As the development of various technologies make our societies flourish, it is a natural implication that the variance of ideas, opinions, and criticisms proliferate too. As a consequence, we will become witnesses to more and more extreme events in all areas of life. The speed with which information travels is so fast that public opinion can change rapidly leading to furious debates on policies or even divided societies. In this volatile context adversaries are incentivized to lead information warfare, while leaders face the problem of uniting the citizens. Technologies like artificial intelligence will most likely lead to the end of humanism, even though few people realize this. Moreover, in a world where it becomes easier and easier to attain basic sustenance, the big question of finding meaning on an individual level steadily starts knocking at the door. We will have to question things which we have been taking for granted. We will have to rethink and adapt.

In order to not get swept by the tide, one has to use their brain. And to be clear, it's perfectly fine to adopt someone else's opinion or drift along with the zeitgeist. But for those which are curious and want to build a robust interpretation of the world themselves this is not an option. One needs to analyze different ideas and consciously adopt or reject them. In this post I discuss some popular ones which seem to carry a lot of meaning but I believe are either questionable and empty at best or outright harmful at worst.

Perennialism

Perennial, or traditionalist, philosophy is the first topic that we'll discuss. It constitutes the teachings of René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Julius Evola - all prominent scholars and thinkers in the 20th century, as well as the contemporary Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Perennialism focuses on the notion that there is a universal, or perennial, wisdom that is shared across various religions and spiritual traditions throughout human history. How is it that most world religions have similar symbols, ritualistic processes, and motivations? Why do these phenomena which have originated at different places at different times share so many common elements? Perennialists would argue that in fact these religions are different manifestations of the same underlying "truth". And for spiritual people, attaining this truth becomes a critical part of their motivations and adopted worldview, hence the huge following that such a philosophy can develop.

Perennialism does not fit the analytical vs continental philosophy spectrum very well. Analytical philosophy (e.g. Bertrand Russel) emphasizes sharp reasoning and is concerned with understanding precise concepts like language, logical truths, or moral actions. Continental philosophy (e.g. Nietzsche) asks broader questions mostly regarding how various things affect us, the people, and what is our place in this big world. Similar to it, perennialism tries to understand the hidden patterns present in all religions but relies more on spiritual studies, comparative religion and other uncommon practices. It simply does not use logic to prove its points, as mathematicians do, or any measurements and observations, like scientists do. And this is my main problem with it. If you are not going to convince me in a way that I find satisfying, then for all it's worth, I can claim the exact opposite point with the same degree of intensity.

Even though most religions exhibit universal patterns, classical perennialists focus on Hinduism as the concrete religion of choice, due to its metaphysical depth, rich mythology, and to some extent the unique, even indistinguishable blend of religious and philosophical aspects. And this often carries dark apocalyptic undertones. Guenon starts his book The Crisis of the Modern World claiming that we are living in the final epoch of the four-epoch world cycle, the Kali-Yuga. As a result, traditional wisdom is progressively lost and man loses his way, living a life of increasing ignorance, sin, and violence. Most of what modern western man is concerned with is already corrupt. Philosophy is profane, because it has substituted traditional wisdom with philosophizing for the sake of philosophy itself. The western fixation on actions and practical improvements is viewed as a sad departure from knowledge and contemplation. Modern science is also profane since it is separated from its traditional metaphysical origin. Individualism, humanism, and the reduction of civilization to purely human elements are viewed as shallow egocentric attempts to put our limited reason above everything else, without realizing the intellectual intuition that we have lost. The materialist approach to everything has dulled our minds leading us to build fragile and speculative models of the world and to wage wars in the name of nation states. Pragmatism represents the outcome of all modern philosophy, and the last stage in its decline.

