Friends and Enemies of Human Conscience

Introduction

In our highly developed and enormously prosperous Western liberal democratic societies, we have become convinced that we are now, due to the scientific and technological progress, prowess, and power we have built over the centuries as a ‘superior’ civilization, entirely self-made humans that are the masters over life, death, and creation, in fact taking the Marxist ideological cue from totalitarian regimes past and present such as the Soviet Union and China.

This in combination with the rapid secularization of Western societies and the mainstreaming of cultural relativism over the past decades has also made many believe that God is dead and will remain so, as Friedrich Nietzsche infamously put it already in his time, and that the transcendent order the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian culture integrated into society as the conceptual framework in which human life as a whole was to be understood, is no longer relevant, even bigoted. 

Instead, the modern Western paradigm seems to be that we are beholden to nothing other than ourselves and the laws, institutions, and applications we have built around the now ‘superior’ homo technicus. Human progress and control by any means available is the reigning order and for the sake of enabling its unstoppable ascent, all else becomes either secondary or to be entirely discarded, especially the search for the truth of what it means to be human, within that stable pre-political framework of transcendent measurements that the 20^th century’s most influential political philosopher Hannah Arendt points out. 

A conception of law which identifies what is right with the notion of what is good for – for the individual, or the family, or the people, or the largest number – becomes inevitable once the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature have lost their authority. And this predicament is by no means solved if the unit to which the ‘good for’ applies is as large as mankind itself. For it is quite conceivable, and even within the realm of practical political possibilities, that one fine day a highly organized and mechanized humanity will conclude quite democratically – namely by majority decision – that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof. Here, in the problems of factual reality, we are confronted with one of the oldest perplexities of political philosophy, which could remain undetected only so long as a stable Christian theology provided the framework for all political and philosophical problems, but which long ago caused Plato to say: “Not man, but a god, must be the measure of all things.”

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1950

It is however this very truth that we as individual man and woman knowingly or unknowingly always search for in life and that we come to understand only in the uniquely private sphere that is at the core of our being as humans and that is itself deeply rooted in this transcendent order: our conscience, part of which is our ‘moral compass.’

Our conscience – which requires the uninhibited ability of truthful speech for its public expression, dialogue, and subsequent development – is the innermost realm of the individual human being where we discern between good and evil, just and unjust, and how we should respond to any given situation where the tension or collision of these two opposites takes place and from whence we are called to take a stand through words or deeds, or neither of these two. 

Our conscience is where our understanding of nature and our ability to reason are at work, guided by our religious or philosophical principles and convictions, and triggered by the concrete realities and responsibilities in which we find ourselves day by day. Ideally, through an ongoing process of education and personal growth, we come to understand and apply the promptings of our conscience ever better as we develop a sharper sense of what is right and just, and how to respond accordingly. Not even the most well-developed AI language model can replace our conscience or even mimic it. It is uniquely and irreplaceably human.

This brings us to the root of the problem that I would like to discuss, when, as the title of this essay suggests, we look at the primacy of conscience versus the propaganda of progress and the resulting technocratic paradigm of modern Western society. The idea of the primacy of conscience clearly threatens the modern notion of unlimited human progress and controllability by any means available as the reigning order. This is because an activated human conscience recognizes only the transcendent or pre-political moral order – also referred to as ‘the Natural Law’ – as leading, not the ideology of the day or the theories and edicts of the current ‘stakeholder’ power that seeks to implement it.

The primacy of conscience is threatening to such powers because as a society we have come to the point not only of rejecting the transcendent but therefore necessarily also numbing our conscience and denying its primacy in all human affairs. What is left are raw human passions, such as fear and hunger for power, to rule us.

In this essay, I will try to illustrate where this in essence dehumanizing and as a result self-defeating ideology leads us to and with what destructive consequences, including the undermining of justice and the Rule of Law in democratic societies. I will also in a small way propose how we may start to overcome this inevitable dead end that ultimately leads us to the wholesale negation of the inviolable dignity of every human being and its unique and unrepeatable calling in this world.

How a Living Conscience Threatens Power

Why is the individual conscience – provided it is recognized and carefully cultivated by its host – and its exclusive rootedness in what Hannah Arendt called “the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature” perceived as such a threat so often in the history of political systems and their governing of nations? How is it that the relationship between the governing and the governed tends to be so fraught, especially when the precarious balance between state power on the one hand and individual freedom or communal autonomy and responsibility on the other are concerned?

