CC BY
13ORIGINAL PAPER
DOI: 10.26794/2308-944X-2023-11-2-59-66 UDC 330.88(045) JEL A14, B55, Z13
"Techno-Structure": Seminal Notions
for Construing Modern Societies as (Horrifying)
Mechanized Anthills
G.G. Preparata
AD TRIARIOS, Città di Castello, Italy / Hemlock, USA ABSTRACT
The aim of this paper is to sketch a description of the power structure in a hyper-modern setting. To make sense of contemporary social phenomena, entomological analogies and metaphors could constitute a conceptual and methodological toolkit worthy of replacing "social science" approaches of these days. To accomplish this, a vast, pioneering, and enthralling research labor of scrutiny awaits to be done. Meantime, it will be expedient to lay the groundwork by positing our shared living space as a semi-automated "nest" based on artificial intelligence called the "Techno-Structure". The results of using an ento-economic approach show that this Techno-Structure appears to be not the concretization of a collective nightmare spawned by the sick psyche of the West (as proclaimed by "postmodernists"), but rather some sort of singular, unannounced, and "revolutionary" reconfiguration of social symbiosis. This economic reconfiguration has been loosely labelled "modernity," and in several substantial aspects, it is indeed alien to what preceded it. What remains roughly unchanged, though - and this is the key conclusion - is the basic stratification of the collectivity into a massive, globalized underclass (increasingly cannibalized by the automation), topped by a thinned out, industrious middle-stratum thoroughly indentured to an ever more powerful and exclusivist leadership group, who holds the keys to the Structure's computerized central.
Keywords: power; state; modernity; exploitation; anarchism; technology; entomology; postmodernism
For citation: Preparata G. G. "Techno-Structure": Seminal notions for construing modern societies as (horrifying) mechanized anthills. Review of Business and Economics Studies. 2023;ll(2):59-66. DOI: 10.26794/2308-944X-2023-11-2-59-66
ОРИГИНАЛЬНАЯ СТАТЬЯ
«Техноструктура» — ключевые идеи для интерпретации современных обществ как (ужасающих) механизированных муравейников
Г. Д. Препарата
AD TRIARIOS, Читта-ди-Кастелло, Италия / Хемлок, США
аннотация
цель этой статьи состоит в том, чтобы представить эскизное описание структуры власти в гиперсовременной обстановке. Понимание современных социальных явлений возможно с помощью концептуального и методологического инструментария с использованием энтомологических аналогий и метафор, которые вполне могут прийти на смену современному аппарату «социальной науки». Для этого предстоит проделать огромную, новаторскую и увлекательную исследовательскую работу. Прежде всего целесообразно заложить основу, представив наше общее жизненное пространство как полуавтоматизированное «гнездо» на базе искусственного интеллекта под названием «техноструктура». Результаты использования энтоэ-кономического подхода показывают, что эта техноструктура является не конкретизацией коллективного
© Preparata G. G., 2023
кошмара, порожденного больной психикой Запада (как провозглашают «постмодернисты»), а своего рода единичной, необъявленной и «революционной» реконфигурацией социального симбиоза. Эту экономическую реконфигурацию вольно называют «модернити», хотя в некоторых существенных аспектах она действительно чужда тому, что ей предшествовало. Однако то, что остается в целом неизменным - и это ключевой вывод - это базовое расслоение общества на массовый, глобализованный низший класс (все более поглощаемый автоматизацией), возвышающийся над ним поредевший, трудолюбивый средний слой, полностью подчиненный еще более могущественной и претендующей на исключительное лидерство группе, которая владеет ключами от компьютеризированного центра техноструктуры. Ключевые слова: власть; государство; модернити; эксплуатация; анархизм; технология; энтомология; постмодернизм
Для цитирования: Препарата Г. Д. «Техноструктура» - ключевые идеи для интерпретации современных обществ как (ужасающих) механизированных муравейников. Review of Business and Economics Studies. 2023;ll(2):59-66. DOI: 10.26794/2308-944X-2023-11-2-59-66
Then, when a number of lodges will have formed around a doctrine of amoral technicity, autochthonous forces will be drawn to their malignancy in order to reawaken with their help the ancient power, the longing for which is always throbbing at the bottom of their heart.1
Ernst Jünger, Gardens and Streets (1939)
Among themselves the machines will war eternally, but they will still require man as the being through whose agency the struggle will be principally conducted. In point of fact, there is no occasion for anxiety about the future happiness of man so long as he continues to be in any way profitable to the machines; he may become the inferior race, but he will be infinitely better off than he is now.
Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872)
Introduction
The context of this piece is what has been labeled, since 2011 (allegedly), as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, namely that societal shift whereby our System has not just been computerized (that transition, in fact, dates from the 1980s), but "intelligently" re-wired within a pervasive, worldwide, and "open" cyber-net of "information," which has transformed commerce and communication by dramatically accelerating the speed and dissemination of "data". Not only this: a further attribute of this progression is the ability of the System — when it is hooked up to the cybernet — to reboot and "upgrade" itself (as computers and smart phones routinely do) autonomously, i.e., without being prompted by the owner of the device. This "self-awakening" of the machine has elicited jittery evocations of the sci-fi dystopias
1 Ernst Jünger, Werke, Bd, 2. "Gärten und Strassen". Stuttgart: Klein-Cotta, 1960-65 [1942], 28-29, emphasis added.
of the late sixties and gone on to feed a massive sociological literature — which reads more like superstitious folktales than "dispassionate social observation" — on the alleged dangers of unbridled artificial intelligence: viz., on the alien takeover of the planet by self-conscious robots bent upon enslaving us in turn. This particular aspect, we shall also address in the discussion.
The gist of the paper focuses on what I call — employing entomological terminology — "chemical communication": in other words, on that sort of mystifying signaling that invading "dulotic" (i.e., slave-making) ants employ to confuse and disarray opposing cohorts of worker and soldier ants when attempting to penetrate and take over a foreign nest. Entomologists have found that such invasions are characterized by the regular use of peculiar "gases," which parasitical invaders spray when leading their sallies: they are suggestively called "propaganda pheromones" [1]. With us humans, it is the same as it is with such social insects. Much of our public, didactic, and official communication is indeed "chemical." Which is to say that such communication works like a mondegreen:2 outwardly, it sounds nonsensically alien — utterly so; but in the apparent gibberish and speciousness of the verbalisms and constructs thus speechified (and systematically foisted on pupils and employees in our System) there lies — if properly reconfigured — not exclusively a set of messages devised to shield from common adperception3
2 A mondegreen is a word or phrase that is misinterpreted as another word or phrase (especially when sung), usually with quaint results.
3 The mental process by which a person makes sense of an idea by assimilating it to the body of ideas he or she already possesses.
the exploitative exigencies of the System, but also a more direct sort of instruction. The superficial hogwash of technical jargon, as it variously transpires from the interminable circumlocutions of public discourse, essentially conceals a basic "chemical" intimation, namely that the subjects of the modern, mechanized antheap are "free." State propaganda is specifically assembled to diffuse this suggestion and thereby ingrain in the hearer the conviction that the State is his home, his protector, his shield, his defender, his father, his Big Brother, his be-all and end-all: the subject only finds "freedom" in the constituted hive. The glandular complement to this secretory System of persuasive innuendo is a conduit of psychological suggestiveness, which is concomitantly activated to placate the individual's anarchistic instinct, to neutralize his (mildly) insubordinate bent: should fear or the fanaticizing grip of patriotism be insufficient to envelop the community as a whole (that is, the sum of its various psychological types), the subject's — more or less dimmed, though insuppressible — awareness of the System's hierarchical iniquity must be "finessed," so to speak; it must be given (psychological) space to be vented out by offering the individual a choice of "anti-System" discourses if the latter chooses (as he most likely will) to abide in the ant-heap as a tax-paying, law-abiding citizen, but of the "progressive" sort — because he (knows he) is no fool to the shenanigans of the political world. Historically, the self-satisfied progressive has been essentially given, or rather, allowed to choose from three "chemical" options: Marxism, Austrian Free-marketeering (so-called "Methodological Individualism"), and lately "Postmodernism" (also referred to as "Multi-culturalism" or "Critical Theory").
