Global Transformations Chapter X

 

Global Transformations - Chapter X

Thus the tree grows in whatever tower is built. The tower will always fall, the tree will always die, and the tower will always be rebuilt. But when the tree dies, the mushroom returns that things that were taken to the soil, and the sequence in which they were taken, or the bonds that held them together, do not matter. All the symbols split apart. All easily changed. In another life you had different beliefs. Build the Soul.

Two Dying Dreams

Two dreams are dying in the West, and as an American Jew (I mean my name is Ariel Shaul Montana Roane) I feel them both thrashing under the covers of their deathbeds. These are two very important dreams, distinguished gentlemen of their times, important for a good many heart in a good many people. They are not just pure fantasies, but indeed they are historical projects, forged in catastrophe, sustained by faith and power, and now unraveling under the weight of their own internal logic and fate.

The first is the Zionist dream: a modern nationalist project that preceded and survived the end of the Second World War, bolstered by important banking cartels of the time.This dream claimed to resolve the Jewish question through sovereignty, territory, and force. The second is the dream of liberal democracy: the Enlightenment vision of a rational human being, progressively liberated from tradition, violence, and genocide through law, rights, and reason. For the American Jew, these dreams once appeared complementary. One promised a land of one’s own; the other promised freedom regardless of land. One offered belonging in the Jewish family; the other offered belonging in the human family.

Both are now failing. And technology does not merely accompany this failure; it forms it incarnate.

I. Zionism After Redemption

Zionism emerged as a modern answer to a long, neverending crisis. European emancipation had failed to dissolve antisemitism; pogroms, racial theory, and political exclusion persisted despite formal equality. Theodor Herzl wagered against the book of Job, and told God he understood the world. He wagered that Jews were a nation like any other and therefore required a state like any other (Herzl, Der Judenstaat, 1896). This was a modern answer, borrowing the grammar of nationalism, sovereignty, and historical destiny from the very European ideologies that had excluded Jews in the first place, in pursuit of mythic halcyon days.

After the Shoah (I suppose analogous to the Nakba), this wager appeared vindicated. The extermination of European Jewry shattered the Enlightenment promise of moral progress and made the argument for Jewish self-defense brutally persuasive. Israel’s establishment in 1948 was framed not merely as a political achievement but as historical redemption. Jewish weakness would be replaced by Jewish power; exile would be replaced by rootedness; trauma would be replaced by mastery of the world around them. Moral scruples be damned.

Yet from its inception, Zionism contained a contradiction that some of its sharpest internal critics recognized early. The philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that a Jewish state ruling over another people would inevitably corrode Judaism itself, transforming ethical tradition into nationalist idolatry. In a series of essays and interviews after 1967, Leibowitz described the occupation as a moral catastrophe that would turn Jews into what he provocatively called “Judeo-Nazis”—not as an equation of suffering, but as a warning about the logic of domination unchecked by ethical restraint, a natural result of occupying territory (Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, 1992).This was not a marginal concern. The Six-Day War marked a turning point in which Israel ceased to be merely a refuge and became an occupying power. Since then, the apparatus of control—checkpoints, military law, settlement expansion, surveillance—has become normalized. What began as emergency measures hardened into permanent structures. The dream of safety through sovereignty metastasized into a regime that requires perpetual violence to sustain itself (Gordon, Israel’s Occupation, 2008).

What technology exposes is how far this logic has traveled. Surveillance systems, biometric databases, algorithmic risk assessments, and predictive targeting are not deviations from Zionism’s original promise of safety through control. They are its refinement. Security no longer depends on judgment, restraint, or even ideology. It depends on data.

This is not uniquely Israeli. But Israel has become one of the clearest laboratories where trauma, nationalism, and technological power converge. Control is no longer episodic; it is continuous. The occupied subject is rendered legible as a dataset, a probability, a threat score. Domination no longer needs hatred; it needs optimization.

The dream of redemption through sovereignty gives way to a regime that cannot stop itself, because stopping would mean confronting the unresolved trauma that power was meant to bury. For American Jews raised on a liberal Zionist narrative, this produces a psychic schism. Israel is simultaneously framed as the guarantor of Jewish survival and as a state whose actions increasingly violate the ethical commitments many Americans in general hold most dear. Criticism is recoded as betrayal; moral concern is framed as existential threat. Trauma becomes a political resource.

II. The Death of Liberal Man

The second dream—the liberal democratic project—has been dying more quietly, but that is just because its death has taken longer. The dream born of the Enlightenment and systematized by thinkers such as Kant and Hegel: that history bends toward freedom through reason, that human beings are progressively emancipated as subjects of law rather than objects of power. Hegel’s conception of the human being as a rational agent embedded in ethical life (Sittlichkeit) underwrote much of modern political thought. Liberal democracy assumed that individuals could be abstracted from their particularities—religion, ethnicity, tradition—and recognized as equal citizens under universal law (Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 1820). For Jews in the diaspora, this promise was transformative. One could be Jewish in private and human in public.

