Dante's Nine Circles of Hell and the Internet Inferno

I’ve seen several references to various social media apps and the Seven Deadly Sins, but this Sunday morning, as I consider the darkness that seems to breed in social media circles—from teen bullying on Snapchat and Instagram, to Twitter trolls threatening female reporters in India with rape and abuse, to child pornography on the Dark Web and the children who suffer miserably, literally living in hell for predators’ public pleasure— Dante’s Inferno comes to mind, and how this ancient story from 1300 might actually describe our reality right now, as we enter the Information Age of our human development.

Perhaps this stage of humanity had to take a technological twist, one Dante couldn’t have imagined in his time, but one that was destined in our evolution none-the-less. For no other invention has ever truly united human minds together. The Internet is where we are able to peer into the human psyche and together decide, shall we go on to Heaven, or will we devolve into the sadistic beasts depicted in Dante’s work? Our online behavior effects the whole, we can’t create true connection as long as the beast continues to dominate the conversations. If we want a truly liberated Internet-of-Things, then we will need to face the demons inside of us, and overcome them with the help of some trusty advisers.

Let’s go back in time then, and see if the great Dante Alighieri can shed some light on the baseness of the online world and how we can transform it into the ideal that sparked the birth of the Internet, as well as every social media application that now serves to bring us together.

And what exactly is the noble spark that underlies the Internet?

Inferno begins with Dante on a quest to be reunited with Beatrice, his true love. This then, is the ultimate goal of our human experience. Love. Not necessarily romantic love, but connection in the truest sense. Behind all of our impulses is the desire for connection with others such as family, lovers, community. We want to belong to a group. I think this is what we’re searching for when we go online, the promise of connection, of finding our tribe. Hence, we have created the Internet as a forum to do so. We want to find one another on a deeper level, one that knows no physical bounds.

But, like Dante's quest, the path to union is a dark one. He finds himself in a dark woods and wants desperately to leave it. This is the aspect of the online world that we must address if we're ever to realize its potential, a dark world full of fear, hate, intimidation and misinformation. Dante sees a mountain in the distance and tries to climb it, but is stopped by three wild animals—a leopard (Apple, since they made the smartphone), a she-wolf (Google, since the she-wolf is one of Wisdom’s symbols and Google has put all knowledge at our fingertips) and a lion (Charles Babbage, since he’s the one who created the first computer and set the entire information age into action. Besides his Wikipedia picture sort of looks like a lion). They basically doom Dante to go back, i.e. enter the dark woods of the Internet. Their inventions have made it so. There’s no way around it.

Fortunately, the Roman poet Virgil suddenly appears and gives Dante hope. He says they have no choice but to descend into Hell together, but that on the other side is Beatrice and the heaven they both long for. Thus my fellow humans, we have to go into the World Wide Web in order to face the evil within us before we can experience the true connection that we not only long for, but also binds us together with the whole of life.

Virgil leads Dante to the gates of Hell, which bear the sign, “Abandon All Hope, You Who Enter Here.” Nice. Some of the wisest people I know say that about social media. Abandoning all hope, they go in and enter the outer regions of Hell—a place where the souls in life who couldn’t commit to anything, good or bad, spend their lives chasing a blank banner and being bit by insects. Sounds a lot like email to me. The first major application to drive early Internet development, email is an entry point into the online world, without actually going in and getting dirty. Each day we’re inundated with emails, mostly just trash, but we login all the same, hoping for a meaningful letter from a friend, or a new job opportunity, or perhaps an invitation to a party. Unfortunately these more important notes are often hidden in a jungle of emails from every vendor or website we’ve visited online. And don’t even bother trying to Unsubscribe, the cookies and bots won’t let you.

Next, Virgil and Dante cross a river and soon find themselves in the First Circle of Hell—a place reserved for those learned men who died without knowing Christ. Now, Dante wrote a religious tale, but Christ is also known as the Word, or Logos, which is the term in Jungian psychology for reason and judgement. Thus this level of Hell is filled with those who love information and share it with others, but lack the underlying reason and judgement to do a great service. Sounds like some of the bloggers out there today, as well as others who push their opinions as news, thus clogging up social media with posts that look like journalism, but are really click bait, or written in order to deceive. We may glorify our most famous bloggers, raise them on pedestals, but without knowing Logos, without being disciples of reason and judgement, they’re nothing more than parroting what we already believe, making us even more divided in the long run. Blogger, Tumblr, even Medium are entry points into this level of Hell, enabling us to pontificate without reason or responsibility (alas, like I am right now).

