The Abolition of Consciousness

Apr 05, 2024

What we call a sense of reality is based on the distinction between the actual and the possible. We make this distinction by comparing what we think and imagine of our own accord with the data imposed on us by the present situation. At this moment, for example, I am typing on the computer keyboard the words that spring from within me. They could be different if I wanted to shift my attention to another subject. If I write these words and not others, I can assure you, in the language the witty people attributed to former Brazilian President Jânio Quadros: I did it because I wanted to. However, as often as I open my eyes while sitting here, I will see in front of me the same keyboard and screen, which impose themselves on my vision, as if data from a world I did not create, ready to reach out to me. I cannot make my eyes see anything other than what is in front of them. I cannot turn them from here to Porto Alegre, to Machu Picchu, or to Winnesburg, OH, as I instantly turn the screen of thought and change my words. My gaze is limited by what the world offers me, whereas my imagination knows no limits other than its own. This difference is what gives me the measure of reality: I admit as actual, as objectively existing, a world that resists me, that does not immediately bend to my will with the plasticity of the imaginary. To exist is to resist, as Dilthey put it.

If my perception is limited to the space where I am, it is even more strongly bound to a certain moment in time. Space can still be partially overcome by the displacement of the body, which, in another place, will see other things and not these. But time is invincible. What sensitized my retina yesterday, coming from outside, today can only be produced from within, reproduced in the imagination, and not without some effort. The delightful scenes of yesteryear, lived as a free gift from reality to our senses, can now only be relived as our work, by an act of will that resolves to go in search of lost time with the reconstructive commitment of a Proust. Likewise, what will happen tomorrow cannot be perceived now as a fact, but only conceived and projected from within, as hopeful or fearful conjecture. However certain and inevitable the future may be, an announcement will never have the massive presence of the accomplished fact; and whether it is good or bad, it will always be accompanied by the fear or desire—possibility, in short—that things may turn out differently.n In contrast, the present, which could have been different a moment ago, can no longer be so now: it is fixed forever; having happened, it cannot unhappen.

It is by understanding the limits of my power—what Kurt Levin called vital space1—that I come to distinguish the real from the unreal, the actual from the merely possible. I comprehend, therefore, that the distinction between the perceived fact and the imagined possibility is made in reference to the will, which is a subject in one case and sovereign in the other. But I can only make this comparison if I clearly remember having thought or imagined such and such things of my own accord, from within, and if I assume the authorship of these inner acts as I do of my material and external actions. It is only in this way that I can grasp the difference between what arises from me and what comes to me from the world. The sense of the difference between the imagined and the perceived rests, therefore, on memory and responsibility. We become aware of objective reality, differentiating it from our subjective projections, exactly by the same means and to the same extent that we become aware of ourselves as free, active subjects, creators of our acts as well as our intentions. The objectivity of knowledge is a function of moral liberty.

Now, our inner acts have no other witness but ourselves. Only I know by direct testimony my thoughts and intentions, which those around me can only conjecture by analogy. If I decide to lie about what is happening within me, no one can prevent me from doing so. Not even those who, by external signs, perceive the falseness of the intention I claim can prove by direct testimony the one I hide. The sincere testimony to oneself is the first and indispensable condition of objective knowledge.

However, the desire to assume authorship of one's inner—or even external—acts is not innate in humans. With innocent nonchalance, which in an adult would be cynicism, a child attributes the responsibility for its actions to a little brother, a colleague, or imaginary beings, without realizing that it lies only under the stern gaze of the father who brings it down from the sky of imagination to anchor it in the earthly ground where causes are inexorably tied to consequences, and guilt to punishment. Initially, the child accepts this limitation on account of the father's authority, but later learns to establish the connection between before and after, between intention and action, between authorship and guilt, and thus, self-awareness develops—the foundation not only of moral conduct but of objectivity in knowledge. The truth is accepted as a moral value even before it establishes itself as a cognitive criterion. The admission of truth about oneself precedes the admission of truth about things. “Self-consciousness is the birthplace of truth,” said Hegel.

