The Insurrection
The Insurrection
In a scene from a Science Fiction film (Star Trek: Insurrection, 1998) an inhabitant of an extraterrestrial people, who had reached the maximum technological knowledge, states “that when you create a machine to do the work of a man it takes something away from Man!”.
Behind this consideration, which may seem extremely romantic and nostalgic, lies instead a profound social truth: Man is such (in his fullest realization) to the extent of learning, and of the consequent knowledge and consciousness, which derives from contact with the things of the matter that surrounds him.
The matter of which things are made is, in itself, imbued with rules and principles (think of quantum mechanics which is the basis of its existence) and as I wrote in the book: From matter to the Father, 2003, “itself it is a source of education and teaching, through the observation of the same principles that support it”.
Simply put, the contact between Man and matter is the first source of Man’s Knowledge and, therefore, the first source of human Knowledge, without which the determination of Consciousness is also impossible.
There is no human knowledge without contact, observation and manipulation of matter. The assertions and claims that globalization, the internet, and other specificities of “modernity” have increased humanity’s knowledge are paradigms of unprecedented intellectual poverty.
Nobody here wants to state that globalization and the internet (to name a few) are a reason for the involution of society, they are simply new vehicles of social interconnection but, in themselves, they are only containers and not contents.
To return therefore to the affirmation of the extraterrestrial in Star Trek, it is clear that interposing “technological systems” between Matter and Man, if on the one hand it can lead to “apparent monetary wealth”, on the other hand impoverishes Man’s Knowledge which , in the long run, leads to the impoverishment of the Self and the Matter that surrounds it.
This analysis, which might seem simplistic and tends towards an impossible restoration of the ancient, instead contains within itself an elementary truth: every machine, built to increase the performance of human work, actually impoverishes knowledge and, with its speed-up, undermines the regenerative capacity of our Planet.
This speeding up leads to a chain reaction where reduction of resources, increase in derivative financial systems, decrease in individual knowledge, etc. lead to a degradation of the social and environmental structure.
This evolution of socio-environmental dynamics historically receives the greatest impetus with the Industrial Revolution, the daughter of an offshoot of reductionist Enlightenment thought and of little anthropological value.
The effects of this evolution of history are evident today and before the eyes of all of us: the impoverishment of the knowledge of our young people, the disappearance of some professions (especially manual ones), the drift of artisanal activities and the arts in general ( increasingly marginalized by blind and arrogant finance), represent only the tip of the iceberg of a new Middle Ages in which the true and great Poverty, progenitor of all other poverty is that of Human Knowledge.
In just a few decades we have lost that knowledge which, often handed down from father to son, was that heritage accumulated over centuries of history from which all riches arose: first the spiritual ones and then the material ones.
Today we don’t want to go back to walking with mules or warming ourselves with braziers, this is not the objective and meaning of this thought; we do not want to return to the stone age, because any knowledge acquired should not be lost (it is part of that historical heritage) but we must break that logic that has seen in the assembly lines, in that industrialization useful only to an obtuse and self-interested capitalism, in every human alienation of work (seen only as a source of business – to use a term dear to the Anglo-Saxons), the only archetype of a seriously ill Society where we all recite a script that cannot lead to any happy ending.
An Insurrection is necessary against this cultural and political logic that sees finance and its use as a promoter of well-being; against Politicians and Multinationals who speak a language that the common man feels increasingly distant within himself.
We must restore the capacity for self-determination of our young people, outside the assembly lines but certainly within the evolution of a new technology on a human scale and tool of our minds and our hands.
We must recompose that generational mosaic broken by a cultural stupidity with which our rulers and the useful idiots who follow them must be clothed.
The only Freedom that our future generations will be able to acquire will be that of returning to the Knowledge that contact with Matter gives us.
Man’s greatest wealth is that of the knowledge of the matter we are made of. When we break this bond we generate cultural and spiritual pollution that destroy the foundations of which our world is made.
This is why: “when you create a machine to do a man’s work you take something away from Man” and it, with all its repercussions, strips us of the material we are made of, depriving ourselves (to quote Shakespeare) of stuff dreams are made of.
Guido Bissanti