In public discourse for quite some time now, the opinion has been promoted that everything happening is the result of inevitable deterministic processes dictated by human evolution (Determinism, Historicism). That the world could not have developed any other way. That people have become too many, and therefore not everyone can do whatever they want. That unfreedom and division are the price of Civilization and Progress. That the individual is nothing, and the State is everything. That we must resign ourselves to the role of “a part of the whole”… and so on.

But is that really true? Is the individual’s fate to be nothing more than a “little screw in the Machine”? If so, the question arises: who designs and builds the “machine,” and is the “machine” well made? Who bears responsibility if something in it breaks down (the screws can’t be responsible, can they?)? In the end, a doubt creeps in: can society even be treated as a machine?

In his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, the British philosopher Karl Popper argues that, contrary to such mechanical comparisons, society is not a machine (he uses the notion of an “organism”), but a process. There too, Popper criticizes Determinism and Historicism, defending the idea that there are no cycles and predestinations in human history, and that history never repeats itself, nor does it follow some general logic that would make it predictable.

As for evolution and progress—has anyone proven that they always follow a single direction: the direction of today’s development, the “mechanization” of society and culture, corporate diktat, the depersonalization and enslavement of the human being? Is this development truly inevitable, as it is presented?

Possible alternatives to the status quo are energetically condemned by systemic propaganda as decadent and leading to social collapse and decomposition. They are depicted in extreme, distorted images: triumphant anarchy, perversion turned into norm, total social and value chaos. Today’s elites present themselves as defenders of culture and civilization against liberal “barbarism,” and exploitation and inequality are justified as an integral element of civilization.

But real barbarism consists in the ruthless, methodical degradation of the majority by the minority, through the levers of neoliberal economics and corporatocracy—condemning people to an everyday, domesticated level of existence, to an endless struggle with problems that could be solved under a better and more humane organization of the economy and the social order.

Collectivists claim the individual is a function of society and environment. But isn’t society also a function of the individual? Should corporations that claim to speak in the voice of science (that bundle of scientific “fields” financed by the corporations themselves) be the ones to decide how far freedom, personal choice, and free will should extend—values that are sacred even according to the Bible? Has this science answered why it seems people are built to fight for freedom, choice, and dignity—even sometimes at the price of life itself? Or why we call dystopian works dark rather than bright? Why is there no famous work of art inspired by unfreedom, obedience, and diktat (setting aside propaganda art of a regime), while works expressing and praising freedom fill museums and ignite human souls with rapture and enthusiasm?

Through the Procrustean bed into which the System places the Human, trying to standardize them—does it not attempt to cut off precisely those parts that make them Human?

The novel Divergent by Veronica Roth provokes reflection on what would happen if aspects of human nature started being removed because someone decided they were “in the way.” The book’s concept is that everything in human nature is interconnected and holistic, and therefore removing something from a person (in the novel, through genetic engineering) affects the entire human behavior and essence—not merely the particular component someone has deemed undesirable. So reducing and profiling the human being according to someone’s vision of society and progress would lead only to catastrophe.

Just as you cannot build people’s lives, you cannot build the human being.

Each of us is different; each of us must walk our own personal path toward ourselves. There is no recipe for how to live or what to be. A society that tries to kill individuality ultimately kills itself, because it becomes a lifeless gray mass of robots with nothing to drive it.

The oligarchy and the elites, trying to pit individualism against solidarity, attempt to impose a collectivist philosophy of the individual’s submission to the collective. They try to equate solidarity with collectivism. Yet at the same time they preach a Dickensian capitalism in which there isn’t a drop of solidarity. They oppose the social state, whose founding principle is solidarity, and they are even trying to deny justice as a value, counterposing it with some social Darwinism and “social necessity.” But justice is built into all social animals as a necessary condition for co-existence—otherwise there would be no point to society if most lose from it.

Today, visions of the future ignore what is innate in us. The arrogance of the mechanistic, materialist science that drives those visions seems boundless. The wisdom of Pythagoras, who showed already in Antiquity that the more a person knows, the more they realize they do not know—because expanded knowledge increases contact with the Unknown—has been forgotten. Today the paradigm is mechanical: the belief dominates that the future can be predicted and programmed with ever more powerful computers, without asking whether super-powerful computers can predict the effects produced by their own power. Can they calculate the “butterfly effect” they themselves generate with every calculation?

Is the world predictable—programmable? And if it is (which I deeply doubt), is there any way that forecasts and visions of it would not be distorted by the self-interest and lust for power of those who could predict and compute it?