The possibility of objective knowledge, therefore, depends on a preliminary choice in which humans assume—or do not assume—an inner commitment to truth and coherence. Nothing can force them into this commitment. The ease with which human beings let it go has always astonished philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle to Kant, Scheler, Ortega y Gasset, and Éric Weil. Philosophers would like everyone to be docile to the truth, but it is a utopian and self-contradictory aspiration: if the perception of truth arises from freedom, only those who are free to deny it can know the truth. “Known truth is obeyed truth,” said Plato, but even known truth cannot be obeyed once and for all, through a preventive suicide of freedom that guarantees us against future temptations of error and lies. The commitment to truth must be renewed daily, amid hesitations and doubts that constitute the price of human dignity.

The commitment to truth, even if heartfelt, never binds the whole person: entire continents of the soul, like the imagination or certain feelings, can continue to roam outside any obligation of truthfulness, catering only to immediate appetites. There are always many ways to escape from the truth. Dreams, for example, are a fabric of euphemisms that can serve to cushion or divert the impact of unwanted truths, helping to keep the psychophysical organism in that state of tension-free equilibrium that doctors call homeostasis. Of course, in a large number of cases, this opportunistic arrangement ends up producing a neurosis. The best definition of neurosis I know comes from my late friend and master Juan Alfredo César Müller, a genius of clinical psychology. “Neurosis,” he said, “is a forgotten lie in which you still believe.” If lying to oneself is forgetting the truth, neurosis is forgetting the forgetfulness, erasing the tracks of the deception. In neurosis, the lie turns into a system, into a program that multiplies itself, hiding the initial lie under mountains of debris only for someone to later pay a psychoanalyst to remove them. But no one would become neurotic if the neurotic option did not seem advantageous to them, at least at the decisive moment when an intolerable truth opens before them like an abyss. Lying provides relief because it saves the psyche from enduring temporary imbalance.

This means, in short, that there is no moral consciousness, no objective knowledge, without some voluntary psychic suffering, without the at least temporary sacrifice of inner harmony for values that transcend the immediate interests of the psychophysical organism. “To be objective,” said Frithjof Schuon, “is to die a little.” Objectivity is sincerity projected outward, just as sincerity is the internalization of objective limits. Sincerity and objectivity, in turn, form an inseparable connection with responsibility: the three conditions that constitute moral self-awareness.2

Once the demands of self-awareness are relaxed, imagination becomes the helpful servant of immediate organic interest, producing as many fictions as necessary to keep the individual in a state of profound moral drowsiness, where they do not have to answer for their actions. The numbness of conscience has degrees and stages, ranging from the commonplace “rationalizations” with which in daily life we evade the call of small duties to complete inversion. The morally blunted man can no longer “feel” the intrinsic goodness or badness of his actions. Although he perfectly knows the social norms that approve or disapprove certain behaviors, he sees them only as mechanical conventions, and may even continue to obey them externally out of sheer habit, without even thinking of adhering to them wholeheartedly; and he will continue like this until the conjunction of necessity with opportunity transforms him once and for all into the criminal he always was. Albert Camus paints a portrait of the type in l’Étranger, whose pacific mediocrity hides the most absolute moral insensitivity. One day, the man walks along the beach and, for no reason, not even feeling anger, decides to shoot two passersby. Until the end, he does not understand the revolt and indignation that his crime arouses. Since human intelligence does not operate in a vacuum but only processes and transforms the data it receives from the sensible sphere, it is natural that when a man no longer feels the reality of something, the concept of that thing, the schema that corresponds to it on the plane of abstract intelligence, soon begins to seem senseless to him. At such times, only to a true philosopher will it occur to become aware of his inner impoverishment and go in search of the lost feeling to give new life to the concept. The majority will simply adapt the concept to the current state of their soul. In a man with no greater moral interests, the emptied concept has no further function and will simply be forgotten. However, if this man is literate, he will not endure being the only one to feel as he does. Invariably, he will create arguments to demonstrate that what he does not feel does not exist in the objective world. His inability to discern good and evil except as empty conventions will be used as “evidence” that all moral law is an empty convention, and the deformity of his psyche will be erected as a moral standard for all humanity. But a man does not live for long in a state of moral abstinence. After undermining the foundations of any objective moral criterion, he will continue to have hatreds and affections, repugnances and desires, which, in the intellectual sphere, will give rise to other corresponding morally reasoned judgments. Unable to indefinitely bear the insecurity of admitting that these judgments are mere subjective preferences, no better or worse than any others, he will fall into the temptation to argue in their favor, to give them an intellectual expression and foundation; and in doing so, he will create a new criterion of morality, which will consist of nothing more than the universalizing expansion of the perverse tastes of an individual. The abstract language of moral philosophy will have become a weapon in the service of selfish ends, of an inflated ego that will reshape the world in its image and likeness.

