Robots

The Machine Will Never Triumph, part fourteen

The Gulf

Now again and now for ever breaks the great illusion
of human oneness.

Sons of earth, sons of fire, sons of air and water
sons of the living elements, sons of the unthinking gods,
women, women the same.

And then the hordes of the spawn of the machine
the hordes of the ego-centric, the robots.

For listen! the ego-centric self is the same as the machine
The ego running in its own complex and disconnected notion
using all life only as power, as an engine uses steam or gas
power to repeat its own egocentric motions
this is the machine incarnate:
and the robot is the machine incarnate
and the slave is the machine incarnate
and the hopeless inferior, he is the machine incarnate
an engine of flesh, useless unless he is a tool
of other men.

The great industrialists know it.
Mr Ford knows it.
The brain of the machine knows the limbs and trunk of the machine.
But oh, men, men still unmechanised,
sons of the elements and the unspeaking gods
sons of the wind and rain, sons of the fire and rock
what are you going to do, entangled among all the engines?

Behold the gulf, impassable
between machine-spawn, myriads
mechanical and intellectual,
and the sons of men, with the wind and the fire of life
in their faces, and motion never mechanical in their limbs.¹

Human oneness always was and always will be an illusion. The only good oneness is a oneness of individuals who are free from entrapment by their egos. But a oneness based on race, religion, ethnicity or nationality should be shunned and avoided, since such a oneness can easily degenerate into an mindless mob. Now, we have only three classes of men and women: 1) those who have a direct perception of the Gods and who are completely withdrawn from the Machine (there are only a few of these great people); 2) those who have not or cannot directly perceive reality, but ally themselves with those who do (there are slightly more people of this class); and 3) those vast hordes of mankind who make up the bulk of the human population, who have become enmeshed within the Machine. As for this last category of men, Nikiphoros the Monk states in the Philokalia: “For if you choose to be a friend of this present age you are an enemy of God. And who can help an enemy of God?”²

Only those who have freed themselves from the clutches of the ego may become free from the mechanical paradigm of the modern world. Without attaining this freedom, the ego runs on autopilot, and this automatic consciousness runs a person until death. Egocentric people created the first machines, and now the Machine fosters egocentricity in people. These egocentric people are virtually robots, enslaved by the Machine. Men and women who would be free must separate themselves from these hordes of robot-machine-people. Past ages were not perfect, but they were better. The past two-hundred years have witnessed an ever accelerating disintegration of the individual and social consciousness into machine-consciousness. Lawrence describes this as follows:

I took the steamer down to Como, and slept in a vast old stone cavern of an inn, a remarkable place, with rather nice people. In the morning I went out. The peace and the bygone beauty of the cathedral created the glow of the great past. And in the market-place they were selling chestnuts wholesale, great heaps of bright, brown chestnuts, and sacks of chestnuts, and peasants very eager selling and buying. I thought of Como, it must have been wonderful even a hundred years ago. Now it is cosmopolitan, the cathedral is like a relic, a museum object, everywhere stinks of mechanical money-pleasure.

I dared not risk walking to Milan: I took a train. And there, in Milan, sitting in the Cathedral Square, on Saturday afternoon, drinking Bitter Campari and watching the swarm of Italian city-men drink and talk vivaciously, I saw that here the life was still vivid, here the process of disintegration was vigorous, and centred in a multiplicity of mechanical activities that engage the human mind as well as the body. But always there was the same purpose stinking in it all, the mechanising, the perfect mechanising of human life.³

When individualism triumphs, the ego triumphs over the interests of the community. When each individual in a society is egotistic, the entire society becomes egotistic, and this is how states and nations can enter into seemingly unthinkable wars and atrocities. Lawrence writes:

The true crown is upon the consummation itself, not upon the triumph of one over another, neither in love nor in power. The ego is the false absolute. And the ego crowned with the crown is the monster and the tyrant, whether it represent one man, an Emperor, or a whole mass of people, a Demos. A million egos summed up under a crown are not better than one individual crowned ego. They are a million times worse.⁴

Gerard Manley Hopkins puts the same sentiment into verse in the following lines:

On ear and ear two noises too old to end
  Trench—right, the tide that ramps against the shore;
  With a flood or a fall, low lull-off or all roar,
Frequenting there while moon shall wear and wend.

Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend,
  His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinèd score
  In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour
And pelt music, till none’s to spill nor spend.

How these two shame this shallow and frail town!
 How ring right out our sordid turbid time,
Being pure! We, life’s pride and cared-for crown,

 Have lost that cheer and charm of earth’s past prime:
Our make and making break, are breaking, down
 To man’s last dust, drain fast towards man’s first slime.⁵

Or to put the same concepts into formal philosophic terminology, here is Ludwig Klages on Spirit and Self:

The history of mankind depicts in man and only in man the fight “to the finish” between life throughout the All and a power outside the spatio-temporal realm, that seeks to split the poles and seeks thereby to destroy, to de-soul the body and to disembody the soul: it is called Spirit [Geist] (Logos, Pneuma, Nus). It also makes itself known by the dual nature of our being: through discriminating consciousness (Noesis) and through purposeful will (Boulesis). The common stopping point of them both, which has become for us the eccentric centre of life, is called: I or Self. As bearers of life, we are, like all bearers of life, individuals (that is indivisible independent beings); as bearers of Spirit [Geist] we are moreover I-beings or Self-beings. “Person”, in Latin persona, in Greek πρόσωπον, originally designated the mask of a mime through which a daemon speaks. This has long since become life raped by Spirit [Geist] and life in the service of the role that is assigned to it by the mask of Spirit [Geist]! We now live solely within a compulsion to think and a compulsion to want. Only by passing through the I-feeling can we still perceive the voices of the All from which we have been separated; this mask has grown into and is a part of our flesh and with each passing century it grows further embedded in us.

