The Death of Community: Individuation, Authentic Relationship, and the Crisis of Modernity (Lecture 10/14/26)

The Death of Community

Individuation, Authentic Relationship, and the Crisis of Modernity

So I want to do a lecture on kind of a hot-button topic. I think I’m transitioning into a different way of doing this; it might become more contemporary. I just want to talk about dating, community, and the architectures of the current—I would say modern—ecosystem, and the problems that I think we are experiencing at large in terms of human relationship. And this extends all the way into our economies. It goes into stuff like OnlyFans, consumerism. The big issue that we’re having right now as a species is the crisis of modernity, which is to say the death of community.

Historically, the way that community was understood was as a local, tribal, even regional impulse to collectivity as a means to survive. And a lot of the ways that these communities were bound were primarily cosmological—which is to say, religious binding. So when we look at the conditions of modernity—fragmentation, alienation, isolation, which are fundamental to modernity, and I’ll explain why—we’re looking at the atomized modern world, a world of the utter individual. This is a philosophical problem which emerges in the Enlightenment era—which is to say, John Locke, or Adam Smith—which, coincidentally or not, is the emergence of the idea of a free-market philosophy. The idea of opening the markets is what is behind globalism, or globalization. Whether or not you want to call that a colonial impulse doesn’t really matter; the phenomenological results are the same.

Which is to say, we are now living in a world where commerce, communication, information, and relationships extend globally—ostensibly, if there are sufficient resources to transfer information or to move individuals across bounds, borders, and obstacles which, historically, would have seemed unconquerable. You have to think about, maybe, the Viking ships, or the necessity of nomads on foot in early human conditions. So these technologies have opened the borders of the world. When we understand World War I and World War II emerging in industrial modernity, they’re emerging through industrial modernity. These are the technological revolutions of coal, oil, electricity, the light bulb, the airplane. All of these emerge from the scientific revolutions that we’re also discussing here, and that I have discussed in depth: Clerk Maxwell, thermodynamics, Clausius and Carnot, into the quantum mechanical, and obviously into the information-technological, with Claude Shannon, John von Neumann, and the internet. These are scientific revolutions which become technological revolutions.

I don’t want to get too bound up in the semantics of that, because the practical implications are extreme. And the practical implications are, fundamentally, the loss of embeddedness in community. I’m going to argue that this is both a good thing and a bad thing, and I’ll explain why. Historically, community was based upon the practical reality of needing to survive, immediately and locally. So these community architectures were consensual only in the sense that they were necessary. It was not a matter of choice. It was a matter of life or death. And this is deeply embedded in the human nervous-system architecture in terms of in-groups, out-groups, political exile, et cetera. These fears are deeply embedded in the primate genetic nervous systems of human beings.

So when we’re looking at the profusion of modernity, we’re looking at the possible choice of community and the possible choice of relationship. And we see this, I think, most clearly and coherently in the struggle for women’s rights, or the lack thereof—which is to say personal autonomy: the autonomy of bodily choice, the autonomy of whom women choose to relate to and be in relationship with, and why. This flashpoint issue, for lack of a better word, is the symptom, the phenomenological aspect, of this new historical paradigm in which chosen relationship is becoming more of a physical, technological, sociological possibility. And you have to understand, when you look at the grand course of human history, just how unprecedented this moment is—not only for women, but for human beings themselves.

Consider the architecture, the infrastructure, of community historically, in terms of literal, limited locality. You’re born into a tribe which has, say, an ethnic background and a religious cosmology to which it adheres: all of the members of the tribe subscribe to this idea of creation, existence, and being. And furthermore, this tribe is necessary for survival. You’re looking at an entire human history based around a fundamental containment of space and time, and thus of identity, and thus of choice and autonomy. So we see this historical revolution towards individualism, which emerges first in the West. And I would say it emerges first in the West not because of some phantasm, but because of technological and scientific availability, which is the revolution of the West itself. The West itself is a scientific and technological revolution, which then becomes globalized.

The making available of these energetic circumstances—which is to say, a movement towards singularity in space and time: communication, information, travel, transformation, the ability of beings, products, and resources to move across borders and bounds with increasing efficiency and speed—creates the availability of survival in such a way that a concept such as individualism, or individuality, can emerge. And this is critical in the development of human history. So when I study with such vigor a Rimbaud or a Camus, a Dostoevsky or a Lispector, and I put that in relationship to the Vedantic tradition, or the Tao, or the Buddhist philosophers of old, they’re fundamentally saying the same thing, but they’re coming at it from radically different perspectives. The individual descent into hell, à la Rimbaud or Baudelaire, acquires an existential flavor noticeably different from the Eastern mode, precisely because the Western mode has acquired individuality by way of technological and scientific revolution. This is a very sophisticated way of looking at history. I’m just trying to make it transparent.