In essence, what these three pseudo-contrarian forms of chemical communication (ultimately seek to) achieve is to convince the acquiescing recipient that power as such simply does not exist — power, i.e., as a structured elite (of parasites) controlling (by way of a middling stratum of industrious workers, viz. "the technocracy") every step, pulse, allotment, and bio-rhythm of the social metabolism. It is a criminal erasure of exploitative responsibility effected through discursive suggestion. If power must not be acknowledged; if power must not be mentioned, such effacement is perforce achieved by intoxicating the subject
with the hallucinated sentiment that s/he alone is empowered: s/he has to believe there is no true wielding of power other than his or her own. For Marxism, power is merely "superstructure"; it just falls away when individuals will have seized the means of production after having banded together and victoriously fought in the (chimerical) name of "class-consciousness"; economics is everything, politics is nothing. For the Austrian free-market followers, the market and individual success thereon is everything; the State is but a tribal, "constructivist" encroachment on the freedom afforded by creative entrepreneurship in the mercantile arena; economics is everything, politics is (worse than) nothing (a nuisance, in fact). For postmodernism in its Foucauldian variant, power is but the result of a chronic, raging, and issueless conflict waged "at the margins" of society by a demoniacal materialization — the "disciplinarian machine" — against the aboriginal resistance of unsubmissive flesh; the unsubmissive flesh of criminals, jobless nobodies, and marginalized masses. The rage against the machine is everything, politics is nothing.
Postmodernism is not only the latest, most fashionable of the three main forms of chemical progressive discourse, but, more than the other two, it has come in the last two decades (since its launch in the eighties) to dominate the discursive space of State and academia with a pervasiveness and despotic assurance rarely seen before. In response to the recent apprehension about the fate of the environment and the ravages the latter has suffered as a result of blind technological advance and the consumeristic waste issued therefrom, postmodernism has sold as "explanations" its usual package of metaphorical imagery unmistakably featuring the technological Behemoth, variously and perennially occupied with cannibalizing on this earth all that is good, green, and pristine.
The discussion uses the latter vignette as its point of attack and goes on to trace the origin, motivation, and political expediency of such discursive material before addressing the true problematic aspect of the late technological drift of our societies.
Methodology and summary findings
Drawing on the institutionalism of Thorstein Veblen and, for certain finer aspects, on the anarchist sociology of Jacques Ellul, this pa-
per argues that technology as a societal frame of organization, though unique as a spiritual manifestation, is not in itself a cosmic and unmanned plague besieging us all, but rather a manipulable artefact wherewith the exploitative process of the parasitical leadership of the nest can be, and has been, considerably refined. In this sense, the theoretical contribution of this short essay is to offer an unconventional approach to social phenomenology by constructing a framework made of the following pieces: 1) the incorporation of entomological findings and their application to the human realm — an interpretative device which I designate as "entomo-economics"; 2) the assumption of an unambiguous "New Anarchist" stance, which champions the works of thinkers not generally encompassed by traditional anarchist literature (viz., old school, nineteenth century revolutionary anarchism) — i.e., pacifist authors who identify the chief source of organized and ultra-noxious parasitism in the institutional performance of modern States and their industrial appendices (i.e., the Techno-Structure); and 3) the methodological commitment to complement the analysis of modern political economy by default with philosophy, religion, and anthropology, which are systematically neglected in the profession.
Discussion
Much has been talked and written about this new, so-called technocratic era. Much has been said, through "literalized metaphors" (T. Szasz) — for that is all we seem capable of doing — of this human being "at the center of," or better, "imprisoned" by a hyper-technicized, centralizing apparatus; of this human being who, thus entrapped for over two centuries, ends up not knowing neither what he is doing, nor why he acts the way he does, nor what he himself has (humanly) become after such a prolonged habit-uation to the dictates of an alien presence — of an inhuman presence, like that of the "machine," which appears to have gained the upper hand over everything [2, 3].