After prehistorical mankind of the dominating Soul [Seele]—we are permitted to interject here—came historical mankind of the dominating Spirit [Geist]. This will however be followed by the post-historical mankind of the merely pseudo-living larva. We are currently witnessing its appearance and ascent. But whether we poison, burn, or atomise the life within us and around us: the “fury of the Erinyes” arises relentlessly from the corpse of the murdered Mother. In vengeance for the defiled and desecrated life, humanity will perish in an inconceivably horrendous way at precisely that moment when it celebrates the last, limitless triumph of the larva, the Golem[.]⁶

The dark age of mankind we are now witnessing is an age of the spirit/self/ego, whereas the golden ages of mankind were epochs of the soul. In Zoroastrian terminology, the ego is the embodiment of the evil destructive spirit Ahriman. Though the Gnostics were counted as heretics for their dualistic metaphysics, they were correct in positing both good and evil principles. The Machine is the ultimate metaphysical principle of evil and destruction, and the ego is its embodied tool. The soul, on the other hand, is a direct connection to the Good, the Gods, and hence to the infinite life force that flows through all of creation, namely the Heraclitean Fire.

Thinking and wanting are the work of the ego. The soul does not think or want, but simply is. This thinking and wanting destroys vital connections and ravishes the planet. We are now in a planetary transition from the era of the ego to the era of nothingness. When men create machines, they are still—debased—men, but now it is the machines that create men, and men and women are little more than maggots crawling on the dead flesh of civilization.

The Cross.

Behold your Cross, Christians!
With the upright division into sex
men on this side, women on that side
without any division into inferiority and superiority
only differences,
divided in the mystic, tangible and intangible difference

And then, truth much more bitter to accept
the horizontal division of mankind
into that which is below the level, and that which is above.

That which is truly man, and that which is robot,
the ego-bound.

On this cross of division, division into sex
division into slave and freeman
Christ, the human consciousness
was crucified
to set all men free
to make all men noble
to wipe away the mystic barriers of sex.

In vain, in vain, in vain, oh vastly in vain
this horrific crucifixion.

Now risen man and risen lord
risen from the dead, after this crucifixion
must learn the supreme lesson—

That sex is an eternal upright division, before which we must bow
and live in the acceptance of it,
it can never be wiped out;
the gods that made us are greater than our consciousness
and we, we are mostly unexplored hinterland
and our consciousness is a spot of light in a great but living darkness.

And then, risen, we must learn the most cruel lesson
of the horizontal division of mankind
the eternal division between the base and the beautiful.
The base, those that are below the bar of the cross
the small ones, ego-bound, little machines running in an enclosed circle
    of self
the inferiors.

The inferiors, the inferiors, there they are, in hordes.
And they will destroy all, unless they are made to submit
and to serve that which is flamey or pure and watery or swift wind or
    sound ringing rock
that which is elemental and of the substantial gods in man.

Mankind is lost and lost forever
unless men swiftly divide again, and the base are thrust down
into service, like the roots of trees.

For to-day, the base, the robots sit on the thrones of the world
in all the high places, and they are masters of industry
and rulers of millions of robots, being robots themselves, the same
only the brainy sort:
But brainy robot, or aesthetic robot, or merely muscular or mechanical
    robot
it is all the same
less than real men, inferiors, inferiors.

How then are the few men, men of the wind and rain
men of the fire and rock, how are they going to come forth
from the robot mass of rich and poor, mechanical ego-bound myriads?

Life will find a way.
Life always finds a way.
Only. Oh man, stare, stare into the gulf
between you and the robot-hordes, misnamed your fellow-men.⁷

Equality is a false idea, for there can never be equality between men of the Gods and machine-men. Equally, men and women are not equal, and that is a good thing. The modern focus on equality has reduced even the great to the base, and now it is the basest of the base that rules the world. There is a chain of being, there is a higher and a lower, but in this world of modernity that which appears higher may be the lowest of all. The value of a man has nothing to do with his wealth or worldly power, but everything to do with his connection to the cosmos. The people who run the world today have “luck,” money, worldly power, and—perhaps—brains, but their power is solely a power of the will and ego, i.e. it is an ephemeral power, rooted only in the realm of contingency. Even the wealthiest and most powerful person is little more than a worm, if he or she is a machine-robot. The entire point of the Christian religion is not the crucifixion, nor the vast edifice that came after Christ, but the resurrection. Even if one were to move on wholly from Christianity, he or she should keep the example of the resurrection, for this world is now crucified, and we all need to be resurrected. The only way to resurrect this world is for a few men and women to resurrect the spirit of vivacious being within themselves, and then to lead the rest of humanity to such a resurrection. As it now stands, “the homogeneity of the proletariat was divided between haves and have-nots, owners and wage-earners, capitalists and workers. It was a polarised homogeneous proletariat. It was all Robot. And it was the suicide of the human race.”⁸

There is no way to live partially with machines. The Machine is evil, hence it must be banished. If one gives way to evil even a little, then iron enters the soul. As R. S. Thomas writes:

“The body is mine and the soul is mine”
says the machine. “I am at the dark source
where the good is indistinguishable
from evil. I fill my tanks up
and there is war. I empty them
and there is not peace. I am the sound,
not of the world breathing, but
of the catch rather in the world’s breath.”
Is there a contraceptive

for the machine, that we may enjoy
intercourse with it without being overrun
by vocabulary? We go up
into the temple of ourselves
and give thanks that we are not
as the machine is. But it waits
for us outside, knowing that when
we emerge it is into the noise
of its hand beating on the breast’s
iron as Pharisaically as ourselves.⁹