And so, with the making available of these energetic possibilities, you necessarily have a shift in historical consciousness. This is what happens at the birth of modernity, which Nietzsche observes and describes in depth in the vast majority of his philosophical works. He’s remarking on the same problem over and over again, at increasing resolution and clarity. He stands on the cusp of the fin-de-siècle moment of transformation, which is the twentieth century—this explosion of energetic availability in the West, which turns his agrarian Germany (which was really not Germany at all whatsoever; it went by an entirely different name) into a nation-state. And then you have Hitler frantically trying to gesture back to a past which will never return: a past prior to this technological revolution, which produces a radically new mode and method of subjectivity in space and time.

So what has been lost is really the entire architectural foundation of the genetic scaffolding of the human being. This is substantial. It’s incredibly significant. This architectural scaffolding was based on group-based survival. And Marx—regardless of what you think of his politics, and most people know very little about his actual work—diagnoses the emergence of modernity very early on. Marx is really the prescient political economist of atomization at the level of being itself. This has nothing to do with laws or rules or belief systems at the level of economy, whether it’s capitalism or socialism. These things are smokescreens for the fundamental technological, architectural, ontological problem: the human being’s architecture entering into a technological phase change, which is radically shifting the human being out of the prior mode.

And of course, when I take this back to women’s rights in terms of bodily autonomy, or the right to choose whom one is in relationship with: historically you have the commodification of women—as sex objects or as wives—historically without property, and, as recently as a few decades ago, without bank accounts. So this is a question of the political autonomy of subjects. We’re entering into a phase of technological existence where the emergence of the individual—emerging, as we discussed, in the West through scientific and technological revolution—has reached such a fever pitch that this fragmentation produces the isolated subject, which is now capable of effectively surviving on its own. And this creates a radical reflection upon the prior circumstances: these infrastructures which were communally organized, primarily around survival. Pure survival.

And this is what’s so fascinating to me, looking back at the architectures of human history, which obviously determine the architectures of our present moment—whether that’s religion, culture, group spaces, belief systems, et cetera. These organizations are now outmoded, and they’re dead. That’s what we see when we look at the modern world. Gramsci has that great quote: we’re between paradigms, between spaces; now is the time of monsters. We’re between necessary collectivism, necessary communalism, and the radical, hitherto unprecedented societal and technological circumstances which allow for the individual to come into being.

So when a psychologist such as Jung talks about individuation, that is a technological-historical paradigm shift. It’s not possible outside of modernity. Jung is talking about this around 1930, when Pluto is discovered—and archetypally we could make connections in terms of Pluto and transformation, but I won’t go there in terms of theory of history right now. Where I will go is this: this is a specifically modern problem. It is a problem that has never existed before in the entire course of human history. So you are working with the literal technological space of the human genome. I’ve discussed this in depth: the relationship between technology, culture, and genomic iteration. I even talked about it in terms of lactase. Culture and technology are literally transforming the genome, in all spaces and at all times. And this is such a radical moment of transformation, down to the bone of the architecture of the human species, that we cannot necessarily predict what consequences it will have genomically on the species going forward, generationally. These are very profound grounds to be speaking on, because it’s the ontological ground of the transformation of the structures of being in time. This is literally how nature changes beings. We go back to Darwin on that. Darwin is a fantastic introduction to modern ontology, and he’s a lot of what allows my ontological ground to come into being.

So in this new space—and you see this present with families, you see it present with dating, with communities and religion—it is a space of uncertainty and transformation, where community now becomes a chosen device. It becomes something constructed out of the actual relationship of a being to itself. And so we see that so much of the emphasis in modern culture is on self-realization, on becoming oneself, on discerning who one is and what one wants—especially, again, in relation to women, given their historical commodification. This is entirely new ground. This is new territory being walked. Even twenty or thirty years ago, this ground was scarcely possible in terms of the technological advances. And this is also the question that comes into being with artificial intelligence: what kinds of radical freedom are enabled when energy, quite literally, is freed up from the process of thought, or from labor? And then politically, what are the consequences when technological revolutions like that happen? How is that integrated into the culture to produce the most beneficial results for the community itself?

And of course, we’ve seen the course of atomization. This has occurred over several generations—you could say five or six. And it has been handled so improperly by the human species. It’s not ground that the human species has any idea how to walk. Of course it’s been handled in a survivalist sense, because most human action is entirely reactive and conservative, because, again, it’s based on bodily survival. Entering into this new space, the problems emerge that I think we see on the global stage: everything from religiously laced political conflict over fuel, over energy, over resources, across nation-state lines that historically would not really have been in contact whatsoever. You look at the situations between Iran and the United States, or the United States and Venezuela, the United States and Russia—all of these geopolitical conflicts would scarcely have been possible a hundred-odd years ago. And this is kind of taken for granted in the current geopolitical climate: the technological revolutions which humanity has scarcely been able to cope with, even at the level of individual identity, would have been a non-factor 120 or 130 years ago. But these are themselves the defining conflicts of our time.

