De-Souling the World: Mattias Desmet, By Brian Simpson

The opening of the article by Mattias Desmet struck my attention as he describes his encounter, of sorts, with a cashier at a line in a coffee bar in an airport in Lithuania. She was neither friendly, not hostile, but blank and emotionless. He goes on to use the idea of "de-souled," and to develop a critique of modernity in these terms, that the mechanistic worldview that science has imposed upon us, has metastasised to the social world, making that without a soul as well: "The soul is withdrawing from the world. And that phenomenon is related to our rationalistic worldview. In recent centuries, we have come to view humans as "organisms" without a soul, and now they are increasingly behaving that way. "The universe is a machine - a collection of elementary particles that follow the laws of mechanics without any room for protest or frivolity. And humans are small machines caught in the big machine. They have neither soul nor spirit; their consciousness is a meaningless by-product of the bio-electrical processes in their brains."

Desmet goes on to support this thesis with examples from the World Economic Forum, such as its leading philosopher, Yuval Noah Harari, who has taken the mechanistic world view to its logical conclusion. If humans are just a type of inferior bio-computer, then according to the transhumanists, they can be programmed at will, since free will does not exist.

According to Harari, with technology, humans can become "gods": "In reality, humans don't die because a figure in a black cloak taps them on the shoulder, or because God decreed it, or because mortality is an essential part of some great cosmic plan: Humans always die due to some technical glitch" (Harari, Homo Deus, p.25). "And every technical problem has a technical solution. We don't have to wait for the second coming to overcome death" (Harari, Homo Deus, p.26). The ambitions of rationalism reach high – to the heavens. The rationalist declared God's throne empty and then sat on it himself. When the rational understanding of the universe-machine and the human-machine is advanced enough, humans can make themselves superhuman – humans can become God. "In the twenty-first century, the third big project will be for us to create divine powers of creation and destruction and upgrade Homo sapiens into Homo Deus" (Harari, p.53).

This quest was shown in the Bible to lead humans to ruin, as finite, fallible beings simply cannot be gods, and would dramatically fall upon their faces even if hey were given such power, due to original sin. There would be inevitable self-destruction, which I think is being seen right now.

https://words.mattiasdesmet.org/p/the-de-souling-of-the-world-the-veil

"I was walking through an airport in Lithuania in mid-April and stood in line at a coffee bar. When the line in front of me finally cleared and I reached the cashier, I looked into the eyes of a young woman, about 17 years old, I estimate. Those eyes stared back at me, motionlessly waiting for my order.

I hesitated for a moment but then broke the inscrutable surface of those eyes with my words. "A chai latte, please, preferably with oat milk and cinnamon, if you have it." She typed on her computer keyboard with outstretched fingers, then looked up and met my gaze again for a few moments. Since I had nothing more to say, she tapped her keyboard a few more times, neither quickly nor slowly, and handed me the receipt. "Can I pay with cash?" "No." She slid a small payment terminal towards me - I scanned and entered my code. "Thank you." And she directed her motionless eyes like the lenses of a surveillance camera to the next person in line.

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At the table where I waited until the red neon numbers on the sign above the desk announced that my chai latte was ready, I lapsed into contemplation. That young woman – she was neither polite nor impolite, neither trying to stand out nor hide, neither rude nor friendly, neither fast nor slow. But what was she? Neutral perhaps? Technical and dry? She moved and acted like a machine; her soul had withdrawn into the unfathomable depths of her cells. De-souled! – that was the word that sought birth in my thoughts.

And with that word came from the fog of my memory a whole series of figures that had all made the same impression on me in recent times: beings glued to their smartphone screens on trams and trains, people answering my spontaneous greeting on the street with nothing more than a hollow gaze, beings for whom both joke and seriousness are too burdensome, beings who offer a foundation for neither anger nor love.

