Ad Radicem: To the root!

By Darren Allen

A multifaceted series of reflections on the nature of reality, each exposing the common root of human experience. Original accounts of art, metaphysics, gender, madness, technological slavery, moral philosophy and the nature and origins of the simulation we are fused to, but which is now cracking up, inform enquiries into censorship, superstitio

• Language: English
• Publisher: Expressive Egg
• Release date: Jun 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781838407322

Darren Allen

Darren Allen is from old Whitstable, in the county of Kent. He writes non-fiction, novels, teleplays and graphic novels. His work addresses the nature of reality, the origin of civilisation, the horrors of work, death, gender, mental 'illness', Miss Genius, unconditional love, and life outside the simulacrum. He is not qualified to write about any of these things, thank God.

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Darren Allen is from old Whitstable, in the county of Kent. He writes non-fiction, novels, teleplays and graphic novels. His work addresses the nature of reality, the origin of civilisation, the horrors of work, death, gender, mental ‘illness’, Miss Genius, unconditional love, and life outside the simulacrum. He is not qualified to write about any of these things, thank God.

Published by Expressive Egg Books

www.expressiveegg.org

Copyright © 2022 Darren Allen. All rights reserved.

Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective

licensing agreements, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner

without the prior written permission of the publisher.

First published in 2022, in England.

Darren Allen has asserted his moral rights under

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Front cover illustration by Ai Higaki.

‘The end of the world is not the end of the world’

by William Barker, reproduced here with permission

Text design by Darren Allen.

ISBN: 978-1-8384073-9-1 paperback

ISBN: 978-1-8384073-2-2 epub / kindle

Disclaimer: the author and publisher

accept no liability for actions inspired by this book

unless they are extremely funny.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Preface

This book is now a unified whole, but most of the chapters, although they’ve been reworked to better illumine the core they orbit, started life as essays written as standalone articles. This means there is a little overlap between some of them, and also with my other non-fiction books. This is particularly the case with the first essay here, which is a brief, bird’s-eye view of my work and therefore intersects with various parts of it.

Some of the ideas here will strike many people as surprising, even quite outrageous. I invite you to put your opinions aside until you have heard my case or even, if you can, until you have seen how it fits into the whole, which is the point here. If your irritation is too much to bear, and you have to throw the book out the window, go ahead; but it won’t help. What you are reacting to will appear again in your life in a form much more difficult to do away with.

I’ve avoided writing about topical matters for much the same reason I avoid reading about them. Where contemporary people, news events, books and so on appear they are offered as means to plumb deeper lakes. I still have vestigial interest in geopolitics and the various horrifying facts of collapse, but at this stage there’s not a whole lot that can be learnt from the simulated world our screens bring to us, which is floating away from worldly reality as that same reality fissures and splits. My ambition here, as elsewhere, is to see through the cracks, into heaven and hell.

Darren Allen, Reading 2019-2023

Contents

Preface

Ad Radicem

Introduction: A World of Lies

A Beginner’s Guide to The System and the Self

The Technological System

Spectacle and Simulation

The Source of Ought

Panjective Ethics

You are a Bastard!

On Bafflement

The Mechanical Marx

Panjective Aesthetics

Video Games are not an Artform

Are you Living in a Simulation?

Panjectivism

Love

Panjective Gender

How to not Murder your Wife (and not be murdered by her)

The Schizophrenic and the Psychocrat

I Am Security

The Religion of Life

Postcard from the Void

In Praise of Superstition

The Sun of Schopenhauer

Barry Long’s Time Will Come

The Christian and the Nazarene

How to Be Unlikeable

On Discernment

The Surrogate of Sport

Don’t Take this the Wrong Way

Teach Yourself Insanity

The Primal Way

Beyond Theory, Beyond Conspiracy Theory

The Postmodern Nightmare

The Primalist Manifesto

Consider the Mushroom

Ad Radicem

As soon as a man appears who brings something of the primitive along with him, so that he doesn’t say, ‘you must take the world as you find it,’ but rather ‘let the world be what it likes, I take my stand on a primitiveness which I have no intention of changing to meet with the approval of the world,’ at that moment, as these words are heard, a metamorphosis takes place in the whole of nature. Just as in a fairy story, when the right word is pronounced, the castle that has being lying under a spell for a hundred years opens and everything comes to life, in the same way existence becomes all attention. The angels have something to do, and watch curiously to see what will come of it, because that is their business. On the other side, dark, uncanny demons, who have been sitting round doing nothing and chewing their nails for a long time, jump up and stretch their limbs, because, they say, ‘here is something for us…’

Søren Kierkegaard

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

Henry David Thoreau

Introduction: A World of Lies

Where I live there is no nature, just a few spots of carefully curated greenery. Certainly nothing that could be called wild.