So, to go deeper into that—because this is the question of the individual and the collective, and this is really at the roots, the meat, of what I’m talking about—there are now these new challenges emerging out of what was, for lack of better terms, necessity: the coercive survival conditions of being a human being in the wilderness of nature, or in an agrarian setting. And everything that happens over the past 130, 140, 150 years—which is to say, the crux of industrial-technological modernity—is entirely divorced from this condition, and divorcing from it. It creates hyperspace, or escape velocity, away from this historical paradigm, which existed for hundreds of thousands of years, in and out of different species epochs themselves. This contains the entire gestational period of cosmological, historical, natural revolution and evolution itself—the entire history of millions of years of biological and genetic survival. We’re looking at that level of shift. These technological circumstances which compress space and time—everything from shipping containers to jet planes to artificial intelligence—this rapidly accelerating industrial-technological revolution opens up, for the first time in human history, the question of the individual.

Whereas Dostoevsky might have been a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church a hundred years prior, all of a sudden he becomes an existentialist literary figure. Even the concept of the literary figure is a novel one, and I would say a specifically Western one in its historical roots. Why is that? Because of the concept of the individual. Even if we look back to Homer, and the import of hearing the voices of the gods in these subjective characters—whether that’s Achilles or Odysseus—it is the beginning of the subjectivity that we’ve already discussed in terms of the epoch of the forebrain. It’s the slow movement of individualization occurring cosmologically, in terms of the evolution of the species: the forebrain itself, which is an epoch of recursive consciousness—beings reflecting upon being, reflecting upon themselves.

And therein, the technological revolution of the past 150 years is created through this epoch of the forebrain, through the scientific and technological revolutions: the ape digging in the lithium dirt to produce the iPhone. This is a forebrain phenomenon. Spinoza articulating the monad—that is a forebrain phenomenon. It is beings reflecting upon nature with increasing acuity, which is neurosynaptic sophistication at the level of the architecture of genomic recombination in spacetime. In this historical moment of the forebrain, the species achieves a sort of scientific-technological hyperspace, which is industrial-technological modernity, which then produces these increasing abilities to compress, condense, and singularize—a deeply Hegelian concept, which we actually see in history. From the moment of Hegel to this contemporary moment, his structural theory becomes almost obscenely accurate.

This emergent singularity of space and time comes through technological revolution—not only through the genome, which is a glacial phenomenon, a natural energetic architectural phenomenon, which is the organic body, but through what these organic bodies are able to produce through recursion: the forebrain. Before and after the forebrain is really the mark of history, insofar as we know it in a grand cosmological sense in relation to humans. This is a real geopolitical and geological change. And this is what’s at the root of globalization. It’s at the root of the concept of the individual. It’s at the root of the free market. It’s at the root of human relationships. Because the emergence of this level of autonomy, or even the ability to conceive of the self, is, one, a genetic phenomenon at the level of architecture, and two, a sociopolitical, technological phenomenon: the making available of the free space of the individual in the first place.

So the death of the tribe—or, as Nietzsche would say, the death of God, as the cultural fabric of a community and space organized around a cosmology which held the tribe together at a local level—the death of this phenomenon is the technological-scientific revolution of the nineteenth century, hinging into the twentieth. And it then produces, at a level which I think Marx somewhat predicts, the alienated, isolated subject, because the subject, by the very circumstances and conditions of modernity—which is to say technological efficiency—becomes individualized. The individual itself becomes a historical possibility.

Please understand how radical this is in terms of survivability. The job is now found in a sea of online applications. Dating is now found in a sea of online applications, or in random encounters on the street. The death of community itself as a structural phenomenon in relation to survivability brings about this historical individual, which is now navigating the streets of an alienated, atomized modernity: applying for jobs, attempting to find relationships, whether platonic or romantic, et cetera. This is the product of a deep-space, deep-time process, which hit exponential hyper-acceleration at the turn of the twentieth century and has not looked back.

And so this question of individual autonomy is then a question of knowledge of self—which is, of course, the process of individuation, which Jung describes, albeit somewhat archetypally: the process of actually discovering who and what one is, not only locally but cosmologically. Actually discovering the identity of the self is a process which cannot be doctrinal, because at the level of the granularity of the individual in relationship to the cosmic, this is novel terrain in terms of the incarnation of beings down to the level of the embodied subject, the embodied person, the beings themselves. We can trace cosmological history down through the genome, down through the genealogy of the being, and of course we can understand, in a divorced, abstracted sense, the birth of the being itself. But we cannot understand that being’s intimate relationship to being itself outside of existential experience. That’s why I described existential philosophical literature. This is the birth of existential philosophical literature. It emerges precisely because of this.

