The instrumentarian deathcult of certainty

From Parmenides to the Moloch of technofeudal dystopia and what's next

Instrumental vs intrinsic

To say that one thinks and acts instrumentally is to say that the reasons for attaining goal(s) of such a thinking and acting override the reasons for thinking and acting that would be independent from whether they lead to achieving these goals or not.

For example, an instrumental reason for writing a Substack article could be having people read it, which is my extrinsic motivation for doing this—the value of writing is thus instrumental insofar as it leads to being read. Conversely, when I decide to write an article because I value the process of writing in and of itself (which I do), then we can say that such a reason or motivation is intrinsic—I write because I enjoy it, regardless of whether anyone reads it or not. Thus, instrumental rationality is product-oriented, while non-instrumental rationality is process-oriented. The former confers extrinsic value on an action which springs from extrinsic motivations, i.e. the consequentialist logic of means to ends. The latter, on the other hand, confers intrinsic value on an action, which is to say that it considers something as intrinsically valuable, i.e. valuable as an end in itself.

It is important to note that most of the time both of these types of reasons work together, and that intrinsic motivation benefits from being supported by an incentive of an extrinsic one. That said, one could also argue that once instrumental purpose overrides the intrinsic one, the integrity of the entire process is in question, because once instrumental reasons overpower the first principles upon which they have developed, they start to undermine the basis of their legitimacy.

An illustration from Charles Foster’s 1897 Bible Pictures and What They Teach Us, depicting an offering to Moloch.

The argument I lay out in this piece is not that instrumental rationality is bad and that non-instrumental rationality is good—both are necessary in their respective domains. Rather, I will try to show that if instrumenal reasons become predominant and absorb intrinsic ones, we become strangers to ourselves as our experience of life then becomes an endless meandering of means-to-ends operationality (just like a machine) with no ground to anchor all our instrumental endevours in. I will therefore call non-instrumental rationality existential rationality as it pertains to the essential dimension of human life which affords us the basis for meaning-making, identity-forming and founding axioms required for developing ethical codes, all of which are necessary preconditions for making sense of ourselves and the world we inhabit.

Faith vs knowledge

For millenia, existential dimension of human experience was fostered through religious practices. In our technoscientific age, the acknowledgement of the problem that the lack of spiritual culture in a post-god society leads to crisis has been explored by thinkers associated with the “genres” broadly referred to as existentialism and phenomenology, including thinkers like Kirkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Heidegger and others. Existential thinkers sought to address the spiritual void which the Nietzschean death of God had made apparent in the secular language of philosophical discourse and literary prose. Some of these thinkers had considered themselves religious, some not, but all had realised the truth that one cannot simply ignore the spiritual dimension of human existence, even in the face of the fact that science and reason had rendered much of the religious myth and dogma obsolete, which has benefitted humanity in many ways, at least for a while.

While the currency of faith is meaning, the currency of knowledge is certainty. For the past four hundred years of Western history since the Enlightenment, the currency of faith has been giving way to the currency of knowledge. The world has become a reservoir of information, and with the newest technologies of the past thirty years or so the sheer abundance of information itself has created a world where its quantity and the processing power of the ever more advanced informational tools have started to overwhelm our biological capacity for making sense of it while the power of capital started to increasingly consume the scientific integrity.

What I’m trying to say is that our unbounded quest for certainty which manifested itself in the process of knowledge acquisition has got us to a paradoxical point of exponentially diminishing certainty where information tools have become powerful enough to undermine our critical faculties of using them with sound reason while at the same time being weaponised by the timeless human vices, such as greed, envy and revenge. This in turn caused the re-emergence of spirituality where faith is gaining in currency after scientific knowledge has seemingly failed to deliver on its promise of certainty. In a hyper-simulated world where little can be known anymore, and increasingly we are forced to make decisions based on insufficient evidence, we are forced to reclaim the power of believing ourselves into our future realities.

Instrumentalism and certainty bias

Human brain hates uncertainty. We have evolved to make decisions and plan ahead to ensure survival so our decision-making capacity is directly tied up to the algorithmic evolutionary demand of maximising our life chances. This suggests that the human mind has to make sense and feel certain about our assessment of reality as a precondition for executing our plans with conviction.