As soon as we use a device, such as a phone or a computer, no matter how careful we are, the machine eats away at our inner sanctum. This is why we must go back, back to ways and times without machines or their products. As soon as one gives way to even a seemingly benign device the transformation starts taking place, turning one into a robot, and these robots must be feared and struggled against. As Lawrence writes:

It is not the will of the overweening individual we have to fear to-day, but the consenting together of a vast host of null ones. It is no Napoleon or Nero, but the innumerable myrmidons of nothingness. It is not the leopard or the hot tiger, but the masses of rank sheep. Shall I be pressed to death, shall I be suffocated under the slow and evil weight of countless long-faced sheep? This is a fate of ignominy indeed. Who compels us to-day? The malignant null sheep. Who overwhelms us? The persistent, purblind, bug-like sheep. […]

But worse than the fixed and obscene will of the isolated individual is the will of the obscene herd. They cringe, the herd; they shrink their buttocks downward like the hyaena. They are one flock. They are a nauseous herd together, keeping up a steady heat in the whole. They have one temperature, one aim, one will, enveloping them into an obscene oneness, like a mass of insects or sheep or carrion-eaters. What do they want? They want to maintain themselves insulated from life and death. Their will has asserted its own absolution. They are the arrogant immitigable beings who have achieved a secure entity. They are it. Nothing can be added to them, nor detracted. Enclosed and complete, they have their completion in the whole herd, they have their wholeness in the whole flock, they have their oneness in their multiplicity. Such are the sheep, such is humanity, an obscene whole which is no whole, only a multiplied nullity. But in their multiplicity they are so strong that they can defy both life and death for a time, existing like weak insects, powerful and horrible because of their countless numbers.

It is in vain to appeal to these ghastly myrmidons. They understand neither the language of life nor the language of death. They are fat and prolific and all-powerful, innumerable. They are in truth nauseous slaves of decay. But now, alas! the slaves have got the upper hand. Nevertheless, it only needs that we go forth with whips, like the old chieftain. Swords will not frighten them, they are too many. At all costs the herd of nullity must be subdued. It is the worst coward. It has triumphed, this slave herd, and its tyranny is the tyranny of a pack of jackals. But it can be frightened back to its place. For its cowardice is as great as its arrogance. […]

Let there be no humanity, let there be a few men. […] [S]mash the glassy rind of humanity, as one would smash the brittle hide of the insulated bug. Smash humanity, and make an end of it. Let there emerge a few pure and single men—men who give themselves to the unknown of life and death and are fulfilled. Make an end of our unholy oneness, […] let me be by myself, let me be myself. Let me know other men who are single and not contained by any multiple oneness. Let me find a few men who are distinct and at ease in themselves like stars. Let me derive no more from the body of mankind. Let me derive direct from life or direct from death, according to the impulse that is in me.¹⁰

The last paragraph of the foregoing quote is a prayer: memorize it, recite it, utter it profusely, and invoke the Gods. It is time our robotic humanity is brought to an end. There never was a “humanity,” save for robot humanity. Let us free ourselves from the technological tyranny, band together with other liberated people and find joy together in the cosmos. As for the rest of humanity, they can either be liberated or serve; the choice is theirs, though the robotic man, being nothing but a partially dehumanized man, may no longer have the capacity to choose. As Simone Weil writes: “As collective thought cannot exist as thought, it passes into things (signs, machines …). Hence the paradox: it is the thing which thinks and the man who is reduced to the state of a thing.”¹¹

When the robot reigns supreme, the Gods abscond from the world and their incarnations seldom visit us, save for in visions of the blessed. Instead, a new god is worshipped, a false god, the god of the Machine, which has a keyboard for its pew. This is the religion of the robot. As R. S. Thomas writes:

What made us think
It was yours? Because it was signed
With your blood, God of battles?
It is such a small thing,
Easily overlooked in the multitude
Of the worlds. We are misled
By perspective; the microscope
Is our sin, we tower enormous
Above it the stronger it
Grows. Where have your incarnations
Gone to? The flesh is too heavy
To wear you, God of light
And fire. The machine replaces
The hand that fastened you
To the cross, but cannot absolve us.¹²

Hold Back!

Oh men, living men, vivid men, ocean and fire
don’t give any more life to the machines!
Draw it away, draw it away, for these horrible machine-people
can’t live any more, except for a spell, when the living cease to accept
    them as brothers
and give them life.

Machines of iron must be tended by hands of flesh
and robots must have encouragement from men of the vivid life
or they break down.

Oh men of life and of living
withdraw, withdraw your flow
from the grinning and insatiable robots.¹³

Machines have no lives of their own: without men to mind machines they would break down and stay that way. That is why we must stop working with and repairing the machines; we must withdraw our living flow from the machines. There is a difference between a tool and a machine: a tool is designed around a human and can do nothing on its own, whereas a machine can run automatically for some period, and humans have to adapt to it. This is why plows and scythes never made men into machines; and it is also why people are turning into robots today. The Amish are a free people, and they can live independently to a certain extent, but the machine people of today cannot survive at all without the system. That is why everyone who is free should first try to free the machine people, but if that doesn’t work, they should withdraw the flow of life from them, for in causing the breakdown of the robot, the man may be saved. As Lawrence stated, “the living souls of men may upset the mechanical march of events at any moment.”¹⁴

What Lawrence terms a robot, Ludwig Klages terms a “Golem.” Whatever term is used, the meaning is the same, namely a person who has sacrificed their free individual self, their soul, and their connection to the divine fountain of being, in the name of the ego. Once one becomes a robot/Golem, that person functions as a vampire upon the blood of the world. As Klages writes:

The Golem is bound up with the problem of vampirism, for the Golem is but a particular species of vampire…He is, in fact, the “man of the future!” He is that man — or non-man — over whom the machine will exercise complete domination. Already, the machine has liberated itself from man’s control; it is no longer man’s servant: in reality, man himself is now being enslaved by the machine.¹⁵

Impulse.