There are no children. The streets are empty. If you see a child, an adult is very carefully martialling it from one high-tech room to another.

Nothing is really being done, nothing is being made. All the objects that people use are made in large factories in China. Nobody here can make anything. Very few people can do anything useful at all.

There is very little socialisation. Everyone interacts with each other, and with the world, through their screens, which most people spend most of their time staring at.

Most human behaviour here is low in subtlety and complexity. Conversations are usually rudimentary. Mating rituals are particularly crude.

Love still appears, but very rarely and in a sentimentalised form. Most relationships are functional at best, very often a source of misery.

Fear, anxiety, anger, despair and anguish are everywhere. Oceans of suffering simmer just below the surface.

It is almost unbearably ugly. It’s hideous. Most of the buildings here are cubes made of breeze-blocks. Colours, where they do appear, are clashing and gaudy.

People here eat what they call ‘food’, but which is actually highly processed fat and nutitionless protein, laced with poisons.

Just about everyone is addicted to something. The most common addictions are sugar, pornography, alcohol, prescription drugs, recreational drugs, technology and buying things. None of this makes anyone happy; quite the reverse.

Very few people are healthy. Most are overweight, with strange posture, red or rheumy eyes, pale or blotchy skin, weak-looking or sickly; while those who are healthy are very often obsessed with health, which is another addiction.

Everyone here looks like they are weighed down, dried up, haunted. Boredom reigns. There is no joy.

There is no culture here. No original art, no beautiful music, nobody is dancing, at least not well, and certainly not sober. Occasionally someone in the high street sings a cover of a machine-made song, but that’s it. The books on sale here are about depressed middle class women, the cinemas show remakes and superhero films, the newspapers are full of lies.

Every surface is covered in messages persuading you to buy things or reminding you to be terrified. More lies.

What is this hell? Where am I? Actually, I could be any-where in the world. In fact I’m in a place called Reading, a very ordinary town in England, a Western European state at the tail end of the first and last world civilisation.

But every town everywhere is like this. Some are certainly prettier than Reading, but you’ll find the same adverts, the same shops, the same cars, the same clothes, the same screens, the same schools, the same hospitals, the same conversations, the same boredom, the same sickness, the same misery.

The good news is that this nightmare is at last coming to an end. We are now well into the final stage of a bad dream which has lasted for thousands of years.

I probably don’t need to tell you that. A lot of people know it now. At the very least they can feel it.

World dread.

What few people are aware of is what the world really is, how we actually got here and what it truly means to be free of it all. Not free in a future dreamworld, or idealised utopia, but unconditionally free, here and now.

That’s what this book is about. The truth.

A Beginner’s Guide to The System and the Self

What is the Truth?

Facts are not the truth.

Facts are ideas which are based on things that the mind creates. Colour, sound, sensation, hardness and smell are all things that the mind creates and then turns into facts.

These words, for example, are, for you, a literal, factual experience that your mind produces for you by interpreting stimulated nerves in your eyes.

Obviously what you are looking at is based on something real. Obviously facts exist — only mad people believe they don’t — but what you are actually experiencing is information made by the optic nerves and by the interpreting mind. Not the words themselves, not the page or the book, itself.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

The answer to this famous question is no. When the tree falls, it produces something, some kind of waves, disturbances in the air, but sound is what our minds make of those waves. Without a mind, there is no sound, there is no colour, there is no hardness, there are no properties at all, such as we experience them.

If this is a little strange, it gets much stranger. It’s not just colour and sound and smell and hardness and so on that the mind makes for us, but time and space are also creations of the mind.

I’m looking at an onion and a candle. I experience these things as two separate objects — the onion is separate from the candle — with a past and a future — they existed yesterday and will exist tomorrow. But these facts — the separateness of things and the fact that they have a past that caused them — literality and causality — are also presented to me by the mind.

