The Post-real world as Hell

 The Post-real world as HELL

"Nothing impels thee like illusion"                                Ibn e Attaullah

"You can’t tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you’ve let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?"  

                              Jarod Lanier, You are not a gadget: A Manifesto

“In these times a spiritual path is an ark. The great task is to make the flood visible.”

"Our decision about how we shall live our lives will depend upon what we regard or experience as real."
                                         Marty Glass (Yuga, An anatomy of our fate)

“It is the power of appearance that leads us astray.” 

                                                                      Plato (Protagoras, 356D)

We live in a world where everything that is not easily accessible to our lower animalistic self (nafs e ammara) is readily rejected. If it is not "convenient" and "practical", if it does not “pay”, does not satiate our carnal appetites, or if it comes in the way of our comforts and passional cravings, it does not exist, or is even deemed outright evil. The modern masturbatory lifestyle of instant and constant gratification, of limitless acquisitiveness, one-dimensional, surface knowledge, celebration of the mediocre, surrender to the pathological, a total disregard and contempt for quality and love and respect for quantity, and a complete inversion of all that is True, Good and Beautiful in traditional civilizations into the worst forms of degeneracy, is spreading like a plague the world over.

As total creatures of our times, thoroughly immersed in and totally shaped by "the times", lacking all sense of Sacred Time and of Eternity, forgetful of our true origin, center and end--- hence unmoored and rudderless---intellectually and morally malleable to the point that we can be pushed and pulled in any direction by the forces of Darkness, we have traded all traditional sources of authority and wisdom for the toxic ideologies of historicism, progressivism, evolutionism, technicism or technologism and all the other pseudo-philosophies emanating from the grand cult of modern scientism. One must now always go along with and be in tune with "the times” without pausing for a second to ask the reasonable question: “and what should the times be in tune with?” 

Instead of conforming ourselves to what is higher and above us, we bring down the superior and the noble and rub them all into the dirt of the world. All is flattened and equalized. The new priests, who constantly set the moral and intellectual bar low, now wear white coats and not black or brown gowns and turbans. They preach the gospel of this scientism which is a parody of the older, sacred sciences, of the holistic, integral forms of knowing, doing and being. This profane weltanschauung rejects symbolism and metaphysics and tells us that they don't mean anything at all. In their stead, we are offered a reductionist science that is only concerned with the "how" questions and is good at violently torturing and raping the natural world but impotent when it comes to answering the essential questions of existence and reality---the "why" questions. It is a paradigm without First Principles. For it, nature is nothing but an engineering and technological problem which will soon be resolved, just as society can be cured into a utopian paradise by social engineering. In its quest to torture, control and dominate nature, or matter, this narrow and inherently violent mode of knowing and doing has now brought all life to the brink of irreversible collapse. Nature is already responding in kind and every response bears clear signs of the impending apocalypse. To those with discerning eyes or intellect, those who are not drunk with the sheer arrogance of modern scientism, it has become more than obvious that it, nature, will have the final say about the fate of this planet.

Nowhere is this crisis of humanity more visible and felt than in the culture of virtuality. This virtuality is the digital universe of social media, the hyper-real, cyber world of video games, of fantasy and porn movies. It is the Satanic dungeon of the brazenly plagiarizing deviants who churn out humorless memes, diabolic falsities and other such nihilistic fluff. It is the shadow cosmos par excellence, the denatured abode of the increasingly dehumanized tribes of numbed yahoos and bored trolls, of socially awkward, reality-shunning, effeminate, cake eating bozos exploding with impotent rage in front of their glowing screens in darkened rooms. These are the perverts, the narcissistic, psychologically damaged "post-human" creatures whose only link with the real and with reality is a quick trip to the refrigerator or the toilet: the organic body that houses their shrunken souls is just too much of an inconvenience that comes in the way! These are people who are connected and plugged into the totalitarian Megamachine (Lewis Mumford), into the Luciferian algorithms 24/7 and whose nafs get continuously fed by the demonic matrix manufactured and maintained by the Silly-Conmen, the transhumanists and other such techno utopians. The “likes”, the followings, the ego massaging emojis and other signs and symbols that proliferate these devices and machines make sure that the reign of nafs (of the lower, bestial self) continues. Thus, speeding up the destruction of this anti-social, anti-spiritual matrix’s cunningly hoodwinked victims.

According to Charles Upton, in this virtual cosmos "reality" is "simply what is configured by the individual according to his needs, his interests, his fears and his desires. Like Jung's 'collective unconscious', [it] represents not an objective reality, either material or metaphysical, but rather a mass subjectivity with objective consequences. It might be characterized as a form of mass training in solipsism or autistic introversion, whence the proverbial retardation of the 'computer nerd'. Nothing exists but the 'me' and its global tendrils. I am the thinker, you are my thought. The world is my nervous system." The writer Marty Glass once coined a word for this spirit killing illusory world: spiricide.

Says Marty, “In the Computer’s displacement of Truth by information, of knowledge by data, of quality by quantity, of human encounter by interactive software, of thought, understanding, insight and intention by sequences of algorithms, of the inexhaustible richness and subtlety in human discourse by serial yes-and-no statements, the self-consciousness of humanity, of society and of our world, becomes insentient. Consciousness itself becomes inorganic, which is to say dead….Whatever displaces Life can only be Death.” (Marty Glass, Yuga)

With the denial of the Real, of objective Reality, we are left with a pseudo cyber world in which the wars of subjectivities rage on, one enraged "me" battling another vulgar "me" in a hellish conflagration where each one of these relativities aims for its absolutization and supremacy. Without the Absolute, the Truth, man is two (psyche/soul and body/jism) and not three as in tradition/religion (Spirit/Ruh, soul and body) and that means that all is mundane power and everything is decided by this power and not by Haqq/Truth. Ego everywhere, and what is ego if not sheer lust for power? In this sub-human jungle then, since everything is ego and power, the bigger beast will always devour the smaller ones: an unending nihilistic war of solipsists!

The post-real world of the Internet is a simulacrum, or, a simulacrum of a simulacrum (to use Jean Baudrillard’s term), a disintegrated, shadow universe with its own satanic hierarchy where the most elevated denizen is one who has completely emptied himself/herself of all reality. This is a place whose philosophy is completely consistent with the cynical theology of postmodernism which triumphantly leads us “from the Real to the unreal”. It inverts the perennial wisdom in the Traditional/Religious worldview: “Lead me from the unreal to the Real”, supplicates a seeker in the Upanishads   (Invocation, Birhadaranyaka Upanishad).

For more, please click: The System: Inversion, Social Media (Urdu)