But you then have this imperative. It really is a cosmological ethical responsibility that emerges in the birth of modernity, as a necessary outcome—a necessary outcropping, a necessary product—of the technological revolution: the responsibility of the individual to itself, to oneself. This is what Sartre calls the radical freedom of being. But it’s not so thoroughly exegeted as I have done here, in terms of Darwin or thermodynamics or cosmology. I’m giving you the scientific background as to how and why this freedom emerges. And therein, the atomized, isolated, historically produced individual must come to terms with his or her—or their—own individuality. You must actually discover yourself. And this is a challenge which, I think, given the typical laziness and convenience of the human architecture, is very rarely risen to.

Because in this new paradigm, the individual exists as a technological reality. The individual is no longer embedded in community architectures in order to survive. This is, I think, deeply and implicitly understood, in the sense that it is known—but it’s not at the level of consciousness for the vast majority of the species. And it is experienced as a profound state of alienation, because it is a paradigm so far outside the technological architecture of the human species that there is really no way to cope or deal with it. And the call there—which I think is also the birth of true psychology, which really only exists in its nascency, and even then becomes a commodified market—is to go within and discover the self. This is a project of excavation, of exhuming the being that is oneself: beings themselves in their unique granularity and individuality, in relation to cosmological being itself. And this is terrain that has not been walked. It is extremely novel terrain.

So we have the species itself attempting to return to this idealized past—which is, of course, one of the call signs of totalitarianism, in the brief historical possibility of totalitarianism, something that again emerges through this technological-social architecture of modernity. Same thing as the nation-state, or globalization. These are all technological phenomena. That past is a state that could only be returned to—if there were such a desire to return to the coercive, cosmologically bound communal architecture—if the technological scaffolding of civilization were removed. So this is the background upon which the individual, the atomized subject, this new call into chosen community, comes into being. Without that infrastructure, the historical and ancestral circumstances effectively just return: the localized, we could say agrarian, community living off the earth, in adherence with one another in a religious sense to certain value systems—cosmologies, or stories about what is valuable, what is important, what is ethical. It’s a sort of Ten Commandments architecture of the community. And that’s what binds these communities.

But what we see is that the nation-state at the beginning of the twentieth century becomes outmoded in a matter of decades because of the technological revolutions. And we see this in terms of the Constitution of the United States: it is an ideological infrastructure which can no longer hold the technological reality of modernity. It was written, what, 250 years ago? And the nation-state as a foundational concept is barely a hundred years old—we’re talking about World War I. And already these conceptual definitions of beings in world, and of how they organize themselves, must be radically revolutionized, because they no longer fit the actual technological revolution, which is now moving at exponential light speed through artificial intelligence. We’re trying to hold on to infrastructural realities which no longer actually exist, definitionally, in space and time. It’s no longer the way that energy is moving. It’s like saying that the human being is attempting to adhere to single-cell concepts, when it now has a forebrain and is operating in an entirely different ontological paradigm. We’re holding on to a past which no longer exists. And this is, of course, the terror and the failure of conservatism around the world: what is being called back to in order to survive no longer even exists. The scaffolding of modernity would have to be stripped away.

So within this synthetic architecture of modernity, which is scientific and technological—all of the infrastructure, from data centers to parliaments to electric cars, whatever devices you want to describe—we have the increasingly individualized subject: the being in space and time, unmoored from the necessity of collectivity. This death of community is felt everywhere, at all times. And the atomization of the individual becomes a sort of scavenging within the architecture of civilization. So look at the pillaging of the social or communal architecture of government that occurs in totalitarian or fascistic systems—and this is, of course, the historical debate for or against central or federal government, or any government at all. You are looking at systems which posit communal engagement within a larger relational energetic architecture: the transformation of currents of energy, whether bodies, relationships, information, supplies, or resources, which no longer requires community.

So when you look at a nation-state—you look at the United States of America and the problems that emerge in the actual civilization, the country itself—you’re looking at the posited relational existence of these beings within the pseudo-architectural territory of the United States of America, with all of its colonies or state systems existing within the larger federalized governmental space. And the relationship between these beings is posited primarily, really solely, because of geography: geographical territory which is supposedly owned by some subsidiary of some government, upon which rules of law are then imposed, et cetera. That paradigm doesn’t even exist anymore, technologically. We are having intimate relationships with people from China or the Philippines more so than we have intimate relationships with our neighbors.