Again, as with the words on the page, there is obviously something factually separate about the onion, and it obviously was caused by something which factually existed yesterday. This is why, no matter how fanciful someone’s beliefs, nobody ever acts as if we live in a world in which onions can turn into candles, or can fly off of plates and pass through walls. Literally, factually, causally speaking we do not live in a magical world. But, the fact remains, this non-magical world is brought to us by the mind. It is a representation.

The mind can only experience its own projections. It’s as if we’re sitting in a cinema, watching a film of our lives. The mind can never show us what is ‘really real’, what is actually happening, only mind-made images of it. These images are obviously accurate, but they’re still just images.¹

You might think, ‘fine, who cares?’ You can trust what the mind presents to you. What’s the use in worrying about it?

A philosopher might tell you that one reason is that you can never be sure that what you are experiencing is factually real. Am I, the author, real? Do I exist (or did I)? Are the things around you really real? Is the red you see really red? Or is it all an hallucination, or a virtual reality illusion?

Philosophers love to talk about these things. It’s all very entertaining, but it’s not terribly important in our day-to-day lives, is it? We might persuade ourselves that we’re dreaming, or floating around inside the mind of an evil demon, but then we have to cross the road, or do our taxes, or deal with our ingrowing toenails and we forget about academic mind games.

There is though, something else that representation can never tell us, and this is not just important, there is nothing in the world, nothing in life, that is more important.

What am I talking about? We have various words for it, but here I’ll use a word which encompasses them all; quality.

My mind can never, ever, directly show me the true quality of something, the meaning of it. Good and bad, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly — all of this is, ultimately, meaningless to the mind. Because, again, mind can only give us images, representations, never the thing-in-itself.

Take me, the author; what am I? Really? What is any object? I’m looking out of my window at a tree. What is that? What is a tree? Really? This is not an academic game; we’re talking about reality here. Do you know what reality is? Can you know? Because if you can’t, you’re in deep shit.

One problem you’ll have, if you never really know what anything or anyone really is, is existential loneliness. You’ll be trapped in your self, unable ever (ever) to reach across to the reality of something or someone else.

Another problem inherent to being trapped in a me-shaped prison, is existential fear, the knowledge that the representation your mind presents — which is to say, your life — is fragile, weak and, most worrying of all; mortal.

Finally, if you never really know what anything or anyone really is, you’ll be condemned to existential uncertainty, never really being sure of the right thing to do, at least in matters of real importance.

When it comes to important decisions the mind is paralysed. When it does act, it always makes the wrong decisions, or says the wrong things, because it never really knows what is right, or good, or true. It can only go by its factual images.

For the mind the beauty of the tree comes down to its factual value; whether it threatens me or whether I can profit from it — or its factual utility; what I can do with it — or down to its factual reputation; that other people say it is good — or down to some kind of factual, sensory, pleasure; it feels factually nice to sit in the sweet shade, or look at the pretty colours.

There’s obviously nothing inherently wrong with any of this, but if that’s all there is, mind will completely miss what is important. It will miss the astonishing truth of the tree-in-itself, and then make terrible decisions about it.

You may have noticed that minds, by themselves, are always making terrible decisions. This is because the mind, by itself, misses the astonishing truth of everything, because all it can see is representations of things. It cannot see things as they really are, in themselves, the mystery of them; just images, symbols, ideas, reflections, words and projections.

So how can I ever really know what anything or anyone really is? I can be confident about facts it seems, but how can I be confident about the essential quality or meaning of things? Is it all just in the mind? Many people today would say it is, that truth and beauty and so on are all subjective.

There is however, something we can experience directly, without having to go through representation. There is one thing, and only one thing, in the entire universe, that we have direct, inward access to.

And that is consciousness.

What is Consciousness?

This question — what is consciousness? — is one of the great mysteries of science and philosophy. Minds have been thinking about it for thousands of years, but they haven’t got one step closer to the truth of it.

This is because consciousness, ultimately, is not a literal fact. All the facts in the world tell us nothing about the quality of conscious experience.

The only thing that can tell us about consciousness, the quality of it, is conscious experience.

