To make a god whose god is us pt I
How the ultimate aim of technological progress is to replace religion
Humans have been afraid of the unknown since before we were humans.
Since we were terrified mammals gazing out into the dark abyss of night and perhaps even before that.
Our solution to the crippling terror of the unknown was mostly trial and error.
We observed cause and effect and then tried to achieve effects that worked in our favor and discourage those that did not by replicating the causes.
Animals tend to shy away from fire, so we harnessed flames to keep them at bay. Their sharper claws, greater strength, and longer range gave them the advantage in combat, so we re replicated these advantages in our weapons against them.
But this process was highly biased because we didn’t evaluate our experiments with equal rigor. Things we desperately wanted to be true, like the idea that dance rituals could somehow impact rainfall and crop yields, or that various aspects of the world around us were governed by supernatural entities with moods and personalities just like us, gained unanimous acceptance.
There were things over which we refused to believe we had no control.
So unwilling were we to have these convictions challenged that for millennia any who dared question them were declared heretics and blasphemers, punished with banishment or death.
Daemons of the dark and daemons in your email
One of the driving forces behind the scientific age is the realization that so many of the pagan 'gods’ humanity created to get us through the terrifying dark of night and explain to us the mystifying dark of the unknown are actually figments of our imagination.
There is great power to be generated by mentally representing emotions like love or natural forces like the tides, to be sure, but at the end of the day, gods and demons are conceptualizations of the inexplicable to comfort us over things we can’t control.
They are personifications of powerful aspects of the world we perceive around us. Without us, these forces would still exist, but they wouldn’t have names or human forms.
Before demons took on the reputation for being pure evil, they were “daemons”: ephemeral intelligences which one could interact with and rely upon to help guide their life. Socrates believed in one, as did many other classical Greeks and Romans and others well into the middle ages.
I’m not here to argue whether “daemons” actually exist or had agency outside of the persons interacting with them. What’s clear is that the conceptualization of what was perceived as external to Socrates as being something between a robot and a god was very helpful to many.
If nothing else they personified one’s intuition and gave hunches and insights more weight.
You could say that people “programmed” daemons to help them interface with life long before programming in our modern sense was a thing.
Early coders understood this implicitly, which is why they nicknamed the mini-programs they made to do repetitive, imp-like tasks such as letting you know you entered an address wrong, “daemons”.
In the mental program sense, all mythological entities from fox spirits to dragons, from fairies to satyrs, and even the gods themselves, were “daemons”. This is why the definition of “daemon” evolved into the Christian one we’re more familiar with, since all such mental constructs had the potential to distract and lead astray from the embodiment of all truth, the one and only God.
However, the monotheists merely replaced many mental programs with one big one.
In case you think yourself too advanced for such superstitious thinking, realize that most of us have just given such “entities” different names. Today, that which exists outside our conception of self gets called things like, “superego”, “id”, and “collective consciousness”.
For just as mailer daemons can’t run without your first hitting ‘send’, ancient “daemons” and other entities also required a spark to get going: they required belief, otherwise known as faith.
The second demise of Christ
When Nietzsche declared that “God is dead… and you have killed him” a lot of people didn’t understand the full literary brilliance of this statement.
These are words intended to bring a close to the Christian age.
The first time they were said, western society believed they had literally killed God in His earthly manifestation as Jesus Christ.
When Nietzsche said them, God had figuratively been killed by a people who’d done away with their belief in the existence of anything sacred.
What we did next, was rebuild Him.
The Matrix is real and we keep remaking it
The first Matrix is a self-help hero myth. It’s everyone’s favorite movie for the same reason everyone loves Dune or the myth of Theseus: it’s about a guy who discovers he’s “the one” and takes up the reins to beat the system.
But Matrix Reloaded is the sequel that actually spells out the truth: we tear down the system only to end up replacing it with a more effective one.
Want to know why there will never be a Matrix sequel where Neo and the gang aren’t fighting against evil machine slave masters? Because most of us have no idea what we’d actually do with our freedom. This is why there even is a Matrix Resurrections, we collectively willed the robots to take over again so we can watch our proxies beat the system one more time.
Science created for people a more accurate and reliable representation of the world than the priests and rituals of religion. One with very little room for God. This, declared various figures of the Enlightenment, is true freedom.
But the people couldn’t take it. The panic and fear which ensued led people who no longer believed in religion to put their faith in their country aka nationalism, which led to the excesses of the French Revolution and the slaughter of millions in WWI, among countless other examples of misery and suffering.
Disillusionment with nationalism led still more people to seek refuge in ideology, culminating in the greatest mass murders ever seen in history throughout the latter half of the 20th century.
In other words, we took the power true freedom granted and use it to build new all-encompassing thought systems to provide the certainty and comfort religion once did.
The church has no more power than what we give it, neither does the government or its laws, or some global superstate built upon principles derived from one pseudo-scientific theory of everything or another.
Our attempts to institute total control have let to one massive failure after another, but it hasn’t stopped us from making yet another attempt.
Only this time, the virtual chains we build out of technology are very much binding.
And the daemons coded out of 1s and 0s are far better jailers than the words and totems which preceded them.