This is the story, the tale, the myth of the monster, of the mechanized Golem, which, cosmically, insinuates itself in the psycho-social fabric of our recent experience in order to take possession of the world and its inhabitants. From this my-
thologeme, as we know, Hollywood has derived a notorious blockbuster: The Matrix (1999). In this story, as in the many discursive speculations aired in the past century on so-called "technological power," the curious aspect resides in the suggestion that the political executive (in- and out-of-sight), with its elites, its "clubs," has disappeared; apparently, we may no longer see, or catch sight of the (more or less violently autocratic) "conductor," who, in the narrative, is thereby (suitably) replaced by a "routine" of a "crazed" computer, which, one day, nests itself deviously at the helm, ensnaring us and/or eventually attempting to annihilate us all (as in A. Clarke's novel, which S. Kubrick brought to the big screen with his 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey), or which, like the "matrix" itself, "vampirizes" us after having systematically thrown us into a state, generally irreversible, of psychic coma. The machine "masks" the coma, spoon-feeding us, throughout our lives, a scripted hallucination, which we grab hold of, mistaking it for the daily consecution of our wakeful state.
Some of the many philosophers that have treated this esteemed theme have stressed how the "discipline of the machine" is, in their view, animated, through the response/obeisance of the human body, by the pursuit of self-seeking "utility" — a utilitarian pursuit that, in the final analysis, translates into, or rather, is beheld by man, thus manipulated, in a moment of intermittent lucidity, as naked desire, a naked will to power.
At this juncture, we encounter a paradox, for, in fact, the point of departure in this story coincided with the advent, with the jubilant introduction of the machine, which enters the stage as a product of "technique" — namely, as something issued from Apollonian intuition, science, and practical ingeniousness, intended to make our lives simpler, by saving working hours and all the physical toil theretofore expended in achieving one or more functions, often vital ones. So, this progression starts out as a fundamentally positive and benevolent development, but then, eventually, and unfortunately (nobody knows exactly why), it ushers into a dystopian nightmare made up of steel-and-glass structures, irradiated with magnetic impulses. These irresponsible structures are chewing up the world and mankind, regurgitating the one as a slosh of radioactive trash, and the other as
an ugly conglomeration variously divided into 1) herds of zombies hooked up body and soul to the technocratic network; 2) of campesinos ever more marginalized in the moribund periphery of the rural world; and, finally, 3) of overflowing masses of "excluded ones," i. e. men and women, unskilled and redundant, all of them "flesh" ("bodies") in excess —flesh whose existential condition interests absolutely no one, precisely because the substance within human beings that could have stimulated empathy itself (human interest) has been entirely emptied (by the machine) of its lymph.
The paradox leads us directly to the practical question. We do understand that technique is the creation of a good instinct; it emerges as an all-human, genial solution to a series of concrete existential problems; yet it is just as patent that "something" has perverted this aboriginal seed of (technical) goodness into a colossal degeneration. This fact is horribly disquieting and sensational at the same time. What is to be done?
If a regression to cave-dwelling is unthinkable — all the more so as the social and technical "virtues" of the machine per se (and of its inventors: the class of the "engineers") are undeniable — one cannot but go back, yet again, to the issue of ethics. Such is the question of how "best" to employ the machine, or of how "best" to posit, morally, the question of man, of the engineer-man, who initially fathers the machine and yet falls hostage to his creature after it bizarrely "awakens" and thenceforth proceeds to manipulate him for good or ill (in point of fact).