In general Guenon's work is quite heavy and sombre. Similar to the universal wisdom that it tries to unveil, it bears quite an apocryphal esoteric vibe and is quite apocalyptic at times. It also triggers me down to my spine when I read it due to the sheer criticism directed to those, of which I consider myself part of. And while I do find it fascinating to explore these ideas, and to get initiated, I ultimately disagree with them. They are undefendable and for a rational person they are moreover absurd. It is unwise to denounce the Western world as intellectually inferior when it is the West we have to thank for most of the technological progress. If it wasn't for the West's pragmatical thinking I would likely be dead now. Has it not occured to Guenon that the modern world has not abandoned the traditional values but rather evolved and surpassed them? And what is even the point of thinking about supra-natural phenomena when you cannot experience them? All living creatures are general problem-solving automata. The truth which we understand is not fundamental but subjective, based on discernible differences that we observe through our limited sensors and we interpret by the constrained generative models in our brains. To think otherwise is naive beyond comprehension.

Anarcho-Primitivism

A more realistic idea, but equaly preposterous, is that technology brings more harm than benefit. The main proponents here are the famous Ted Kaczynski with his Industrial Society and Its Future, and the French philosoper Jacques Ellul with his book The Technological Society. First and foremost, irrespective of whatever view one holds, no one has the right to aggress or hurt others. Any such action should be penalized heavily and the underlying offender should be made to pay compensation, and likely be isolated from that society. There is no question about this. By this factor alone, the bloody history of anarcho-primitivism makes it a failed philosophy in that instead of inspiring, it has provoked fear and hatred. But why do the ideas that technology is detrimental to society even have a following?

In the Industrial Society Kaczynski argues that our society is deeply troubled. Leftists carry a psychological worldview based on feelings of inferiority (they feel defeated, hate everything that is strong, always need to prove themselves) and oversocialization (they feel a tiring need to fit in the system). For fulfillment, any human needs a power process - the ability to spend reasonable autonomous effort to achieve a nontrivial goal. If providing for the basic necessities is given, people engage in surrogate activities for achieving artificially constructed goals. The argument then goes that in the industrial society it is very easy to provide for yourself - it only requires obedience and functioning non-autonomously as part of a great immense social machine. As a result, this produces psychological problems in people.

These social and psychological problems of modern society are attributed to excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity of social change, and the break-down of natural small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village, and the tribe. These aspects put us in conditions radically different than those from which we've evolved, claims the author. Each incremental technological improvement by itself is beneficial, but taken together with the others contributes to constriction of our freedom, understood as exercising the power process. As an example, consider that a drug which cures some disease is obviously beneficial in the short term but on a more macro scale, as the effect of that disease on everyday life diminishes, it will start to prevent natural selection from favouring genes immune to this desease. Does it follow that modern medicine should be abandoned? The author continues that the technological trend is irreversible from within the system. For that reason revolution is easier than reform.

I believe it is impossible to reduce the role of technology back to its levels in primitive times, and moreover we should not think in that direction. Despite the overall analytical reasoning, it seems it has not occurred to the author that the power process which one is so craving has not become inaccesible, but rather has modified itself. If the immediate concerns related to food, safety, and attention are already handled, then all the better. But there still remains the question of what surrogate activity one should take up. Before, people did not have a choice in terms of what to devote their lives to. But now, precisely because of the combinatorial explosion of opportunity and potential, we have arguably more autonomy and more power to decide what to do with out lives. I completely reject the main thesis of this philosophy. Life is becoming more complex. Entropy is increasing. This implies more choice. So we are on the right track.

Critical Theory

Critical theory is another fairly harmful theory that is obsessed with uncovering and levelling hidden power structures in all areas of society. It believes that social problems are caused by certain systemic cultural assumptions and social structures rather than individuals. The main thinkers here are Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer. Here our reference will be Marcuse's One dimensional man.

In general, this is a book that is very confrontational right from the start. Consider the first sentence: "A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress". Just by reading this I sense that the author is a troublemaker. The style of the book does not help in establishing the main points, in fact, this is one of the densest unreadable books out there. Filled with complicated words, long sentences, it just comes off as incredibly pretentious, unfriendly and elitist. Read Marcuse and Rothbard back-to-back and you will see how badly written this is. In general, it seems the motivation for writing this is not to educate the reader in a down-to-earth manner, but to bring the people to arms and provoke violent confrontation. These are the first impressions.

