FROM GUTENBERG TO THE METAVERSE:

The light-speed of information and the emergence of a divided world. (Written with Dr. Roman Kechur)

Photo by Ali Abdul Rahman on Unsplash

Dear Reader: I am pleased to publish this collaboration with esteemed colleague and friend, Roman Kechur, MD, PhD. Dr Kechur is a clinical psychologist and psychiatrist practicing in Lviv, Ukraine. I had the honor of working with him on this piece, which I much enjoyed, and which was published last year in Zbruč, an online magazine of psychology and literature. Dr. Kechur’s full bio is included at the end. I hope you find food for thought in the article, about this paranoid-schizoid moment tearing our world apart. Enjoy.

1. Introduction: How did we get into this mess?

Our world is divided. Everyone knows this. We divide it into conditional camps: American progressives, Starmer, Merz, Macron, Zelenskyi versus Trump, Xi, Erdogan, Putin, Assad, Orban. One camp is for the most part zealous for progress, while the other insists (with varying degrees of actual or rhetorical violence and disinformation) on “tradition”. One camp supports (with varying degrees of intensity) “green” energy, gender equality, inclusion and diversity, while others defend fossil fuels and gender binary. Modern Catholics versus Huguenots. It has always been this way, but it seems like we are accelerating, perhaps on the verge of another St. Bartholomew’s Night.

Why have extremes become popular again? Why are the dissatisfied in the majority once again? Why are more and more people on both sides of the extremes saying,“Everything is bad and it’s their fault. Perhaps we need to destroy everything, burn it all down, and start over”?

We want to look at what is happening at the margins here, while recognizing that readers likely experience this split in more subtle yet persistent ways. In fact there is a hunger in many quarters for a “normal” that may have disappeared.

Western societies have benefited the most from technological and economic development, but many feel deceived: high consumption has not made people happy.

Leaving our sympathies on the side of liberals/progressives in our reflections, we are forced in this essay to attempt to be “above the battle”. Otherwise, we will simply continue to fuel animosity and feed binary arguments, going in circles.

2. Medievalism.

Why are we on the verge of a “new Middle Ages”? In the true Middle Ages, people poorly distinguished faith, thought, and action. People in other words understood sinful thoughts and their prohibition as synonymous with actions to be avoided. If someone had a different understanding of faith, meaning their thoughts deviated from the dominant doctrine, they could be declared a heretic and subjected to repression, even to the point of destruction. Non-conformity was perceived as hostility, and thoughts were equated not only with evil intentions but also with criminality. It’s not surprising that the Freudian proposal to investigate free associations and fantasies became possible only quite recently, historically speaking.

After all, to freely fantasize for example about the “killing of a king or president” in the psychoanalyst’s office is only possible in a world where fantasies do not equal intentions, let alone actions. Otherwise, one could lose their head. Only in the modern world can people recount dreams about the death of a president and vote for his party in elections. Fantasies and dreams in Western culture have been separated from intentions and actions. A space emerged for psychoanalysis and free art.

But a poor differentiation between actions and thoughts is present in totalitarian modern countries. This poor distinction between the internal and external worlds creates a paranoid world and divides the populace into “us” and “them.” Infidels and those with different thoughts have always been under suspicion and perceived as the main source of threat. Historically, we talk about times when people had limited knowledge to explain the world. Mystical beliefs simultaneously served as explanatory narratives for the structure of the world, markers of identity, and indicators of political and religious loyalty.

It is important to remember that the majority of people on the planet still live in a similar worldview today. Residents of university campuses find it difficult to imagine that for most people on the planet, religion is still the foundation of culture, while education remains fragmented. Those among them who use the internet do not search Google for scientific articles or informative programs but remain in the bubble of archaic beliefs.

During the Enlightenment, the boundary between thought and action was restored through rational discourse, thus limiting the archaic aspects in human nature. Even religion became more rational in the mainstream Western world. The Protestant ethic predominantly depicts God as Law, rather than a mystical figure. This tendency has gradually spread to a significant portion of the entire Christian world. As a result, not only has a connection emerged between religious and scientific knowledge, but there has also been a differentiation between them, a mutual recognition autonomy.