This problem must be encompassed within what may be construed as the hyper-modern — rather than "postmodern"— era. "Postmodern" is a label devised with a view to deceive considering that the degeneration of which we are speaking is nothing but an exasperation of a tendency exhibited by societies ever since they began to mechanize their institutions in a systematic fashion — especially their executive and monetary-financial functions, i.e., the very nodes in which power is exercised. Or "used to be exercised," would quibble the cultural neo-movement of so-called postmodernism, which stretches the metaphor of the "matrix" to the extremes of a representation from which, as we were saying at the beginning, the elites have been opportunely erased: in this vision, "power" becomes lymphatic liquid which
circulates seamlessly in a "circuit," in the pipework of a reticulated "cage" — i.e., our own world, which the alien spirit of the machines had refashioned into a hideously mechanized termitary, chaotically jolted by uncontrollable tumults of mutinous flesh — where nothing, of a criminal nature or otherwise, is truly anybody's fault and where everything is blinding and mute violence, action and reaction, enthusiastic multitude and languorous counter-multitude; where everything is polluted by the waste of a structure, once "modernly" self-assured and presently dilapidated, which, from 1945 onwards, would seem to have totally lost its bearings [4].
Thus may be roughly summarized the "theory" (a fairy tale, in fact, as it customarily is in the "social sciences") of the French postmodernists; a theory which strikes its roots in the visionariness of the genial and disquieting Georges Bataille (1897-1962), whose sociological insight [5, 6] was, in fact, plagiarized, altered, and astutely re-confected ad usum academicorum by philosopher and academician of France Michel Foucault (1926-1984) in the 1960s. France's propagandistic central turned Foucault into a vedette in 1966 when it understood that with a vision of this sort, one could have relieved, discursively speaking, the dialectical schema of Marxism, which had then become obsolete (propagandistically speaking); the parts in the play had to be re- assigned: for the role of the "rebels," the "proletarian workers" were replaced wholesale by the pègre (the low-class delinquents of the "gutter"); and for the role of the "capitalists," the industrialists were substituted, instead, by ... the Void, the nothingness of mechanizing and disciplining power: which is to say — and here lies the "beauty" of the construct — by the absence of power itself, as traditionally understood. On the rhetorical plane, this was a hyper-conservative maneuver, and a particularly crafty one, whose pernicious consequences may be clearly seen today: in the United States, Foucauldian postmodernism has become a State-mandated (sub-)liturgy (and, as in all standardizations worthy of the appellation, Foucault's name has been elided in the process) — one just has to think of the gigantic inquisitorial and discursive apparatus which, in that country, revolves nowadays around the so-called politics of diversity. Upon this postmodern bastion, itself erected on weird, late French re-elaborations of
mystico-gnosticism,4 the USA, res mirabilis, has effectively launched yet another colonization of Europe's discursive space, "forcing" into the cultural game the "metaphorical dividers" of difference; these conceptual "wedges" are thrown into play with a view to create, artificially, fences of hatred between persons belonging to the same social stratum. This peculiar wordplay forcibly sets people up against one another by reference to differentiations of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and beliefs (even the flimsiest ones).
The relation of all this with the hyper-modern fable of the Technological Empire lies in the fact that, having assimilated the notion of "power" with that of the de-personalized "evil" of technocracy — which, according to Foucault and his American epigones, possesses, in the macro-political framework, neither face, nor center,— the only "human weapon" we have left in the face of this disciplining monster bent on homogenizing all things so as to feed on them would be to fall back upon our last, makeshift turfs of "partial certainty," upon our niches of inter-personal and inter-social "difference" — be it a difference of sex, "race," or religion — and, thus re-invigorated, (attempt to) react intermittently against the machine and against the potential vexations of "the others," who, in the final analysis, are all so very different from "us" [8].