In other words, a sense of certainty is instrumental for us to successfully carry out our plans. But unwarranted certainty comes at a high cost, which we realise when we find out we got something terribly wrong and the bottom of our world falls out. The ultimate source of such a realisation of this is becoming aware of our self-deception which we had fallen into for the sake of unwarranted certainty our mind is naturally biased for. In the majority of cases this bias will work for us alright, helping us survive or even thrive as a mental shortcut which automates cognitive processes. But the cost of this is the inevitable moments of self-deception when we get carried away by our evolutionary algorithms as a result of not keeping mindful of our own thought processes and perceptions. Ultimately, having our illusions destroyed is great because it forces us to redraw the map of our world anew so as to refresh our criteria for sensemaking. Each time this happens we learn something new about ourselves, and the hardship we experience as we go through the process of our psychospiritual deaths and resurrections is the necessary catalyst of such a self-renewal.

Mis-attribution of certainty can be easily identified on the individual level, but I want to explore how it plays out in the process of civilization so that we can see the current planetary metacrisis through this lens. The reason for this is to dig out the historic process of how the Western technoscientific quest for certainty has evolved over centuries, eventually leading to what Shoshana Zuboff in her 2019 ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ calls instrumentarian power whose final goal, as she argues, is to reduce life processes of a society (which are inherently complex and uncertain) to total certainty through total automation of all life.

The fundamental question which comes to mind at this point is, ‘How do we reconcile faith with knowledge—our religious need for existential meaning with our scientific need for certainty, in a way that lets both faculties occupy their respective domains of the human experience without conflict?’

The Western quest of certainty: from Parmenides to AI

Because feeling certain is such a big deal for humans, and because the price of being falsely certain is so great, it makes sense to develop tools which can increase the reliability of human judgement. The chief tool we have evolved in the West to enhance the reliability of our feeling certain is the scientific method.

The story of scientific thinking in the West goes back to pre-Socratic philosophers like Thales, Heraclitus, Anaximenes, Democritus, Parmenides and others. They had all sought to explain the natural world in terms of a fundamental underlying principle of all nature which they called arche— a sort of primordial substrate of reality, the orgin and essential element of the whole of cosmos; something certain to found an entire metaphysical worldview upon. For Thales this substance was water, for Heraclitus fire, for Anaximenes air, and for Parmenides the mysterious One.¹ The writings of these early Western thinkers were mostly allegorical poems which aimed at revealing some fundamental aspects of their reality where mythology and insight coexisted in an inspired flow of ideas.

The birth of dialectic

But with Socrates and Plato the psychotechnology of dialectic emerged with a whole new level of reasoning power. Dialectic, the development of—which the cognitive scientist John Varvake attributes to the invention of alphabetic literacy—fortified by the empirical experiments of Plato’s mentee, Aristotle, have laid the axiomatic foundation for two thousand years of Western culture that is now, as I see it, once again being re-evaluated at our own time of Kairos—the ‘time of the metamorphosis of the gods’ or, in other words, of a fundamental re-evaluation of the categories and concepts by the means of which we understand and orient ourselves towards the world. As the psychotechnologies of language and information evolved, human cognition evolved also, and with it the human capacity for assessing certainty.

The methods and epistemic technologies used by the early Greek thinkers might be seen as naive and primitive by our moden standards, but what I will try to show is that despite the tremendous scientific advancement of the past few centuries, the underlying motivational drivers of scientific progress have been roughly the same: the instrumental quest for certainty in explaining the world which is both much richer, sophisticated and better in a multitude of ways, but the downside of it is that through the advancement of our tools we have virtually emptied the would of mystery, awe and wonder, which I believe to be essential to human thriving as they foster inspiration, creativity and symbolic meaning-making. When awe and certainty are in combat, it appears as though certainty always wins, and as our knowledge-generating tools become ever more sharper, the blade of certainty cuts off all parts of the human experience which don’t fit its strict validation criteria.