The soul is withdrawing from the world. And that phenomenon is related to our rationalistic worldview. In recent centuries, we have come to view humans as "organisms" without a soul, and now they are increasingly behaving that way. "The universe is a machine - a collection of elementary particles that follow the laws of mechanics without any room for protest or frivolity. And humans are small machines caught in the big machine. They have neither soul nor spirit; their consciousness is a meaningless byproduct of the bio-electrical processes in their brains."

Yuval Noah Harari is perhaps the best-known literary prophet of the mechanistic view of humanity today. In his mega-bestseller Homo Deus, he takes this thinking to its extreme consequences. Humans are robots; every physical and mental behavior is the result of mechanical processes; they have no free will, make no choices, and consequently cannot bear any responsibility:

"In the nineteenth century, Homo sapiens was like a mysterious black box, whose inner workings were beyond our grasp. Hence, when scholars asked why a man drew a knife and stabbed another to death, an acceptable answer said: 'Because he chose to. He used his free will to choose murder, which is why he is fully responsible for his crime.' Over the last century, as scientists opened up the Sapiens black box, they discovered neither soul, nor free will, nor 'self' – but only genes, hormones, and neurons that obey the same physical and chemical laws governing the rest of reality. Today, when scholars ask why a man drew a knife and stabbed someone to death, answering 'Because he chose to' doesn't cut the mustard. Instead, geneticists and brain scientists provide a much more detailed answer: 'He did it due to such-and-such electrochemical processes in the brain, which were shaped by a particular genetic make-up, which in turn reflect ancient evolutionary pressures coupled with chance mutations.'" (Homo Deus, pp. 328-329).

Within mechanistic thinking, it is not considered a bad thing to view the universe as a machine. The big machine of the universe can be fully understood, predicted, and manipulated rationally (see, for example, Laplace). Humans can take control of their own lives through reason. They will print food in laboratories and leave the burden of pregnancy to artificial wombs; they will go to Mars and control sunshine and rain. And they can perfect themselves, definitively eliminating the flaws and shortcomings of the human condition.

The moment when humans will perfect themselves is imminent – Harari feels the moment approaching:

"Experiments performed on Homo sapiens indicate that like rats, humans too can be manipulated, and that it is possible to create or annihilate even complex feelings such as love, anger, fear, and depression by stimulating the right spots in the human brain. The US military has recently initiated experiments on implanting computer chips in people's brains, hoping to use this method to treat soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. In Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, doctors have pioneered a novel treatment for patients suffering from acute depression. They implant electrodes into the patient's brain and wire them to a minuscule computer implanted in the patient's chest. On receiving a command from the computer, the electrodes transmit weak electric currents that paralyze the brain area responsible for the depression. The treatment does not always succeed, but in some cases, patients reported that the feeling of dark emptiness that tormented them throughout their lives disappeared as if by magic" (Homo Deus, p.334).

If we understand the human-machine well enough, the engineer-doctor will be able to eliminate any malfunction – this is roughly the message of transhumanism. Disease and suffering will belong to the past. And ultimately, even death will yield to the light of Reason. Yuval Noah Harari puts it unequivocally:

"In reality, humans don't die because a figure in a black cloak taps them on the shoulder, or because God decreed it, or because mortality is an essential part of some great cosmic plan: Humans always die due to some technical glitch" (Harari, Homo Deus, p.25). "And every technical problem has a technical solution. We don't have to wait for the second coming to overcome death" (Harari, Homo Deus, p.26). The ambitions of rationalism reach high – to the heavens. The rationalist declared God's throne empty and then sat on it himself. When the rational understanding of the universe-machine and the human-machine is advanced enough, humans can make themselves superhuman – humans can become God. "In the twenty-first century, the third big project will be for us to create divine powers of creation and destruction and upgrade Homo sapiens into Homo Deus" (Harari, p.53).

Homo Deus is on the horizon, the human who, through merging with technology, can become God. Artificial eyes, ears, and noses will provide humans with information that is much more accurate and extensive than that obtained through natural senses. They will be able to smell like a dog, literally have eyes in the back of their heads, and hear what is said kilometers away.

