Neo-Monastic Rebellion Against the End of Human Communal Being

Mass capitalist society, culminating now in artificial intelligence, is increasingly pushing humans aside. We are becoming redundant and without economic purpose. From a religious perspective, man was never meant to find his purpose in economics. Traditional understandings of human purpose rarely placed the efficient mass production of materials at the center of meaning. In modernity, however, that's how humans are valued (though it's now increasingly regarded as arbitrary among many thinking people). 

Modernity has tied wealth and power and meaning to our ability to efficiently produce and distribute goods. That seemed okay so long as the vast majority of people still had a clear use in our hypothetical society-wide production machine. Now, however, as computers and robotics take market share, and most humans are rendered redundant for reasons of IQ or personality or interest, developed nations are increasingly facing an existential crisis. People don't want to work. Why? Because many of them don't need to, but also because they get nothing of value out of it. The average person, who can only fill a lower skill position, has no significant incentive to waste their lives in a low paying job which gives them neither dignity nor economic advancement. Who is going to feel satisfaction while working a service job for an impersonal corporation which will never grant the means to buy a house or provide for a family? And yet, these kinds of jobs seem to be most of the ones available for the average person who's not willing to work crazy night-shift hours.

Creating and providing for a family is ceasing to be a persuading incentive to work in a world that's increasingly detached from roots or community. As participation in civil society declines, people no longer feel any reason to have kids. Children are investments in the future, in the future of a community, but people are losing the ability to imagine the kind of community their kids might belong to. They can't see what role their kids might take on, and this inability to imagine gives people anxiety about the future. There's no clear role that parents or kids play in an economic-centric society that's losing the need for humans altogether. Everything is being deterritorialized, and children are blood and soil type assets that don't draw a return on investment unless they serve a broader communal role. 

The industrial revolution made sense when it was bettering the human condition, but several recent technological trends have clearly been steps in the wrong direction. Social media has now been proven beyond any significant doubt to have created an epidemic of social isolation, polarization, and depression that almost everyone is suffering from. Designing and manufacturing more iPhones is not benefiting mankind, it's tearing us apart. It's growing more reasonable to take steps backwards into something like an anti-smart-phone community than to continue down the road to utterly dystopian metaverse addiction and virtual reality.

It feels like everyone is searching for solutions to this problem. Opinion pieces proliferate. I personally think that one of the solutions will be a neo-monastic movement that tries to return humanity to a communal state revolving around something other than the mechanized production of consumer goods. As Nick Land and others have discussed at length, the self-reinforcing spiral of capitalism basically predestines society to continue down our present road towards the most disturbing anti-human realities. If machines are more powerful and efficient than humans, then they'll create forms of control that will allow those who wield them to manipulate their fellow humans; and some alienated persons will always decide to utilize these advantages for their own benefit, even if the majority of society is unwilling to embrace such techniques. The result is that artificial intelligence will inevitably arrive at its most sinister conclusion: the displacement of humanity in the name of another part of humanity that's willing to use it. Society will eventually allow AI to dominate so long as AI proves itself capable of giving some portion of humanity its most basic ambitions in certain short-term scenarios. Eventually, the vast majority of people will check-out of reality when they can have everything they want in the VR matrix. 

The only defense is religion because it is only in religion that these basic ambitions can be repudiated as non-ideal ends. Like the inhabitants of the 'Dune' universe, there will probably be some kind of religious prohibition on "thinking machines," and it's hard to see how this can happen unless we begin banding together in counter-cultural semi-monastic units willing to defy contemporary trends and put human-being, the God designed human way of being, at the forefront of our worldview and lifestyle. It turns out, here at the end of modernity, that religion is actually the only thing that's human. Technology and material accumulation is anti-human and will eventually erase humanity from existence (as it's already doing with humanity's fast collapsing fertility rates).