This recognition phenomenon can be compared to various identity-roles, defined by context. We can for instance behave and experience differently in a sauna, at a stadium, in a theater, or in a museum. Despite this striking difference, it is still us. We contain multitudes, to paraphrase Walt Whitman.

This equally applies to a scientific laboratory, library, university lecture hall, or church. In Ukraine, we try to comprehend this difference and ironically look at naive attempts of dichotomous opposition. Overall, this is a complex task because it requires constant reminders of the limitations of our knowledge. If we remember the imperfection of our minds, disputes between science and faith become senseless. We believe that our identity arises from our individual and collective rational and transcendent experience—a “pastiche” of experiences and contexts—as well as innate character. Such understanding aims for tolerance of differences amongst our fellows.

3. A new authority.

Returning to earlier times. As the enlightenment spread, privacy and freedom of speech emerged. The world evolved into a modern politic that aspires to rationality rather than religious doctrine.

A major contributor here is the Gutenberg press. Gutenberg, by introducing printed words on a wide scale, contributed to the organization and rationality of human thought. Writing became embedded in sociocultural fabric. It became a logical, rational, and coherent presentation of text and idea. This method of organizing and transmitting knowledge became a standard for thinking, leading to explosive technological developments. In turn, technical and material resources were required for printing. Publishers and editors gained intellectual power. Anything not printed remained nonexistent; the archaic equivalent of today’s “pictures or it didn’t happen.”

Now it was authors and editors, not just priests, who began to attribute significance to facts, performing a parental societal function.

4. Enter the algorithm

Now we arrive in another explosive new era: that of the microprocessor. Authority is flattened in the hyper-democratized online landscape. Soon one fact is as good as another. Electronic social networks and economic progress created large clusters of people for whom expressing thoughts (in writing or orally) becomes nearly synonymous with action, a digitized hyper-reactivity.

A strange new tribalism develops. Which camp are you in? To digitally post a thought is to take a stand. Word and thought become equated with deeds, and the boundary between the internal and external is once again destroyed, and we all find ourselves in paranoia. Which side are we on or should we be on? Will we rouse the online mob? Meanwhile we resent or even hate those who spread lies and falsehood (as we understand them.) To say something is to be something.

Meanwhile, as author Tom Nichols has discussed, “expertise” loses its sociocultural authority, as editors lose their power. Now anyone can write, self-publish, or digitally distribute. The scarcity of information has been replaced by its excess and subsequent dilution.

The societal narrative fragments. Modern individuals find themselves in chaos and disorientation. Everyone lags behind a sociocultural mainstream evolving at light speed. Keyboard-warriors and self-proclaimed experts on specific issues replace the scholarly encyclopedists. The identity of an individual is reduced from a multiplicity of signifiers—geographic, religious, political, racial, cultural, and so on—to a single micro-partiality. Which side are you on?

From being individuals of the Enlightenment era, we transform again into the “siloed” categories of Christian, Muslim, or Jewish, leftist or rightist, progressive or conservative, and so on. (Even these categories evolve and fragment.)

Unable to hold the complexity and multiplicity of truth in our minds, we identify with partial identities, in parallel with Freud’s and Klein’s partial objects.

By this we mean a phenomenon understood via an analogy with child perception. A very young child identifies the Other (usually a father or mother and anyone significant) with parts of their body, such as the penis or breasts (sometimes with objects, as in the case of fetishism). This also applies to regressive adult self-identification and the identification of others through simplification (reduction) to a simple partial identity—Christians, Jews, atheists, leftists, liberals, and conservatives. As with certain sociopolitical stances also: pro this or anti that. And so on indefinitely. We see this splintering even in our own field.

This identity and semantic fragmenting in the modern West leads to the emergence of collective confusion and fear of disintegration or exile (colloquially, fear of missing out.) This psychotic-like fear drastically intensifies the uncompromising struggle among partial “truths” that stand authoritatively as the whole story.