And don't think that this transhumanist ideology is limited to the realm of fantasies and grand ideological plans of writers and philosophers. Over the last seventy years, governments have developed concrete projects to bring this ideology to reality. From projects like Elon Musk's Neuralink to DARPA's 'Neurowarfare' programs – they are feverishly trying to realize the great transhumanist dream …

Rationalism promises to bring humanity to paradise, but so far, that has not been very successful. The air of the 21st century is constantly saturated with a sense of crisis. The war on terror, the banking crisis, the climate crisis, the MeToo crisis, the corona crisis, the Ukraine crisis – the thundering echo of one crisis still resonates when the lightning bolt of the next crisis strikes the fragile structure of society again.

In a way, the major social crises of the 21st century all reflect a problem in the relationships in which humans are caught: they all stem from problematic and failing relationships between humans and institutions (banking crisis), between humans and fellow humans (war on terror), between men and women (MeToo crisis), between humans and nature (climate crisis).

Initially, rationalism itself tries to provide the solution to the problems it causes. The proposed solution for problematic sexual identity is a mechanistic-surgical adjustment of the body; the solution for the threat of terrorism is the surveillance state; the solution for the detrimental impact of humans on nature is digitized "five-minute cities" where humans live in small housing units and never go more than a few kilometers from their homes, hyper-technological electric cars that can be switched on and off by the state at will, a forest of wind turbines, and plains of solar panels. And if that doesn't work – everyone knows, by the way, that it won't work – we will move on to exploding nitrate bombs in the atmosphere and installing manipulable mirrors between Earth and the Sun.

The more the rationalist vision fails, the more desperately it claims the truth. With every new crisis, the representatives of the dominant narrative – the mainstream media, national governments, global institutions – respond with more censorship. Armies of fact-checkers and "digital first responders" scour the internet looking for any dissenting voice; algorithms slow the spread of any dissenting voice on social media; millions of posts, even from people who recently gained worldwide fame by winning prestigious scientific awards, are removed from the internet.

These "ambassadors of Truth" remain remarkably unmoved when it later turns out that the story they defended uncritically was wrong. The corona crisis abundantly demonstrated this. Almost everything about the mainstream narrative turned out to be wrong: the virus was bred in a lab rather than arising from zoonosis; the mortality of the virus was at least ten times lower than stated; the vaccine did not prevent the spread of the virus and had many more side effects than suggested, and so on.

The reaction of the population when the lies are revealed is especially astonishing. Hannah Arendt put it this way: "The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness" (The Origins of Totalitarianism p. 382).

This is something remarkable: The zealous pursuit of "correct information" and "science-based policy" leads to the opposite: a society that falls into increasing absurdities. Within the group which follows the dominant narrative, people start to believe that the Earth is tipping over because we are pumping too much water and that there is no biological (and psychological) difference between a man and a woman.

And at the other opposite end of the socio-psychological spectrum, in the group of people who resists the mainstream narrative, more and more people believe that the Earth is flat and that a reptilian chest is hidden under the white shirts of the elite. The whole world problem is increasingly viewed in a one-sided and simplistic way as the problem of a malicious, satanic elite.

At both polar extremes, the same psychological processes are ultimately at work: a tired and lonely person, whose life feels increasingly empty and meaningless, tries to gain control over his sentiments and affects by pinpointing the cause of all fear and problems to one small point. The "mainstream" side projects all evil onto the anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists; the "counter-movement" locates all evil in the "malicious elite."

A constant on both sides is that the evil is primarily projected outside oneself. And to that extent, one cannot help but fall into aggression and powerlessness. The way out of this powerlessness is not in dimming sunlight with technologically controllable mirrors in space or exploding nitrate bombs in the stratosphere; our fear of terrorist attacks will not go away by introducing a surveillance state, racial hatred will not disappear by rewriting history books, sexual drive will not become less problematic through the woke ideology, and diseases will not be prevented by mRNA vaccines and nanotechnology in the blood.