In fact, such sophistic intoxication has also superbly served as choice ammunition in the intense barrage of fire that postmodernism has been continuously directing at the Catholic Church (finger-pointed by her adversaries as a most pernicious and ultra-powerful disciplining central, arid and retrograde: in other words, a self-contained "matrix" in her own right). Why the Catholic Church? Because the latter had remained throughout the twentieth century the only "imperial" rival which the Anglo-American Commonwealth had not yet succeeded in knocking down after the results of the two World Wars, when England with American brawn had been able to disable in succession: Russian czardom, the Central Powers (Prussia and Austria-Hungary), the Ottoman Empire, and,
4 All sorts of latter-day fable-like constructions about Creation and the beginning of collective life that draw imagery from non-Christian, non-traditionalist myths and Gospels that feature demons, titans, snakes, and demiurges of various sorts fashioning the universe and/or ruling over the cosmos on an equal footing with, if not with far greater clout than, the "good God" of traditional religion.
finally, the Empire of the Rising Sun (in one big, unrepentant blaze). Looming like a vast de-territorialized kingdom that ruled through credence alone over a billion souls (a marvel), Rome, with its vicar of Christ, was simply too much to stomach for the Anglo-Americans: it had to be taken, harnessed to the Anglo-American locomotive, and hyper-modernly refitted. This arm-wrestling match between Washington and Rome began in earnest in the 1980s under the pontificate of John Paul II.5 Discursively, the clash became tangible under Pope Ratzinger.
The Church timidly rebuffed what she saw as an attack on her magisterium on divine truth and family values via a blustery advocacy of "difference/diversity" for its own sake, which she felt sought to put her teachings on an equal and levelling footing with those of multitudinous other authoritative sources (worldwide) of proper moral comportment (relativism). That the provocation was done out of "spite" — and possibly something more than that — may not be doubted, although the trouble was that it had absolutely nothing to do with relativism, "practical" or "ethical" as it may be. It was something far more insidious. It was not just designed to challenge the Vatican's doctrinal "infallibility" and thereby downsize its "political ego," so to speak; it was above all a studied offensive to delegitimize progressively an adversary's authority in order to defat and absorb him entirely in due time.
Conclusions
Two aspects are worth stressing. The first is an-thropocentrism, i.e., the mental drift that for more than two centuries has been spinning Hyper-modern Man around, convincing him that, with reason alone, he can solve all his needs and practical questions; convincing him, moreover, via the self-awareness of his psyche — i.e., via the illusion of being complete and self-contained — that he is ultimately autonomous. This profound alienation from true existence and from the complexities of Nature (this "schizophrenia"), imbued with avid arrogance, is said to cause man to stray, to mishandle himself and the environment. Some commentators thereby
5 See the author's book Empire and Church: The Anglo-Amer-
ican Buyout of the Vatican and the Hyper-Modern Demise of Catholicism. Citta di Castello and Hemlock, NY: Ad Triarios Press; 2023. Forthcoming.
auspicate — this is the second point — that, in light of this glaring aberration, the world community finds a way to lay the foundations of a "new Man," a new humanism; of something that is especially sensitive to the "respect for labor."
Very well. To the foregoing, one may add, or rather, it may behoove the argument to reiterate, that the issue of "morality," and of the associated exigency of reforming it continually, ultimately emanates from that overwhelming and insidious psycho-social current, whose "physics" Thorstein Veblen, as early as 1899, had described in his extraordinary classic The Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen expounded the basic heinousness of this drift under the appellation of "barbarian" or "predatory temperament." [9-11]. Two decades earlier, with a terminology and intensity comparable to those of Veblen, Leo Tolstoy had exposed in his Confessions the same phenomenon by referring to it as the "Law of Violence." The gist is the following: as long as human beings — as they have done heretofore, "believers" and otherwise, all of them, in the like, undaunted fashion — will continue to evaluate, assess, and judge everything in terms of exclusivist success, victory, exploit, strength, excellence, clannishness, prestige of rank, competition, and incessant struggle for "primacy" and privilege (viz., vying for the best "combs" in the hive), it will be impossible to rid ourselves of noxious hierarchies; it will be impossible to dispose of a spirit of ubiquitous and imperious prepotence (a thirst for exploiting, bullying, bossing others around), which distorts every kind of human rapport; in one way or another violent, manipulative coercion and intimidation course through the entirety of our mutual (especially professional) interactions, from the most subtle and apparently harmless exchange or psychological intimation, to the most humiliating and brutal forms of subjection. From the institutionalized exaction of usury (in our sacrosanct bank accounts) to the culminating and final "dementia" of craving power/ "high status" pure and simple6 — which is the delirious end-all and be-all of human behavior — everything we do and organize always appears to be inspired by a more or less latent acceptance of a regime of (status-driven) contempt
6 "...Cette autre forme de démence, maintenant disparue, qu'on appelait l'ambition politique." (".This other form of dementia, presently vanished, which was once called political ambition." Gabriel Tarde, Fragment d'histoire future, 1896).
