Fleeing from reality

Last week I was at a zoom meeting where the beautifully designed living room behind one of the meeting participants was suddenly "split" by a door that opened next to her. The elegant living room contracted so that you could see the small chaotic dark room she was actually sitting in. A dizzying moment of unreality. Insignificant perhaps, but at the same time part of the tendency that the virtual takes up more and more space in our lives. A tendency that is probably worth considering before it's too late. For what if things like "fake news", identity theft and beautification filters are only the tip of the iceberg and it is in fact the case that virtualization in broader terms is about to eat up our souls as well as the planet?

What if all the viral and epidemic lies are just a symptomatic climax, the last step on a long journey away from reality? A culmination of the virtualization that we have allowed to spread into still more areas of our life. And which crypto-currencies, NFT art, the Metaverse, AI and transhumanism are making still more intimidating.

But let's take a few steps back and look at the worldview dominant in the Western world.

On the one hand, Western culture is based on the Platonic dualism between body and spirit that put logic, abstraction and ideas above the physical. And on the other hand it is underpinned by the great monotheistic religions, where a power-loving god (created in the image of man) set man to rule over nature.

Where most cultures until then had lived with worldviews that saw nature as sacred, a new power relationship arose between man and nature, when Christianity won out.

It is this worldview that underlies the mechanistic understanding of life, which by way of the victory of quantifiability in the scientific revolution led to the industrialization, where the movement from country to city made the separation between man and nature ever deeper.

From industrialization to space travel to computer technology to transhumanism the culture of measurability is driving a development that puts more and more distance from nature - i.e. the chaotic, physical, limited reality - with technologies and abstractions, that insist on controlling, mastering and extracting resources to make life easier, longer, limitless, more efficient, more profitable.

The goal seems to be to escape from nature, from work, from trouble, from feelings, from each other, from home and from reality. With the aim of creating so-called "growth" - i.e. collecting more and more capital in fewer and fewer hands.

In a way, the dream of the virtual seems to be yet another step of "spirit" over body.

Virtual games instead of play, porn instead of sex, virtual friends, contactless contact.

And in many ways one of the most ironic dimensions of extractive culture's latest moves is the fact that the gigantic amounts of data that are collected about our behavior and language when we move around in the virtual space of the web, are sold to the industries that work to develop artificial intelligence - essentially the "robots" that will replace us on the labor market.

When the development of technologies to promote efficiency shortly will have reached a point where machines have overtaken humans, it may become difficult to see the purpose of people. It can't be long before you can make a robot, who is as good or better at eating frozen pizza and playing computer games than us - and will still pay for it with some of the infinite digits circulating around cyberspace under the name of money. These numbers that grow and grow because the banks continuously create more virtual values that are based on nothing but debt.

Money have always been virtual. A fact that is highlighted by inflation. Housing markets, stock bubbles, currency speculation - all manipulation and mass psychoses. But in many ways it seems that the steady movement towards more virtuality is now moving us from the Anthropocene to what some have called the Capitalocene, where there is really nothing else that counts anymore the accumulation of capital - where it is the will of money alone that shapes the world. Where Bitcoin, NFT art and "real estate" in the Metaverse generate "value" without any other relation to reality than the enormous amounts of CO2 they produce.

I can certainly see the allure of disappearing into virtual worlds when we have wrecked the physical well and truly with our consumer materialism.

But we have to face the fact that this strategy - to separate ourselves more and more from nature, from our own nature and from the earth - in addition to harming the planet also creates still more imbalance in the mental ecosystem.

To believe that we can have good lives in space bases on Mars, in the Metaverse or as data uploaded to the cloud is without any insight into - or acceptance of - how deeply dependent our mental ecosystem is of the earth as well as the body. How it makes absolutely no sense to think of humans without body and earth.

Every moment of the day light falls from a new angle and everything throws others shadows than shortly before and shortly after. Every little detail is new - a bird, who chooses to take off because a gust of wind throws a fly in its direction; a dog that barks because the sound of the bird's wings makes a cat prick up its ears. Constant change outside our control. Just the simple fact that every morning is new and different from the previous one, should be a warning against trying to do everything the same way every day. A machine can do that. A human cannot.

Not without losing the ability to feel oneself. Feeling the core of your being, which is nature, and therefore, just as every morning is new, is always in constant motion, different every day. It is the very essence of life, the magic of being alive that we have sacrificed to be efficient as money machines.

Only by being present in the ever-changing now can we be whole, in contact with reality. Everything else - past, future and virtuality - are places we should only visit momentarily if we are not to lose ourselves and get lost in life.

The ultimate (and convulsive) continuations of the Greek separation of body and spirit, and the monotheistic dogma of man as the ruler of nature, are perhaps understandable as attempts to control chaos, but will only make us increasingly unhappy and homeless within ourselves.

 The best chance to avoid that, is that we radically change course and recognize that our only possible future is the one Glenn Albrecht calls Symbiocene - a culture that is based on a thorough respect and care for the fact that all life is connected in mutual interdependence.

If we want to be part of the continued story, we must stand 100% by our nature as nature, and do everything we can to make our connectedness in mental, social, local and global ecosystems the focal point for all choices and decisions, so the road from that Anthropocene does not become Capitalocene but Symbiocene.

The flight from the body, from the trouble, from earth, from the real, from the tangible is not the inevitable "evolution". The virtual is one way, but we can also choose an other way. A rebellion that takes back humanity, the body, nature and the sensuous, the poetic. So we can create a world where the concept of economy comes back to its linguistic roots in Oikos - home, and we use the growing knowledge we now have about our home, ecology, to think completely differently about how to "keep house" with our earthly home - how to create a regenerative oiko-nomi that relates to real values.

(Printed in “Poesiens Økonomi, Nr 4”, March 2023)