What this means is that if you don’t know what consciousness is, it’s because you’re not conscious. It’s as simple as that. You can be the cleverest scientist in the world, with all the world’s knowledge at your fingertips, but if you’re not conscious, all you’ve got is facts. Mere facts.

Many scientists believe that that’s enough. There’s no objective evidence for the existence of consciousness, and we don’t need it to objectively explain the universe, because everything seems to work fine without it.

So how do I know that consciousness even exists? I know because I am conscious. This unbearably simple, primitive experience, is the only indisputable evidence I’ve got, or can ever have, for the existence of consciousness.

There’s no way to prove it — it exists entirely outside of fact, and therefore outside of the scientific process. You just are conscious.

Aren’t you?

What’s more, consciousness — your conscious experience of being here, wherever you are, reading these words, on this particular day — has a quality to it.

Doesn’t it?

Many people are so used to going through their factual minds to reach reality, so used to ignoring the simple, primal truth of consciousness, that they have no experience of it at all. For most people, consciousness and the quality of the moment it reveals are, at best, vague, fleeting impressions, sandwiched between all their other worries and cares, between all the practical things they have to do every day and between the sickening rollercoaster of ups and downs they call ‘experience’ or ‘life’. Usually consciousness doesn’t appear at all.

We are not talking here of a pleasant or exciting or ‘spiritual’ feeling, or a positive assessment of what’s going on, or a wonderfully creative idea, but everything which is fundamentally good:

First of all unconsciousness misses the mystery of consciousness. Although it is indisputably true, factually, that the onion is a separate thing, separate from me, when I consciously experience it, this ‘fact of separateness’ somehow breaks down, and I get a qualitative sense of the inwardness of the onion. We normally call this mysterious experience, of sensing or being from within, ‘love’.

Secondly, unconscious people miss the uniqueness of consciousness. Just as the quality of every moment is unique, so conscious experience of the moment, which forms and informs the self, is also unique, as am I. We all know this, and yet we think, speak, act and feel just like everyone else. Somehow, we automatically get absorbed into the same, samey, unconscious mass as everyone else.

The third experience unconscious people miss is the depth of consciousness, of life; the profound quality of it, the soul of it, if you like, the strange rightness that lies under even great sorrow, the immeasurable intensity of the moment, and our response to it, or even, more simply, what the right thing to do is, in any given, unique, situation.

Mystery, uniqueness and depth are missed, all the time, by just about everyone. Very little strikes them as mysterious, nothing is ever really unique and reality is really just a kind of skin, pulled over the hollow drum of the world. Quality, when it does appear, is so dim and dulled, or elusive and fleeting, or abstract and unreal, it hardly registers.

Why? How does this happen?

There are two reasons. Firstly, representation has a kind of momentum of its own. It’s as if the film of the moment you are watching cannot be switched off.

If you sit down in a quiet, beautiful place you usually find all your thoughts and emotions churning away just as they did at home, or in the office. You can’t seem to switch yourself off, and see through to the reality of your own experience.

The other reason that quality hardly gets a look in, is that it is not useful, and the world is only ever really interested in what is useful.

Take a tractor. It is extremely useful, but it is not conscious, nor does it need to be. It’s the same for us. We can get everything we need to get done in the day, without ever having to consciously attend to it. We can and do live our lives like tractors, ploughing through the filth of the day. Conscious quality is not needed in our machines and it’s certainly not needed in our day-to-day lives. It is at best a hindrance, and at worst a threat, which must be dealt with like any other threat.

Or take a computer. It has no need for quality, and neither do the minds which make and manage them. Technicians use the word ‘quality’, but when it comes down to it, what they’re nearly always talking about is a kind of accuracy.

Technicians, engineers and designers don’t actually need quality, and neither do we. We might love great art and the glories of nature, we might value love and kindness and honest work, but we can easily live our lives without any of these things. In fact living in the world is easier without them.

Or take science. It has no need for quality either. It plays almost no part in any scientific endeavour and when it does appear — when for example, a genius brings something genuinely new to scientific enquiry — it is strenuously, very often violently, resisted.

Or take economics, in which goodness, beauty and love play no part whatsoever. That something is meaningful to human beings is irrelevant to economists, who can only consider objects and people as factual things with factual values.

