. And when the human being can no longer afford to pay for what he/she needs, how can he/she still live with dignity? Thus, euthanasia, and requiescat in pace, and let’s make use of the body for transplants, for beauty farms and, last but not least, ash for the ground (never waste anything – don’t forget – that is an economic moral duty).

Is it all clear now?

So, as you see, Wokism, LGBTQ, Black Lives Matter, Cancel Culture they all appear as tools used and exploited by something different. And they are effective because they do not know how, and which way, they are being exploited, and to which aims. They are genuinely certain that they are fighting for rights and liberty, for a better new society. But in fact they can be compared to a smoke screen – and behind that screen you have the worst and most greedy capitalism.

Ciro Paoletti, a prominent Italian historian of military history, is the Secretary General of the Italian Commission of Military History. He is the author of 25 books, and more than 400 other smaller works\, published in Italy and abroad, and mostly dealing with modern and contemporary Italian military history and policy.

The featured image shows, “The Tower of Babel,” by Lucas van Valckenborch; painted in 1594.