Brief notes on the religion of the technique and the genesis of terrorism

The Man has reached extraordinary, technical results; they allowed to obtain very remarkable conquests, getting wide the man’s own physical space, making possible to conjecture in a concrete way the realization of human settlements, far away both from the Mother-Earth and psychically from the deep core of own soul. The God of the Origin is not yet – according to earlier alchemist Hermes Trismegistus – “an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere”[1]. Indeed, the divinity is made literal in his worldly meaning and he could lose own generative power, its own mana.

There are more ‘signs’ and less ‘symbols’ in the contemporary, religious life. The ‘death’ of the religious symbol causes dangerous, extreme drifts, because it alienates the Man from his own nature, that is made of body and pneuma, both physical and psychic realities, resulting a loss of the paradox, in any deadly, primitive and psychic emptiness. The individual excludes the “other” because he is not recognized or accepted, that is belonging at his own élite: the religious integralism could turn in a dangerous way, towards individual and collective psychosis.

The man considers himself as “child of the Earth”, born, nourished, absorbed by the Mother-Earth up to the end of his life cycle. The Earth is an enormous mandala and has always been the only place in which the human existence happens.

The man has been tried to penetrate the Universe for becoming its essential part, for understanding it, too; moreover, he wish to avoid to fall down, slipping into the Mother-Earth’s gravitational grip, trying for a sort of weaning.

The expansion of man’s action range and colonizing capability towards the space could be a risk, because he could fall into the hybris; each technical knowledge hides any grievous, misinterpreted imitatio Christi, that could foolishly lead for researching of control of Nature, towards a real, “mechanical” omnipotence, in which the worship turns to the technique. Therefore, the research of his own Individuation happens inside and outside of himself, but it is a false myth.

Approaching at the Heaven and at the desired House of Gods, it distances the mankind from his own Self, fragmenting the soul in some entropic, destructive ways.

Such projective way is with no soul; it could impoverish the mankind by his values, withdrawing towards a never-ending, psychic immaturity, at the state of puer. Such centrifugal movement, that is as an “escape from the Center”, or from a real religious yearning, impoverish the soul by any “psychic matter”, feeding any behaviour with empty formalisms, without any awareness or deepness.

Man needs a built world for living; he is a sort of wandering creature, that is the disposition to colonization leads him for finding new stay and new psychic ‘centers’ to whom he can refers. Helmut Plessner spoke about man’s ‘eccentricity’[2], that is a movement of the soul for creating the consciousness, leading him a ‘being in situation’, according to Italian psychoanalyst Umberto Galimberti[3]. Instead, Karl Jaspers described Man as a perpetually, ‘de-situated’ being[4].

Nowadays, the man has been able to expand own consciousness, keeping a ‘bond of soul’ with the Center, that is ‘his’ own Center.

The mankind has weaved a bond both sacred and transcendental through a medium: the prayer; through it, the man raises himself at God. The illusion in omnipotence of technique has deprived the prayer of its devotional meaning and submission at imponderable. The prayer has lost its ability of intercessory towards the Other, so that it has become an empty, worldly and propitiatory action.

Asking at the Divinity, such action turns itself from a propitiatory and public deed, that is unanimous and shared, to a mere private and parcelled process, in which the Cosmos is not the main author of harmony both the world and the individual, but it is just a simple scenery, as a background.

Such religious decadence hides the risk of bewilderment the sense of the Wholeness; in the past, it was the healer of both community and individual: human well-being was derived from God’s goodwill (in Latin Deo concedente).

As we speak on care and health of both person and social groups, we refer to ability to get any healthy relationship between the individual and social assembly where he lives; also, between the Persona, that is the Latin mask, that is to say the aspect we show at the world and the deeper and more ancient parts of our own psyche.

About terrorism, the terrible facts we have been witnessed, they are as a short circuit, a collapse among Persona, personal and collective unconscious on terrorists; more, it is happening a very serious downfall into the archetype of Shadow, that is both an alien and psychic object inside our psyche. Such object is very dangerous because it is not recognized: all the negative, unacceptable, demonic, shameful, they are any natural components of ambivalence of human nature, for being situated inside our Shadow, or Ombra. It is neither positive, nor negative: it could become harmful if is ignored or projected towards an exterior, psychic object.

Such so rough and bad events show both a lack of recognition of the Ombra and desperate research of ‘sense’ by the so-called western community. The ‘civilization’ has forced the individual towards a hard restriction of its own freedom, that is each personal idea of ‘justice’ is secondary regarding any social justice. Such justice can be divine or secular. Moreover, the technique has enlarged the interchange capability among any person. Any centrifugal and horizontal movement is prevailing than any centripetal, vertical, by psychic way: we perfectly know the surface, instead we do not know under it (or we have forgotten to know it).

Such attacks are included in pseudo-religious reasons, both for lexical aptitude and political profit; it might be thought that the commitment is in whatever cult, but it would be a dangerous simplification of thought: in a more realistic way, I think we could attribute it at a rough paganism.