Knowledge and complex thinking become incredibly challenging. We stand on the brink of a looming “enlightenment” of a different sort, where some mystical and fanatical idea may seize the majority. Fear finds its reasons.

A quick aside about such fanaticism or delusion. This mechanism in psychiatry is called a delusional (psychotic) illumination, when persistent confusion and fear reach their peak through self-protective “moves” of projection and projective identification, the problem “contained” in an Other now demonized and hated, creating a psychological world of externalized "strange objects" according to Wilfred Bion.

What goes missing is the introspection, reflection, and awareness needed to understand our own unconscious contributions, individually and collectively. The choice seems to be a paralyzed helplessness or intense, short-term reactivity. (This leads to an addiction-like attachment to our comforting points of view.)

In literature, there are descriptions of states where for example it appears that people in photos look strange, passers-by glance threateningly at each other, and objects in the room are suspiciously arranged. This psychologically unbearable condition, called a psychotic mood, is overcome through psychotic reduction: suddenly "everything becomes clear," and a delusional idea arises that "explains everything." This is how psychosis typically emerges: a delusional thread that gives cohesion to intolerable subjective fragmentation. We see this happening with intractable conspiracy theories, or any position beyond rational argument or debate. As a result it can seem as though those seeking some middle ground or semblance of reasonable consensus are the “crazy ones,” as if no center can hold, already collapsed beyond recognition.

#

Roman Kechur, MD, PhD, is head of the Department of Psychology and Psychotherapy at Ukrainian Catholic University; a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in private practice; teaching therapist and supervisor of the Ukrainian Union of Psychotherapists and the European Confederation of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapies; President of the Ukrainian Confederation of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapies; and Chairman of the Board of the Ukrainian Psychotherapeutic University.

Also strange is the parallel of our era with medieval times, which confused thinking with action, where we today confuse sociopolitical action with tweeting, posting, or arguing on Facebook. At times we are seduced into thinking an “anti” position well-defended will fortify us psychologically. Yet there is a difference in destroying, canceling or tearing down versus the attempt to create something new. It is easier to decry fascism or socialism from the keyboard than actually do the slow, grueling work of protecting democracy and voting rights (and other civil liberties) here in the U.S. Ukraine, meanwhile, seeks literally to defend its borders and democracy against an invading sociopath: a grueling, relentless struggle both violent and mired in uncertainty.

In this sense, we face the threat of a new medieval era. Although it remains possible (and we hope for this) that rational discourse will prevail. Perhaps the Western capacity for finding compromises as conflict resolution will be realized by analogy with precedent law. Maybe we are just at the beginning of a new cycle of development, and the new ethics, as always, lags slightly behind the needs of the time. Perhaps the analogy with precedent law is the future form of the new ethics, capable of responding more promptly to changes in emerging contexts. It would be interesting to see if this is the case... (By this we mean an analogy with principles of justice, where “precedent is a principle or rule established in a legal case that becomes authoritative to a court or other tribunal when deciding subsequent cases with similar legal issues or facts”. From this we expect new ethical decisions.)

4. Death of the Editor

Since we are both writers, we pause a moment to look at the “death of the editor (or authority figure).” It should be noted that in some current liberal discourse, emphasis is placed almost exclusively on an editor’s (or professor or University dean’s) restrictive, authoritative, and frustrating “parental” functions. At times it seems that to edit is to censor. This stance ignores the potentially soothing container role (according to Bion) of the editor, who is seen as threatening to preserve hegemony and an extremist narrative requiring destruction.

But then an insistent or inflexible opposition to such function becomes its own authority. We see this happening in some pockets of our own liberal camp.

Lacan introduces the concept of Symbolizing the Name of the Father, the (symbolic) Law providing an organizing function. It divides the psychic content into the conscious and the unconscious, or using another metaphor, assigns meaning to facts. This is a symbolic and needed function of human psychology, in Lacan’s view, to find a metaphorical order against chaos and relativism.