You can count on anything, but you can’t count on impulse.
You can’t even count on the mechanical impulse for money and motor-
    cars
which rules the robot-classes and the robot-masses, now.

Once disillusion falls on living men, and they feel the illusion ebb away
the illusion of mankind, the illusion of a hopeful future for these masses
    and classes of men
once disillusion falls on living men, and illusion of brotherhood and hope
    bleeds right away,

Then, then comes the great moment of choice.
Oh, life is nothing if not choice.
And that which is choice alone matters.

In the moment of choice, the soul rolls back
away from the robot-classes and the robot-masses
and withdraws itself, and recognises a flower, or the morning-star
but utterly fails to recognise any more the grey rat-hordes of classes and
    masses.

And then, when the soul of living men repudiates them
then at once the impulse of the greedy classes and masses breaks down.
and a chaos of impulse supervenes
in which is heard the crashing splinter of machines
and the dull breaking of bones.

For the robot classes and masses are only kept sane
by the kindness of living women and men.

Now living women and men are threatened with extinction
and the time has come to cease to be kind any more
to the robot classes and masses.

Oh, if the huge tree dies
save some shoots, some lovely flowering shoots
to graft on another tree.

Trees raised from seed have wild and bitter fruits
they need grafting:
and even the loveliest flowers, you must graft them on a new stock.¹⁶

The time to make a choice is now. If we don’t fight the robots and the Machine, all life on this planet may very well be extinguished within a century. There may have been a time for gradual change, there may have been a time for being kind to the robots, but that time has passed, and now we must fight and strive tooth and nail to save the world. Clean energy and carbon neutrality will no longer suffice. Nothing less than drastic population reduction and an even more drastic change to Amish-like lifestyles will allow the earth to heal. If society cannot be saved, then we must withdraw to secluded ark-like communities, such as Rananim, to save what can and should be saved. Peace can never come in the cities, and the robot-people will never leave one in peace. Only in a remote place, close to nature, may one feel peace. This is why communities, such as Rananim are so important: they help to foster the stillness and peace that passes all understanding. As Lawrence writes:

Now he could remember the frenzied outward rushing of the vast masses of people, away from themselves, without being driven mad by it. But it seemed strange to him that they should rush like this in their vast herds, outwards, outwards, always frenziedly outwards, like souls with hydrophobia rushing away from the pool of water. He himself, when he was caught up in the rush, felt tortured and maddened, it was an agony of irritation to him till he could feel himself drifting back again like a creature into the sea. The sea of his own inward soul, his own unconscious faith, over which his will had no exercise. Why did the mass of people not want this stillness and this peace with their own being? Why did they want cinemas and excitements? Excitements are as nauseous as sea-sickness. Why does the world want them?

It is their problem. They must go their way. But some men, some women must stay by their own inmost being, in peace, and without envy. And there in the stillness listen, listen, and try to know, and try to obey. From the innermost, not from the outside. It is so lovely, the peace.¹⁷

As stated earlier, we are past the point of reforming the system, so the system must go, but we must never fight the system with the system’s own tools. If one stands on a side-walk and tries ever so hard to destroy the concrete with a hammer, little will be accomplished save for exhaustion. But, if one is patient and has faith in the natural world, a simple dandelion can destroy concrete in ways a hammer could never fathom. So, we need communities to help foster new shoots of life, while we wait for the robot masses and classes to disappear. As Lawrence writes:

It is no use trying merely to modify present forms. The whole great form of our era will have to go. And nothing will really send it down but the new shoots of life springing up and slowly bursting the foundations. And one can do nothing, but fight tooth and nail to defend the new shoots of life from being crushed out, and let them grow.¹⁸

On and on and on—

The machine will run on and on and on—
then let it!

Oh, never fight the machine,
nor its mechanised robots, robot classes and masses!
Lift never a finger against them, that they can see.
Let them run on and on and on—
It is their heaven and their doom.¹⁹

How can we fight without fighting? Simple: by attaining inner peace and stillness. This peace, with patience may foster new life, new shoots that break down everything rotten in this world. Or, with patience, we wait. If the robot masses cannot see their errors, the apocalypse will come, and they will be destroyed by the cataclysms that destroy the mechanized infrastructure their lives now depend on. The internet will collapse; the power grids, smart phones, and roads will deteriorate; and global trade will grind to a halt. Those who have escaped the system, may also escape some of the calamity, and those few living souls may be able to grow something new and good upon the face of the earth.

Technology is a seemingly invincible force, but it contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Unlike the soul, which has no limits, technology has defined limits. It may be close to the point at which it can not be overcome, but it will eventually destroy itself. Heidegger puts this into philosophical terminology as such:

The tyranny of technology—where technology itself against itself is so uncertain, tottering, and fading; surpassed by itself in the instant and without guarantee that it can master and fascinate—which humans does this presuppose? How far must the uprooting extend in order to be carried away by such a thing? […] Technology can protract, delay, and move in this or that way into what is measurable—it can never overcome—i.e., ground—; it itself is becoming more and more that which cannot be overcome, and so it precisely maintains itself in a duration—although it offers no guarantees, especially where it stands against its own kind.²⁰

How does a person today become a robot? Simple: by doing something so simple as turning on an electric light. We are alienated from ourselves, from others, and from the products of our labor. Lighting a fire, forging a blade, growing grain by hand all partake of the mysteries, but flipping a switch only serves to alienate the alienated. Now, if something so simple as turning on a light roboticizes someone, just imagine what hours on a phone screen will do. Lawrence writes:

Machines depend upon the conquest of the external forces, so that by the intervention of machinery, we not only destroy the purest joy, but we rob ourselves of very life, we become as it were deaf and numb in the elemental physical body. Every time we turn on a tap to have water, every time we turn a handle to have fire, we frustrate and annul our own life. The more appliances we have, the more applied we are, we become merely a master-appliance in ourself.