Yet this was a fragile agreement, and already ironic upon its conception. Look no further than the United States itself, the world’s first liberal democracy, who enshrined the values of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for its citizens while systematically exiling and killing the Native Americans, sustaining African American slavery, and offering a white veneer for semi-white races like the Irish and the Jews.

After the second world war, liberal democracy survived not because it bested fascism and resolved its internal contradictions, but because material abundance, American geopolitical domination, and Cold War shadow-work fantasies concealed its weakness. As those conditions eroded,  so did the coherence of the liberal subject. At the end of the 20^th century, the dollar that had created the material conditions for enlightenment concepts was the same dollar that pulled the thread out from the universal man. The monied forces of commoditization turned on people themselves, neoliberal transformed citizens into consumers and politics into spectacle (Brown, Undoing the Demos, 2015). Marx’s analysis of alienation anticipated this disintegration: social relations reduced to commodities, labor abstracted from meaning, life itself subordinated to accumulation (Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 1844). And yet his political economy was no more.

The result is a form of democracy without demos: formal rights without substantive enfranchisement, freedom reduced to choice within markets, and culture politics substituting for shared political purpose.  The human being conceived by Hegel—ethical, rational, embedded in communal life—has been disassembled into data points, preferences, and psychological profiles. Training sets for our data-center-based collective shadow.

This is not a betrayal of liberalism. It is its endpoint. Not just because the concept of money drives its development, but also because the universal human does as good of a job at banishing its shadow as does your average Joe.

III. The American Jewish Double Bind

The American Jew stands at the intersection of these two collapsing projects. Zionism and liberal democracy once functioned as complementary fantasies: one resolving the problem of Jewish vulnerability, the other resolving the problem of Jewish difference. Together they offered a way out of historical precarity.

But both were, in retrospect, dissociative strategies. Zionism externalized Jewish trauma into territorial control, imagining safety as a function of dominance. Liberalism belied true difference, imagining that emancipation could be achieved by systems of reason, law, and government. Neither required a reckoning with the deeper wounds of exile, persecution, and survival.

What emerges from the Zionist liberal democracy is neither the corpse seen by Elie Wiesel (Night, 1956) nor the transcendence envisioned by Viktor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946) – a Jew’s own version of the Martin Luther King Jr – Malcolm X dichotomy. What emerges is actually not an idea at all.

IV. Technology and the Collective Shadow

Technology shows us both deaths because it strips away narrative. It shows who we really are, because technology can never divorce from the people that built it. It is a subjective-objective, an artifact of human consciousness.

Artificial intelligence is often described as humanity’s crowning achievement. In truth, it is humanity’s collective shadow made operational. Every dataset is a record of what was seen and what was ignored. Every model is a personal view of cause and effective - not to say that it is arbitrary, but to Kuhn’s point in The Structure of Scientific Revolution, it is certainly not objective. AI does not hold anything that we don’t already possess, it is a grand mirror, build from smaller mirrors, warped in the same ways.

And this is why AI feels inevitable; it is nothing but ourselves. It accelerates what has already been chosen.

The convergence is quite striking. Zionism’s logic of security-through-dominance and liberalism’s logic of abstraction-through-universality meet in machine intelligence. Control without presence. Power without responsibility. Judgment without accountability. Pure matrix, a Baudrillardian wet dream.

V. The Environmental Cost of Abstraction

The dissociative strategies of modernity have always hidden their natural costs. Zionism repatriated land that was never owned by those who received it. Liberal democracy corralled native peoples in smaller and smaller segments as it gobbled up territory for progress.

AI intensifies this pattern, and intensifies the subterfuge and disguise inherent in the word “progress”. The cloud is not a metaphor. Data centers devour land, water, and energy. Rare earth extraction scars ecosystems. Heat and waste accumulate. The earth becomes substrate for computation. Trump aggressively pursues Greenland. AI unites these dissociative domineering trends into a technological system that can run without the people that built it, and thus nature is transformed from life giver into infrastructure, a true Faustian bargain. And for what exactly? More optimized warfare, a tighter mind control schtick?

VI. Beyond Control of the Past

The future, if there is to be one worth inhabiting, depends on looking inward and seeing ourselves as we are—light and dark, victim and perpetrator, wounded and wounding. This requires a movement backward, but not in the reactionary sense of mythic return. It requires going back before Jews existed as a category, before identity ossified into destiny.

Such a return cannot be accomplished through language alone. Language is already saturated with justification and denial. As Nietzsche observed, concepts often serve to protect us from experience rather than open us to it (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 1887). To remember what precedes identity is to listen to the body, to intuition, to what psychoanalysis calls the pre-symbolic.

Modern politics is obsessed with controlling the past: archives, narratives, memory laws. Orwell’s formula—“who controls the past controls the future”—has become a self-fulfilling prophecy (1984, 1949). But beneath this struggle lies something more primal: an attempt to metabolize trauma without feeling it. Rationalization replaces mourning. Dissociation replaces responsibility.

Reflective consciousness, one of humanity’s greatest evolutionary gifts, becomes a hall of mirrors. We analyze ourselves instead of living with others. We narrate our pain instead of transforming it. The world becomes an object to be managed rather than a life to be shared.