The Second Circle of Hell is reserved for those who are Lustful, and they swirl about in a terrible storm. Here we have our Instagram and Snapchat accounts where we post our perfect meals, perfect bodies, and perfect pets while at the same time bullying and hurting those who are “out” in our culture. Teens notoriously use these two applications to vent their insecurities, leading to too many instances of the very young taking their own lives. It used to be that you could leave the bully at school and get a break from his/her abuse at home. No longer. If you’re the uncool one, the hate follows you into your back pocket. And what about those boys who snap pics of their sexual conquests and then share them with their friends? The virtual locker room is sexual harassment storm.

In the Third Circle of Hell, we experience the Gluttonous, who must lie in mud and endure a rain of “filth and excrement.” Oh, this is horrible! Yet Facebook newsfeeds recently feel like a rain of filth and excrement. Elections now hinge on the Fake News published through the medium of Facebook and while many of us use it in order to find connection to those we can’t see every day, it turns out that this app is a huge reason for the divide between liberals and conservatives in many nations. From Trump’s election to Brexit, gluttonous politicians now use Facebook to gain access to the emotional states of the gluttonous voters by feeding their fears and desires with crap, over and over, as they swipe their smartphones for hours a day.

In the Fourth Circle of Hell, we meet the Avaricious and Prodigal, those who spend, spend, spend. Their greed covers the land and they desire nothing more than the next lavish purchase. In this level of Hell, they’re made to charge at one another with great boulders, each one taking down the other. Amazon Prime ring a bell? Or Alibaba. Take your pick, both seek to bring you your every material whim, hopefully within two hours, if they can get the approval to fill our airspace with their little delivery drones. Now, that does sound like hell. Imagine all of our materialism made manifest with the constant drone traffic above our heads.

For the next level of Internet darkness, I have to quote Sparknotes, for this summary can’t be beat: “The Fifth Circle of Hell contains the river Styx, a swampy, fetid cesspool in which the Wrathful spend eternity struggling with one another; the Sullen lie bound beneath the Styx’s waters, choking on the mud. Dante glimpses Filippo Argenti, a former political enemy of his, and watches in delight as other souls tear the man to pieces.” Imagine it? Of course we can. Ask any journalist, politician, or even minor celebrity what it’s like to have a Twitter handle. Jimmy Fallon’s “Mean Tweets” segment is only the tip of the iceberg. On Twitter, souls are ripped apart into pieces, devoured by trolls that come together for the singular purpose of threatening other users. Twitter is a perfect example of how something with a noble start (basically a broadcasting station for all voices in the world) has been co-opted by our lesser natures and turned into a “fetid cesspool in which the Wrathful spend eternity struggling with one another.”

Yet, my friends, we’ve only just begun experiencing our evil archetypes. For now Dante comes to Dis, a city so horrible, the gates are closed to him and he has to get help from an angel to enter. Why then go in, if even the demons refuse us entrance? Because we can’t help ourselves, we always have to look. Besides it’s the only way to Heaven. So into the Sixth Circle of Hell we go to encounter the Heretics, the bot accounts on EVERY SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM that spew forth misinformation and conspiracy theories galore, appearing like a real human user, but are actually nothing more than chatbots, created by governments to influence elections and public opinion. These bot accounts sound very American, like “@MomLuvsTrump” or “@TruRedWhiteNBlue”, but they exist merely to push propaganda that is beautifully crafted to look like something any thinking, rational, internet user should follow.

