The Grand Inquisitors

"La razón de la sinrazón que a mi razón se hace, de tal manera mi razón enflaquece, que con razón me quejo de la vuestra fermosura." 

• Feliciano de Silva, recogido en Don Quijote de la Mancha, de Miguel de Cervantes

A Rant against Reason

It may seem counterintuitive to argue against reason. After all isn’t reason responsible for all the advances of modern civilization? Humanism advanced by discarding mysticism and superstition and embracing reason. But in our present society, the avaricious power structure of exploitation maintains the veneer of rational sophistication while discarding its humanism. Just as Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor informs Christ that he is no longer necessary, the high priests of reason teach us not to question, simply to obey. Questions about the self need not be asked. The high priests teach us that religion may be followed as long as it is understood that religion is meaningless. Spirit is meaningless. The only rational explanations for existence are physical explanations. There is no meaning and it is useless to search for meaning. Obedience to the paradigm will yield material satisfaction and that is all that is needed. All else is null.

Zero divided by zero is zero. Zero plus zero is zero.

The profound cynicism of the power elite teaches the doctrine of technology: “Everything has a rational basis, but you are too simple to understand the complex reasoning. Leave it to us. We will provide you with the rational justifications. Move on.”

Thinking is a dangerous business. The scientists, technologists, economists, and responsible bureaucrats will do our thinking for us. We shall busy ourselves amusing ourselves to death with social media, self-censoring our friendly messages while the government scours our communication for treason.

Since the assault on consciousness is total, the Inquisitors believe that thought itself must be petrified and fossilized. Every thought can be classified and analyzed, they say. No creativity will be allowed. And so our logic makes us agnostic; we are paralyzed with ambivalence. Like Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukṣetra, we are unable to act.

We know only uncertainty: we cannot speak of what is, only what might be. Our language is tortured by conditionals. Only Big Brother speaks clearly and absolutely. The Grand Inquisitor tells us what reality is and we obey. All facts are merely partisan points of view. We who are trained in logic hold both sides of the question in our minds until we are immobilized by the equilibrium of petrified reason. This is being professional. Anything less would be amateurish. And so we are suffocated with agnostic doubt until we are told to obey. After all, thinking would be dangerous.

The Inquisitors would have us think that any clear experience of the self must be prohibited as dangerous. We must be trained, not only to avoid self-realization, but to spot it in others and report it when it happens. You are being watched.

Sartre believed that freedom is our existential condition. In reality, we want nothing to do with freedom. We want to be told what to do and how to do it. This was Dostoyevsky’s point. His Grand Inquisitor challenges Jesus. “The people want bread and miracles. You gave them freedom. They don’t want freedom. We take their bread and bless it for them, creating miracles. They gladly surrender their freedom for the miracles we provide. True freedom is slavery. The church provides the slavery they need. Go.” Jesus vanishes after kissing the Grand Inquisitor.

In our rational world, we worship reason but have no time for thinking. After all, the experts will do the thinking for us and explain it to us later. Anyone who thinks for himself, after all, is a terrorist. Our fearless leaders tell us that terrorism and thinking should be punished with death. Those who might know better are afflicted with such deep cynicism that they are immobilized.

No intellectual curiosity is to be tolerated. Let the experts do the thinking.

And in the face of blind power the thinkers think what they are told to think. There can be no questioning of the dominant paradigm. Exploitation is the only truth, regardless of political party. Reason is only a mask of power. No true intellectual curiosity is to be tolerated. The great minds of the day are exploited for the creation of financial schemes or military weapons. Cognitive science becomes a slave to artificial intelligence research which in the end will be used to create robot police to protect the rich and powerful. The best and brightest geniuses in philosophy and literature will be harvested to create pornographic cartoons to amuse the masses.

The remaining intelligentsia are schooled in passivity and fear. Slaves to the machine, their expertise, like that of mad scientists in 1950s film, serves a commercial model meant only to squeeze the last drops of energy from nature.

There is a vicious circle between the corporate-industrial military complex and the halls of academe. Research projects favor only the model of exploitation. If there’s money to be made in pulping the rainforests into toilet paper, Harvard scientists will do the heavy lifting in research and development.