The machine is the perfect Neuter of all life. It exists by virtue of the pivotal vacuum, the centrality of the perfect neutralisation, the potent void. Whilst we use the potent neuter machine to serve the impulses of life and creation, all is well. But when life and being are subjected to the service of the machine, productive or destructive, then all is ill, life is all running into the central vacuum of the machine’s pivot.

When we balance the sticks and kindle a fire, we perform the Promethean mysteries, we poise the elements. But when we turn on an electric tap, there is as it were a wad between our sensitive, sensible body and the vivid elements. Under this wad we grow numb and atrophied. Our appliances at last exterminate us.²¹

The Machine epitomizes nothingness, or as Lawrence put it, it is “the perfect Neuter of all life.” The Machine has castrated our once fecund world. That which we want to save us—our machines and appliances—are killing us. As R. S. Thomas writes:

And the machines say, laughing
up what would have been sleeves
in the old days: “We are at
your service.” “Take us”, we cry,

“to the places that are far off
from yourselves.” And so they do
at a price that is the alloy in
the thought that we can do without them.²²

The machines seem so useful! Who wouldn’t want a refrigerator? Yet, once we accept these diabolical devices into our lives, we find life hard—or impossible—to live without them. We got by just fine for thousands of years without phones, refrigerators, electric light-bulbs, etc., not to mention the more nefarious devices, yet if they were taken away tomorrow all hell would break loose, and many would suffer and die. No one should work with a tool more complicated than they can understand, and no one should use such a tool they cannot do without. A pencil is understandable, while a computer is not, and outside of the most basic early palaeolithic tools, nothing is really needed. In fact, since the earliest ages of humanity, we have not experienced progress, but degeneration! All talk of progress is really talk of decay, or as Klages puts it:

[W]e know of no “progress” other than that which results in complete dissolution and final destruction, in so far as things continue on the straight course down which “civilized” humanity has been racing since 1789 at an ever-accelerating pace.²³

But I say unto you: Love one another.

Oh I have loved my fellow-men—
and lived to learn they are neither fellows nor men
but machine-robots.

Oh I have loved the working class
where I was born,
and lived to see them spawn into machine-robots
in the hot-beds of the board-schools and the film.

Oh how I loved the thought of thoughtful people
gentle and refined,
and lived to find out
that their last thought was money
and their last refinement bluff, a hate disguised,
and one trapped one’s fingers in their brassy, polished works!²⁴

The universal love of humankind is not helpful. We must not love machine robots. A robot only loves machines, money, and other robots, and that is if it is capable of love at all. These robots create nothing, but destroy everything. As Lawrence writes:

They had a universal desire to take life and down it: these horrible machine people, these iron and coal people. They wanted to set their foot absolutely on life, grind it down, and be master. Masters, as they were of their foul machines. Masters of life, as they were masters of steam-power and electric-power and above all, of money-power. Masters of money-power, with an obscene hatred of life, true spontaneous life.²⁵

Robots destroy everything they come in contact with, including people who love them, infecting them with the disease of mechanization. Just like robots, machines destroy everything they touch. A person who interfaces with a machine becomes a robot/machine-person, which then goes on to create more machines, but the creation of a machine is not creation, but destruction, since a flower is created from the seed without any loss, but machines—even simple ones—destroy much in their process of coming to be. Wendell Berry writes:

The expert on resistance to torture
becomes an expert torturer.
The machine that helped a woman
to do her work replaces her at work.
The machine that helped a man to think
ticks on in absence of the man.
The communications technology that was
to become the concourse and meeting
of all the world, bringing the longed-for
peace to all the world, becomes
a weapon to break the world in pieces.²⁶

But, don’t the rich, the so-called masters of machines have more freedom and power? No, since the wealthy are themselves mastered by the machines, and since they have access to more, they, often, are even greater slaves than the poor, but whereas the poor are slaves to the wealthy and the machines, the wealthy are doubly or triply slaves to machines and the Machine. Lawrence writes:

And what are we all, all of us, collectively, even the poorest, now, in this age? We are only potentially rich men. We are all alike. The distinction between rich and poor is purely accidental. Rich and poor alike are only, each one, a pit-head surrounding the bottomless pit. But the rich man, by pouring vast quantities of matter down his void, gives himself a more pleasant illusion of fulfilment than the poor man can get: that is all. Yet we would give our lives, every one of us, for this illusion.

There are no rich or poor, there are no masses and middle classes and aristocrats. There are myriads of framed gaps, people, and a few timeless fountains, men and women. That is all.

Myriads of framed gaps! Myriads of little egos, all wearing the crown of life! Myriads of little Humpty-Dumpties, self-satisfied emptinesses, all about to have a great fall.²⁷

We should not want to be rich in money or things, but rich in life!

As thyself—!

Supposing I say: dogs are my neighbours
I will love dogs as myself!

Then gradually I approximate to the dog,
wriggle and wag and slaver, and get the mentality of a dog!

This I call a shocking humiliation.

The same with my robot neighbours.
If I try loving them, I fall into their robot jig-jig-jig
their robot cachinnation comes rattling out of my throat—
and I had better even have approximated to the dog.

Who then, O Jesus, is my neighbour?
If you point me to that fat money-smelling man in a motor-car,
or that hard-boiled young woman beside him
I shall have to refuse entirely to accept either of them—

My neighbour is not the man in the street, and never was:
he jigs along in the imbecile cruelty of the machine
and is implacable.

My neighbour, O my neighbour!
Occasionally I see him, silent, a little wondering
with his ears pricked and his body wincing
threading his way among the robot machine-people.

Or my neighbour
sometimes I see her, like a flower, nodding her way and shrinking
from the robot contact on every hand!

