There is no freedom without conscience and without reflection. But there is no space for consciousness in our society overwhelmed by the incessant visual stimuli that reach us by telephone and other screens. The current weather drags us at full speed and we press the accelerator even more, because we have fallen in love with speed and can no longer stand the wait. Now then, consciousness inevitably demands interior time, pause, serenity. So we want to be free, we will idolize freedom, but we lack the essential individual conscience to practice it. We confuse freedom with desire, impulse, appetite, reaction, instinct.
Nor is there room in our times for reflection, which requires, in addition to pause and serenity, solid and careful reading. It is not easy to equip oneself with cultural baggage to be able to navigate the ethical dilemmas of the present (from gender fluid to cyborg through surrogacy). It requires effort when everything invites instant opinion. Ask for time. But time now seems lost to us if we allocate it to just one thing: it gives us the impression that we are missing out on many others (there are so many opportunities and incentives that pressure, seduce and demand us).
Equipping oneself with ethical baggage calls for concentration and study, when everything pushes us to disperse, when so many things, so many desires, so many stimuli demand us at the same time. In the age of Twitter, appealing to a pause, to a well-founded argument, to a thoughtful response seems naive because now, as in the Baroque era, those who possess verbal ingenuity and mental quickness stand out above all, virtues that are certainly enviable and valuable, but that tend to to put himself at the service of sensationalism, seduction and rhetorical boxing. As the Baroques already knew, ingenuity can create spectacularity and brilliance, but what shines can be gold or trinket and what seems powerful can be marble or papier-mâché.
It has always been difficult for humans to discern between truth and lie, goodness and evil, triumph and defeat – in yesterday’s Catholic celebration, Palm Sunday, the entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem amid applause and palms, immediately leads to the Friday of the crucifixion : triumph and tragedy are the face and the back of the same page. A fog of noise and confusion has always surrounded our societies. But perhaps never before had the noise been so deafening and the confusion so thick.
This confusion is the result of the absolute predominance of technology, which for centuries has progressed alone, driven by economic greed, unrelated to human needs. Now, humans trying to survive in the jungles of the Paleolithic are identical to those who are entering the jungle of artificial intelligence. With one difference, the hardness to which our ancestors were accustomed made them resigned to suffering, but also very restless in the face of dangers, very distrustful.
Now, we Westerners, accustomed to comfort, face suffering with hysteria. They make us suffer from inflation, lack of energy, weather and war because they block the wheel of happiness, which we have identified with the constant satisfaction of pleasures and desires. That is why we so willingly enter the jungles of the algorithm that learns by itself (machine learning): we know that the definitive enthronement of virtual deception will have a formidable therapeutic function: it will help us endure discomfort.