Or take medicine. Rightness, goodness, truth, beauty; none of these qualities have any place in the hospital or clinic, which operate, and can only operate, on the assumption that man is a machine, a collection of rational parts, which, when the machine goes wrong, must be tinkered with like a machine.

Or, finally, take institutional religion. That certainly uses many fine words, like ‘love’ and ‘God’ and ‘nirvana’ and so on. But if you look at how institutional religion actually works, it resists conscious quality, and it persecutes those who try to introduce quality into it.

All this explains why economists, doctors, priests, scientists, technicians and businessmen are normally such primitive, one-dimensional creatures. They see life in the crudest terms and, although they pay lip service to fine ideals, they tend to scorn anyone who seriously lives consciously.

So here we are in a place which has no use for consciousness nor for the quality of it, full of people who are unconscious and unaware of the goodness of life.

We call this place, ‘the world’.

What is Nature?

The world is not the earth. The world is unnatural, and the earth is natural.

That’s quite simple. But what is nature?

Nature is very difficult to define. We know it when we see it, and we know what people mean when they say that something is ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’, but we find it very hard to put our finger on what those words mean.

This is because ‘nature’, like many important words, cannot be rigidly defined, it can only really be expressed, through art, or through living a natural life.

That said, there are still a few things we can say directly about nature.

One is that it is what we call fractal — which means three things. Firstly, that the part somehow contains the whole. This is similar to how each part of a cauliflower or a tree or a pair of lungs looks like the whole thing.

Secondly, nature seems to be both ordered and chaotic at the same time. Watch a cloud of starlings or cream being poured into coffee and you’ll get a sense of what I mean.

And thirdly, the complexity of nature seems to both go on forever and, at the same time, have definite, material limits, like a coastline, which never decreases in complexity, no matter how close you get to it.

To put all this another way, nature, like consciousness, is paradoxical. It seems to be both one thing and, at the same time, another thing.

This is why it’s so hard to literally define nature and consciousness, because literal words and ideas aren’t paradoxical.

The literal word onion, for example, literally means the thing we call onion, and that’s it. An onion is an onion, a table is a table and words and ideas can capture that. Words are themselves and things are themselves.

Or are they?

If I say that ‘the onion is on the table’, your literal mind knows exactly what I mean, because the word ‘onion’ literally means the thing onion, the word ‘table’ literally means the thing table and the word ‘on’ literally means the relationship of one thing being on another.

But if I say that ‘the onion is the table’, your literal mind hits a dead end. It cannot imagine what I’ve just said. It can imagine the onion-thing and the table-thing, but it cannot imagine one thing being another. Try it.

You can imagine an onion-shaped table, or a table made of onions, or ‘onion’ and ‘table’ in rapid succession, or an onion ‘melded’ to a table, but you cannot imagine the onion and the table being the same thing at the same time. This is because you cannot imagine paradox. This is one of the fundamental limits to imagination.

What that means is that the paradoxical cannot be seen with the rational mind. And what that means is that the mind cannot experience anything which is both one thing and, at the same time, something else. If reality, or any thing within it, is paradoxical in this way, the mind will miss it.

Mind, you may have noticed, can only come down on one side or another. This is why it indecisively flits between the two; why it finds it so hard to make good judgements, because it can only see reality in terms of one thing or another, never in terms of a mystery from which both things arise.

It’s also why the mind regularly misses beauty in nature, because it can only see the literal idea, the thing, of it.

Look at a cloud.

It is a literal thing, that can be literally studied. It has a literal name, ‘cloud’, and a literal symbol that represents it. It’s very normal. It’s literally a cloud.

But it is also something non-literal, something strange to the mind. There is something un-thing-like about it, something paradoxical. It is both complex and simple, both chaotic and ordered, both defined and unbounded.

More than this, it has a quality to it, a meaning, which the mind may express, somehow, through art, but can never quite grasp, like it can grasp 2 + 2 = 4.

We don’t normally think about natural things like this, we don’t normally think about them at all — that’s one reason why we love them — but the strange paradox and meaningful quality of natural things is what makes you say, when you really see a cloud, or a tree, or the ocean, ‘ah, beautiful’.

You start to feel a sense of deep beauty when you are in nature. I’m not talking about a stroll in the park, or a holiday to a campsite. I mean when you spend extended time in the wild, or when wildness touches you.

