Humanity Has An Ideological Fever – And It Might Destroy Us
Divided, we will fall into a Postdigital Dark Age
When the human body begins to detect that all is not well, it goes into a frenzy of activity in an attempt to “cure” the ailment: fever is such an example.
It is as if war begins to unfold, and in attempting to fight off what the body perceives as a grave threat, it harms and might even kill itself with its own immune system.
Humanity as a whole is experiencing something similar.
The expansion of our knowledge has increased our perception of existential threats: cosmic impacts, climate change, volcanic events, earthquakes, great waves, poverty and inequality, capitalism, communism, pandemic — the list is now nearly endless.
The result is a feverish response of frenzied action and unification of many around conflicting goals, all guided by a fundamental instinct: “eliminate the threat so we can stay alive.”
However it is our own overreaction that is the biggest threat to our existence.
A sick person often dies not from an infection itself, but because of the body’s reaction — fever, dehydration due to forceful expulsion of fluids, mucus production that fills the lungs, etc.
Humanity faces the same threat — its resources may overreact to the threats it perceives and do irreparable damage to the whole system, all in the name of self-defense and survival (or, through an ideological lens, “justice” and “fairness”).
Fear has overtaken our collective consciousness, and the modern chaos we see (murder, war, riots, “cancel culture,” book banning, the rise of demagogues, the crumbling of democracy worldwide under cults of personality) is a result of our immune system going haywire: the body has divided its resources to wage war against itself.
This is obvious to many at an emotional level. We can feel that something is terribly, terribly wrong.
But modern scientific dogma is so thoroughly opposed to anything that might be framed as metaphysical thinking — like the idea that humans are connected in a way that transcends the physical and cannot be observed with instruments or eyes — that we are unable to make any progress toward healing our shared psyche.
Like a teenager who wants to throw off the stifling religious thinking forced onto him by his parents, modern intellectuals are more interested in distancing themselves from our religious past and deeply spiritual existence than they are in studying and healing this thing which we don’t understand — the logos that connects all thinking things.
This is wrong for two reasons: 1) humanity is now at risk of destroying itself by its own violent actions, and 2) none of its frenzied activity is actually increasing its ability to avoid catastrophe from what is inevitably heading its way: supervolcanoes and other seismic disasters, rocks hurtling through space, deadly disease, magnetic disruptions, solar flares, and things as yet unknown.
It is myth, storytelling, and unification around a long-term goal that will save us — if we do not destroy ourselves before then.
Fiction is a product of our biology that allows us to move together toward something that does not exist — a prosperous and peaceful utopia of some distant future of which none of us currently living will get a glimpse.
These stories are in our very instincts, and they emerge as myths.
Moses left his comfortable position as adopted son of Pharaoh to unify his people and bring them to the promised land. His personal reward was decades of suffering in the desert, the derision and thanklessness of his own people, and what was likely no small amount of existential angst and wonder if he had made the right choice in leading his people into the bewildering unknown. Then he didn’t even get to set foot into the future he had suffered to create.
Similarly, Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus promised us that heaven was on its way in the distant future, but that it would be on the far side of chaos and strife.
This kingdom of heaven is not some blessed afterlife — it is what our descendants must build. And they can only build it if we lay a strong foundation upon which they can work.
The thing about story is that our vision of the future is symptomatic of our present experience. When we feel secure, strong, healthy, and confident, we imagine bright futures for ourselves. When we feel insecure, weak, and incompetent, we imagine that our future will be Hell (the Hebrews called this state of mind Sheol).
Just think back to the dreams you had as a child! I wanted to be an astronaut, and a bestselling fiction writer, and I had hardly an inkling of the fear I now face every single day about how I might eat and pay my bills in the future.
This is the Genesis myth of the Garden of Eden. Knowledge and experience disillusion us of the fictional bliss we believe in as children — before we know how dark, cold, and terrifying existence truly is.
Adam and Eve were not cast out of the Garden. To believe that is to miss the point of the story. No, what happened is that their belief in a Garden of peace and prosperity faded away as Adam and Eve increased their awareness of how the universe truly works:
What is here today may not be here tomorrow, so we must work, risk , and suffer to prepare for the future — Adam’s curse
Bringing children into the world sounds fun until we realize that it is a violent, brutal, and sometimes deadly process, and that the meager resources that provided for two of us likely will not provide for three, four, or five of us — Eve’s curse
Humanity has reached a similar point today. The deeper we peer into the abyssal unknown and the unpredictable future, the more we realize that our Garden of Eden — the Earth itself — has no walls and is in fact just a fragile oasis in a cosmic desert of terror.
And so we panic — understandably so. Humanity’s biological defenses have stirred. We are in the midst of a collective fever — one that may damage us severely or destroy us altogether. Above all, it is our collective knowledge that is threatened, by propaganda, misinformation, and total destruction.
These are the conditions that precede a descent into Dark Ages.
Just as bitter and selfish conflict destroyed the repository of human knowledge in ancient times when the Library of Alexandria was burned, we are now at risk of destroying our modern repository of all knowledge: the internet, which for decades has bound rival nations as mere pieces of a larger whole, each providing critical contributions to our collective archive of ancestral knowledge.
War threatens us in several ways.
Since our nations are bound together by cables that transmit knowledge across borders, a single bad actor could sever the fragile tie that binds us and isolate us instead into fractious war parties who are unable to see each other as equally human and precious as our families, friends, and neighbors.
However, should war unfold along a cyber front — which it most certainly will — propaganda, misinformation, and downright lies (exacerbated by artificial intelligence) will inflict us with a global dementia by corrupting our shared mind (the internet) to such a point that we will be unable to know what is or is not true.
In this way, power-hungry warmongers will be able to sever us emotionally and psychologically while maintaining the illusion of connectivity — a type of global gaslighting that will make us doubt our belief in the humanity of the people we are told to hate.
We will be systematically trained to call our fellows any number of names: degenerates, deplorables, snakes, pigs, traitors, narcissists, fascists, oppressors, criminals, thieves, exploiters, and worse. Anything but human.
We stand now on the precipice of two possibilities.
The first: we will unify through the story of our shared humanity and, for the first time, we will become a truly global society as we lay the foundation to go interplanetary and even interstellar.
The second: we will divide again into tribes and descend into a time of strife that will be referred to by our descendants as “the Postdigital Dark Age” — a time where we will be forced to rediscover centuries of spiritual and scientific knowledge (which are merely two halves of a unified whole I would call Wisdom) — all because we cannot get along and realize that these petty modern disagreements will look to future humans like nothing more than a stupid squabble between siblings over territory and toys.
Cain and Abel.
Romulus and Remus.
Right and Left.
We must grow up, or we will destroy ourselves — all in the name of justice.
Put another way, the more we divide into camps and try to extract the pound of flesh from our “enemies” that we think we deserve, the sooner we will weave the tapestry that will one day depict our own demise.
Compromise or die.
I, Christopher J. Fritz, hereby give complete permission for this document to be copied and distributed by anyone, either digitally or in print, even for commercial use, provided the work is transformative (a lecture, critique, analysis, elaboration, or something similar) and proper attribution is given to me as the original author.
If you do use this material, feel free to send your work my way at team@chrisfritz.me.
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Let’s keep wisdom alive.