Why is it that even in Western liberal democracies today, as we will discuss below, the fundamental rights to freedom of conscience, religion, and speech are so visibly undermined and at times suppressed by policies and actions that claim to represent the agenda of progress, safety and security? Again, Hannah Arendt, way ahead of her time, has a poignant answer ready in “The Origins of Totalitarianism:” 

The more highly developed a civilization, the more accomplished the world it has produced, the more at home men feel within the human artifice – the more they will resent everything they have not produced, everything that is merely and mysteriously given them. (..) This mere existence, that is, all that which is mysteriously given us by birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine “Vodo ut sis (I want you to be),” without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation. Since the Greeks, we have known that highly developed political life breeds a deep-rooted suspicion of this private sphere, a deep resentment against the disturbing miracle contained in the fact that each of us is made as he is – single, unique, unchangeable.

The modern capitalist state that deems only itself omnipotent in human affairs and built on the ideology of unstoppable human progress through unlimited use of technology and scientific advances in general brings with it an unquenchable urge to control its subjects and customers even more because the success of the project of the entirely self-made and predictable human being depends on it that we all fully cooperate with that same vision and comply with the actions that result from it.

To achieve this adherence by the populace, those promoting this vision – whether state actors, NGOs, or large commercial interests advancing this ideology together as we will discuss below – need to be able to not only control the narrative itself, but also the bodies, thoughts, and feelings of the individual human beings under their always benevolent rule, since they merely want, in the words of Arendt, “what is good for mankind.” 

In a recent article published by David McGrogan from Northumbria Law School, the author gives a prescient analysis of the essence of this battle for the ‘private sphere’ of the individual human being, as I called it above, and around the public dissemination and discussion of information in its various forms: true, false, misleading, insulting, dangerous, or whatever other label is appropriate to qualify a specific piece of information shared, and how the State, its partners and society as a whole should deal with this. In his analysis of the deeper roots of the problem, a major issue that is mostly being ignored in the still far too limited debate on the undermining of fundamental freedoms of conscience, religion, and speech in today’s technologically directed Western societies, McGrogan observes:

The problem at root is not that there are people who are seeking to suppress freedom of speech (though there are such people); the problem rather is the underlying desire to manage what I will call – following Foucault – the ‘circulation of merits and faults’ in society, and how this relates in particular to speech-acts. Put more straightforwardly, the issue is not exactly that freedom of speech is being restricted, but rather that a global effort is underway to decide what is true, and to produce a consciousness of that ‘truth’ within each and every individual, at any given moment, so that their speech indeed can do nothing but declare it.

In different words, we hear McGrogan echo Arendt’s description of the resentment that exists, not only as well-known from totalitarian societies, but now also in (il)liberal Western democracies, against the voice of the individual human conscience and that which is not in accordance with the specific ‘mainstream’ opinion or publicly approved narrative of the day. The former, by lack of an overarching higher order we might otherwise choose to abide by, is, therefore, itself considered the highest and indisputable truth to be followed in thoughts, words, and actions (think of popular phrases such as ‘The science is settled’). We are thus engaged in a battle for the human mind. 

The resentment is especially directed against that single, unique, and autonomous human being who in general tries to live as good as he or she can in accordance with their conscience and weighing the options in front of them related to his or her responsibilities towards family, community, and country. This is obviously an imperfect process that takes many twists and turns but is surely not to be managed instead by faceless technocratic bureaucracies and state-like companies. Rather, it needs the constant helping hand of the community of which that human being is a part, a solid holistic education, and the free flow of information, dialogue, and public debate.

It is on all these fronts that we are today so terribly failing in what we like to call our advanced Western liberal democracies, whereby in recent history our collective response to Covid-19 has been the darkest and most comprehensive of our failings.

As I noted in a video message to my students already in April 2020, the global response to the Covid-19 outbreak was a Pavlov-like reaction without much reflection applying a technocratic and moralistic sledgehammer (‘Nobody is safe until we are all safe’), so characteristically illustrated by the martial language and symbols of state power applied by our leaders during their regular live-streamed press conferences at the time. We at the same time saw on display modern society’s ire (whether by the rulers or the ruled) – inspired by the passion of fear – directed against the diverging ways in which inherently different and unique human beings and communities tend to respond in thought, word, and deed to such potentially life-threatening situations.

