Sex Bots and Self-Alienation

The Neo-Ciceronian Times ^ | Jan. 25, 2023 | Theophilus Chilton

[Yashcheritsiy]

One of the characteristics of the modern world that you can see in people all around us is an intense dissatisfaction. Not just with social systems or with politics or whatever else, but with themselves. At a deep level, there is a profound alienation which these people have from themselves, indeed from human-ness itself. While they love hedonism and perversion, they hate the actual human being himself.

Culturally, this is readily seen in pretty much every culture war position that the Left takes. Pregnancy is a “disease” and a child is an unwanted “clump of cells” that gets in the way of your sex life. Every sexual perversion - adultery, homosexuality, pornography - is celebrated while marriage and procreation are increasingly being cast as low brow and low status. “Medically assisted suicide” is becoming a leading cause of death in many places, such as Canada where even the non-terminally ill are being encouraged by official state organs to end themselves. Every normal, natural human impulse is hated and discouraged, even (or especially) at official levels.

The fundamental basis for all of this is rebellion against the very concept of man as God’s highest created being, the ones who bear His image and were given dominion and stewardship over the earth. As a result, the uses to which man was made - even for his very body and soul - need to be twisted, perverted, misappropriated into that which was not intended and for which they are not fitted. More deeply, it’s a rebellion against the very structures of God themselves, of order and arrangement. It isn’t enough for the “progressives” among us to revolt against moral restrictions applied by this or that religion, but even against those restrictions imposed by material form and function themselves.

Yet, even that is not enough - and this is where this starts to get weird. In their hubris, these philosophical anti-theists (who are, as we shall see, spiritual anti-materialists) believe they can improve upon man, change him and transcend his material, God-given limitations. Hence, the obsession that so many of these “progressive futurist” types have with concepts such as artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, and transgenderism. Each of these involves an element of trying to “fix” or “improve” some aspect of human existence. The dream for AI is for it to eventually be smarter and more capable than its creators (and hopefully not get any ideas about eradicating us in a robot war). Transhumanism wants to overcome the limitations of human biology by replacing it with a spiritualised machine, while transgenderism wants to pretend that human biology doesn’t really exist or can be molded to the caprice of psychological whim.

This is the reason why there is such excitement in recent years over things like ChatGTP, AI artwork, and the like. At least as far as their programming allows, these can realistically imitate a human’s writing style or method of creating graphical arts. Now, I have my doubts that a truly self-conscious artificial intelligence (i.e strong AI) will ever be created. The output from these programs, of course, heavily depends upon human input - they basically respond with what they are programmed to provide, no truly independent or conscious activity is involved. But the point is that there are scads of reddit-tier atheists and the like out there who desperately want for these programs to be able to reach self-awareness, to be able to produce art that is better than our own, to replace human reliance upon the human-created word.

Of course, this alienation from normal humanity and normal life is reflected in the distortion which these people suffer socially. God created man to be a social being. Friendship, marriage, parenthood, sociableness in general - these are all aspects of the total human being (except, perhaps, in very specifically defined cases). But modern progressivism’s tendencies disfigure these as well. Gay “marriage” and adoption are two obvious examples. So is the progressive futurist obsession with ever more lifelike “sexbots” intended to serve as a sterile and unproductive replacement for genuine human relationships that are built upon love and natural procreation. Transgenderism is designed to further alienate mentally unstable individuals from themselves and from normal social interaction, creating a sort of skinsuit caricature of normal human sexual expression. This is why transgenders are so deep in the uncanny valley - their rebellion against reality results in an obvious discord between what they say about themselves and what can be seen which no amount of propaganda and browbeating can rectify.

This sort of rebellion is not new or unique to the modern world, of course. Indeed, it is simply the spirit of small-g gnosticism, which often crops up during times of sociopolitical collapse (unsurprisingly, the big-G Gnosticism that we know from church history flourished during the collapse of the Principate cycle of the Roman Empire). Man’s rebellion against his Creator - which was reflected in the big-G Gnosticism mentioned above - always includes this element of revolt against order, utility, right function, and ordained law. In their place, there is always chaos, misuse, perversion, and lawlessness. This revolt is connected to the ancient spirit of gnosticism - rightly understood - which denigrated the value of the physical world over and against some idealised “spiritual” realm to which we attain through rejection of the strictures and order of the physical world (and the physical world’s God). This was done via knowledge accessible only to a special few (those possessing gnosis). This is why Gnostic cults against which the early Church competed nearly always erred either toward extreme asceticism or extreme hedonism (usually the latter, since it’s “funner”) - both of these involve derogation of the physical body and its temperate uses as a metaphorical symbol for material creation at large.

Make no mistake about it - this philosophical anti-theism has a definite “spiritual” element in the sense of affirming a gulf between God’s creation and the sort of intangible, psychosomatic reality-warping that it purports to override created order. In this sense, “spirit” can act in a purely nominalistic way to refashion that order and structure according to how it “names” them. Now, it might seem counterintuitive to us that so-called “scientific materialists” would hold to this type of spirituality, yet they essentially do. Many of these types do so explicitly. Above and beyond our world of sense and experience lies a perfect realm that transcends our mundane existence. Don’t believe me? Then what do you think the “universe as a computer simulation” nonsense is all about? The world around us isn’t “real.” It’s an illusion. None of it really matters (no pun intended). What “really” exists is something deeper and accessible only to the “knowing ones” who reject all of that superstitious Christian stuff about God and created order. Even if someone doesn’t explicitly believe in “universe as a fancy Minecraft world,” the fundamental element of gnosticism still lends itself to believing that they have access to some secret knowledge that eludes the blind masses and which will allow them to fully alienate themselves from this restrictive world.

As with any other belief system, this lends itself to real world consequences. For gnostic progressivism, this manifests itself as a small elite of “knowers” who direct the street-level thugs and PMC bureaucrats. At a global level, these people have driven every luciferian element of the modern Left’s agenda, from the Soviet extermination of millions of class enemies to the modern climate change/Agenda 2030/you’ll-own-nothing-and-be-happy program. Why does it seem like every policy choice - from reducing energy consumption to interfering with supply chains for fertilisers needed to grow food to encouraging our youth cohorts who should be preparing to marry and have kids to neuter and mutilate themselves - happens to tend towards population reduction? Of course, it’s not the elites whose population is going to be reduced, right? Per their gnostic beliefs, the unknowing ones are just cattle to be culled, while the knowing ones aim to transcend their humanity and become as gods, the original luciferian lie from the Garden of Eden.

Which brings me back around to AI art and sex bots and transhuman cyborgs. Every worldview has its ideal teleological endpoint. Regardless of particular eschatology, that of Christians is a world ultimately ruled by the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. For progressive gnosticism, it is a world in which the possessors of gnosis break free from the bonds of created order so that they can fulfill their every whim and desire. Yet, by believing they are becoming something more than human, they end up as something less than human instead. Ultimately, it’s nothing but folly and fantasy, but sadly, the process of its ultimate failure will still be fraught with great harm for the rest of us.

[Yashcheritsiy]

Hey, look man, this is a judgment free zone. If sexbots are your thing, we won’t say nothin’!

[BipolarBob]

Did you see the movie? I think she had it all.

[DannyTN]

Ah, thank you.

Yeah, that we might be able to improve human physiology, doesn’t disprove God. God made us lower than the angels. He made us the way He wanted. Not with the eyesight of an eagle, or as fast as a cheetah, but the combination of attributes that He wanted. And it was sufficient to dominate the planet.

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

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