The dominant digital algorithm pulverizes such notions. This leads to disorder and anxiety, in fact perpetuates it in the anarchic clamor for our attention. (How many news articles in America contain the verbs “worry,” “alarm,” “panic,” and so on?) It attracts the information-consumer’s attention while perpetuating anxiety, necessary for the functioning of advertising. Our fears and means of salvation are sold to us but never quench our thirst. This is the price for the victory of consumer paradise.

As an outcome, in some camps of human rights activists, a zealous new censorship and ostracism (“canceling”) have emerged. On the other pole, defenders of tradition mainly protect their right to brutality, xenophobia, and violence. Though we are again on the side of the liberals, we see a pattern of opposites amplifying the other; the common thread is intolerance. The liberal threat to established religious and ethical norms destroys the thin layer of culture of archaic societies, disrupting the delicate civilization of the latter, those outside the western liberal order, and leads to more frequent breaches of an almost animalistic ferocity. This regression on one pole further dehumanizes it in the eyes of the other. As a result, one side loses empathy, while the other becomes even more archaically, primitively organized.

This is how the good intentions of liberals with a lack of empathy contribute to a traditionalist hell. This also happens in more subtler ways within more westernized societies, with a profound gap of empathy, interest, or dialogue between the two sides.

This dynamic of binary viewpoints have been exacerbated by the information avalanche, as excess replaces information scarcity. We are reminded of Baudrillard’s comment that we have more and more information and less and less meaning.

The world's largest libraries have grown 140 times over the centuries. In the last 30 years, more new information has been created than in the previous five thousand years. Perhaps this flattens information along with the value thereof, all information being equal. A more primitive power game emerges, replacing critical thinking. It is better to cancel or humiliate rather than debate your opponent.

This information avalanche, in the absence of global authorities, diminishes the significance of facts. Even the definition of “fact” becomes slippery.

The culture of humanity, which is still rapidly expanding and impossible for an individual to grasp, is reduced by individuals to simpler, partial forms. People unite around these simplifications according to the archaic principle of “us vs. them.”

We have split because we have created a paranoid discourse as the new norm. We were building a new liberal paradise but ended up in an unbearable medieval hell. The struggle for the connectivity of information flows ended with the "murder" of the editor, and once marginal gossip has become mainstream. No dispute is too small to “go viral.” It seems our naive belief in progress is changing as we come to realize that we still need to learn how to use these very powerful new tools.

Criminals like Putin, Assad, and others should be held accountable. It would also be good if Trump were never president again. However, if we do not understand this paralysis, others will come in their place.

5. Conclusion.

Splits or binaries are always pregnant with totalitarianism, in a world where there is only ideologies of “us versus them;” in this Manichean regression, both “us and them” require leaders who will secure victory for us (against them). The search for social compromises has transformed into uncompromising struggle.

Any “happy medium” or compromise requires an understanding of our commonality. Regression to partial identities and the confrontation between them is a synergistic process leading to the disappearance of such a “happy medium”. As written on Freud’s tombstone: “The voice of reason speaks softly.”

Of course, Darren and I are psychologists, and we might say the flourishing of psychology is connected to an expansion of consciousness, as demonstrated (we hope) in our essay. Such expansion is significant only when human life has value, in a free world. We can also understand our shared grasping for certainty, to be on “the right side” of the binary, the common fears and anxieties that grasp us as seek to grasp some monolithic truth which ends up handcuffing us. In this sense, by trying to reach beyond fear, to transcend it with certainty or buffered assurances, we become ever more its prisoner.

###

Roman Kechur, MD, PhD, is head of the Department of Psychology and Psychotherapy at Ukrainian Catholic University; a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in private practice; teaching therapist and supervisor of the Ukrainian Union of Psychotherapists and the European Confederation of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapies; President of the Ukrainian Confederation of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapies; and Chairman of the Board of the Ukrainian Psychotherapeutic University.