So there’s this rift in spacetime, which I lovingly bring about in my epic—sometimes on baseball history and sometimes on the meaning of life. The book I wrote very recently very much describes this scrambling of spacetime, and the human being itself cannot deal with it. So everything from the most primal or primordial urges—which is to say community, deep and intimate relationship with a romantic partner, the foundations of friendship and camaraderie—all of these are thrown into profound architectural, ontological confusion by the technological predicament, which has transformed the very necessity of those things, which were historically required across the entire genomic evolution of the species. And so what is called into question is really the genomic architecture of the beings themselves. This is what I discussed in the last lecture regarding the transformations of culture and technology, and the way they themselves transform the genome, which is the primary ontological architecture of beings encountering being. This is the importance of technology, and of the scaffolding of civilization via culture: it changes the way that the genome manifests, presents, moves, and is, in space and time.

And these consequences that I’m describing are paradigmatic. They’re at the level, I would say, of the forebrain—a species-level transformation between species paradigms. But there is no context for this, because it’s occurring through channel two architecture, which I’ve previously described as the prosthetic device: whether that’s the telescope, which allows Copernicus or Galileo or Kepler to reach understandings which then become multifactorial in an ontological transformation of the way beings see and observe reality and being itself; or the discovery that lithium and certain minerals within the earth can create personal computational devices, which then plug into a globally interconnected internet, which exchanges information at light speed across continents. I did a lot of work on this in terms of AT&T and the grid of national television—how World Series baseball games were broadcast. This is a transformation in the way that beings perceive reality, at the level of nervous-system architecture, which at a deeper level is genetic architecture, because the nervous system is basically a root system that springs up from the seed of the genome, if you want to look at it analogically.

So this profound contrast is a crisis. It is the crisis of modernity, which has accelerated even over the past generation—the past thirty years or so—to a fever pitch of chaos, crisis, destruction, and calamity. Precisely because we’re no longer just looking at television: radio waves broadcast to a passive observer, who can change the channel but can’t broadcast back. Individuals are now broadcasting back and forth to one another. Drop shipping, all of these different things that spring up with the internet revolution of the nineties—this is such a substantial technological paradigm shift in terms of interpersonal relationship via digital space. And this is why I’ve talked about digital space as something akin to the revolution of the forebrain: the creation of a literal, additional scalar sphere of engagement with being, with reality itself, in a way that creates chaos at the level of the individual, the genome, the being.

And all of this comes back, again, to the relationship between self and other—in terms of community, romantic relationship, platonic relationship—and the individual. What is primarily being transformed is the individual itself, which is to say the individual has now become possible. The individual is no longer a tribal production, but an ever more pressing ontological priority, and a requirement to come into relationship with being itself. It’s not something mediated by a church, or by a tribal, religious, or cosmological structure to which one perhaps unconsciously adheres in order to survive and remain within the tribe—not to be exiled, so to speak.

And this fracture and fragmentation is observable everywhere. It is the ontological condition of modern humanity. It’s in every aspect of the news, every religious, national, ethnic, and racial division, because these concepts and preconceived notions are coming apart at the seams, and will escalate—and do escalate—down to the level of ontological transparency and existential calamity that we observe in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground or Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. These are the very early alarm bells ringing from the trees, the most perceptive birds before the volcano. They are the first examples in human history of the forced descent into the ontological substrate of the individual. This is really the history of shamanism itself in tribal contexts. But as a modern, individual phenomenon, these people undergo this catabatic descent in isolation from the cultural systems which formerly upheld or substantiated this descent—the prophetic traditions, so to speak. It is entirely new. And it is this forced descent which we observe with increasing calamity and pressing necessity, which is becoming the modern condition: the very technological revolution forcing the individual to come into being out of, and out from, the mass web of the cosmological storytelling of the tribe.

And that is the call—not only in terms of existence itself at this point in cosmological time, but furthermore, the necessity of coming into authentic community. And I would say there has never been an individual, nor has there ever been an authentic community. Our earliest examples of individuality are people like Rimbaud or Dostoevsky. An authentic community has never existed, because the conditions themselves have not existed for it—which is to say, the necessity of radical individuality. Men, women, people: the necessity of radical individuality, which is the ability to discover oneself authentically at the level of the ground of the being, all the way down through cosmology, through history, through culture, through all of these constrictive architectural historical realities, to discover the being itself—and then to come into relationship with beings, having been established as being oneself. This is the ontological responsibility articulated quite clearly in the French existentialist paradigm of the middle of the twentieth century.