After a while, of being in a wild place, you find you think less, because there is less there to think about.

Some people love this. Some people adore nature. Others find it most disturbing. They spend so much time literally thinking, that when the source of all their literal thoughts is absent — when the world is absent — they go out of their minds.

Have you ever gone out of your mind? For many people it is rather an unpleasant experience, because they are their minds. Absence of thought, for the mind, is death.

This is why the mind constantly thinks and worries, and why it constantly stimulates emotion — excitement, anger, depression, anything — in order to keep the momentum of thought, the momentum of representation, going.

The mind, in other words, will do whatever it can to keep nature out.

It will even build a world.

And that is the world we live in. The unnatural world.

What is Unnatural?

Let’s look a little closer at the difference between the natural and the unnatural.

Earlier, I said that one of the paradoxes of nature is that it is both bounded — it has limits — and is unbounded — it is limitless. What do I mean?

The things of the world too, after all, seem to be both bounded and unbounded. There is, for example, no theoretical limit to how much power we can use, or how much information we can process, or how far we can progress.

If we had an endless number of earths, stretching away into infinity, and could hop from one to another, we could go on world-building forever.

The difference between the limits of the world and those of the earth is that natural things are bounded in size but have boundless quality, while unnatural things can grow and grow and grow, but can never, in themselves, get any better.

Take a natural home, a snail shell. It can only get so big, in time and space, before it stops. It reaches a literal limit. At the same time, its beauty is endless. If you get closer to a snail shell, its beauty does not diminish.

Now take an unnatural home, one of ours, a huge modern block of flats for example. Eventually of course nature will put limits on its growth, but it doesn’t have its own limits. Like the cities they are part of, these hideous buildings just grow and grow and grow.

When I say ‘hideous’ you might think I am making a subjective judgement. I’m not. Nor am I stating an objective fact. I am expressing a conscious truth. I am saying that only unconscious, unnatural minds could call a modern block of flats beautiful, but even they would struggle to find it beautiful at smaller scales. The lobby of such a building, the ceiling, the corridor, the doors; all are plain, crude, ugly, unnatural.

This isn’t to say that large natural buildings cannot be consciously built. Winchester Cathedral, for example, not far from where I live, is one of the most beautiful buildings on earth, and it is beautiful at all scales. Its floors are beautiful, its ceilings, its banisters, even its hinges and doorknobs.

When the great medieval cathedrals of Europe were built, people still lived natural lives. They were hard lives, but they were still natural, which is why people wanted, and were able, to make beautiful buildings.

Nowadays we have much more worldly power than we did a thousand years ago, but we cannot make buildings like Winchester Cathedral any more. We appear to have the technical power, but this same power has robbed us of the quality required to build beautiful things.

How does this happen?

Imagine a snail shell that somehow grew beyond its limits. It would soon be too heavy for the snail to carry.

If it were a strangely clever snail, it might actually want this — it might value the protection, or the bigger shell might get it sexier girlfriends, or it might have a perverse desire to be original and special.

It might then, rather than reduce the size of the bulging shell, start finding ways to carry it. It might devise wheels for the shell, then roads for the wheels.

Then it would need other snails to help it build these things, which would all need to be cleverly devised and labouriously maintained.

Then of course other snails would have to grow their shells, not just to keep up with each other, but because the world was being built for bloated shells. An ordinary shell would just be crushed.

Finally the snails would become the servants of the world they had built. They would be the shells.

And this is what has happened to us.

At some point in the past the ‘shell’ of the man-made world ‘grew’ in power and independence, until it exceeded its limits and started to make a tool of us.

We were then forced to set about constructing wheels and roads for the ‘world shell’ we’re all now carrying around.

Worse than this, man, in order to fit himself into the world he had made, had to change not just the natural world, but himself. This led to deformations in the human psyche unknown to earlier people and which now threaten to destroy human nature for good.

Have you noticed how worldly people, who have adapted themselves to the world we live in, are insane? Have you noticed that they don’t really feel anything, that their eyes are dead, that they are miserable, that they don’t know how to socialise or form loving relationships, that they can’t really do anything and don’t really want to? They can give an appearance of these things, but really they are just empty shells?