How can that be my neighbour
which I shrink from!²⁸

As Lawrence makes clear above, one who loves a robot ends up becoming a robot. Instead one should withdraw from the robots entirely. A person who does not have the iron hook of the Machine through his face will be repulsed by the robot masses. But, the same individual will recognize the glow on the faces of the few free men and women who walk among us who are not of the robot. Regarding those who think they can love a machine or humanize a robot, Lewis Mumford has the following to say:

And now I come to a final point, which is essential to our understanding of the relations of art and technics in the world today. There is no extraneous way of humanizing the machine, or of turning it to the advantage of that part of the human personality which has heretofore expressed itself in what we may call the humane arts. You do not make a machine more human by painting it with flowers, as our ancestors used to paint typewriters and coffee grinders, or by spoiling its smooth surface with mechanical moldings and carvings, as our ancestors used to spoil the looks of steam radiators and cooking ranges. That is sentimental nonsense: the canons of machine art are precision, economy, slickness, severity, restriction to the essential, and whenever these canons are violated—either by the application of irrelevant ornament or by packaging the works in an irrelevant form, streamlining pencil sharpeners or other stationery objects, for example, or making the radiator of an automobile look like the mechanical counterpart of a shark’s mouth, or accentuating speed, as another motor car designer tries to, by turning what should be a protective molding into a chromium arrow—when this sort of thing is done the result is not the humanization of the machine but its debasement. It does not thereby acquire human values; it merely loses important mechanical values, values which, by their proper esthetic expression, do have at least a modicum of human relevance, to the extent that they express order or subserve power. The point is that the machine is not a substitute for the person; it is, when properly conceived, an extension of the rational and operative parts of the personality, and it must not wantonly trespass on areas that do not belong to it. If you fall in love with a machine there is something wrong with your love-life. If you worship a machine there is something wrong with your religion.²⁹

Precisely! If a person has become a robot, and if a non-robot loves that robot person, there is something deeply sick within the non-robot’s soul, which will end up killing that person through the process of roboticization. Similarly, as Mumford makes clear above, one who worships a machine, whether that machine is a phone, a car, or something else, is in the midst of a religious crisis. Only the pure, the natural, the organic should be loved, and only the Gods should be worshipped. As for how one should live in this robot infested world, Lawrence has some very simple, but very difficult instructions, which he presents in Kangaroo:

Whatever wrongs I have done are my own, and private between myself and the other person. One may be wrong, yes, one is often wrong. But not for them to judge. For my own soul only to judge. Let me know them for human filth, all these pullers-down, and let me watch them, as I would watch a reeking hyaena, but never fear them. Let me watch them, to keep them at bay. But let me never admit for one single moment that they may be my judges. That, never. I have judged them: they are canaille. I am a man, and I abide by my own soul. Never shall they have a chance of judging me.

So he discovered the great secret: to stand alone as his own judge of himself, absolutely. He took his stand absolutely on his own judgment of himself. Then, the mongrel-mouthed world would say and do what it liked. This is the greatest secret of behaviour: to stand alone, and judge oneself from the deeps of one’s own soul. And then, to know, to hear what the others say and think: to refer their judgment to the touchstone of one’s own soul-judgment. To fear one’s own inward soul, and never to fear the outside world, nay, not even one single person, nor even fifty million persons.³⁰

You must stand alone, and only compare your actions to your own personal standards for behavior. Men should have equality of opportunity, and the basic necessities of life should be provided for free, but with the understanding that each person is unique. Only machines can be equal, so striving for human equality is striving to become like machines. As Lawrence writes:

The moment you come to compare them, men are unequal, and their inequalities are infinite. But supposing you don’t compare them. Supposing, when you meet a man, you have the pure decency not to compare him either with yourself or with anything else. Supposing you can meet a man with this same singleness of heart. What then? Is the man your equal, your inferior, your superior? He can’t be, if there is no comparison. If there be no comparison, he is the incomparable. He is the incomparable. He is single. He is himself.—When I am single-hearted, I don’t compare myself with my neighbor. He is immediate to me, I to him. He is not my equal, because this presumes comparison. He is incomparably himself, I am incomparably myself. We behold each other in our pristine and simple being. And this is the first, the finest, the perfect way of human intercourse.³¹

Revolutions as such!

Curiously enough, actual revolutions are made by robots,
living people never make revolutions,
they can’t, life means too much to them.³²

This is so true. Just look to history: each and every revolution brought us closer to the dominance of the Machine. The American, French, and Russian revolutions were orchestrated by robots. Life is intensely valuable, so the greatest revolution is one that takes place in the soul and leads to an awakened existence. One may hate the Machine; may even have escaped to Rananim, but none of that matters without inner peace. Additionally, a man should not let hatred for the robots destroy his inner peace, which is priceless. Lawrence writes:

One may be at war with society, and still keep one’s deep peace with mankind. It is not pleasant to be at war with society, but sometimes it is the only way of preserving one’s peace of soul, which is peace with the living, struggling, real mankind. And this latter one cannot afford to lose.³³

It must also be noted, that at the root of almost all revolutions is the will to power. A revolution—even one against the Machine—with even the slightest hint of desire for conquest or egotism would be a tragedy. Klages writes:

The spiritual will to conquest is the ultimate offense against life, and the offender must be prepared to endure life’s harsh retaliation in consequence. This proposition will remain in force so long as mankind exists, and it will have demonstrated the full horror of its ultimate implications when a degenerate mankind finally evolves into a completely rationalized and desecrated counterfeit of life.³⁴

Robot feelings

It is curious, too, that though the modern man in the street
is a robot, and incapable of love
he is capable of an endless, grinding, nihilistic hate:
that is the only strong feeling he is capable of;
and therein lies the danger of robot-democracy and all the men in the
    street,
they move in a great grind of hate, slowly but inevitably.³⁵

