uzak's weblog

Bad infinity

 
Table of Contents

Descriptions of modern hell. Inspired by Ted Goia’s 13 Observations on Ritual:

Slow traditional culture -> Fast modern culture -> Dopamine culture

  • The smartphone cannot be a ritualistic object.
  • Genuine ritual is always embedded in time and place.
  • Memes are rituals drained of transcendence.
  • The largest companies today are obsessed with generating content in a completely de-ritualized context.
  • Internet businesses feel this void, and try to fill it with pseudo-rituals
  • In an overly digitized world, people embrace with intensity the few remaining ritualistic activities available to them.
  • Ritual is a source of stability, especially in our moments of greatest vulnerability
  • If you created a community but eliminated all rituals of politeness and sociability, it would look like Twitter. Social media is the dark twin of ritual. It never achieves wholeness or closure. > * Scroller has no closure -> “bad infinity” (Hegel).
  • Economic interests fear genuine ritual, because it is not about consumption
  • When deprived of rituals, people are driven to create their own
  • Artistic performances originated as rituals
  • Even science originates as ritual.
  • When technology truly empowers life and promotes human flourishing, the results are ritualistic.

So rituals ground us as a human being in time and space. They allocate our place in the bigger whole - in the cosmic order, which after all is the source of its name. Sanskritic “rta” means “cosmic order”. The smartphone allows us to do what we want and when we want. Instead of being allotted a role in the grand whole we become the centre of our own personal hell. And that’s the price of liberty - the freedom to do what I please in order to fool me that I can escape the limits of the person by doing so…

It is important that a ritual has a beginning and an end. A closure. Otherwise, just like infinite food will lead to disease - obesity, infinite consumption of information will lead to mental diseases. If nothing else then restlessness and infinite search in the wrong place for something grand, something transcending us. To what Hegel described as “bad infinity”. Modern enterprises capitalize on never providing closure and thus requiring us to consume more and more in the hope of the resolution, of the happy end, which they never serve.