The Inversion

Rudolf Steiner turned out to be prescient in relation to what Kingsley calls ‘the growing presence of entropic, or counter-evolutionary, forces within humanity.’ (p. 135) He wrote that ‘humanity urgently needs to become aware that the spiritual world is working down into every detail of existence in the physical world’ and that these are represented by the operations of Luciferic and Ahriman forces whereby ‘the only defence against these things is knowing about them. If you know about them, you are protected… but you must not be idle about acquiring real knowledge of these things.’ The material-digital ecosystem is head-based, and Kingsley points out that the very notion of programming is an intellectual skill that can be applied to undermining free will through manipulative conditioning. Steiner explains that the counterweight is the principle of Love, in other words the heart. In a number of sections, he draws interesting parallels with Philip K Dick where the ultimate goal of human life is to accomplish the human-Source merger. By contrast, the Inversion involves the prospect of a human-machine merger, which will cut us off from this spiritual source of our being.

Hence Kingsley’s argument that we stand at the threshold between two paths: ‘there is a great risk of falling prey to the mechanical impulse and being incorporated into a dense, technologised world of control, surveillance, and restrictive freedoms.’ (p. 139) We needed instead to align ourselves with those forces that act upon the inner development of the individual, whereby we can be a transformative force in the material world. Here we will be in the world but not of the world, as Christ himself suggested. In this way, Kingsley astutely diagnoses our current human situation and trajectory to show how we need to wake up from our manipulated consensus reality construct and affirm our spiritual identity as the core of what it means to be human. This is in line with the primacy of consciousness and Spirit rather than matter. Virtual realities provide a counterfeit invisible dimension which distracts us from real contact with evolutionary spiritual forces.

It is interesting to reflect that the current influence of the elite groups such as the World Economic Forum recapitulates theocracy as a system of centralised political governance that has become ‘embedded into mechanisation, power, and control’, leading to a form of mass conditioning and hypnosis, the gradual technologisation of humanity and further separating us from the organic background of life. As Kingsley points out, this has resulted in dissonance, exhaustion, and psychic fragmentation. The instrumental cult of efficiency leads to ‘monitoring, regulation, management, and control’ through artificial and devolutionary socio-spiritual engineering. This is exactly why we need to protect ourselves by remembering our authentic spiritual inheritance and innate connection with Source. As many commentators are now realising, this represents a struggle between forces of liberation and enslavement; and we have seen how the dominant consensus ‘does not gladly tolerate dissenters.’

More generally, one could contrast the thinking of Carl Jung and BF Skinner. Jung was already aware of the dangers of mass psychosis and the psychic manipulation of the masses leading inevitably to ‘doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny.’ (p. 37) Gurdjieff also warned that ‘contemporary culture requires automatons… man is becoming a willing slave. He no longer needs chains. He begins to grow fond of his slavery, to be proud of it.’ Aldous Huxley in his later work anticipated that we would face the choice between anarchy and totalitarian control, with most people slipping into what he called a ‘polite’ form of totalitarianism ‘where they would have the illusion of individuality whilst conforming to a social uniformity.’ In a post from Mattias Desmet that I just read today, Huxley says that ’the successive advances in technology have been accompanied by corresponding advances in organisation… In order to fit into these organizations, individuals have had to deindividualize themselves, have had to deny their native diversity and conform to a standard pattern, have had to do their best to become automata.’

The behaviourist psychologist Skinner (and more recently Yuval Noah Harari) with his operant conditioning sought to abolish the inner man, ‘the man defended by the literatures of freedom and dignity. His abolition has been long overdue…’ (p. 41) He reasons from this perspective that ‘human cultures should be intentionally designed for the control of human behaviour’ through propaganda and conditioning, perception management, and narrative control of thinking patterns. This is the concern of those seeking ‘cognitive security’ and censoring nonconformist views. We are presented with what in behavioural psychology is called ‘choice architecture’ and nudged in the desired direction. This policy is reinforced by the polarity of social bonding and ostracisation (see also Kingsley’s review of Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism in PE 142).

We need to understand how what Kingsley calls ‘the machinic impulse’ equates to the forces of materialism and is essentially anti-human. There is ‘a clear lack of any soulful behaviour or intent’ on the part of many incumbent leaders pursuing their own interests behind a veneer of humanitarian concern. Such individuals and groups ‘seem determined to curtail human freedoms, sovereignty, and inner empowerment’, denouncing these as extreme right-wing when they in fact represent classical liberalism on which the US Constitution was based. The mechanisation process is reinforced by the acceleration represented by 24/7 access to information and news, crowding out the silence we need for spiritual practice and silent reflection. This penetrating analysis give a clear account of our predicament while also helping to put us back on a genuine evolutionary path.

PS See also this recent podcast by Gregg Braden on The Spiritual Battle for our Humanity - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpYDN1VtE5M