or key figures in this operation?
In your work the term
Gnosticism often appears, a variegated doctrinal corpus that aims at the elevation of man through knowledge. In what way can we speak of Gnosticism in this case? Is there a particular mix between the knowledge and manipulation of invisible forces, also a prerequisite of magic, with the knowledge and manipulation of information and digital forces? Can you explain to us in a synthetic but exhaustive way, even for the layman, how this process occurs?
What I find most fascinating about certain Gnostic drifts of high technology is the propensity to the form of total disintermediation. Gnosticism, wanting to simplify to the extreme, from the ritual point of view, of praxis, has historically aimed at overcoming the institutional and representative dimension, so much so that it has represented a complete break with organized cults and historical religions.
The idea of embracing an absolute
and totalizing knowledge, using the strength of the individual, and far from the coils of a ritualized institution, is one of the most evident and strong ambitions of Silicon Valley and digital culture.
Here too, this kind of knowledge is not for everyone: technognosis, which Erik Davies was the first to write about and which I paid homage to in a chapter of the volume, in fact also becomes a powerful marketing tool.
Consider the financialization of the economy
: with new contracts, such as derivatives, swaps, and speculative short-selling, we buy and sell and in fact bet randomly on differential elements that have no physical substance. We buy and sell information, based on the difference between the purchase and sale value, or information on the solidity of a given commercial company and its financial products or on the overall stability of the market.
It is in fact an economy based on an alternative reality in which there is no longer flesh but only information transmitted electronically.
In this case, to know how to orient oneself in Chinese in America the chaotic sea magnum of these completely digital markets, one must really develop prophetic and oracular characteristics.
That it is a risky process, seems evident to me.
The complete virtualization of the existing and of social relationality is an accelerating flight against a wall, because it ends up generating generations of anti-social misfits.
Analyses conducted in the depths of the large international companies most deeply immersed in this dimension demonstrate alarming propensities and attitudes of their members, from suicides to strange initiation rituals borrowed from those of university brotherhoods which in turn are taken from esoteric groups.
I will deal with these specific aspects in the sequel to ‘The Dark Throne’.
“When we find ourselves in front of a certain object, recommended in a persuasive manner, we feel we want it and have always wanted it.”
In this regard you have often
But this perception of ours is suffocated by the chaotic background noise of the digital flow , within which what we write becomes a simple graffiti carried away like a twig by the ocean current.
The chaos that I refer to figures like Trump is typical of the archetypes of trickster deities, those figures who at every latitude, from the Greek Eris to the spirit of Coyote among the Winnebago Indians, have sown irrationality and discord, connecting human beings, despite and through technology, to their primordial and feral soul.
The Divine-rogue investigated by Jung, Kerényi and Afghanistan Phone Number List Radin, a figure who sows havoc and who through his own obscurity balances the architecture of the cosmos. Something more radically profound than the demagogic and insipid grillino ‘vaffa’.
I am not saying that Trump
was aware of this role, but his figure was used and seen by a large part of those who agitated in his favor in the bluish shadow of the Internet as the figure capable of shattering the institutional order of supposedly rational politics.
Which makes perfect sense from this perspective, because the chaos brought by the Trickster is not evil or negative, it only aims to blunt the presumed ‘reason’ of goodness: on the other hand I do not believe that Clinton was a completely clear or enlightened character, her defeat at the hands of Trump balanced the hypocrisy of ‘goodness’.