Without this coming into being, community is just frankly not possible. There is no possible community, because there is no authentic community. There is no authentic conception or perception of self to be articulated in relationship to others. So what we have now is a community and a pseudo-individualist infrastructure entirely mediated by the lower being, the lower human being—which is to say consumption and production. An entirely economically transactional, mediated structure, which is then translated into quote-unquote dating, quote-unquote relationships, quote-unquote the world: beings who have no relationship to themselves at the level of the ontological ground, who then come into quote-unquote relationship in the most rough and brute sense of the word—just instigating transactional movement, which is to say resources.

They have no relationship to being in themselves, which is the ontological crisis we’ve described with Heidegger, in The World’s Midnight , and in the vast majority of my work. But in that crisis there is, of course, the relational crisis: beings without relationship to being can have no relationship to one another in any meaningful way. They can only have instrumental relationships—which is, again, the standing-reserve-ization of nature. Human beings, in relationship to one another in this context, are, for lack of a better word, logs to themselves and logs to one another. They’re simply information or resources to be harvested, in relationship to themselves and to one another, which is a deep, deep, deep ontological poverty. There’s no relationship to nature as in the forest. There is only relationship to the log of the tree, which can be burned for a certain amount of time until it can no longer be burned, because it’s been burned to ash—and then, of course, the next tree is harvested. This is the approach of modernity, and it’s deeper than capitalism. It’s deeper than socialism. It’s deeper than all of these political-economic ideas. It is an ontological problem.

So the emergence of the possibility of individuality does not mean that the individual actually exists at all whatsoever. This is the problem. We can have the forebrain; we can have the civilizational, technological architecture which allows the being to emerge out of the coercive contract with the tribe, or with the cosmology—the belief system necessary to survive. But that does not mean the actual movement, the actual transformation, has occurred at the level of the ontological realization of the being itself. This requires the authentic inquiry articulated in the Socratic sense: know thyself. This seems to be somewhat of a tall order, ontologically, for the human species, because it requires true, genuine introspection. It requires true, genuine inquiry into what one is, who one is, why one is, where one came from, and, through actions, where one is ultimately going. And then, by way of that inquiry, to move into relationship with others who are also conducting, or have conducted, that inquiry. That is authentic community.

And so you can see why the concept I’m articulating is so novel and so scarce: it requires so much of the species, which has done so little with what it currently has, because it’s in an ontological, ecological, and sociological crisis. It’s at a flashpoint, because these technologies have effectively overwhelmed the historical subject. The transition has not been made ontologically into radical encounter with the individual—outside of, maybe, Artaud, Rimbaud, Lispector, Dostoevsky. These real attempts have occurred in an isolated sense, as they have had to historically, because this is entirely new. This is a new way being paved, new ground being broken. And this is the call for all beings in this. This is really the purpose of civilization, beyond and behind what many can only see as brute survival: it exists, at the deepest level, to bring the individual into emergence—for the individual then to have an authentic encounter with being, and then, necessarily, to be able to create the new paradigm of human relationship, which is actually authentic, integral, and based not only on a real connection to oneself in terms of being in nature, but on relationship to others who are also in this ontological connection with the ground of being. That is a developmental process that requires real, authentic, integral introspection and work.

Outside of that, there is only this technologized abyss: the being made available as resource, and the transactional, currency-based architecture of human existence that moves through it. It’s emptied of all meaning. It has no meaning. It can’t have any meaning, because it’s not in relationship to being itself. It’s not in relationship to the actual substrate of the individual. It’s entirely transactional, entirely consumptive, entirely productive. And thus, of course, we exist in a larger political-economic paradigm which articulates exactly that: global consumerism, even at the level of relationships, even at the level of the self. And this fundamental lack of self-knowledge has vast consequences in this Wild West ontological terrain of digital-technological and industrial-technological modernity. These are power tools being leveraged without any awareness whatsoever of being—which is a problem I’ve already articulated.

And this, again, is the crisis we observe everywhere relationally. There is no foundation for relationships. They’ve been removed from the survival context—and from the culture, religion, cosmology, and belief systems which were all agreed upon locally, in community. The reach of information and communication, and even physical relationship, has now expanded globally in a matter of moments—or at most a matter of hours on an advanced plane. So you have this radical expansion of territory without the necessary radical expansion of self. And this territory becomes only exploitable terrain, because it’s emptied and evacuated of the necessary perceptive conditions—the understanding of oneself, cosmologically and existentially—to navigate this new possibility. So it becomes profoundly overwhelming, and not only overwhelming but profoundly exploitative, because no beings are in relationship to themselves at all whatsoever. They are just acting through the village survival of old. They haven’t made that leap into individuality and individuation—which is why, of course, this is such a pressing concept for early psychology at the turn of the twentieth century, which, I think by no mistake, emerges alongside quantum mechanics. These are the same problem: the problem of atomization, the problem of self, the problem of being, of what is perceptible in and beyond the bounds of human architectural experience, and the definition we have of self and of being itself. Quantum mechanics is a Spinozan problem, existentially—which is to say, it’s the problem of being itself: the monad.