This “disenchantment of the world”—to use Max Weber’s term—by the pursuit of total certainty continued after the Greeks by the great minds of Thomas Aquinas, William of Occam, Rene Descartes (the certainty of deductive reasoning), Isaac Newton, David Hume (the certainty of empirical method) or Immanuel Kant (the “apodictic certainty” of the criteria of knowledge itself). It has left us hanging in a world emptied out of the sense of awe and inspiration, where human life is reduced to hard data after being quantified, computed, predicted, mapped and extracted in an instrumentarian AI-Moloch of total operationality; a Moloch with no inherent purpose other than devouring the life of that upon which its metastasizing self-destructiveness depends. The example of this predicament is having man-made tools designed to engineer our ignorance of the myriad of false certainties by the means of which we drive the ship of humanity off a cliff as we enter the 21st century.

Instrumental meaning vs existential meaning

The problem with seeking certainty is that it eludes the seeker by serving an illusion of itself. By chopping the non-quantifiable/non-observable aspects of human experience off for the sake of having “reliable” data, a scientist causes fragmentation of that which originates as a whole, while ignoring all of the world’s wondrous contingency that resists all categorisation. It is the essence of life that it is unruly, spontaneous and emergent in ways that surprise, excite us with unique unexpected meanings; meanings that cannot be universalised or reduced to numeric values or statistics. This is where we thrive as biological entities—in the space where spontaneous creativity manifests itself irrespective of instruments which, if used wisely assist us, but if used in ignorance lead to our demise. Instruments serve life insofar as they add value without making us too attached to them.

As Heidegger points out in Being and Time, we discover existential meaning of something when we lose it. During the lockdowns of 2020 many of the conveniences we had used to take for granted vanished. We felt isolated from each other. This experience reoriented us to appreciate the existential value of human relationship and connection, a walk in a park, but also the value of solitude and its cathartic power of making us face ourselves to reflect on our life, values and habits, hopefully leading us to realign our will with our true purpose—as our routines modes of operation broke down, this had made existential dimensions of our experience come to light. None of the above had anything to do with science other than being a consequence of human mishandling of the science’s godlike power by creatures whose nervous systems are still those of a caveman.

How did it feel to lose our old ways of being? When we realise that answering a multitude of scientific ‘hows’ still leaves us hungry for the existential ‘whys,’ we also realise that what has happened in the West is that those who most strongly reject the need for the ‘why’ of life are the ones who project their unconscious yearning for it in a desparate quest for total certainty in the world increasingly devoid of one. The most dogmatic kind of religion is one self-deceived into believing itself to be its opposite.

From scientism to instrumentarianism

Knowledge produced by science produces certainty, for much of what once was myth and superstition could not be verified and rectified through application of rational analysis and empirical examination. The core problem is that technology, incentivised by capital, instrumentalises science to arbitrary ends, because it is capital and not sound epistemic principles which drive the reasons for the technological application of scientific knowledge. When instrumental motivations for knowledge production and application dominate the intrinsic motivations which could check the integrity of the process, then the very purpose of science and technology becomes untethered from its original purpose as formulated at birth of the Enlightenment: science and reason will save humanity from its irrational instincts, religious superstition and tyranny of class privilage.

Just as instrumentalizing God—(applying reason to the ineffable) through Aquinas’ theology where Aristotelian logic meets religious dogma—had led to undermining Christianity in the West, the new “religion” of the Enlightenment has thought its own logic to its ultimate realisation: that it itself was just another myth, driven by the same desire for certainty that religion had tried to address in the pre-scientific age. From the Nietzschean perspective, both religion and science have one and the same goal: truth-seeking. For religion this truth is revealed, transcendent in a pre-cognitive sense; for a scientist, truth has to be grounded in empirical evidence and sound logic. Still, the goal of both is an attempt to seek truth—just the methods change as the times and psychotechnologies change.

Now, if truth-seeking is merely considered as instrumental then there’s nothing to ground its instrinsic purpose in. The only way in which we could secure the value of truth-seeking as intrinsic would be to make it independent of instrumental reasons for treating knowledge as a means to technological ends. But at the same time we know that the capital that drives the technoscientific process is blind and imposes total instrumentarianism as an invisible dogma dictated to humans through the very instruments humans themselves have developed. To paraphrase Spengler, we have become slaves of our own productions. We don’t drive progress—it drives us. The more powerful are the tools we develop, the greater the capacity we have to develop even more powerful ones. Current AI modules can even recursively improve themselves, which is unprecedented in the history of human tool-making. The more powerful the science, the greater the temptation to employ it prematurely into new technologies and be caught up in certainty bias of fist-order thinking; the bias of not being able to stare into the abyss of what might go wrong as a result of our drunkenness with the unforeseen possibilities of scaling the inherent potentialities of human inventiveness.