How does so-called ‘western’ thinking regard to such extreme forms of fanaticism and ‘no-thought’? An apparent faith that is anchored only at an external form in which the religious function is not just a ‘fact of soul’. Religious phenomenon has to be an experiential and psychological event, if it is deeply religious: it is a ‘mysterium’. In this word is included the particle ‘mu’, that is to say the silence. The divine image is an archetype; it has found its own sacred silence, that is not as a pneumatic and desperate emptiness, but it has to traverse the path from the heart of the collective unconscious to the consciousness. Such image is often reduced to a simple simulacre, in which the image does not simbolize any underlying and psychological reality[5].

In ancient times of mankind, the instinctive level of thought was a normal event for the individual; instincts were easily, naturally integrated at the conscious level of psyche. Civilization and technique have taken off this opportunity to Man, because mankind has forgotten the way of access to the necessary supernatural and sacred symbols for the approach at ‘sacred’, for ‘seeing’ the sacred by the eyes of the soul.

We are attending at a global, new actualization of an archaic form of thought in those individuals who have projected and achieved such criminal attacks. Also, a very bad psychic immaturity emerges but, above all, a very dangerous incapability of thinking through symbols.

If we think through symbols, we are proceeding towards comprehension and acceptance of possibility of indefinite in our own inwardness; also, accepting the uncompleted, the doubt and the paradox, that are elements of which the Self is done, with the awareness that the existence of a hidden world further the meanings and more evident explication, beyond the absolute Light. There is a deluged world of contradiction, no-conclusion and endless explanations; these features refer at further meanings and so on…

A contemporary and key topic is the secular trend of some religions: that is because some worships are trying to approach the worldly instance of mankind. The first effect is a positive re-finding of a pure ministry, close at its own origin; however, such trend probably derives from a necessity of opposing at a decreasing participation at religious events. Such approach allows at diverse Churches, to contact the men in their ordinary life, using modern, friendly language, but it hugely impoverishes any transcendental, ineffable aspect and takes away by the thought any paradoxical aspects that could allow to include the Self, not only through each emerged parts, but especially through the deeper and invisible ones.

A colloquial language, such as visual, gestural, could be soothingly for churchgoers, but it prevents at religion to officiate its esoteric dimension, that is ‘high’, vertical, deep, instead of exoteric dimension, that is horizontal, extensive, superficial. We witness a lack of surplus of sense that was the mysteric heritage of each religion; such surplus could feature its otherness. Mankind has filled his own psyche with concepts, technique, certainties, competences and so on, but mankind has lost the richness of silence.

It could be a coincidence that after a few proclamations of tolerance, ecumenism, incorporation of any external and cultural instances, both geographical and social, often divergent; inconsequence, there could be a dramatic radicalism of any cultural contraposition. Such event seems to underline a psychological requirement for some people to feel, to show himself as ‘different’; it happens because a kind of fear to embody a social system that has a hegemony for economy, resource, technique.

It is a debate about the right interpretation on contents of Koran: some people claim the incoherence between Koran Law and brutality of several criminal events; on the contrary, someone else is thinking on the closeness between terrorism and its ideological source derived by the Koran. Above all, apart a likely conflict between civilizations, I think there is a fight between collective unconscious and personal unconscious.

Currently, it is a confrontation between individual and the society in which the individual lives and was been growing; there is a dramatic break between the collective unconscious, that is naturally impossible for identifying, whose roots are dating back at very far away eons, and the personal unconscious, made often by painful memories, that are removed, full of privation, eradication, ignorantly, wishes of revenge that are asleep. Such feelings have not found yet a resolution in psyche of individual: so, they remain as Ombra. In the period ’96-’99 circa 250 Palestinian who were living in Gaza territories were interviewed. They gravitated around Hamas or the sphere of influence of Jihad: the outcome of these interviews was a very low psychopathological component[6]. Nowadays, I think it is correct to speak about a sort of ‘terrorist’s psychopathology’ because the current background is very different since the time of that research, both locally and globally; furthermore, the pathology that I concern is not a psychiatric pathology, deriving from the DSM, but it is a pathology of the soul.

Concretely, I think the main cause on such crushing fury of latest, dramatic events is deriving by making manifest any socially and pathological needs as the angst of ‘not- being’, identity crisis, under which the terrorists have found their way-out. We are able to know them because among these terrorists is the first generation of immigrants with full satisfaction of primary needs; they have been addressed their own evolution from a natural routine to a technical one: their grandfathers and

parents had to invent again their own daily social backdrop, obtaining a job, a lodging and a ‘logic’ with the estrangement by their birthplaces. Early, their ancestors had a deep and psychic link towards these birthplaces, whereby they were own children; on the contrary, such terrorists are not anymore ‘children’ of their birthplace, not even psychically adapted in new situation, but only at an exterior level. These individuals have available an enormous amount of free and psychic energy, that is not used on the side of society, but against it, as a deed of rebellion, multi-stratified from previous generations, that is desperate. It is as if the psychic energy of 2 or 3 previous generations could find a punctiform gap, so aggressive. If individuals have lost each capability to relate themselves through the symbols with any impersonal and social establishment, the very dangerous risk is the collapse of the public part of individual’s life and his consequent retirement: the radicalization.