There’s nothing to do but keep going at this point, down to the darkest parts of the internet that mirror the very worst in humanity—the Seventh Circle of Hell, where we find those who were violent towards God, Nature and Art. To me, this is Reddit. Sure, the threads mean to be a place of power and change. I’ve often likened this online social arena to the pamphlet movements during the Revolutionary War. And I love to attend AMAs hosted by various favorite personalities. Unfortunately, Reddit is also the rallying place for the alt-right where they can spew their violence against God, Nature and Art. Reddit is often where trolls gather to plan their Twitter attacks on a certain media personality. Or to organize a hate rally, Milo Y. or Richard Spencer book signing, etc. Hate speech vs. the First Amendment begin to face off in this realm of the Internet Inferno

Spending time in Reddit will often lead the user to the next circle of Hell. When Dante gets to the Eight Circle of Hell, he finds not just one type of evil, but pockets of evil. Nine of them at least, filled with panderers, seducers, charlatans, and barraters (those who accepted bribes). These evil ones are suffering in various ways, from regular whippings, to being held in pitch while demons tear them apart. I can’t help but think of 4chan when I read of this place. 4chan is a site where people can post images anonymously. Oh ho, nothing can go wrong in such a community, can it? 4chan has devolved so much in the past years that in 2014, its very founder, Christopher Poole, walked away. Why? "I've come to represent an uncomfortably large single point of failure," he wrote in his farewell post. I guess when a murderer uses your site to post photos of his victims, your invention has gone from the Wild West to the Nine “Evil Pockets” of Hell fairly fast. Poole works for Google now, so perhaps he’s the she-wolf at the beginning of the story?

The Ninth Circle of Hell is a frozen wasteland and filled with those who have betrayed their kin, their country, their religion, and their community. This then is where we see the worst in us, for betrayers are the ones who prevent true connection from taking place. Those who hurt and abuse others for their own gains and pleasures are the ones who stand in the way of the salvation of our species. Here then are the ones who use the Internet for the purpose of betraying others, from money laundering, to drug cartels, to prostitution. In my opinion, one of the darkest, most evil betrayals is the abuse of children. I don’t wish to spend time in this icy wasteland, and any of the above applications have been implicated in this behavior, but I have to name it—the use of the Internet by child pornographers and consumers lies here, in the heart of hell. One can’t be any more evil, even if he murders another. For to spread this filth is to stain the entire endeavor, and at some level those who prey on children in this way are enabled by the Internet and the ease of sharing images. It isn’t surprising that if this is festering in the virtual world, all of the other disturbing trends mentioned above exist as well.

Unfortunately our technology is held hostage by the worst of us. Until we can turn the technology around and use it against those who commit such evil, we can’t get out of the woods.

However, Dante and Virgil do make it out of Hell. Interestingly the poets cross through the barren wasteland and to the river of forgetfulness, emerging from Hell on Easter morning.

I find it interesting that they must forget the darkness in order to leave Hell and make their way to Heaven, where true connection, love and solidarity await. What must we forget in order to fulfill the promise of the Internet and the idea of a globally connected world?

Our hate? Our jealousy? Our anger? Our fear? Our ignorance? Our greed? Our lust? Our mistrust?

I imagine so. In the meantime, our experiences online seem to be on one hand accelerating and enabling those who wish to sow the seeds of discontent, and on the other hand bringing us together, enabling the collection and sharing of information and knowledge, and making us aware of those places and people in our community who are in need. If we can rid ourselves of our lower natures and focus on the fact that when we’re online, we’re actively creating a world together, perhaps someday we will hold Beatrice in our embrace, and finally find human connection at the deepest, most satisfying level.

It's Not My Fault: The Reality of Group Evil

To create Edgar Prince, the villain in eHuman Dawn, I had to dive deep into the shadows of the mind and psyche and do some serious research on phenomena called evil. As I began work on the sequel, it became clear that to understand him better, and the world he has created, I needed to go further, and face that shadow directly within my own life and the world around me. As I surface from this journey, I've discovered something very important: One evil man does not make an evil world. We may follow him and make him our leader, (see my blog on psychopaths) but he can't be effective unless his orders are carried out by many individuals, and rarely do the orders seem purposefully evil. Instead, they often make sense from a group perspective, even if they actually cause great harm to others.

I believe in humanity and the future. I believe that our science can and will unlock secrets needed for long life and a cleaner planet. But there's also this part of me that cautions, reminding me to look at who's offering the technology before "Jumping" into it, as the process for uploading the consciousness into an eHuman body is called in my novel. In the short term, it solves the problem of death, but who will make sure the mechanized body lives forever? Who guarantees the quality of life in a programmable world?

To give our lives to technology is to give them to those who own the technology.

