Attack on man. Artificial versus natural

The normal man does not like to deal with universal themes. Thinking about life and death, good and evil, peace and war is scary. Fair enough: it is already too complicated to live the everyday. Why fret over issues that are so much bigger than us, often unsolvable and out of our control, making existence more bitter? Looking around becomes increasingly burdensome, an anxious exercise in teratology, the exposure and study of monstrous things. However, these are inescapable topics; someone has to reflect and - alas - take note of reality, a preliminary stage in attempting to understand the world, make judgements, fight for the true, the beautiful, the good, the just.

We face a Way of the Cross with many, too many stations, in the hope that sooner or later resurrection will come. Our thesis is that a gigantic war against the human creature is in full swing. All the foundations of our species are under attack - biological, anthropological, ontological - under the blows of an immense, monstrous (teratology again...) apparatus of techno-financial domination (masters of money, masters of the most powerful technologies in history). The rulers possess all the means, economic, financial, industrial, technical, cultural, media. A dome of a few thousand 'universal masters' (Giulietto Chiesa) has the fate of humanity in its hands, determined to modify it, reshape it, even transcend it to re-create a new trans and post-human species. It possesses all the means, it determines all the ends. Its own, which we can summarise as dominion over inert, undifferentiated human matter, to be placed under the orders of the technological apparatus.

To this end, it abolishes truth and reality: the artificial overpowers the natural, facts are replaced by imposed representation, the uni-verse by the meta-verse. The power of this dome became immeasurable at the dawn of the fourth industrial revolution, based on the power of electronic technologies. The world, from 'analogue' that it was, is now 'digital'. The first term describes the workings of the human mind, based on the recognition of similarities between objects and situations that are even very distant from each other. This type of reasoning is the basis of creativity, which is fundamental for solving new and unexpected problems. Digital (digit , figure) is the typical way of implementing computer science and electronics, which deals with quantities in numerical form, converting values into numbers of a convenient numbering system, usually the binary system.

In such a complex context, we are witnessing a profound, very rapid 'paradigm shift' in the sense indicated by the epistemologist Thomas Kuhn, i.e. the overturning of the entire worldview and all its implications. Before examining the three fronts of the war being waged by the fintech dome against homo sapiens, it is necessary to recall the theoretical foundations on which 'absolute' globalist hyper-capitalism, i.e. freed from all constraints or limits, is sustained: a crude materialism alien to any transcendent hypothesis; the cult of historicist-nihilistic progress. A nihilism announced with desperate lucidity by Friedrich Nietzsche along with the 'transvaluation of all values'.

At the dawn of the 20th century it was Pope Pius X who grasped the meaning of the time to come in his encyclical E supremi (1903). "With all forces and with every artifice there is a tendency to completely suppress the memory and notion of God. Incompatible with every form of spirituality, but also the enemy of every ethical, political, economic, value alternative, power feeds on the will to power, on the implacable hatred for every limit, seen as an impediment, a regress. Nothing is sacred, everything is available, matter to be conquered, occupied, reshaped, bought and sold. Ezra Pound's warning becomes even ridiculous: the temple is sacred because it is not for sale (Cantos, Canto XCVI).

In the spirit of the times - a time without spirit, an era of emptiness (G. Lipovetsky) - there is no other temple than the commodity form, the reduction of everything to a thing, a product to which to attribute a bar code and affix a changing price tag. The 'disenchantment of the world' of which Max Weber spoke is coming to an end: everything is calculated and calculable, the past is the clumsy intellectual minority of a childlike humanity, the future does not exist except in the predictive form of the intersection and processing of data and metadata.

In a world reduced to a figure, a thing, a mass, Pier Paolo Pasolini's desperate message resurfaces: I want to recognise things and, as far as possible, I want to re-mythologise them. What we are being made to undertake is a journey into the desert, or into the 'night of the world' announced by Martin Heidegger, welcomed with ebullient gladness by contemporary 'western' merchants. The most widespread objection among the believers of postmodern myths is the following: how can power be totalitarian, absolute, if it preaches any kind of democracy, inclusion, if indeed the most common criticism is the excess of permissiveness?

Pasolini again: techno-capitalist power "is no longer satisfied with a man who consumes, but demands that no other ideologies than those of consumption are conceivable. ". It 'has decided to be permissive because only a permissive society can be a society of consumption'. The sphere of rights, moreover, while it is disproportionately enlarged in the individual and intimate sphere, fades into the public sphere, in which the paradigm is that of surveillance, of single thinking, of the repression of ideas, of principles that are contrary to the neo-authoritarian biopolitical/biocratic order.

