The Reverent

Here again we have a piece reflecting on the relationship between man and technology. It is our religion in some ways. We devote our dogmas to its prescriptions and shape our epistemology, psychology and ideology according to its structure. Technology is a word I use a lot, so allow me to clarify it here. Technology, for me, includes all of the products, produced by human minds, which other human minds can practically employ. This includes ideas like religion, language, democracy, currency, economics and mathematics, as well as more colloquially understood technologies like computers and other physical mechanisms. I am interested in this relationship because it reverberates in a strange symbiotic/parasitic dynamism. The creators are also users and the users are also creators. We are slaves and masters. The impact of centuries of human civilization is inescapable, and even if one could disconnect from this influence, it would only serve to create in a person something so alien as to be unthinkable. I feel this push and pull relentlessly. To strive for authenticity is to imagine that there is some part of you that is uncorrupted by the world, and that this part can be uncovered through introspection and radical self-reinvention. Yet, after destroying one's 'self' upon this altar of individuation, there is seemingly nothing left. Worse still, whatever motes of meaning might linger there cannot be apprehended, for to reach this state, one would've sacrificed all of the intellectual technologies that could make such apprehension intelligible. The task, then, is not so much of a perpetual self-overcoming, but one of acceptance and rejection. Accepting what we can or must and rejecting what we can or must, using only that brutish intuition which is similarly the product of all the same 'outside' forces... And yet, it can be done. We can, at times, move beyond the loop, because we are also the authors of these rules. Words are invented, new governments are imagined, theorems are proven, and eventually progress is made. For the individual, this is a process of attending to oneself, not rejecting the world as Nietzsche might have it, but finding oneself as being-in-the-world, or to put it another way: to recognize that there was never a difference between the exterior and interior forces to begin with, because this 'self' is a technology too.