In our unreflective race to the bottom of more and more technics, we fail to notice the way in which our perceptions get colonised by technical thinking, converting everything, including the intrinsic values of life, into data which exterminates the wonder of uncertainty and builds us a digital cage with a promise of increasing the multitudes of desires to deliver us to short-time pleasures at the cost of long term sufferings, the former meaningless, the latter meaning-making. To become free from the Moloch of instrumentarianism, it seems, means to develop the capacity to walk away from pleasure for the sake of intrinsic values in a world optimised for selling intrisic values for instrumental reasons.

A glitch in the Matrix

The linear machine-logic of instrumentarian power cannot stand the organic spontaneity and uncontrollability of life, and therefore it silently seeks to erode it, convert it into data, subjugate it to its dead protocols while feeding on its biological energy. In the process it stuns will, aneasthesises our capacity for insight, and cripples relationships with a dissociative imperative induced by having our faces stuck to screens at the cost of feeling alive, inspired, connected and thriving. As a replacement for losing the real thing, the deathcult of instrumentarianism offers lifeless substitutes: fake relationships, fake jobs, fake smiles, fake reputations, fake politics, fake eye-lashes, fake motives, fake interactions, fake social media accounts, deepfakes, and ultimately, fake intelligence in the form of AI. Nothing would be bad about having all of these available if the fake did not colonise the real as it evidently does.

Instrumentarian religion sells just like every other which preceeded it. The competitive advantage of its marketing strategy appeals to poeple’s unwarranted certainty in radically uncertain times. The Roman-Catholic Christianity sold the certainty of salvation at the cost of scientific ignorance only to discover this very ignorance ended up undermining the legitimacy od dogma by the scholastic thinkers. The Enlightenment sold salvation through the scientific certainty of secular rationality which has eventually metastisized into the Moloch of intrumentarianism. But instrumentarianism sells the the religion of certainty as total security, simulation and synthetic immortality at the cost of sacrificing one’s right to autonomous thought on the altar of total automation.

Instrumentarianism’s zeal is cultish, its methods reductive and its power inexorable. Its insatiable hunger consumes life, converts it into binary code and spits out anything that doesn’t fit its metrics. All that is not optimised for total frictionless efficiency is automated out of existence. The Moloch of instrumentarianism, just like the archetypal deity of the ancient mythos, devours its children in a futile attempt to sustain its self-terminating nature as the undivine adversary of all life which arificialises, devours flesh and blood and vomits out drones while making is look like a miracle—thus the Moloch of instrumentarianism is the master illusionist—the true face of macrocosmic deception. Instrumentarianism cloaks itself in the virtues of love, charity and humanitarianism in order to suck the blood of humanity by continuously enhancing the ways in which its deception becomes imperceptible to those it feeds upon.

Exit deathcult

If thriving life requires embracing the adventure of play, taking risks, the novelty of feeling surprised or inspired, making mistakes to learn and embracing ambiguity to be able to think through complexity, then instrumentarianism cannot tolerate any of this as it cannot handle what it cannot control by the false binaries of its atavistic algorithm.

This is why the more we exercise our humanity, the more we demonstrate the ultimate fraud of the glamourous spendour that the instumentalist regime tries so desperately to implement—it’s all fake. Be authentic, speak your truth, live your life the way that makes sense to you, connect with people who care as much as you do and ignore what deserves to be ignored. As the Tower of Babel builds itself beyond the scope of human supervision, its increasingly frail structure becomes visible to us who have decided to return to the ground of the human world. We can now patiently watch it reaching out to its inevitable collapse and lead those who survive into a fully human future for the first time in history.

1. Importantly, Parmenides had come up with a distinction between truth (alatheia) and opinion (doxa) which we still use to define what science is.