Your Idea of "Self" is Killing You

Dionysos, Selfhood, The Internet, and Communities of Choice

It has been plainly stated before and cannot be disputed that the human being is a social animal. In fact we may even approach a kind of “eusociality” of the sort seen in insects; what I mean by this is that our cognition, our “software”, is carried out on hardware that includes and is centered around but is not actually limited to our brain and body. If a group you are part of makes a decision and you then go along with that decision, have you made a personal choice? You could say “yes, I have decided to concede to the group,” but I am going to propose instead that the group has made that decision as an extension of you, as an organism in itself which you are a part of and which is also a part of you. Hearing this may be scary to the modern reader because we are socialized into an atomized definition of the self. We understand the individual to be something that starts in the brain and ends at the skin, and we invest great moral value in the “independence” of this unit. I am going to state this plainly: This idea is false and is damaging your ability to understand the world and the proper way to act within it.

The Buddhists can tell you that when you dig into the individual self and examine it you will eventually find a thing that is “empty of self-essence,” which is devoid of causation. Which, in other words, depends on other things in order to exist at both the highest and the most basic levels. The self relies on energy from food and light for its body’s existence, and likewise the body must have received its consciousness - or rather, its participation in consciousness - from somewhere. Only when we free ourselves from the conception of the self as being bound by the body are we able to start getting closer to where our consciousness must have originated. When we follow the new line of questioning which is opened up by this, we are able to see ourselves in our environment and in our social groups. We are able to accept that a messy room and a clean room have tangibly different effects on our well-being because they are literally a part of ourselves, interacting with our hormones and nerves and all of the other constituents of our bodily selves. We are able to understand why the emotional wellbeing of our friends and family has such a drastic influence on our own. When we scale up this understanding we can see our little-selves participating in the selfhood of tribes, nations, species, and ultimately of the whole incarnate world itself.

Enter the philosophical Dionysos. Dionysos is the echo of Zeus within the incarnate, ensouled world, the “sublunar” plane as the ancients called it. He is the passageway between pure, unmixed divinity and the physical world just as Zeus is the passageway between the ineffable, unknowable, “unreal” One and positive existence in the manner of Being, Intellect, and Soul. Dionysos carries out his function by splitting wholes into their opposites so that dialectical motion may occur. The purpose of that motion is to slowly return things to their wholeness while shaking out the impurities, like sand from a beach towel, that arise from proximity to nothingness the further away from Zeus and the One that spirit gets. Dionysos, in this position, is by no means a one-way street. We do indeed “Return to the Father through Him” as has been restated by the portions of christianity that have incorporated elements of Neoplatonist theology.

At the highest level, we all indeed are parts of the One. Our selfhood is nothing but the Monad itself as it flows and emanates into and through the Indra’s net of Henads, Gods, which fashion it into forms and beings. But we must learn to walk before we can run; before returning to Zeus, we return to his “lower” hypostasis in Dionysos. In order to do so we must endure the processes of dialectic opposition and cooperation which are meant to broaden the brittle and atrophied sense of a limited selfhood that we have found ourselves in. Towards this end we have been granted friends, families, peers, communities, and enemies. The health of all these people are paramount to our own health because our very selfhood, the next level of selfhood after our own body and a step towards our shared selfhood with Dionysos, takes place within all these people.

And the modern world is damaging all of these people and our bonds with them. Capital and global trade have set up monetary incentives that harm our health by encouraging low-fat, sugary, canola-oil laden diets. The economy encourages families to split up and move to different places in pursuit of job opportunities. A breakdown of community sentiment and ritual as displayed and fostered by festivals, games, feasts, etc, has greatly impoverished public life and can partly be blamed on the breakdown of christianity. The towns and suburbs that house half of our population are not human-scaled, walkable, or beautiful. Our public schools socialize children into a prison model where people are segregated by age, contributing to a sense of generational warfare and a worrying lack of cultural exchange and heritage between the older generation which is sequestered in nursing homes and the younger generation which is locked up in a mental prison made of IPads, influencers, and total disconnect from the physical and real.

This brings us to the most pertinent point, the way the internet has changed the way we socialize and form communities which, in turn, literally changes the way we participate in the process of selfhood, abstracting us out from our bodily experience for huge portions of our day. The selfhood we experience through our peers and our landscape is inevitably changed even if just by this shift in our bodily experience. The internet also opens up an avenue for people to participate in collective selfhood at a staggering speed and distance, letting group belonging occur faster and faster and with lower and lower stakes; you can signal belonging to an “ingroup” literally just by using, say, a photo of a marble statue or a fursona as your profile picture. The internet introduces elements both of autonomous choice and structural manipulation that result in a never-ending process of people splitting off into sects and sub-sects at lightspeed. This new proliferation of communities of choice is going to have enormous consequences for our future, both positive and negative.