The acceleration imparted by 2020 (pandemic, digital identity, compression of mobility, identification and surveillance systems, limitation of agriculture, artificial food, eco-climatic emphasis, repression of dissent, generalised medicalisation, diffusion of gender ideology, transhumanism) suggests that the paradigm shift is in its decisive phase. The empty western humanity, ensnared by the parallel myths of the market and technology, is reduced to the scheme that Diego Fusaro draws from Greek mythology. The postmodern deities are Dionysus, who presides over chaos, the formless, the unlimited and transgression; Proteus, the god of hybridisations, of continuous change, of the overcoming of every boundary and the demolition of every difference. Finally Narcissus, the contemplation of self, the self-aggrandising egoism of the uprooted atoms that has in the practice of the selfie its compulsive ritual, to be shared on social media in the expectation of the 'like', the thumbs-up of the wandering atoms connected to the metaverse.

A war on man conducted in the form of the calling into question of truth, of reality itself, of the foundations of existence. We said that the aim is to disrupt the biological, anthropological and ontological foundations of man. Biology - discredited, derubricated to a variable dependent on cultural constructs - is attacked in its refusal to recognise what has always been clear to men of all times and civilisations. The biblical 'male and female created them' is denied in the name of 'genders', which have taken the place of the (two) sexes. For the transhuman neo-culture, genders are potentially infinite, as many as there are self-recognitions, even the strangest, most bizarre and (once!) deviant of every human being, changing, temporary and revocable. Roles, distinctions between male and female are but social constructs, like pregnancy and motherhood.

The tendency is the identical, the androgynous, the trans. Ethnic, personal, cultural, sexual disidentification, the gateway to existential fluidity, leads to a kind of denaturation aimed at subtracting the ascribed biological dimension. Without biological foundation, I am what I want to be or believe I am. The former Minister of Equality in the Spanish government, Irene Montero, went so far as to affirm that women do not exist, since woman is anyone who feels like one. It is up to society and its norms to take note of this. Since Montero is a radical feminist, one cannot understand what sense feminism makes in the absence of the subject!

Biological is the aim of total medicalisation: we are imaginary healthy people, to be stuffed with drugs, preparations, gene serums, whose real function (mRNA) is to permanently modify our genetic heritage. To what end? Biological and at the same time anthropological is the progressive subtraction of procreation from natural sexuality. The outcome will be ectogenesis, i.e. the 'production' of human beings through machines, artificial wombs and artificial semen. The consequence is the demise of parental figures, the transmission of life entrusted to those who have the technology and can determine, as in Aldous Huxley's New World, the quantity and quality of artificially produced post-humanity.

It is not by chance that the intermediate stages are the asphyxiating propaganda, h.24, of sterile sexuality, homosexuality and transsexuality, phenomena that from biology transit into the territory of anthropology and ontology, attacking the foundations of being. In passing, the operation of human reconfiguration needs to trivialise abortion - elevated to a universal right - renamed 'reproductive health'. This syntagma shows the biological regression of the human into the animal. After all, the Lords' ideology regards homo sapiens as nothing more than a manipulable biochemical mass. Man is animalised at the same time as the animal world is given rights similar to human rights. Absurd, since the animal cannot claim rights nor exercise corresponding duties. 

At the same time, man is imposed a stripped-down, limited neo-language - the unified grunt - through which he must define and judge objects and concepts, the world around him and himself according to the newly imposed paradigm. Detached from his family, removed from the ethnic, territorial and cultural community to which he belongs, impermeable to the instances of the spirit, removed from his biological and intimate nature, initiated into a series of dependencies, hybridised with the machine and meanwhile dependent on artificial apparatuses, abandoned to drives, unable to raise thought beyond the moment, governed by fear, heterodirected by the power of the techno-structure, uncertain, subjugated by the artificial, the human atom loses its freedom, no longer recognises reality and moves away from truth.

Is he still, biologically and ontologically, homo sapiens, or has he turned into a different species? It is the paradox of Theseus's ship, the physical and metaphysical question of the persistence of the original identity of an entity that has changed completely over time. Does the creature-man remain the same if all its components have changed and even the brain is reconfigured through machines and 'thinking' artefacts?

Greek mythology - which posed every question of meaning to humanity - tells of the ship on which Theseus travelled on the adventure that led him to challenge and kill the Minotaur, the monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull, one of the founding myths of the West. The ship had remained apparently the same, despite the fact that over time each of its components had been replaced, from the keel to the oars to the sails. There came a time when all the original parts had been replaced, although the ship retained its original appearance. It had been completely remade, but at the same time remained the same. Was it still Theseus' ship?

Were the true, the good, the just, the beautiful still the horizon of meaning, or had the war been won by men who were enemies of other men? Put in these terms, the attack on man requires a primarily spiritual response. To remain - or become - human again, we need more than ever to turn our gaze upwards, towards what exceeds matter. It is the mother of all battles, in which we must pit our love for ourselves, the creature with the divine spark, against the icy cynicism of egoless oligarchs, soulless sociopaths.  Where danger grows, that which saves also grows; it is Hoelderlin's lesson that the last few harsh years have reversed. In spite of everything, a new awareness grows laboriously, an antagonism that is still a minority and confused, made up of many small fires. Signs of cautious hope. Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto, I am a man; nothing that is human is foreign to me.     

Source

Translation by Costantino Ceoldo