Topic: The Machine-Planet: Our future? Darth Vader as Ahriman
From 'New View' Magazine. (Anthroposophic magazine). Not available on the internet.
The Machine-Planet: Our future?
by Ingo Hoppe
If one-sided developments are thought through to the end, grotesque pictures arise, which reveal essential spiritual beings. In the following article, pictures of this kind are brought out of the Science Fiction myth Star Wars and are discovered again in phenomena of the High-Tech industry, whereby a similarity is revealed in their essential nature. The first Star War films are already a thing of the past, but their mythology still lives on. Not only in the latest film, which was shown everywhere last year; but also in countless comics, toy-figures and computer games its central figures live on and fascinate millions of people. Even if one does not know that George Lucas (the Director) is reported to be well versed in many of the books of Rudolf Steiner, one can find confirmation of this at every step.
The 'Death-Star'
Whether in medicine or in robot-guided automobile production, whether in the entertainment industry or in daily life, everywhere the machine grows increasingly more dominant. To people like Bill Gates (head of Microsoft)1 it seems perfectly justified to wish to be allowed to connect up with cables and networks as many areas of life as possible, with the greatest possible speed and thoroughness, and computerise them totally. The Earth, encircled by satellites in ever greater numbers, becomes ever more tightly enwoven into the world-wide telecom and computer networks. Huge cities are constantly expanding, entire countries are transformed into deserts by industry, and cultural landscapes that have evolved over many centuries are criss-crossed by eight-lane highways, telegraph masts and television towers. Scarcely a family can be found that can do without the omnipresent entertainment machine, the television. And now, with gene-technology, living nature is also to be forced into the straight-jacket of mechanistic manipulation. If this development is thought through to the end, and if one assumes that it is the only developmental tendency of mankind, then it is plain to see what its final consequence would be: the environmental destruction of living nature in favour of the total mechanisation of all aspects of life.
If the individual is asked his/her opinion, scarcely anyone at all would seriously wish for this consequence. And yet millions of human beings act from day to day as though this very thing were their most earnest desire. Even though the individual does not wish it consciously, the inherent dynamic of the collective strives with clear goal-directedness towards a machine-planet. Everyone is opposed to it, but all are actively involved. Although human beings do not actually want total mechanisation - they may not always be aware of this but genuine reflection can raise it to consciousness - they nevertheless do everything that is needed to bring it about. To do something, indeed even, in a certain sense, to will it when one does not really want it, means that it is not the actual self of the human being that is behind the willing. It means that this will does not come from the human being, and that therefore something non-human wills it in him or her. Where, then, does the will come from, if it does not come from me? It must be something that is not me, but which nevertheless has the capacity to will. But willing in the true sense is something that only a Being can do: something that has at least an inner psychic nature; a dead object cannot will anything. From this it follows, therefore, that Beings must will in the human being, when, in a dull state of consciousness, he or she wills something that in their innermost being they cannot want (or will).
Advertising strategists stir up this foreign will within the human being on a daily basis, through their manipulation of the unconscious. Now the Being who in the human being strains in the direction of a machine-planet, a process greatly aided by the constant suggestive attacks of advertising, bears in anthroposophical terminology the name Ahriman. The ahrimanic beings "…invade the unconscious of the human being, they swarm into the will-life, the life of the metabolism and limb system. They are that race of spiritual beings who wish to instil into the human being a special interest in everything mineral-material, who wish to instil into him an interest in everything, for example, that is externally mechanical, machine-like". 2
Also connected with this is the environmental destruction of all that has arisen from the great developmental cycles of the Earth in the past through the divine creation of the living kingdoms of nature: "They ... would like the world of the animals to disappear, the physical human world to disappear, the plant world to disappear. Of the mineral realm they would wish only the physical laws to remain, but in particular they wish that human beings should be removed from the Earth; and they would wish to build a new Saturn [this means an extra-terrestrial planet - Ingo Hoppe] consisting only of machines, a new world of nothing but machines. The world would then continue in this way." 2 One of the biggest dealers in technology in Germany, the 'Saturn' company, has designed a sales-brochure which speaks of "artificial intelligence", portrays a 'Saturn' planet, and offers "nothing but machines" for sale. This appears to be highly effective as an advertisement.
Star Wars and their Spiritual Background
It is not easy for the modern person to accept the existence of spiritual beings. And yet, half the world's population rushes to see films like Star Wars, which is a veritable 'stomping-ground' full of pictorial representations of spiritual facts. What is the reason for this? Why are people so interested in these tales? Is it merely the action, and the appeal of fantastic make-believe? This is most unlikely. Whoever has entered deeply into art can recognise that any work of artistic fantasy awakens a heightened interest when it also contains truth. And the machine-planet in Star Wars is an exact image of what humanity, as we have shown, is so busy working towards, without wanting to. In the cinema the viewers stare in horror at the death-star of evil, and have no idea that in real life they are working continually at its realisation. Could this be why the horror-effect is so great?
This horror then increases enormously when the strangely dehumanised Being appears, who possesses paranormal faculties and seems to be inextricably linked with the machine-planet, permeating and controlling it as a mighty power. His name is Darth Vader. Far-fetched as this may appear to the reader, it is nevertheless so: Darth Vader is an exact science-fiction imagination of the Being we referred to above as Ahriman. There are countless correspondences between the descriptions by Steiner of Ahriman, and this Darth Vader, a dark, icy dictator, frozen almost to a machine, who controls with merciless severity his technologically advanced military apparatus: the 'Empire' - a terrifying system of suppression and socially mechanised monolithic state par excellence. Darth Vader, the fallen father who was once on the good path, the father of the fighter for the good, Luke Skywalker, who redeems his fallen father through defeating him in the battle between good and evil, this central inner motif of our time. The entire film is filled to overflowing with motifs, Beings and events, which have clearly been drawn by the Director George Lucas from the ideas of Anthroposophy.