So then, of course, there are these predictable outcomes: the operationalization of relationships, the transactional quality of relationships, which exists in the abyss of unindividuated individualization. That is total atomization: the being without community—without enforced community—thrown into individuality without being individuated. Understand that this is actually a deep survival problem, and it is experienced as a survival crisis neurologically, and even genomically. This is a profound violence. It’s the violence of the rift in space and time, which has been radically expanded and singularized at the same time—through digital-technological architecture, AI, the jet plane, et cetera—but not incorporated, not integrated at the level of the architecture of the being itself: genomically, neurologically, and, furthermore, ontologically, the being in relationship to itself. This is new ground over the past five or six generations, and it exists as effectively unexplored territory. It’s an abyss. It’s a trench into which few have dived, and even fewer have made marked progress down into that trench to observe real ontological continuity.

So the crisis we experience today is fundamentally and absolutely that—politically, sociologically, culturally, existentially, et cetera. This ground, this abyss that has been opened up, is the abyss of technological modernity, which has made available the problem of the individual for the first time in human history. See the consequences of this. When the individual becomes a problem—which is to say, when the individual is actually made available in space and time, technologically—community itself, as a coercive constraint upon survival, utterly disappears, because there is no need to be in relationship at the level of survivability. Which then requires us to interrogate: why would we be in relationship? And most of the architectural realities occurring in modernity are still running on this script of survival.

The being itself has not actually made the leap into individuation—which is to say, the acquisition of a real relationship to being. ‘Acquisition’ is a transactional word, I’ll say: coming into being, coming into real relationship with being, and thus moving and activating the self as an individuated force in an individualized society—an atomized society, produced entirely by technological scaffolding. Civilization itself is a technological bubble. It’s a prosthetic device. So we’ve created the possibility for this reality to come into being, but the reality must come into being through an equal and opposite ontological realization at the level of the individual: the individuation of the self. And this has not yet occurred. So of course the self is still deeply embedded in the survival architectures, looking backwards.

And the grounds for the real, necessary leap that must happen communally—even globally at this point—have not been laid. The technological territory is open, abandoned, and yet exploited at the same time. Understand this. And this is what creates the profound feeling of meaninglessness, ennui, the repetition of the same violent acts, corruptions, distortions—which themselves are really nothing more than ontological abandonment. When we think about the violences, the abuses, the sexual coercions and manipulations, we’re looking at ontological abyss and absence, in which pleasure or power take over as the modes of production and reproduction of behavior in space and time. Because there has not yet been a real movement past the historical precedent, which was the primary organizing principle of local, tribal, regional environments: the religious mode, for lack of a better word, which was the organizing force of community and which dictated, for the most part, communal behavior. So this is what happens when the individual emerges as a historical possibility. And I think I’ve articulated pretty clearly here just how unprecedented it is.

So the real consequences obviously come down to the individual, in terms of relationship to oneself. Without that, it is effectively a hell. It’s a sort of purgatory: the repetition of old, outmoded survival systems and behaviors within this new ontological possibility, which has only been made possible by technology. It is the rift between the entire genomic history of the species and this new technological availability, which is making possible the question of radical community and radical individuality. The question is whether or not that is actually grasped—or whether these technological possibilities collapse, and the human being is thrown back into a sort of forced communalization in order to survive. That, of course, would also be the death of the individual: the subservience of even the brief historical possibility of the concept of the individual back into the communal architecture of obedience, under the threat of exile—which is primarily the way that most human infrastructure, including political culture, currently operates.

So that transitional leap needs to be made ontologically. And that’s an inside job, for lack of a better word. This is, of course, part of a larger cosmological revolution of recursion and self-reflection, which I’ve already articulated via the transformation of the genome, the larger cosmological history, and then the advent of the forebrain and the entirety of the history that emerges after it, as a necessary architectural and infrastructural inquiry into the possibilities of this new terrain, which has been carved out via genomic evolution—again, Darwin.

So that’s about it. Unfortunately, this problem is the way it is for very specific, clear reasons, which I think I’ve articulated very transparently here—maybe in a sort of spiral form, a recursive form itself, thinking aloud. But these things don’t change until that level of individuation necessarily comes into being, which is self-realization. So you have the transparency of a species sleepwalking through its own technological revolution—a revolution which is utterly shifting the technology of the being itself—without responding to the necessary call of self-realization. Which, in many cases, I would say, is just not really possible at the level of the infrastructure of the existent organism. This isn’t to say it’s impossible. It’s to say that it appears to me to be very exclusive historical terrain in terms of the genome and the genealogy of the species. And thus the purgatory comes from the inability—or just, practically, from the fact that the leap has not yet been made ontologically, commensurate with the technological possibilities which have now unfolded.