The modern mindset of omnipotent human control and capabilities that was so visibly caught off-guard and thus panicked by the outbreak of Covid-19 has been fixated on one-size-fits-all solutions – ‘measures’ as we so often heard during the years since 2020 – that are preferably centrally directed without much regard for human diversity, ethical considerations, and above all a rigorous scientific debate informed by complete honesty and transparency. The careful observer could see play out live starting in February 2020 what happens to society when humanity no longer accepts the overarching limitations of the transcendent order, whilst being confronted with the harsh reality of its inherent ignorance, fragility, and mortality in relation to the forces and laws of nature that are – other than we keep trying to tell ourselves – not under our control and never will be. 

It is obvious that a coordinated response to the outbreak was necessary and that leaders had a responsibility to act. It was however the motivation that drove our response, namely fear, which made it so problematic. 

From the Rule of Law to the Rule of Power

The outbreak of Covid-19 and how we responded to it – whether or not humans in a Wuhan lab caused it, which is a debate to be held elsewhere – is a tragic example of the homo technicus overplaying its hand. Through the instrumentalization and also weaponization of fear, measures were implemented by governments that would normally not pass the litmus test of parliamentary and judicial scrutiny in relation to proportionality, constitutionality, and respect for human rights. 

As a result, the Rule of Power, which too many leaders gave themselves based on real or imagined dangers to public health, quickly replaced the Rule of Law. The results have been devastating and lasting, which can be illustrated by briefly discussing the three areas of human life listed above where we have done the opposite of what was needed to help people deal with the Covid-19 crisis in good conscience and health. 

We closed access to community life. This specifically included the vitally important access to religious services in times of crisis. The worldwide and nationwide lockdowns between 2020 and 2023 were a perfect example of a dehumanizing approach where all human beings were collectively treated as potential biohazards to be submitted to the power of the State whilst being required to live in isolation for long periods of time, even when it was clear from the beginning of the outbreak that the risk factors in relation to the age groups were widely varying and thus calling for a more diversified approach. At the same time, those we were called to ‘protect,’ the old and vulnerable, were suffering and dying often alone, with no family or loved ones allowed at their bedside.

We closed educational institutions, in some countries for more than two years. No group in society has suffered more and more lastingly than our youth, who in the prime of their lives have missed out on learning and on the essential work of forming their characters and building relationships and social skills in an educational environment of daily exchange and growth. The mandatory and prolonged closings of schools and universities and the subsequent mask and vaccine mandates – with the exception of those institutions led by the few like myself who refused to prolong this injustice – have wreaked havoc for decades to come. Youth psychological issues have exploded.

We throttled information and debate and continue to do so today. Here as with other societal problems we currently face and that are related to the essence of human life (such as for example climate change), alternative and carefully reasoned and scientifically based viewpoints are all too often not appreciated, even called dangerous, anti-science, and the work of “conspiracy theorists,” because these question the false notion that we as an advanced civilization can bring any phenomenon occurring unplanned within our control through collectively promoted and executed technological interventions based on ‘settled science’ (a contradiction in itself since science is inherently an ongoing process of questioning, not a truth factory).

Information and debate that questions this prevailing narrative of the entirely self-made human being in control of everything is deeply resented by the arrogant and profoundly intolerant ideology of progress and will inevitably be automatically labeled as “mis- or disinformation” and ‘anti-science,’ whilst being countered with censorship and propaganda. We again turn to Hannah Arendt who, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, carefully analyzes the tool of propaganda and its workings in a political setting:

Scientificality of mass propaganda has indeed been so universally employed in modern politics that it has been interpreted as a more general sign of that obsession with science which has characterized the Western world since the rise of mathematics and physics in the sixteenth century; thus totalitarianism appears to be only the last stage in a process during which “science [has become] an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man.

Modern Western societies, with their obsession for unstoppable progress and unlimited economic growth by means of science and technology alone, could also be referred to as a 21st-century form of technocracy. Technocracy is defined as “government by technicians who are guided solely by the imperatives of their technology” or “an organizational structure in which decision-makers are selected based on their specialized, technological knowledge, and/or rule according to technical processes.” 