This problem is explored in the film Wanted (2008, with Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman). In the film, a secret organization devoted to “protecting humanity” periodically receives the names of people who must be eliminated so they will not harm its development. This happens through an esoteric mechanism called the “Loom of Fate.” These people are not necessarily criminals or villains—more often the opposite—but the Loom produces their names without explanation, and they are liquidated by the organization, “for the good of humanity.” In the end it is revealed that the organization’s leader (Freeman) has been substituting the names in order to accumulate more and more power. Realizing this, Jolie manages to learn the last authentic names the Loom has designated for destruction and discovers they are all members of the organization. Finally, with a single bullet she kills everyone in the group (including herself), and the film ends.

Today, modern science—and quantum physics in particular—runs into paradoxes the human mind cannot comprehend. These paradoxes direct thought toward ancient Eastern philosophical teachings that contradict the crude materialism of Western thinking and science. Yet the discoveries of quantum physics—questioning objective reality, suggesting that observer and observed form one system—remain ignored, somehow outside public focus. The idea that what happens to us is a consequence of our inner processes, emotions, attitudes, thoughts, and representations is officially denied by the materialist paradigm, even as that paradigm loads the individual with precisely those prosaic thoughts and attitudes that ultimately shape them and their life.

Can we renounce our autonomy? Our right to create ourselves and our lives—our freedom, dignity, personal choice? What would remain of us then—of our consciousness, of our Spirit and Soul? Can we take responsibility for what we have not chosen ourselves? Do we want a mechanical future in which there is no place for the Individual and the Personality? Do we want Google, for example, to tell us (or rather, to suggest—to program) how to live: whom to marry, whether to have children and how many, what work to do, what to like, how to spend our free time, what books to read (if any), what dreams to have? Do we want algorithms to manage and program us until we become corporate bots?

Do we want “Science” (that is, the current—and likely censored—version) to decide for us and determine what we should be?

Probably most of us do not.

René Descartes arrived at the idea “I think, therefore I am.” If someone else thinks and decides in our place—will we exist at all? At least as conscious personalities and individuals?

I believe human nature does not fit an order without freedom, justice, and autonomy. A human being cannot live in a “matrix”: we have senses and capacities by which we recognize falseness in life. Just as we recognize fake singing and melody, we recognize disharmony in everything else. Today the system is trying to force the human being into a matrix where everything will be a scientifically regulated imitation—an illusion. The aim is for everything in a person’s life to become artificial: a product of modeling the individual and their environment. Everything is to be priced, turned into market relations, and human contact reduced to the exchange of values.

But this substitution of the human being—this mass falsification—will fail, as all other such attempts have failed. Life cannot exist in a matrix and develop through commands and programs. Life is spontaneous; it is free; and only then does it flourish. The artificial appears in human consciousness as a feeling of falseness and meaninglessness, which leads to apathy, nihilism, and decay.

Once, in North America, slave owners tried to make enslaved people brought from Africa reproduce, because that would have been cheaper than the continual “import” of slaves from the African continent. But it didn’t work. History offers many other such examples. Animals in zoos also rarely reproduce: even if they are fed, they have no freedom. Only livestock reproduces readily—but it cannot survive on its own. For millennia, human beings have degraded wild aurochs and turned them into sheep incapable of living in nature alone. Now the human being is trying to do the same to themselves. If they succeed, the human species will simply self-destruct: it will lose its strength, vitality, and intellect, stop evolving, degrade, and disappear.

Unfreedom, oppression, and violence that create a primitive order have natural limits. They generate more and more problems that drain the system’s energy, until more and more energy is spent dealing with problems rather than development. But attempts to neutralize current problems only create new problems; problems accumulate and eventually bring the system to collapse.

Today the oligarchy is armed with high-tech weapons and psychological sciences through which it tries to control everything. It tries to impose its primitive understanding of life and humanity with force, cunning, and deceit. It tries to reduce the mystery of Life to (“scientific”) ideology and to a chain of values and algorithms, while ignoring what it cannot measure—and likely will never be able to measure. In pursuing these goals, it ignores the fact that knowledge is infinite, and from every summit new and higher summits come into view. The elites and technocrats cannot grasp that life is approached not with scientific arrogance, but with wisdom and reverence for the cosmic order—for what remains a mystery, yet whose manifestations we are gifted to sense and feel. The “human factor,” with its apparent illogic, will always remain outside the technocrats’ social equations.

So technology does not change the essence of things. Even if it mutes the manifestations of a закономерност it labels a “problem,” that закономерност will reappear in another form—again and again.

Including as resistance.