This is just the latest, and final, stage in a process which has been going on for a long time, which has mutilated human beings to fit into a world which is inhuman.

What is Technology?

The snail has its shell; what do we have? What is the ‘shell of the world’ which has taken over our lives?

It is our tools.

At some point in the past the power and complexity of our tools crossed a threshold beyond which they stopped serving us and, like the over-bloated snail shell, started enslaving us.

Before we look at how and when, we have to understand what a tool is. A tool is something which extends the power of my self, which I can use to do something useful for my self; to do something which serves me.

A hammer for example, makes my self more powerful. It makes it harder and more precise. I can bash a nail into a piece of wood with the new power of hardness and precision.

So a hammer is a tool, that’s clear. But so is a stone. Not quite as hard or precise as a hammer, but a lot harder than my soft, lumpy fist.

In fact, pretty much anything is a tool. A stick is a tool, a leaf is a tool, a drop of water is a tool. My hands are tools, my legs, my eyes, and, of course, so is my mind, which massively expanded the power of the animal body it developed in.

So if just about everything on earth is a tool, including my own mind, what’s the problem with them? And how did they create the dystopian hell of the modern world?

The answer is that they exceeded their natural limits.

Let’s take the transport system as an example. When human beings used their feet to get around, and then, later, horses and simple carriages, these tools were what we could call ‘within reach’, meaning that if anything went wrong with them, we could, if the problem could be fixed, fix it ourselves.

In addition, legs and carts do not require an inordinate amount of time and energy to take care of and they do not produce any useless waste.

Once the combustion engine was invented, however, all that changed. When trains, and then cars, passed a threshold of speed and power they began to demand that the world be reshaped for them, and, like the insane snails, we had to work harder and harder to build and maintain that world.

I don’t just mean the time and effort required to save up, buy and then take care of the family car, I mean the whole transport system, all the oil and bitumen and steel and plastic we need for all our cars and lorries and roads and container ships and railways.

As a species we have to devote an immense amount of time and effort to extracting and refining all the materials needed to get us around, so much that we end up, again, as a society, slowing down. Travel becomes difficult, frustrating, boring, slow and unpleasant.² What’s more, everywhere we get to is, increasingly, the same as the place we left.

But our transport system is just one tool which has exceeded our reach. The health system is another, the energy system, the legal system, our information technology, our manufacturing industries and our security systems are all tools that have got out of hand, that have exceeded their limits and no longer serve us.

Take, as one more example, a handsaw. A saw is, in principle, just about within reach of men and women. It doesn’t require much upkeep, or much input from the environment. People can fix it when something goes wrong with it and they can recycle the parts when it reaches the end of its life.

Not so the chainsaw. It provides far more power than the handsaw, but at what cost? It cannot be fixed (or fuelled) by ordinary people or ordinary communities when it goes wrong, it requires a vast industrial complex to manufacture and maintain and it enables us to lay waste entire forests.

The chainsaw is not really a tool. It is a machine. This is the word we use for a complex arrangement of tools which work together to produce a desired result.

All machines, except for the very simplest ones, like a water wheel, are beyond the reach of man.

What this means is that it is foolish to say that machines are ‘neutral’ or that they are ‘useful’.

We may have some control over how we use a chainsaw, and the individual might be able to put it to some good use, but the chainsaw is part of the inhuman system which the individual is powerless to influence, and which enslaves him.

What is the System?

Machines don’t have to be made of objects, like the chainsaw. They can be made of people and information. We call these ‘soft’ machines institutions.

If machines are the hardware of the world, institutions are the software.

And just as simple tools are ‘within reach’, so small, local societies, clubs, teams and other groups are within the power of humans to correct and adapt. And just as, when tools become machines, they start taking control of us, so when groups become institutions, they too subordinate men and women.

Institutions subordinate people by forcing them to adapt to the organisation of the institution. They do this in much the same way that complex machines organise their parts, ensuring that everything fits together.

Machine-like institutions organise people by turning them into parts, which are called roles, then forcing them to do the same thing again and again. Some parts, the more privileged roles, are given more freedom than others, but all parts, from the top to the bottom, must be, essentially, predictable and integrated with all the other parts.

If someone wants to be independent, if they want to live in a way which cannot be predicted and which doesn’t fit into an institution, they are considered to be stupid or insane.

