There are three types of people, regardless of culture, sex, age, or historical
period. There are leaders, followers, and outcasts. These
are minimal distinctions in that there are further subdivisions and other
complications, but these are the main differences that emerge from the
combination of our evolutionary function as social primates and our existential
waywardness, our longing to transcend our station, to be supernaturally free. There’s
a deeper division, though, between the followers, on the one hand, and the
leaders and outcasts on the other, which is to say that the latter two find
themselves paradoxically in a similar position: both are forced to face rather
than ignore the existential crisis. Although biologically and psychologically all
three types are human, in existential terms the followers should be designated
as subhuman. At least, intellectual elites from Plato to Nietzsche tend to
speak of the mob, the masses, rabble or herd, the vulgar peasants, peons and
pawns. Why dehumanize the happy majority? Because most “people” are
existentially inauthentic; they’re spiritually undistinguished.
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Their happiness is the dubious frivolity of the mythical Adam
and Eve, who were only prehuman until they ate from the forbidden tree. In the
story, those two were animals rather than people, because they were unaware of
the conditions of their existence as embodied creatures. Like the other
animals, they could get around just fine, but they lacked the higher-order
conception of what was going on. They didn’t understand anything in normative
terms of good and evil—which is to say they didn’t understand anything at all,
given that Yahweh created Eden for the purpose of testing his favoured
creatures. In so far as everything is artificial, everything has a function;
lacking that level of knowledge, animals are blissfully ignorant. They have
practical know-how, but no godlike, philosophical perspective. Translating this
myth into modern, naturalistic terms, the point is that most people are either burdened
with the task of merely staying alive, because they find themselves
impoverished in failed states, or they’re blessed with middleclass distractions
which allow them to approximate the leaders’ decadence. In either case, these
masses are undistinguished as human persons; they lack the self-control that
requires higher-order thoughts, which is to say a meta-level of thinking about
thinking, so that they can assess their mental states, steer their inner
evolution, and take full responsibility for their actions. They tend not to
engage in meta-reflection because they’re too busy competing in their dominance
hierarchy.
Moreover, they don’t understand the natural conditions of
life. For example, they don’t appreciate that the natural universe is freakish
and wholly preposterous or that all life is an abomination that can be redeemed
only by acts of tragic heroism, as is the secret cosmicist teaching of all the major religions. Preoccupied with sports trivia,
sexual fantasies and games, idle celebrity gossip, and the minutiae of their
increasingly meaningless jobs, the Western masses are
ensconced in a real-life version of Robert Nozick’s Pleasure Machine. Nozick
asked whether we would choose to be happy in a virtual reality or less-than-happy
in the real world. Most people allege that they’d choose the latter, whereas
they actually opt for the former, by retreating from the reality of wild nature
to our artificial microcosms which serve as so many pleasure machines. The
defect of Nozick’s thought experiment is that the pleasure machine, which we
can think of also as the Matrix, is part of reality at the hardware
level. So the actual choice isn’t between pure reality and fantasy.
Thus, a fantasy can be passed off as reality, especially
when the former is an engineered part of the latter. It’s not as if sports
teams, sexual pleasure, the entertainment industry, or stultifying bureaucracies
don’t exist in the real world. It’s just that when we lose sight of the
underlying reality of the undead god, which will eventually raze all the
infrastructures that sustain such foolishness, we occupy a virtually virtual world, a sub-world that blinds us to the greater
one. After all, secular humanists like Neil deGrasse Tyson are aghast not just
because of the persistence of religious fundamentalism in the US, but because
even many American secularists don’t take the time to appreciate the spiritual
aspect of human history or the majesty of the cosmos. The masses are all about business
or ephemeral, narrow-minded pleasure, lacking any existential wherewithal: they
literally don’t know what or where they fundamentally are, and they don’t care
because they’ve automated themselves to fulfill certain social functions.
The Subhuman Herd
These existential subhumans, then, are the followers. They
follow in the same way that not just the less intelligent animals but all
material objects as such follow: these things are all merely undead, meaning
that their energy is naturally forced into certain patterns, with little transcendent
(virtually supernatural or hint of posthuman)
power of self-control. The beta masses’ flight from existential authenticity is
sinful because they forsake their potential for self-control and for
aesthetically noble transcendence, whereas the impersonal parts of nature
follow natural law as a matter of course. The alpha members of social animal
groups lead their pack, but without much originality; instead, they follow
their urges to dominate and to do what’s best for the genetic basis of their
species. Beta humans follow the social conventions that initially stand out as
products of tragic artistry. Our cultural microcosms are
all works of artistic rebellion against the wilderness, conditioned by some
creative class’s awareness of such existential facts as that nature is alien
and indifferent to us, and that there is no deus
ex machina so we alone must look after our kind. But just as metaphors lose
their freshness over time and turn into prepackaged, archaic memes, art and
technology become stale, commercialized, and dehumanizing instruments of
control. Notice how even ongoing wars or spacewalks become old news as the
masses are distracted by the latest fad flashing on their mobile device. Those
devices feed menacing corporations and the government mountains of personal
data that streamline the unsustainable and deleterious hyper-consumption of
material goods.