And the way out of powerlessness is not in a violent uprising against the elite either. The elite is a mirror of the population. They are part of the same overarching organism. As long as the view of humanity and the world does not change, the population will repeatedly create the same elite. The main conclusion is this: the rationalistic worldview has had its time.

A few hundred years ago, people began to believe that rational thinking would lead to Truth. But on that path, deception mostly prevailed. In a sense, this is simply a consequence of our rationalist-mechanist view on man and the world. "Man is a machine caught in the great machine of the universe; his highest goal is to prevail in the struggle to survive. Why would such a survival machine try to speak the Truth? The ancient Greeks already knew: speaking the Truth is always risky. It reduces your chances of success in the survival game. For the rationalistic person, the conclusion is quickly drawn: Only idiots speak the Truth."

Thus, the fanatical belief in "rationality" strangled the Truth. In the population. And in the elite. The entire pursuit of rationality led to what I call "the veil of appearance" becoming increasingly thicker and more impenetrable in our society. The veil of appearance has always existed, but it has grown excessively in the past few centuries. It becomes thicker than ever before. We live in the age of propaganda and large-scale manipulation. Search engines like Google were initially funded by the American state. And that could cost enormous sums of money. Why is a search engine so interesting to the state? Because of its enormous usefulness as a propaganda instrument.

Propaganda tries to steer mental processes. It ensures that attention is focused on one thing and not another. That is what Google does. Every time you search your way through your mental life and give Google a search query, the search engine steers you in one direction according to an algorithm set by the state and keeps you away from another direction. Many of the well-known applications on the internet are camouflaged propaganda instruments.

And it goes further than that. To give one example: in 2020, the United Nations recruited no fewer than 110,000 so-called "digital first responders." These people have one mission: to discredit anyone who supposedly spreads "fake news." And that fake news is defined as "anything that goes against the UN ideology." And not only the UN recruits such collaborators. Almost every major global institution does. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people are busy on the internet trying to influence your opinion by artificially presenting certain opinions as popular and "right" and others as reprehensible and wrong.

The propaganda techniques of the 21st century are downright astonishing in their scope. They range from artificially hiring a virtual or real crowd ("rent a crowd," a form of "astroturfing") to give preferred opinions an attractive aura of popularity to doing the exact opposite by slowing down likes on social media ("shadowbanning") to make unwanted opinions appear unpopular and thus unattractive.

The question of what is real and what is appearance becomes even more blurred by the spectacular rise of Artificial Intelligence. Fake profiles on the internet, chatbots that are barely distinguishable from real people during conversations, artificial photos, and deep fake videos – the world of appearance is becoming harder and harder to distinguish from the real world. Thus, the 21st-century human disappears into a digital hall of mirrors where the real and the virtual image are barely distinguishable from each other. And he moves in that hall like a puppet on the algorithmic strings of masters whose eyes he never sees. This is the big question for the near future: who is The Master in this hall? And how does a person find the way out? This question boils down to this: What is Truth?

Where is the weak point in the armor of the moloch that has the human condition in its grip? The way out of the captivity in appearance lies – entirely logically when viewed from a certain perspective – in the revaluation of an act that humans could perform around the campfires of prehistoric times: the act of speaking the truth. This act is both the solution to the individual crisis and the collective crisis in which society finds itself.

We must focus our attention on this: The art of good speaking forms the logical remedy for a society sick with that new kind of lie that we call propaganda. We are going through a metaphysical revolution, comparable to the metaphysical revolution that led to the Enlightenment. This revolution essentially boils down to this: a society led by a propagandized mass is replaced by a society led by a group of people connected through sincere speaking.

In a sense, this revolution also transforms the imbalances created by rationalism; it turns them back into relationships. Sincere speaking is resonant speaking – it connects the Soul of man with the outside world; it restores the connection with fellow humans, one's own body, one's own drives, society, and nature. It is an important question in this era: what is the psychology of the act of good speaking? What are the different ways in which a person can use words, and which form of speaking can penetrate the veil of appearance and inspire people in times when they are suffocating under manipulation and appearance? How can we master the art of Good Speech?"