Technology perfects this dissociation. We encode our history rather than metabolizing it. We optimize around trauma rather than confronting it.

VII. Good and Dead

This chapter offers only a rebuttal: a refusal to cling to dying dreams simply because they once sustained us. Both dreams may have been doomed from the start. That may be natural to all human dreams, we all live in cycles. Cycles within cycles that we only sometimes manage to parse. Zionism without ethical and religious constraint is almost a twin sister of Nazism. Liberalism without true communion becomes self-destructive markets. The American Jew feels both deaths because both once promised salvation.

What remains is not innocence, but possibility. To live without the shelter of grand narratives is terrifying. It demands humility, accountability, and a willingness to dwell in contradiction without resolving it through violence or abstraction. It demands philosophy and future-visualizing, yes, but also matter-of-fact assessments and plans (like for instance tackling the power-drive of the transnational banks).

If there is a future beyond these deathbeds, it will not be built on mastery—of land, of history, of trauma. It will be built on presence: with ourselves, with others, with the fragile life that persists beneath the ruins of our dreams. We do not need to build more mirrors and call it technology. What we require is a new Promethean Challenge.

VIII. Prometheus Goes Underground

Many, at this point, turn toward psychedelics as a way to find the answers. As political narratives collapse, as ecological devastation accelerates, and as technology absorbs ever more of human judgment, mushrooms and molecules are offered as shortcuts—chemical ladders out of history, out of thought-patterns, out of dissociation itself. Dissociate to dissociate!

But this appeal misunderstands the problem. Psychedelics, when treated as solutions, often offer only a more vivid dissociation. Alas this is not transformation. It is aestheticized rupture. Yet themistake lies in focusing on the chemistry rather than the organism.

If we are to learn anything from mushrooms, it is not from what happens in the mind when consciousness is disrupted, but from what happens beneath the soil when life is integrated. Mycelium represents a radically different form of intelligence—one that does not abstractor externalize. It does not dissociate itself from its environment in order to understand it. It transforms what it encounters by entering into relation with it.

Mycelial intelligence is not hierarchical (queue Jordan Peterson yelling ‘Lobsters!’). It does not assume supremacy by default. It survives not by exclusion, but by connection—by metabolizing death into nourishment, by turning decay into possibility. It does not deny shadow; it feeds on it.

Human consciousness, by contrast, has evolved around dissociation. Language abstracts. War separates. Even dominant alleles assert themselves through exclusion. Dissociation is efficient. It scales. It wins. By default, it assumes supremacy. This is what makes the Promethean challenge of our era—not to steal fire again, not to build smarter machines or stronger states, but to defeat dissociation and non-congruence itself. And dissociation cannot be defeated by opposition. You cannot out-dominate domination. You cannot out-optimize optimization. The only way to defeat dissociation is reintegration.

Reintegration is rare because it is costly. A dissociated consciousness protects itself through distance—through narrative, abstraction, and denial. A reintegrated consciousness relinquishes that protection. It allows what was split off to return. It admits the shadow that language was designed to hide. It accepts contradiction without resolving it through violence or explanation.

This is not regression. And it is also  not innocence. It is congruence.

A reintegrated consciousness sees connections that a dissociated one can never see, precisely because dissociation is blind by design. It sees how trauma propagates across generations, how power disguises itself as necessity, how intelligence without ethics becomes repetition. It recognizes that the shadow is not an enemy to be eradicated, but a signal to be metabolized.

Who will take on this challenge of complete congruence—the Promethean challenge? Who will risk the loss of supremacy, the loss of certainty, the loss of narrative shelter required to reintegrate what has been split?

If such beings emerge, they will not resemble the liberal subject or the nationalist hero. Nor will they be saved by myth or machine. They will be something new: a consciousness capable of holding contradiction without dissociation, an intelligence capable of integration rather than control.

In that sense, the age that follows the death of Zionism and Liberalism may indeed be the age of the Android—not the machine that replaces humanity, but the human who finally integrates what has been mechanized within himself. It is not artificial intelligence, for what is artificial about AI? It is nothing more than ourselves, our language, our grand mirror, one that we have been making in smaller forms for thousands of years.

Instead what the Promethean challenge represents is reintegrated intelligence. An intelligence that no longer flees into abstraction, but remains present with what it has made.

Whether such an age arrives is uncertain. But if it does, it will not begin in the sky, the state, or the cloud. It will begin underground—quietly—where decay is not denied, but transformed.

 

References (selected)

• Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press.
• Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Zone Books.
• Frankl, V. (1946). Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.
• Gordon, N. (2008). Israel’s Occupation. University of California Press.
• Hegel, G. W. F. (1820). Elements of the Philosophy of Right.
• Herzl, T. (1896). Der Judenstaat.
• Leibowitz, Y. (1992). Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State. Harvard University Press.
• Marx, K. (1844). Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.
• Nietzsche, F. (1887). On the Genealogy of Morality.
• Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four.
• Wiesel, E. (1956). Night.