Each experience, each event of life related at the individual, is lived by himself as a profanation of the borders, truth and faith. The individual becomes harsh, suspicious towards the world and society in which he lives; according to Hillman, it is as if there is a surplus of salt, that takes down the individual at a paroxysmal closure and a virginal consideration of himself and his own creed. The risk is, according to Hillman, as the ‘fervor of salt’, that could lead to the zealotry, puritanism, terrorism. A lack of salt takes at the cleavage of any social and individual principle, instead an excess of salt could mean the entrance in a mood of terror[7].

The sense of individuality could be disowned in favor of needs of own reference group; such needs often could be in conflict with individual’s needs.

The unconscious expresses itself through both symbols and images whose ambiguous nature does not allow a clear separation among thoughts; the social rules take and coerce the individual for mixing, apparently, any psychic requests that converge in a superficial way, but their destiny is often turned to collapse, beyond the Persona, in a sort of conflict.

The process of globalization has forced mankind towards a sharing sense and encompassing effectiveness of values; it could lead the Man towards a ‘protection’ of the present and prevailing social system, that could not be able to pledge the claim of person’s individuality, above all the ones without any main role inside the hosting community due to personal and collective events.

It often happens a deep split between the social part of individual (Persona) and his core and intimate elements, that are protected by outer and worldly influences; furthermore, these are both psychically, symbolically closer at the more ancient strata of mankind.

Globalization is derived from an extreme, mercantile way of thinking, in which any human homogeneization includes any undeniable, economic and logistic benefits, above all by the side of a few individuals; it is possible due to very easy chance of communication and movement. The world’s soul does not need on economy or velocity, but she needs differences, forming the wholeness. The whole experience have necessarily pass through the experience of opposites.

Glibly, such terrorist actions promise immortal glory at engaged individuals; more, maybe a quarter of fame, according to Andy Warhol’s way of thinking; I think there are not informed and ideological aims behind any martyrdom. It is as if the person’s individual and collective memory had become sensitive at any solicitations of compensation and revenge regarding the ‘other’, that is the ‘host’, actually the social system. These are often individuals they have assimilated outer and hedonistic appearances about hosting society, making reassurance on any apparent integration (the Persona), avoiding any contact with any parts of collective unconscious that lead deeply the psyche of individual. A rift happens between Shadow and Persona and between collective and personal unconscious; such rift is not immediately visible; it is similar at such fissures that are in some buildings: they have developed themselves in a hidden way, keeping the exterior so untouched. The whole structure is perilously precarious and could fall down, with no sufficient escaping time for the inhabitants.

Contemporary society has lost its own aptitude of wait and the sacred sense, of transcendental and mystery; it has put both sign and symbol at the same floor, with a dangerous chaos of sense. Each sign corresponds with a unique meaning: our unconscious ignores any semantic and univocal way. If it introduces a dissonant and estranging, unknown element, in both rational and operating psyche, both alert and panic turn on: in this case, any unconscious and defensive system are adopted. Regarding to psychoanalysis, the main mechanism is the projection, that is the expulsion of our own things we does not like or our own things whose we are shaming of.

I close this essay with a Jung’s premonitory fragment, that was written fifty-five years ago; it seems to summarize some main fears we are living at current times:

«Modern man does not understand how much his “rationalism” (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic “underworld”. (…) Anthropologists have often described what happens to a primitive society when its spiritual values are exposed to the impact of modern civilization. Its people lose the meaning of their lives, their social organization disintegrates, and they themselves morally decay. We are now in the same condition. But we have never really understood what we have lost, for our spiritual leaders unfortunately were more interested in protecting their institutions than in understanding the mystery that symbols present. In my opinion, faith does not exclude thought (which is man’s strongest weapon), but unfortunately many believers seem to be so afraid of science (and incidentally of psychology) that they turn a blind eye to the numinous psychic powers that forever control man’s fate. We have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity: nothing is holy any longer» (C.G. Jung, Man and his Symbols, Anchor Press, 1964).

[1] Corpus Hermeticum, Bompiani, 2005.

[2] Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology, Amsterdam University Press, 2014.

[3] Umberto Galimberti, Psiche e techne, Feltrinelli, 2002.

[4] Karl Jaspers, Ragione ed esistenza, Marietti, 1971.

[5] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, The University of Michigan Press, 1994.

[6] R. Borum, Psychology of Terrorism, University of South Florida, Jan. 2004; A. Silke, Profiling terror, Jane’s Police Review, Aug. 2004.

[7] James Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, Uniform Edition, 2009.