and harassment. This resigned acquiescence, on our part, in the violence of injustice assumes forms that vary according to the "space" in which such oppression is exercised; this violence of iniquity, as they teach us since childhood, we must either supinely come to terms with in order to survive if we are born weak or defend ourselves from it if we are born strong, so as to prevail somehow. And eventually come to enjoy the deserved plaudits and privileges of triumph. Violent the alpha, violent the omega.
All societal structures, be they pre-modern or hyper-modern, along with the men and women that are part thereof (though the women to a less degree — ours is still very much a "man's world"), have always been saturated with the Law of Violence. So saturated, in fact, that, as pointed out by another sociologist of technology, Jacques Ellul, the belligerent fomenters of State propaganda are no longer expected to rack their brains to concoct ever more colorful hogwash with which masses of individuals may be induced, with patriotic élan, to do/approve/swallow things they would otherwise never tolerate: no need to sweat, the masses are already "sold" [7]. "Mass-Man" — be it a (bitter) fruit of "exclusion" or a nondescript employee (even of mid-level rank) stuck in a cubicle of the mechanized anthill — is, verily, so barbarized, so spiritually debilitated, and, at bottom, so (intimately) aware of his total irrelevance and use-lessness as to be psychologically predisposed, just to feel he is a part of some "grand endeavor," to respond with alacrity to any "call to battle." Thus, he allows himself to be "fielded" according to schemes dictated by a logic of pre-arranged hostility between "irreducible foes."7
For, in the end, even if "the machine," technology and the monstrous techno-propagandistic apparatus that germinates out of it [12, 13], constitute altogether an undeniable reality — let us designate this conglomeration by the term "Techno-structure," — it is no less true, however much the jabberers of postmodernism's may deny it, that it is always the elites — the new ones being more or less legitimate filiations of the old ones — that are ultimately privy to the access codes of the Structure's console. And it is inevitably from the
7 Viz., the case of the bogus contraposition Christian West vs. Islamism or the recent rebooting of Russia's enmity are both conspicuous instances of the geo-strategic, geo-Hollywood-esque "game" of the past decade or so.
elites that violence, by whose "law" everyone is social frame of mind, and, thence, of the socio-
to abide, ultimately radiates. political structures — unfailingly oligarchic and
This is the key point: the "new humanism" will elitist — that have been systematically erected
have to issue from a re-examination of our psycho- upon those particular "spiritual" foundations.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This essay stems from the author's reply as a discussant to the presentation of Professor Adriano Fabris, University of Pisa, "La radice umana della crisi ecologica" ("The Human Root of the Ecological Crisis"), which was offered within a series of seminars devoted to the papal encyclical Laudato Si at the Pontifical Gregorian University on December 17th, 2015.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR / ИНФОРМАцИЯ ОБ АВТОРЕ
Guido Giacomo Preparata — D. Sc. in Political Economy, MPhil in Criminology,
Founder and Editor-in-chief AD TRIARIOS, Città di Castello, Italy / Hemlock, NY, USA
Гвидо Джакомо Препарата — доктор политических наук, магистр криминалогии, основатель
и главный редактор AD TRIARIOS, Читта-ди-Кастелло, Италия / Хемлок, Нью-Йорк, США
ggprep@yahoo.com
https://orcid.org/0009-0006-9915-0851
Conflicts of Interest Statement: The author has no conflicts of interest to declare.
The article was submitted on 04.04.2023; revised on 05.05.2023 and accepted for publication on 17.05.2023.
The author read and approved the final version of the manuscript.