This is the danger facing democracy. When the lowest masses get to make decisions, and when those masses are robots full of hate, then we end up in a hate filled world. At least—even the worst—aristocracy is based on hierarchy and principles, but democracy’s only principle is that of the mud, namely that everything true, pure, austere is reduced to the lowest common denominator. Capitalist democracy and communism are no different in this respect. But, what these systems bring us are ways of life that are not worth living. “Anything is better than stewing in your own juice, or grinding at the end of your tether, or tread-milling away at a career. Better a “wicked creature” any day, than a mechanical tread-miller of a careerist. Better anything on earth than the millions of human ants.”³⁶ The process of decay and the interrelation of money, markets, democracy, robots, and the Machine are described lucidly by Klages as follows:

Today, those are outstanding spirits indeed in whom one can expect to find any independence of judgment. The great masses, who have never been, in the history of mankind, more subject to hypnotic suggestion than they are right now, have become the puppets of the “public opinion” that is engineered by the newspapers in the service, it need hardly be emphasized, of the reigning powers of finance. What is printed in the morning editions of the big city newspapers is the opinion of nine out of ten readers by nightfall. The United States of America, whose more rapid “progress” enables us to predict the future on a daily basis, has pulled far ahead of the pack when it comes to standardizing thought, work, entertainment, etc.

Thus, the United States in 1917 went to war against Germany in sincere indignation because the newspapers had told them that Prussian “militarism” was rioting in devilish atrocities as it attempted to conquer the world. Of course, these transparent lies were published in the daily rags because the ruling lords of Mammon knew that American intervention in Europe would fatten their coffers. Thus, whereas the Americans thought that they were fighting for such high-minded slogans as “liberty” and “justice,” they were actually fighting to stuff the money bags of the big bankers. These “free citizens” are, in fact, mere marionettes; their freedom is imaginary, and a brief glance at American work-methods and leisure-time entertainments is enough to prove conclusively that l’homme machine is not merely imminent: it is already the American reality.

Racial theorists seem cognizant of the fact that this will be the downfall of the white race, and that of the black and yellow races shortly thereafter. (Of the so-called “primitive” races, we say nothing other than that the few surviving tribal cultures are already at death’s door!) All of these facts are scarcely relevant, since the ultimate destruction of all seems to be a foregone conclusion. It is not this destruction that makes us sorrowful here, for no prophet can foretell whether a completely robotic mankind will survive for centuries, or even for millennia: what concerns us is the mechanization process itself. It is the tragic destiny of knowledge — of authentic knowledge and not of the imaginary sort, which provides the intellectual implements required by engineers and technicians — that it performs the funeral march that accompanies the disappearance, if not the burial, of a living essence. The only thing that we know is that we are no more. “Somnium narrare vigilantis est” (Seneca).³⁷

Robot-democracy.

In a robot-democracy, nobody is willing to serve
even work is unwilling, the worker is unwilling, unwilling.

The great grind of unwillingness, the slow undergrind of hate
and democracy is ground into dust
then the mill-stones burst with the internal heat of their own friction.³⁸

The democracy we live under today is a robot democracy, a democracy by and for robots. But as horrible as this system is, Lawrence provides us with hope, by stating that the system is under immense pressures and should, at some point, collapse under its own weight. But so long as democracy survives, so will the robot, and vice-versa. Whereas in all other ages of human existence superiority was determined based on reasonable factors, such as spiritual aptitude, now superiority is determined based on how debased a person has become, and how much that person has acclimatized to the Machine. Ancient Greece had scientists, but it was the oracles and prophets who were given real value. Now, we only value the technicians. As Lawrence makes clear:

Though no man is higher than any other man, intrinsically, still some men are superior mechanically. Some men are more productive materially than others. They know how to combine the mechanical forces of the universe to bring forth material produce. Those that can most successfully subject living and being to the mechanical forces, destroy the intrinsic self and substitute the machine unit, thereby increasing material production, let them be lords of material production. Let money rule.

Which is the inevitable outcome of democracy—Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. And as long as we believe in Equality, so long shall we grind mechanically till […] we have no living soul, no living self, but only a super-machine faculty which will coin money. Then no doubt we shall all be satisfied, negative, anti-life.³⁹

It is time to stop believing in equality and to once again pick up the mantle of the aristocratic tradition. The leaders in this would be those who see the Gods today, namely the sun-men. We are living in the kali-yuga, a period of terrible decay, but time is cyclical, and at some point a regenerating spirit will again take hold. Lawrence writes:

In its living periods mankind accumulates upwards, through the zones of life-expression and passionate consciousness, upwards to the supreme utterer, or utterers. In its disintegrating periods the reverse is the case. Man accumulates downwards, down to the lowest issue. And the great men of the downward development are the men who symbolise the gradually sinking zones of being, till the final symbol, the great man who represents the wage-reality rises up and is hailed as the supreme. No doubt he is the material, mechanical universal of mankind, a unit of automated existence.⁴⁰

Real democracy.

If the robot can recognise the clean flame of life
in men who have never fallen in life
then he repents, and his will breaks, and a great love of life
brings him to his knees, in homage and pure passion of service.

Then he receives the kiss of reconciliation
and ceases to be a robot, and becomes a servant of life
serving with delight and with reverence those men whose flame
of life undimmed delights him, so even he is lit up.⁴¹

Though we have stated many negative things about the robot masses, and rightly so, Lawrence believed that they could become life-worshipping men again. No revolution can make this happen. Only through education and a living example can this take place. That is why all those who worship the flame of life must live to a higher standard, to show all the robot masses that there is another way. Not every robot is capable of awakening, but some are. As Lawrence writes:

One thing he realised, however: that if the fire had suddenly erupted in his own belly, it would erupt one day in the bellies of all men. Because there it had accumulated, like a great horrible lava pool, deep in the unconscious bowels of all men. All who were not dead. And even the dead were many of them raging in the invisible, with gnashing of teeth. But the living dead, these he could not reckon with: they with poisonous teeth like hyenas.⁴²

The Evil World-Soul

Oh, there is evil, there is an evil world-soul.
But it is the soul of man only, and his machines
which has brought to pass the fearful thing called evil,
hyaenas only hint at it.