The subjective aspirations of individuals, however, are not so different from each other, especially in the era of mass culture that standardizes the desires of the crowd. Therefore, the impromptu moral philosopher will soon have the gratifying pleasure of discovering that his ideas are shared by millions of people like him, many of whom have already been producing, for the same purposes, many coinciding moral philosophies. There he will find the decisive argument in favor of his system: the argument of numbers. His personal system of rationalizations will be ennobled and invested with universal validity as an expression of the “aspirations of our time.”

But as the desires of the crowd, shaped by mass culture, all condense into the golden triangle of sex-money-fame, the new ethics born of moral bluntness will consist of nothing more than a system of rationalizations that transforms these three desires into hypostases of universal moral values and maximum foundations of all ethically valid conduct. Thus, the inversion is complete: the lowest and most vulgar passions have risen to the status of divine commandments, the violation of which subjects a person to internal suffering, if not public execration or legal penalties.

The complete blunting of moral intuition, replaced by a sophistical rhetoric of hallucinatory artificiality, has been diagnosed by Konrad Lorenz as a form of biological degeneration. This degeneration, erasing from human memory the records of values learned throughout animal evolution, heralds the beginning of the demolition of the human species.3

However, my intention is not to probe the root causes of this phenomenon on a global scale. What I want to ask is how it occurs in a particular individual. Of course, I exclude cases of congenital psychopathy, technically known as psychopathic or sociopathic personalities. It is not possible that the majority of radical activists in the world consist of a majority of congenital psychopathic personalities. What intrigues me is: how can a man of normal personality be transformed in such a way that his moral sense becomes identical to that of a congenital sociopath? How can moral perversity be artificially inoculated? Because it is obvious that if this possibility did not exist, certain social and political movements could only recruit their followers from psychiatric hospitals and would never go beyond being clubs of eccentrics. When we see hordes of intellectual activists today fighting for abortion to become an inviolable right, for manifestations of antipathy to any sexual perversion to be punished as crimes, for parental interference in the sexual education of young people to be limited to instruction on the use of condoms, for the Church to bless the practice of sodomy and punish those who speak against it, it is necessary to admit that something, acting on these people, has destroyed in them the elementary moral intuition; that, as Lorenz would say, some external interference has erased from their brains the records of moral experience accumulated throughout biological evolution.

If this something is neither heredity nor the fortuitous conjunction of traumatic circumstances that can produce a psychopathic personality, then it can only be a premeditated human action. Premeditated human action, carried out according to a rational connection of causes and effects, is what is called a technique. This technique exists. In fact, there are many. There is not a single mass movement, not a single national state, not a single large company that does not have a technique, or a set of techniques, to shape the personality of its members according to the organization's goals. With alarming frequency, shaping involves greater or lesser blunting of moral sense and intellectual consciousness.