That’s what the term ‘mental health’ means — your ability to adapt to the system. If you can’t adapt, you’ve got a ‘disease’ and you need a professional cure.

It’s not just the parts of an institution which must fit together, institutions themselves must fit together with each other, and with other machines, the whole thing forming what we call the modern world, or the technological system.

The fact that it all fits together means that it has its own priorities. This is very important to understand because many people think that human beings decide what happens in the world, but that’s not how it works at all.

There are people who, in a very limited sense, are responsible for the system — the owners of the system, particularly, but also its professional class — and they do have some power to make small changes — the kind of changes that you can expect from a political party for example, or a corporation, or a teacher’s union.

But the system itself is autonomous. It has its own priorities and its own demands which its human servants must obey or be crushed.

When I say ‘priorities and demands’ I don’t mean, of course, that the machine of the world is a conscious creature. I mean that it can only operate in a certain way, which forces human beings to think, feel and live in a certain way. There are three ways this happens.

Firstly, a machine, as we have seen, has no use for quality and mystery. It has no use for paradox, for love, for beauty or for nature as an end in itself. It therefore forces human beings to disregard these things.

Secondly, a network of extremely complex machines and institutions demands vast quanta of energy, which human beings must feed it, at all costs. If the energy stops flowing, everything falls apart. This is why technological states go to genocidal lengths to maintain control of energy.

Thirdly, improvements in isolated parts of a complex machine require improvements in all the other parts. If you put a Ferrari engine in a 1970s Lada it will tear it apart. You have to improve every other aspect of the car.

Likewise, technological innovation forces a complete change in society in order to accommodate the change.

When, for example, one aspect of British society industrialised — cotton factories — all the aspects of society related to those factories also had to be industrialised; because you can’t have machine-fabrics without machine-power, machine-transport and machine-minds.

Every step of every ‘progress’ requires an accompanying development in every other technology — not to mention in the thoughts, feelings and lifestyles of the people who must use or be subjected to the use of these technologies. This leads to all kinds of unforeseen problems which then require more technological fixes.

When we understand this, that, ultimately, it is not this or that person, or class, or nation that controls us, but the machine, many problems in our social lives begin to make sense.

Immigration, the destruction of childhood, the abolition of gender and sex, hyper-invasive forms of social control, widespread insanity and the death of nature and of culture can, at least in part, be traced back to the prerogatives of a mechanised system which has no use for innocence, self-sufficiency, gender, sociability, the wild or the genuinely original; that has, in short, no need for nature, or for human nature.

The technological system must expel as many humans as possible from its operations or, if that’s not possible, expel genuinely human qualities — such as creativity, generosity, fellow-feeling and so on — from the people who remain within it.

Such qualities cannot be controlled and, more often than not, disrupt the smooth operation of the machine, so they cannot be allowed, which is why only machine-people rise to the top in the technological system; unempathic, cowardly, hyper-rational, automatons.

Meaningless people.

What is Meaning?

Today we lead meaningless lives. Most of us understand this now; most of us can see that we are all chickens with our heads cut off, already dead, but through sheer momentum, running round and round and round, going nowhere, until we drop.

We are all desperate for meaning, but we don’t know where to find it. We all want to travel, to help starving orphans, to work in the film industry, to give it all up and live on a farm, to become enlightened monks, or to raise a family, but somehow these things, even if we are lucky enough to achieve them, don’t ever quite do it for us. We are still discontented.

The cause of our malaise is we don’t know what meaning is, or where to find it.

There are four sources of meaning in our lives.

First of all, and most importantly, there is the primal source of meaning, which is, as we have seen, consciousness, and the quality of merely existing in this moment.

Secondly, again as we’ve seen, there is nature. The beautiful, mysterious, selfless experience of being in the wild, of being wild, or of immersing oneself in wild things, like the sky, or a piece of seaweed, or one’s own body.

The third source of meaning is each other; society, or culture. We build our culture from consciousness — which is where universal cultural quality comes from, by which I mean human qualities which we recognise in any person, no matter where they come from; courage, dignity, vitality, and so on.

We also build our culture from nature — which is where particular cultural quality comes from, that which separates Kenyan customs and art, for example from Eskimo customs