Do not think that a machine is without a soul.
Every wheel on its hub has a soul, evil,
it is part of the evil world-soul, spinning.

And every man who has become a detached and self-activated ego
is evil, evil, part of the evil world-soul
which wishes to blaspheme the world into greyness,
into evil neutrality, into mechanism—
The Robot is the unit of evil.
And the symbol of the Robot is the wheel revolving.⁴³

This is Lawrence at his most Gnostic. For Lawrence there is an evil principle, and that principle is the Machine. But, the Machine is created and is not coeternal with the Gods. Robotic Man is evil, the Machine is evil, but since both were created, both can be destroyed. In Lawrence’s religion, the evil force is not necessarily Satan, but the Machine and the Robot. A lover of the Gods like Lawrence would know that Good is the ultimate absolute, and evil is a nothingness, but as he wrote: “I used to think there was no absolute evil. Now I know there is a great deal. So much that it threatens life altogether.”⁴⁴

We must escape from this evil into the pure and radiant good of the cosmos, but:

The universe of life and death, of which we, whose business it is to live and to die, know nothing. Whilst concerning the universe of Force and Matter we pile up theories and make staggering and disastrous discoveries of machinery and poison-gas, all of which we were much better without.

It is life we have to live by, not machines and ideals. And life means nothing else, even, but the spontaneous living soul which is our central reality. The spontaneous, living, individual soul, this is the clue, and the only clue. All the rest is derived.⁴⁵

The soul is the clue to the end of this degenerating epoch and the start of a regenerating spiritual epoch. Robots have not lost their souls, but they are veiled a thousand times over. Men and women of the sun, moon, stars, and Gods must look inward to discover the numinous light shining out of the core of their being. This light is a beacon that will lead the little soul back to the Gods and from there back to the Fire at the root of the All.

Bibliography

Berry, Wendell. A Small Porch. Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2016.

Heidegger, Martin. Ponderings: Black Notebooks Ii–Vi. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016.

Holy Mountain, Nikodimos of the, and St Makarios of Corinth. The Philokalia. Translated by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. Vol. Four. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Major Works. Edited by Catherine Phillips. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Klages, Ludwig. Cosmogonic Reflections. Translated by Joseph D. Pryce. London: Arktos, 2015.

———. Of Cosmogonic Eros. Edited by David Beth and Jessica Grote. Translated by Mav Kuhn. Munich: Theion Publishing, 2018.

Lawrence, D. H. John Thomas and Lady Jane. Edited by Roland Gant. New York: The Viking Press, 1974.

———. Kangaroo. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2018.

———. Late Essays and Articles. Edited by James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

———. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. Edited by Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

———. Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. Edited by Michael Herbert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

———. “Sea and Sardinia.” In D. H. Lawrence and Italy, 137–326. London: Penguin Books, 2007.

———. Studies in Classic American Literature. Edited by Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

———. The Poems. Edited by Christopher Pollnitz. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

———. “Twilight in Italy.” In D. H. Lawrence and Italy, 2–136. London: Penguin Books, 2007.

Mumford, Lewis. Art and Technics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

Thomas, R. S. Collected Later Poems. Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2004.

———. Collected Poems. London: Orion Books, 2000.

Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr. New York: Routledge, 1999.

1. D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 547–48.

2. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth, The Philokalia, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, vol. Four (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 195.

3. D. H. Lawrence, “Twilight in Italy,” in D. H. Lawrence and Italy (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 136.

4. D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 270.

5. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works, ed. Catherine Phillips (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 131.

6. Ludwig Klages, Of Cosmogonic Eros, ed. David Beth and Jessica Grote, trans. Mav Kuhn (Munich: Theion Publishing, 2018), 116–17.

7. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:548–49.

8. D. H. Lawrence, John Thomas and Lady Jane, ed. Roland Gant (New York: The Viking Press, 1974), 288.

9. R. S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2004), 115.

10. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, 43–45.

11. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (New York: Routledge, 1999), 153.

12. R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems (London: Orion Books, 2000), 228.

13. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:551.

14. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 103.

15. Ludwig Klages, Cosmogonic Reflections, trans. Joseph D. Pryce (London: Arktos, 2015), 132.

16. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:551–52.

17. D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2018), 175.

18. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, 249.

19. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:554.

20. Martin Heidegger, Ponderings: Black Notebooks Ii–Vi, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 264–65.

21. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 283–84.

22. Thomas, Collected Poems, 532.

23. Klages, Cosmogonic Reflections, 33.

24. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:555.

25. Lawrence, Kangaroo, 294.

26. Wendell Berry, A Small Porch (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2016), 42.

27. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, 274.

28. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:556.

29. Lewis Mumford, Art and Technics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 80–81.

30. Lawrence, Kangaroo, 287–88.

31. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, 102–3.

32. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:558.

33. D. H. Lawrence, Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 313.

34. Klages, Cosmogonic Reflections, 79.

35. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:558.

36. Lawrence, Kangaroo, 168–69.

37. Klages, Cosmogonic Reflections, 1–2.

38. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:559.

39. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 213.

40. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, 110.

41. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:559.

42. Lawrence, Kangaroo, 299.

43. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:626.

44. D. H. Lawrence, “Sea and Sardinia,” in D. H. Lawrence and Italy (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 149.

45. D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 169.