Either way, as I described in detail in my 2021 essay on the topic, the global Covid regime convincingly proved its totalitarian tendencies and also specifically followed the terrible example of a real totalitarian regime such as that of China. We need only look at the way in which fear and the tools (the Dutch government at the time indeed spoke literally of a ‘Covid toolbox’) of lockdowns, censorship, and propaganda have been used to achieve compliance with far-reaching and all-encompassing measures unheard of in Western liberal democracies since the end of World War Two, where the general mantra still is that individual freedoms need to be sacrificed on the altar of safety and collective progress. This happens mostly through the application of ever more total technological control enabled by the highly commercialized and seemingly invincible digital infrastructure behemoths described so well as the ‘Big Other’ of ‘instrumentarian power’ in Shoshana Zuboff’s 2018 bestselling book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.”

Whilst quoting George Orwell she rightly warns that “literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it.” What Zuboff probably could not foresee then was how the onset of the Corona crisis in 2020 would fast-track the voluntary capture of Big Tech – the drivers of surveillance capitalism – by the State, whilst enticing them through lucrative government contracts, prestige, and even more power to make common cause in presenting a united front and engaging in a coordinated operation to suppress or discredit any information or public debate that is not in accordance with the health and pandemic policies to be implemented. 

The main aim of censorship, it is often forgotten, is not so much the content of the information itself, but rather individual human beings educating their conscience to be able to receive, share, and publicly discuss other facts, scientific insights and reasoned arguments that are inconvenient or divergent from what are considered official opinions and policies. The seriousness of where such an attitude leads to was on full display during an impromptu March 2020 press conference by then New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who claimed in relation to Covid (mis)information then circulating:

We will continue to be your single source of truth. We will provide information frequently; we will share everything we can. Everything else you see, a grain of salt. So, I really ask people to focus…And when you see those messages, remember that unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth.

This reflex by any governing class is in fact as old as the polis itself; it just continually presents itself in different clothing and using different slogans. Today ‘progress,’ ‘safety,’ or ‘security’ are preferred motivators. 

A most revealing illustration of the reality of censorship in Western liberal democracies was made public through the 26 August 2024 letter published on X by the CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, outlining to the Committee on the Judiciary of the United States House of Representatives how “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.”

The letter follows many earlier revelations on both sides of the Atlantic and in other countries of government censorship, for example, the Twitter files, the German RKI files, and the evidence obtained during the Murthy vs. Biden court proceedings that went all the way to the Supreme Court and will return there again.

Leading politicians such as Ursula von der Leyen, the recently reappointed president of the European Commission, seem to be most preoccupied with controlling the flow of information in their jurisdictions. She said at the 2024 World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos earlier this year:

For the global business community, the top concern for the next two years is not conflict or climate, it is disinformation and misinformation, followed closely by polarisation within our societies.

Is that so? One wonders if Ms. Von der Leyen is for example aware of the massive death toll and economic destruction that current wars and conflicts in the Ukraine, the Middle East, and African countries such as Sudan, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo are causing. John Kerry, formerly US Secretary of State, went even further and at another WEF event spoke about “The First Amendment stands as a major roadblock for us right now” whilst lamenting the rise of “mis- and disinformation.” Who actually defines what these vague terms mean?

Why this obsession with combatting “mis- and disinformation,” “hate speech,” “unacceptable views” (in the words of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau), or more recently the new UK government speaking about “legal but harmful speech,” in fact any form of the Orwellian “wrong think?” Why are political leaders such as von der Leyen, Kerry, Trudeau, and many others in the West, apart from legitimate political concerns about violence, discrimination, and sexual abuse, so focused on what happens in our minds and bodies through the information we consume, share, and debate? 

To illustrate how these urgent questions live on every side of the political and professional spectrum, this is what three respectable recent authors out of many have to say on the matter: in the 2023 book Technofeudalism – What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis, a leader of the socialist Syriza party and former finance minister of Greece, in his analysis of modernity observes that “under technofeudalism, we no longer own our minds,” whilst the British architect and social sciences academic Simon Elmer in his 2022 work The Road to Fascism laments the “normalization of censorship as the default response to disagreement” and that the “corporate media has become the unified propaganda arm of the state tasked with censoring anything the Government judges to be ‘fake news’.”

The internationally recognized German medical doctor, scientist, and bestselling author Michael Nehls, in his 2023 equally bestselling book Das Indoktrinierte Gehirn, where he discusses how we can repel the global attack on our mental freedom, observes: “would-be autocrats fear nothing more than human creativity and social awareness.”

Conclusion and Remedies

Apart from the continued human suffering and economic destruction the policies relating to Covid-19 and other current ‘permanent crisis’ issues such as climate change have brought us, it has also fast-tracked the process of the State, along with its voluntarily captured partners in the world of corporate and non-governmental institutions, in many cases becoming an overbearing leviathan that increasingly takes upon itself the role of the arbiter of truth and the manager of our whole lives. All, of course, to protect our health, security, and further progress. 