Perhaps there is no sector of research in the world where governments, political parties, religious and pseudo-religious organizations, companies, and unions have invested more than in the means of subjugating the human mind. The list of techniques that the twentieth century has conceived for this purpose is enough to make scientists in other fields jealous: conditioned reflexes, brainwashing, psychological warfare, subliminal influence, control of the imagination, behavioral engineering, directed information, Neuro-linguistic Programming, instant hypnosis, pheromone stimulation, the list goes on endlessly. The tamer of men today has at his disposal an arsenal of resources broader and more effective than that of technicians in any other field of activity.

This knowledge is not stored in archives and libraries for the consultation of rare researchers and the curious; they are all being used in practice, in many countries around the world, for the most varied purposes. There is no political dispute, advertising campaign, ideological or religious propaganda that does not make extensive use of them, subjecting the human mind to a deafening bombardment that hinders the normal exercise of discernment and predisposes the masses to a new pathology that has received the very pertinent designation of informational psychosis.4

The thing that most impresses the student of the subject is the omnipresence of mind manipulation in contemporary life. Without it, the great mass movements that mark the history of the century simply could not have existed. It is impossible to imagine what would have become of communist propaganda without the conditioned reflexes and brainwashing invented by the Chinese;5 what would have become of fascism and Nazism without the technique of contradictory stimulation with which these movements disorganized civil society;6 how the two world conflicts and dozens of local conflicts and revolutions would have unfolded without the massive use of psychological warfare;7 what would have happened to Western governments and large capitalist enterprises without control of the imaginary and the “modification of behavior” they exercise over populations that haven’t the slightest suspicion of this;8 what would have become of esoteric and pseudo-esoteric organizations and the New Age movement without the techniques of instant hypnosis and subconscious communication with which they reduce their millions of disciples worldwide to mental slavery; what fate would the mass communications industry have met without the use of subliminal influence by which they reduce the young public of all countries to the most idiotic passivity.

If we were to remove, finally, from the historical panorama of the twentieth century the techniques of mind manipulation, nothing could have happened as it did. They were certainly more decisive, in the production of contemporary history, than all the other techniques conceived in all other domains, including the atomic bomb and computers. They are among the prime causes of historical events in our time, and yet historians continue to ignore them. They know, of course, the importance of “technique” among the causes of historical becoming; but, trapped in a crude and object-oriented notion of what a technique is, they only conceive under this name that which materializes in some type of apparatus or machine, or at least in a more or less patent action scheme. The few who were interested in the field of the mind were diverted in their efforts by a prejudicially selective view, which only highlighted some forms of domination at the cost of hiding others, both greater and worse.9 When the history of the research and use of mind manipulation techniques in the twentieth century is written with a sufficient overview, then it will be seen that no other phenomenon defines and singles it out so well. More than the century of ideologies, more than the century of atomic physics, more than the century of informatics, this was the century of mental enslavement.

Now, would it be conceivable that populations incessantly subjected to this psychological massacre could keep intact for a long time the intuitive and evaluative faculties in whose loss Lorenz sees the beginning of the demolition of the human species? Is it not more likely that manipulated, dazed, deceived humanity twenty-four hours a day will end up in a chronic state of self-deception? One of the few historians who took this phenomenon seriously denounced, in 1969, “the advent of a political system based on deception to a much greater degree than ever before.”10 With the proverbial delay that marks the pronouncements of the Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II finally recognized in 1994 that, under the appearance of continuity of what humanity called civilization, a kind of anti-civilization is growing worldwide, the civilization of the Antichrist. In this new panorama, all the ideas and conceptions that were more frankly erroneous, morbid, deformed, and failed than the centuries and millennia before rejected emerge from the depths of the garbage of forgetfulness to constitute the pillars of a universal cult of deception.

Olavo de Carvalho, an excerpt from "O Jardim das Aflições" [The garden of afflictions] (1994, 2015). Translated by the Olavo de Carvalho Academy.

The Abolition of Consciousness

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