A central idea in the book is technological rationality. In principle, technology increases the total output and reduces the amount of human labour required to produce a given unit of output. So obviously it is beneficial because it makes people freer. But as one sees the improvements caused by technology and how life becomes easier because of them one may start to prioritize that particular way of thinking which further aids technology with the expectation that this will contribute to even more improvements. Marcuse defines technological rationality as the mode of thought and action that prioritizes efficiency, utility, and instrumental reasoning. It is the rationality that governs the development and application of technology in society. In modern industrial societies this way of thinking is so strong that reason has been instrumentalized - we start valuing efficiency and reason more than human well-being and freedom. This leads to a one-dimensional society where critical thinking is absent, individuals are integrated into a unified system of production and consumption through technology and mass media, and in general any needs, desires, or modes of behaviour are all standardized.

This one-dimensionality of life has many undesirable effects. It creates a false-consciousness which blurs the lines between classes. A newly created affluent society disguises the explotative nature of the system. Overall, technological rationality has produced mass behaviour which is irrational. If our societies are so affluent, why do people work harder and harder and burnout more and more? By encouraging us to throw away old products and buy new ones people are reduced to cogs in the consumption process. Advertising further sustains this consumerism and promotes the psychologically damaging idea that happiness can be bought.

All in all, critical theory is rubbish. It is abstract, too confrontational, too general to be applicable to any concrete setting, and does not offer any meaningful alternatives that do not send us back to pre-industrial level of output. Quality of life is increasing and people have more career choices and more agency. It only matters that they exercise it in the right way.

Effective Accelerationism

Compared to the previous views, which focus on the negative aspects of technology and criticise the world governed by it, effective acceleration, abbreviated e/acc promotes it. In general accelerationist ideas always promote the acceleration of some process, in this case technological progress. Therefore, this position argues that we need to facilitate the development of technology - we need to encourage tech companies, we need to give them more freedom, we need to keep AI fairly unregulated, we need to reduce barriers to market entry, we need to educate people that this is the inevitable, only way forward. E/Acc is based on the optimistic idea that if we embed technology into every aspect of our society, we'll be in principle able to optimize every aspect of it. What's wrong with having all your problems solved?

E/Acc carries some interesting theoretical undertones. It believes that the main driver of change at the level of society is technocapital, understood as an inexorable physical process. It only expands. It cannot be stopped. It is rooted in the second law of thermodynamics. Even though in a closed system entropy can only increase with time, in an open system where we have external energy flowing in, a system may adapt itself to reduce its entropy and create order within its own structure, i.e. to harvest negentropy. Lifeforms are negentropy extractors - they harvest the order from the energy bath surrounding them, lower their own entropy, thereby producing complexity, and generate waste in the form of heat. The overall entropy in the total system still increases, but at the expense of the entropy in the living system. No one knows precisely why such systems generate heat - perhaps because the underlying total universe, to the states of which we don't have access, is reversible and causally-closed, and the generated heat is actually deleted information?

This thermodynamic process that creates complexity out of chaos is called dissipative adaptation. In general, the universe favours those futures where matter has adapted itself to harvest more free energy and covert it into more entropy. One way a system can scale this is by replicating itself multiple times, giving rise to Darwinian evolution. It is up to us to explore alternative ways through technological progress, of which artificial intelligence plays a pivotal part.

The view of e/acc is not human-centric. If intelligence is understood simply as the capability to model complicated relationships (one substrate-agnostic definition I like), then it fits well with the general concept of negentropy extraction. This can be applied to all kinds of systems - individual agents, competing/collaborating social groups, hiveminds and so on. But it is unclear how this would affects us right now. And since we don't know, we let the free market decide. It will allocate resources in the best way possible according to our current state of understanding. Top-down regulations only weaken competition and reduce the variance of various dimensions of civilization in order to simplify its control. To truly climb the Kardashev scale, we need to unleash the technocapital and facilitate its growth.