So the individual—the individuated individual—must necessarily emerge through its real encounter with itself, without the guardrails or guide rails of a culture, a religious system, or a political system telling it what to do, what it is, how to be, and who to be. That is a substantial amount of ontological freedom, which Sartre discusses. And then, from that place of achieving that level of ontological ground within oneself, existentially, that being works toward the possibility of community with fellows. Outside of that, there is no individual; there is no community. There’s just the empty technological shell, which functions utterly transactionally, utterly somnambulistically, utterly embedded within the existent deep-time survival architectures—which have implicitly and unconsciously created the circumstances for achieving this new level of consciousness or awareness, but have not yet stepped into them.

And this is, fundamentally, a failure. It is a failure. And this is a lot of what we see when we observe contemporary human existence: this possibility has become increasingly possible, at least via civilizational and technological scaffolding, but it has not been achieved. And the amount of technology at a certain point becomes useless, as the gap continues to grow between ontological awareness and technological possibility. Because without ontological awareness, the species simply repeats itself with increasing force and frequency. That’s what technology makes possible.

So: ontological fluency, ontological education, as usual. Becoming aware of this, I think, is critical, is crucial, because then you’re also able to observe it in day-to-day interaction, day-to-day relation. Most of it is not relation. Most of it is not interaction. Most of it is entirely ensconced within predictable, self-enfolding survival architectures which have not achieved the level of awareness necessary to step into real relationship.

So this returns me, finally, I think, to the problem of human relationship in modernity, whether romantic, platonic, work-based, whatever it is. There is no real relationship, because relationship can only become possible at the level of the ontological ground of the being itself. That level of awareness must be achieved in both parties in order for there actually to be relationship. People look for relationship but do not have a relationship to themselves. It’s kind of a clichéd way of saying it, but it’s fundamentally true. The level of relationship to self required to have a real relationship to another is so deep and so substantial—the ground of the personal self in relationship to the transpersonal self, the existential ground in relationship to the cosmological ground of being, is so substantial and so rich—that this level of excavational, architectural work into oneself is a project of many years. And so there really is no substantial possibility of relationship without those grounds being there, and the ontological commitment required at the level of the being is substantial.

Outside of that, the only relationship possible is transactional, because all that can be exchanged is superficial: resources, or pleasure, et cetera. And that’s the global world condition we have now. We don’t have real relationship. We have pseudo-romantic relationship, pseudo-platonic relationship, pseudo-business relationship—and all of those are bare, disgusting, abhorrent substitutes for real human relationship, real ontological relationship. And that, of course, is a task that occurs at the level of the newly emergent political individual. A very new paradigm. Without that work, there is nothing. It’s just emptiness. It’s a surfeit of superficial trash, for lack of a better word.

And we see that in our culture constantly. We’re barraged by this information, these videos, this text, none of which is actually meaningful information. It’s information emerging from a level, a stratum, of consciousness radically divorced from anything capable of producing meaning. It’s a sort of raging into the darkness from a very surface-level awareness of self and being, of what it is to be. And to expect to be able to come into relationship with a force like that is ludicrous. It’s nonsense. And that, of course, exists in work environments, in dating environments, in digital space, in platonic environments. Without sufficient depth, nothing is possible. It’s just ontologically not possible for there to be a relationship. There can be transaction.

And so this is what I really wanted to establish: the political economy which we experience now is the ontological consequence of the failure of our own self-realization. Which is to say, it’s empty, superficial, transactional, based entirely on materialism, consumption, and pleasure—all poor, grotesque substitutes for real relationship. And the ground of which I’ve spoken here is the ground we must necessarily reach in order to get anywhere even remotely meaningful. Otherwise it’s just empty surfeit, trash, with which it is not possible to be in relationship. You settle for the scraps of a broken, farcical materialism, which endlessly circulates, produces nothing, provides nothing of substance, and must perpetually be consumed to extract rare moments of pleasure or hormonal satisfaction. And that is really a fate maybe worse than death, or as bad as death—which is to say, profound starvation.

And I think this is something experienced at the level of the species almost constantly. Obviously, some level of pleasure is enough for a very low level of consciousness. But there’s much, much more that is available—that always has been available, and is increasingly available, with the technological and historical circumstances which have very recently been made possible: not only the forebrain, but industrial-technological modernity. We have to become individuated. We have to become true individuals. Outside of that, there is effectively no hope for the human species beyond pure, bare, rote survival, subsistence, and transactional relationship from top to bottom, which is meaningless. So there you go. Thanks.