The events of the last 12 months have made obvious something that has been gradually taking place over many years. The world is on the way to being ruled by a system of technocracy. Politics and politicians play their part but they are increasingly just enacting the will of a group of technical specialists and experts working to impose control over the populace. In their own minds and according to their own beliefs, these people may be well-motivated and working for the good of humanity but that is because their vision of life is severely limited. They are completely materialistic, regarding human beings as things to be worked on. Certainly, to be brought to an optimum level of efficiency, at once intellectual, emotional and moral, and made collectively happy with suffering, both physical and mental, reduced to a minimum but ultimately little more than machines which need effective servicing to run smoothly. In this scenario, the individual is of diminished importance, personal freedom is allowed only to the extent that it doesn't interfere with the overall programme and the spiritual is completely denied except insofar as a pseudo-spiritual might be included as a psychological palliative.
It is computers that have made this possible. There are grounds for saying that computers are one of the greatest disasters to have befallen human beings since we got thrown out of Eden. So seductive that we have all succumbed to them but actually separating us from the soul more than we ever have been because in many ways they parody true spiritual consciousness. Indeed, computers can be regarded as a material perversion of the spiritual in that they externalise (on a lower level and in a degraded fashion) some of the qualities of the soul thus disincentivising us to seek the higher reality. But they have also laid bare the myth that technology in itself is neutral. Technology is far from neutral for our minds tend to adopt the form of the technology we use. We are starting to think like computers and in terms of computer technology and in so doing we create a barrier between our minds and higher domains of spiritual freedom and intuition.
Technocracy is anti-God because it is materialistic, atheistic, seeks complete control, subordinates truth to the expedient and the efficient, denies the primacy of the good, the beautiful and the true and puts power in the hands of an unaccountable few whose expertise in specialised areas blinds them to the overall picture. But for the technocratic type of mind theirs is the best way to organise society because this mind is oblivious to what lies beyond the quantitative level.
In a world controlled by data and spreadsheets there is no room for beauty, mystery, sacrifice or love. It is a world run by algorithms in which neither freedom nor the real good can find expression, good now being defined as that which makes the system run more efficiently. Human beings are viewed in terms of their material selves only, and this in a far more complete way than any of our previous political systems which were a hodge-podge of the natural human and materialistic ways of thinking. Technocracy is materialism brought to full power and complete dominance. It is the logical conclusion of materialism hence its appeal to materialistic minds. There is no space for anything outside a closed system. Inevitably any technocracy will collapse in the long run because there cannot be a closed system. Truth must eventually interpose. However, tremendous damage can be done to the soul before this position is reached.
If hell can be defined as a place closed to divine influence then the ideal technocratic society is a reasonable image of of one kind of hell, the kind run by measurement and numbers in which the soul is a known quantity. And this is what we are in the process of constructing. It's what the events of the last 12 months have brought closer. Do you want your soul to be just a statistic on a computer?