I cannot escape this basic truth. Do I trust those who run our corporations and governments? For those who've read eHuman Dawn, the answer is clear: No I don't. I can't because at every turn I see evidence of evil enacted on this planet in the name of the corporate profits and government sovereignty: Wars funded to protect corporate mining interests, children forced to work for no money to make cheap clothing, rain forests destroyed to raise the beef that fuels our fast food industry, ecosystems obliterated for profits and stock markets manipulated for billion dollar bonuses. This is just a small list of the ways our businesses and governments harm humanity everyday. The tendency towards group evil is far greater than the percentage of individual psychopaths in the world.

Why is this? Why are evil policies easily enacted on behalf of the group? In his profound book, "The People of The Lie," author Scott Peck, MD, makes the following observation:

"For many years it has seemed to me that human groups tend to behave in much the same ways as human individuals - except at a level that is much more primitive and immature than one might expect...Of one thing I am certain, however: that there is more than one right answer…this is to say that it is the result of multiple causes. One of those causes is the problem of specialization."

Dr. Peck goes on to explain that while specialization is the reason for groups to even exist, we can get more done together than we can alone, it is also a main reason groups are capable of evil. This is because of what Dr. Peck calls, "fragmentation of consciousness."

"Whenever the roles of individuals within groups become specialized, it becomes both possible and easy for the individual to pass the moral buck to some other part of the group…we will see this fragmentation time and time again…The plain fact of the matter is that any group will remain inevitably potentially conscienceless and evil until such a time as each and every individual holds himself or herself directly responsible for the behavior of the whole group - the organism - of which he or she is a part. We have not begun to arrive at that point."

Thus, when asked why annual inspections were not done on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, the person in charge of said inspections might say, "I was told to stop doing them by my boss." When the boss is asked, he may answer, "Corporate put a hold on all inspections until further notice." Keep going up the ladder and you find yourself in the CEO's office, the one who should be responsible. But what will he say? Dr. Peck imagines an answer something like, "My actions may not seem entirely ethical, but I had to cut expenses. After all, I must be responsible to the stockholders you know. On their account I must be directed to the profit motive."

Who then decides what actions any group will take? The small investor who has no clue how the operation even works? The mutual fund owners? If so, which mutual fund? Which broker?

Who is ultimately responsible for the actions of the group?

In this light, it becomes clear that groups are immature, and in great danger of being morally bankrupt. Since over 90% of people work for an organization, most of us are in danger of passing the moral buck when it comes to our work. Add to this the fact that the majority of people would rather follow than lead, thus allowing a power vacuum that psychopaths can and often do fill, and we have an environment ripe for manipulation and exploitation. We are all part of the problem, whether we like it or not.

It worries me how easy it would be for the world of eHuman Dawn to become a reality. I don't trust the Edgar Princes, nor the Guardian Enterprises of this world, to enable technological immortality for the love of humanity. Yet, I don't believe that halting progress is the solution. There's so much yet to discover about our humanity, and the connections between our bodies, minds and the planet.

Instead of fearing technological innovation, we each need to become responsible, right here and now, for the organizations in which we live and work. Each and every one of us must stop passing the moral buck and become worthy of the technology we're creating. This is the great work that the future requires from us, if we're going to live in a world of personal liberty and freedom for all.

Whether or not your job produces technology doesn't matter. Every organization runs the risk of passing the moral buck in some way, thus creating a mentality that the evil that surrounds us isn't our fault. Each of us has the opportunity to change that group dynamic, and create mature work places and organizations that honor humanity as a whole.

The alternative could be nothing less than the complete technocratic rule of the few over the many. I think we can do better than that.
   

Where My Demons Hide

"No matter what we breed
We still are made of greed
This is my kingdom come
This is my kingdom come"

~ Imagine Dragons, "Demons"

 

I've been spending time lately diving deeper into the psyche of the villain. My novel, eHuman Dawn, is the beginning of a trilogy about the beauty and pain that are possible in a future transhumanist society. Thus understanding power and control is key to completing the trilogy in a meaningful way. Technology is making progress in leaps and bounds, not in baby steps, and it's entirely possible that in my lifetime I will have to make a choice between dying or living forever through the aid of machines. What exactly that will be like, I can only imagine. But what I do know with all my heart is that such a "transhumanist wager", as author Zoltan Istvan has coined it, is a very serious wager indeed.