On the negative side, the ability to access people who share your specific hobbies, politics, or, increasingly, mental illnesses, is atrophying many peoples’ ability to relate to people who are different than them. There is less and less incentive to do the difficult work of mediating in-person relationships that require commitment and compromise because internet communities provide similar hormonal rewards for a fraction of the work, shortcutting our brains’ reward systems just like bad food can leave us full without being nourished. The still text-heavy internet is a communication network that lacks the ability to communicate things that are very important in real life, like micro-expressions, pheromones, posture, tone of voice, etc, and because our communication is a part of our selves the loss of these faculties can damage self esteem on a fundamental level.

Because of the speed and shallowness of the medium, as people accustom themselves to socializing on the internet they socialize in a more and more shallow way, providing humor or wit or simple agreement and validation of the readers beliefs in exchange for recognition and validation that is tied to an “Avatar” rather than to a holistic human identity. The social media Avatar has become to our material selves a reflection of what our material selves are to our soul, and we have been introduced to a whole new layer of existence that must be explored, understood, and transcended if we are to rejoin the divine.

Just like the material world can distract us from our spiritual health with pleasures and pains, the internet world holds the potential to trap us in a discursive cycle of covering up deteriorating physical conditions like loneliness, dopamine burnout, and vitamin D deficiency with more and more drastic pleasures like video games, pornography, and the facsimile of validation provided by social media. You could even argue that this process is happening at a large scale now; real wages have declined significantly in the last decades, sexual and racial relations are somehow worsening, infrastructure is crumbling, and half the world has just spent a year wearing masks and restricting their in-person socialization. Yet throughout all this people have remained complacent so long as they can plug their psychic leaks with soggy cheetos and content themselves with social media activism whose entire premise is “well, if I share this then it might make someone (else) do something (that I won’t).” Meanwhile a combination of social media’s structure and human psychology ensures that ever more polarizing delusions proliferate in an entropic spiral that pits scared ethnic groups against each other, scared masses against their incompetent elites, and ideologically possessed children against their own parents and friends.

And Dionysos is laughing. This is the sandy towel being shaken out. The internet is in many ways like the underworld, a world of shadow, terror, and non-existence which may regardless hold great riches and great lessons for those who can leave once they enter. Like Orpheus, we will not retrieve the beautiful Eurydice that is our peaceful past, but we may return with valuable songs and, more importantly, with proof that it is possible to return at all.

And that brings us to the positive side of all this. The internet has opened up an ocean of information that can be extremely useful to us even in the very mission of transcending the internet. There is the potential to learn profitable skills and valuable spiritual insight. Most importantly there is the ability to form relationships and communities, and with a little bit of conscious intention these can be allowed to go beyond the avatar. With some structure and vision added, they can be eventually transformed into in-person relationships and communities. If that is accomplished then our investment of selfhood in them will yield much better fruit than if they remained simple anonymous pages to be slowly lost track of in the shuffle of algorithms. There is even potential for these relationships and communities of choice to be more enriching than what would be available if we simply never engaged with the internet at all and left ourselves to the mercy of circumstance in our in-person relationships, which are becoming less and less reliable as the people around us spiral into their own algorithmic online worlds. Likewise the intentionality and discipline that we could learn from an organized online community of choice, especially one that is conscious of the risks of internet identity entropy, can be just as easily translated into our in-person friend and family lives if only we are able to share our knowledge and reasoning with them.

In my view, because this crisis has stricken so deeply into the heart of what it means to live, only a devotional approach will be sufficient to counter it; only a firm reestablishment of contact with the divine and the reconstruction of a way of thinking and socializing that reflects that devotion and furthers that contact will be able to overcome the discursive anxiety of the information age. Towards this end I believe that the community of choice will have to be a largely religious one, because belief in and contact with the creative forces that are the actual source of our selfhood (both as bodies and as families) will be necessary in order to create a social structure that is healthy for that selfhood and brings it towards actualization and reunion. The creation of such a social structure is necessary in order to provide normal people in all their diverse situations and archetypes with pathways towards perfecting themselves without expending the Herculean effort and luck required of people in our current environment to even get to the point where they see the need to do so.

This Herculean effort is also demanded of us in starting this project, but in truth we should be thankful for this challenge. Dionysos does and permits nothing without reason; He has set up the situation of our current world because, by the process of dialectics, only a world which is so devoid of meaning, structure, intimacy, tradition, connection, sincerity, vitality, and devotion is capable of evoking the reaction that will create a world which is abundant in all of those things. But just as the cosmos is created through the acts and the essences of the Gods, a community and the network of relationships that power it emerge from the very souls of the people involved, and tending to the soul is actually easier than the process of learning that you should do so. This means that there’s plenty of work for everyone to do, whether it’s as ambitious as building a temple or as simple as eating well and exercising. It also means that there are no excuses left.