If it’s profitable to crush the coral of the Great Barrier Reef into acne medicine, Yale and Princeton will show the way. Nothing is sacred.

Any whiff of the sacred will be sanitized and deodorized, not only by the academic authorities but by the authorized church.

As manufacturing jobs are given to robots, the power of managerial leadership has grown. Theirs is a mind-set obsessed by systems and by control over systems as the essence of power. It is the opposite of leadership. It is all about form over content; a mind-set in which continuity and mediocrity are the same thing. Today their power is such that they feel comfortable manacling the citizenry with debts transferred to them from corporate bodies.



They take pleasure in weighing job creation against planetary warming, as if these were opposites. It is as if they, being experts, had cleverly negotiated a deal with the planet itself. A trade off. But we are not supposed to think. We are told, “All hail the fearless leader who is the great Deal-maker.” The leader may resemble Bozo the Clown or a bad Batman villain. But we are not to question the leader. To do so would be treason.

How is it possible that 200 years of enlightenment humanism and reason has brought us to this stage?

Civilization is in crisis, not least because we are unable to ask ourselves serious questions about our societies and about where they were headed. This crisis is not merely economic, but philosophical. When intellectual dishonesty prevails and meaningless exploitation is the dominant paradigm basic questions become taboo. The question of consciousness may be a “hard” problem for science, but it is one that is rarely considered.

Meanwhile, the Grand Inquisitors of science brush aside questions about self-realization while feeding us with the bread of technology. They give us miracles, proofs of progress, continual breakthroughs—technological, digital, medical. And promise us even greater miracles in the future--artificial intelligence, cloning, robots, even life itself. But at what cost? We understand more about the elements; we know more about the functions of the primal forces of the universe. But we understand less than ever who we are and what the meaning of life is. As a society by becoming slaves to reason we have forgotten the quest for meaning and the self.

And what have we constructed in place of a deeper understanding of the self? After two centuries of struggles for freedom in Europe and the Americas, revolution, violence, and world wars the societies we have established on the basis of reason and humanism lack both. 

In the United States, the so-called culmination of democracy and freedom, for example there has been a surprising focus on the scientific, free-market, nation-state application of racism. Internationally, the triumph of reason moved on to produce a world dominated by a handful of commercial and political empires. The great nation-states founded on the principles of freedom and the ideology of reason display the same symptoms: violence, dictatorship, institutionalized racism, all served by science and the so-called free market. Where is the humanism?

If this is the culmination of the great culture of reason, why is so much of today’s society characterized by racism and the law of the jungle? When the facade of “reason” is stripped away, when we look behind the rhetoric of human rights, constitutions, and free elections, what we see is raw exploitation. International political, administrative and intellectual leaders speak of the sanctity of open trade and growth. But there is no equivalent sanctity when it comes to human life. Contracts are sacred. We are zealous in seeing that other people’s debts are paid. In the religion of exploitation we are evermore religious about utilitarianism, practicality, pragmatism. Adam Smith is a saint and his labor theory of value has become dogma. These are the tenets of faith of the religion of exploitation whose iron flail is the paradigm of reason.

We are told that education is the key. If we push reason through education, a new day will dawn and there will be a brighter tomorrow. But in the technological paradigm of exploitation, education need not ask any questions. It is for tech-training. In our modern society education is not interested in questions, but in training. Education is being pushed towards the utilitarian. Training, not education is the watchword of the day. Because the goal of education is not to inspire, but to teach obedience and conformity.

Scientists like Dawkins and Hawking pride themselves on being mavericks, independent thinkers. They promote the myth that they are Galileo fighting the dogma of the Spanish Inquisition. But these men have no courage. They serve the dominant paradigm like dogs. Their agnosticism is cowardice. With all their intellectual might they refuse to take a position but are paralyzed with indifference.

 Far from fighting the inquisition, they are themselves inquisitors enforcing obedience to the materialistic paradigm of exploitation. They hate the idea of consciousness, since consciousness implies the supernatural. But by denying consciousness they deny their own selves. And by setting themselves up as the inquisitors they encourage conformity to the self-destructive meaningless paradigm of exploitation that would crush the human soul.