To rely on technology in order to live forever and achieve total health is to rely on those who own the technology to consider our lives as precious and important. This means that business and government leaders need to care for each and everyone of us in a way that considers human consciousness and life as valuable and worthy of investment and protection.

Take an honest look at the leadership in our society today--can we trust them with our lives? With our dreams, desires and hopes? NSA surveillance, drone attacks on innocents, dictators approving genocide, business leaders willing to take risks that leave millions without an income, jobs shipped overseas, goods made in sweatshops, children forced into slavery, mountaintops blown off to heat our houses. Yes, there are great things our leaders do, but more and more we are discovering that often our leaders in business and government act without empathy, without fear and without care for humanity and the world as a whole. Their personal interests come first, and if some people suffer, so be it. Sacrificing the many for the benefit of a few has been a theme in the story of domination for centuries.
   
What sort of a person would make such cold and unfeeling decisions? Who is able to shut of their empathy to such a degree that the enslavement of children in order to manufacture goods more cheaply is considered a brilliant business decision? Who manipulates others and markets for their own advantage? In the clinical world there is a name for such a person: the psychopath--a distinct subset of humanity who supposedly can't feel love, empathy, shame or compassion. People who operate for their own advantage, to the detriment of all around them.
   
The psychopath is real, known and well documented. That many of our leaders share traits with the psychopath is not surprising. As the modern philosopher Charles Eisenstein writes in his most recent book, "Living in a system that rewards psychopathy, it is not accident that the psychopathic rise to the top, and that the psychopathic tendencies in each of us rise to the surface. It is a mistake to blame the psychopaths for our present condition; they are a result, not a cause."
   
In a world that rewards the cool, calm and collected human being, is it surprising that our top 1% seem to be distant and callous? For the rest of us, it's no coincidence the use of anti-depressants in America is at an all-time high--we all want to numb ourselves and be distant, detached and level-headed. When our story as a society is that being tough is king and feeling anything at all is for the weak, are we surprised that a businessman might be capable of shipping our jobs overseas in order to make more money for himself? It's the American myth to be independent, self seeking and self-fulfilling. To admit we need each other to grow and learn is to admit defeat.
   
Eisenstein goes on to explain, "Given any cultural trait, there are always some people who embody it in extreme form, holding up a mirror so that we can recognize it in ourselves. These would be the psychopaths."
   
At this moment in history, we are in a place of transition between the story of domination and the story of interconnectedness. The path between the two world views is not straight, it's more like a maze. There is a way out, but in order to find it, we must see the bigger picture. Many look to technology to fix this. I would agree with them, but with a bit of caution.

If we develop the technology to live forever before leaving the story of domination, then the possible future could be one of power and manipulation unlike anything we've ever seen. The ability to own us, program us and abuse us would be very great, and extremely tempting to the psychopaths in charge. The machines would hate us, outsource us and eventually render us useless, because their creators saw humanity through those eyes first. Eisenstein suggests this is because, "…our current story facilitates the rise of psychopathy and empowers the psychopath."

But what if we change our story? What if we see that we are one and begin to look upon the connections between us as powerful, rather than as a weakness? What if we begin to see that humanity with all it's knowledge and wisdom is like the internet--connected, open, free and full of possibility? Would we settle for leaders who disdain us? Would we create machines to dominate us? Or would we create a more beautiful world, where technology serves us and the planet, in harmony with the web of life that surrounds us?

To me, the greatest threat to our race is our self-loathing. Ironically, I share this in common with the villain in my novel, Edgar Prince. Yet here's how he and I differ--He thinks humanity is unable to rise up and respect one another, therefore we must be controlled into behaving. I believe we can do it, because it's what we were born to do. Where he sees weakness, I see tremendous potential.

This is a personal development issue and yet, because we are connected, it's a global one as well. To look at ourselves and one another with respect and dignity is a place to start. From there we take it, person by person, all the way to the top. And perhaps, as a result, when we get to the top we'll discover that we aren't a pyramid at all, rather we're one large web of humanity, co-creating a future of possibility, health, beauty, and most of all, mutual respect and honor. Because when we look into the mirror of the story of interconnectedness, we'll see the light of humanity in one anothers' eyes.