However, in the absence of a recognized pre-political or transcendent order that is accessible through a living human conscience and that defines the fundamental and unchangeable principles of right and wrong whilst also limiting the power of government, the State and its partners unavoidably fall into the all-too-human trap of exercising power arbitrarily along the lines of merely the personal, political, and financial interests of those that happen to be in power at any given moment. Ultimately, government is nothing else than the expression of the individual characters and actions of those that control its (partnered) institutions. 

In our secularized and by now mostly post-Christian Western societies, a gaping moral void has appeared that is being filled by different ideologies and thus also by the leviathan State, which, according to McGrogan referencing Foucault, now acts as the pastor and the governor of souls, willingly assisted by a host of non-state actors motivated by power, prestige, and money. Ultimately, a pastor is exactly what the human being is seeking, a way to guide its soul that is struggling daily to deal with the often conflicting realities of life on this earth. McGrogan further observes that 

secularisation appears increasingly to mean the replacement of church by state in quite literal terms, with the state presenting itself as the means for realising a kind of temporal salvation, and the structure of government taking the form of a mechanism precisely for the management of the “circulation of merits and faults.”

This means that when rejecting as we do today the transcendent order of the fundamental principles that Western civilization was built on, there is only left the prospect of that void being filled by other religious systems or as we have been discussing here an overbearing state apparatus with its supporting institutions, wanting to take full control of every aspect of human life: mind, body, and soul. This is where we stand today. 

Do we really want these structures that are nothing else than a reflection of the human beings and AI systems that govern them, to be our ‘pastors,’ whereby, in the words of McGrogan “the state tells the population what is true, and the population declares that truth accordingly?” Or do we choose the alternative that starts at the innermost realm of ourselves: a living conscience that is a given for everyone to further develop rooted as it is in the “transcendent measurements” (Hannah Arendt) and timeless principles of human life?

What serves democracy and the Rule of Law, a leviathan system of (digital) control and totalizing government by mere interests, or a cultivated inner and community life that is charitable and respects the dignity of individual freedom whilst seeking voluntary service to others, also through the role of government?

What is the remedy for this predicament in which we find ourselves? There is not just one and it would require a whole book to be more complete, but some initial thoughts might lead the way. The most important and urgent task is that we learn and live again the true meaning of freedom. Freedom is not, as we are being told by the ideology of unlimited progress and control, that we can do what we want, when we want it, and how we want it. Freedom is something else entirely: it is the unimpeded ability to choose and act upon what is right and just and to reject what is not. This first requires that we learn again, and teach vigorously in our families and educational institutions, how to think for oneself, to reflect on what is the reality we find ourselves in, and subsequently learn how to conduct a true encounter and discussion with the other, especially those with whom we do not agree. 

Yet ultimately, there is no route possible that tries to go around a return to the study and public debate of the written sources and lived rituals of Western Civilization brought to us by the Greek philosophers, the Roman jurists, and the ongoing Judeo-Christian tradition and its rich culture of searching for the truth of what it means to be human. From Socrates to Cicero, from Adam and Eve to fulfillment in Jesus Christ, and all the great prophetic voices that speak in between, this search has been the unending quest that has motivated our civilization and propelled it forward as we started to find answers and solutions. 

Like any civilization, Western Civilization is not perfect and abounds with tales of human imperfection and grave error, from which we can always learn. The great voices and texts of these four deeply intertwined traditions however all have concrete answers to the problems of today. They most of all teach us a fundamental understanding that they all shared and which is the reason why they did not cancel each other over the centuries but have made each other’s wisdom gain a source of mutual engagement and enrichment: the Greek, the Roman, the Jew, and the Christian all recognized the same truth that in the words of Plato mean that “not Man, but a god, must be the measure of all things.” In his brilliant speech before the German parliament in 2011, Pope Benedict XVI completed this statement by saying:

Unlike other great religions, Christianity has never proposed a revealed law to the State and to society, that is to say a juridical order derived from revelation. Instead, it has pointed to nature and reason as the true sources of law – and to the harmony of objective and subjective reason, which naturally presupposes that both spheres are rooted in the creative reason of God.

This essential and daily humble attitude of the human being in society and in government is the only way to save mankind from yet another descent into totalitarianism and enslavement. The choice is really ours to make.