There is no freedom without conscience and without reflection. But in our overwhelmed society and absolutely full of visual stimuli that reach us mainly through the phone (and all kinds of screens), there is not much space for awareness. The current time makes us go very fast and we speed up even more, because we have fallen in love with speed and can no longer bear to wait. However, awareness inevitably demands inner time, pause, serenity. So we want to be free, we idolize freedom, but we lack the individual consciousness essential to practice it. We confuse freedom with desire, impulse, appetite, reaction, instinct.
There is also no space in our time for reflection, which requires, in addition to pause and serenity, solid and attentive readings. It is not easy to equip yourself with cultural baggage to be able to navigate in the midst of the ethical dilemmas of the present (from fluid gender and the cyborg to surrogacy). It requires effort, when everything invites spontaneous opinion. ask for time But time now seems lost to us if we devote a lot of it to one thing: it gives us the impression that we miss out on many others (there are so many opportunities and enticements that pressure, seduce and claim us).
Equipping yourself with ethical baggage requires concentration and study, when everything pushes towards scattering and dispersion, when so many things, so many desires, so many stimuli claim us at the same time. In the age of Twitter, appealing to the pause, to the reasoned argument, to the reflexive response seems naive because now, as in the Baroque era, it is above all who stands out who has verbal ingenuity and mental quickness, certainly enviable virtues and valuable, but which tend to put themselves at the service of effectivism, seduction and rhetorical boxing. As the Baroque already knew, ingenuity can manufacture spectacularity and brilliance, but what shines can be gold or jewels and what seems so powerful can be marble or cardboard stone.
Humans have always had a hard time discerning between truth and lies, goodness and evil, triumph and defeat (that’s why in yesterday’s Catholic celebration, Palm Sunday, the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem amidst applause and clapping, will immediately lead to the Friday of the crucifixion: triumph and tragedy are the face and the cross of the same leaf). A fog of noise and confusion has always surrounded our societies. But perhaps never as now had the noise been so deafening and the confusion so thick.
This confusion is the result of the absolute predominance of technology, which has been progressing alone for centuries, driven by economic greed, disconnected from human needs. Now, the humans who were 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 harshness to which our ancestors were accustomed made them resigned to suffering, but also very restless and alert to danger. Now we Westerners, accustomed to comfort, face suffering with hysteria: we are made to suffer by inflation, lack of energy, climate and war because they block the wheel of happiness, which we have identified with the constant satisfaction of pleasures and desires. This is why we so gladly enter the jungles of the algorithm that learns by itself (machine learning), because we know that the definitive enthronement of virtual deception will have a formidable therapeutic function: it will help us endure discomfort.