Darth Vader is a true spiritual picture:3 he is an imaginative representation of the world-shaping principle of material-mechanical hardening which can, in the final resort, when conceived as a Being, be articulated - in a struggle with words and imagery - with the help of the pictorial Ahriman-imaginations as they are to be found in Anthroposophy. And this in the knowledge that it is only a stammering attempt to describe something that is hardly accessible to ordinary consciousness and can easily be - and often is - dismissed as unintelligible nonsense. However, to a reflection that is more exact and without prejudice, and which does not make itself dependent on the fashionable opinions of the time, there are very many rational grounds pointing in a factual and logical way to the existence of spiritual beings, without one having to straightway fall, therefore, into a naïve belief in ghosts.
But to return to the central theme in Star Wars: the overcoming of evil. Of special significance here is the light-sword battle of Luke Skywalker (the Sun-Heaven-Walker) with Darth Vader. There, on the screen, it is brought home to one with great clarity, how this 'Darth-Ahriman' could be overcome: not through hitting out in blind aggression, nor even through a martial military war; no, it comes about through a concentrated, individual confrontation, with the sword of light as one's weapon, a wakeful fencing, such as is, wisely enough, practised in acting schools for the development of presence of mind and sureness of aim in verbal duels. And what does this sharp rapier of light represent, as a picture? Does it not stand for the light of the free power of judgement, skilfully wielded by the self-controlled thinker and 'knight of the spirit'?! The materialistic-ahrimanic illusion, which can find its expression in - among other things - the excessive love of machines, is a scientific thought-construction full of sophisticated sleights of hand, but also full of factual errors - and thus can only be seen by means of the power of crystal-clear judgement. In this way, as we press forward to a knowledge of spiritual reality, Ahriman, the god of Maya, can be overcome. The cinema audience trembles in empathy as this battle is waged by the Sun-hero Luke Skywalker against the Empire of Darth Vader; all are visibly relieved when the death-star finally explodes. Their pleasure is euphoric over the defeat of 'Darth Ahriman'. This victory is like a dream, but dreamed at first only in the cinema. In reality, on the other hand, the excessive High-Tech enthusiasm of our civilisation continues unabated. And it is surely this that one would actually like to see 'exploded' (or at least subdued): Ahriman in real life.4
"The Way Ahead"
Someone who is not only dreaming, but also living out his dreams - albeit in precisely the opposite direction - is, for example, Bill Gates. The head of Microsoft - since the beginning of this year responsible only for the "visionary" side of the work - is campaigning with almost missionary zeal for the all-embracing computerisation of our civilisation. It is largely thanks to his efforts that the High-Tech industry is at present undergoing transformations on a historic scale - it is claimed to be celebrating nothing less than a second industrial revolution. It is a 'Way Ahead', travelling at top speed, to echo the title given by Gates, with perfect consistency, to his last book but one. The only question is: where is this 'way ahead' taking us to?
A hectic future-orientation pervades the entire computer industry. The driving force for innovation in this sector is continually developing new products at a breathtaking speed, so that within a few years what a short time ago was acclaimed as the latest achievement is already unusable. One is virtually forced to classify as obsolete those technologies with which we have just become familiar, and abandon them in order to get acquainted with the very newest product: a 'way ahead' at top speed, comparable to racing ahead on a motorway - exactly as it is illustrated on the front cover of Gates' book, through the picture of a road. The message here being: don't come to a halt for heaven's sake, don't stop for reflection!
This headlong race forwards goes hand in hand with the continual struggle for the leading position in the economic world. Whoever is not fast-moving and innovative simply goes to the wall in the great capitalistic struggle for existence. It is essential to win the big race on the business-highway fought out at the leading edge of progress by the companies. In this race Gates' gigantic computer company Microsoft has so far done especially well. This is what people like Gates find most exhilarating: "My aim is above all to keep Microsoft at the very forefront by means of continuous innovation. It is a bit disconcerting to see that in the course of the further development of computer technology no enterprise has been able to maintain the leading position which it held in one period, on into the following period ... I would like to break this rule. Somewhere ahead of us lies the threshold separating the epoch of the PC from the epoch of the Highway [= the total computer network]. I would like to be among the first to cross this threshold" (The Way Ahead, 1995).
A one-sided forwards orientation brings the human being out of balance. He loses, metaphorically speaking, his upright posture and falls into the animal-like horizontal position, whereby the head loses its superior position and stretches greedily downwards and forwards in a material orientation to the future, sniffing around continually and on the hunt for the information-fodder of ever more sophisticated technologies. The limb-metabolic-abdominal organisation on the other hand is raised out of its position subordinate to the head, thus entering, as the organisation of lower drives, the same horizontal plane as the head. Thus it constitutes the actual source of motivation of super-intelligent technology production in the economic struggle for existence. As we indicated above, the 'ahrimanic' one-sidedness can be seen as the stimulator of the will working into the human metabolic-limb system - i.e. into his unconscious life of will, and bringing about the excessive fascination for the technology of machines. Gates describes repeatedly his special enthusiasm for the tremendous possibilities inherent in ever-improving technology. "The feeling that I can see into the future and glimpse the first meaningful hint of revolutionary possibilities, still electrifies me. I think myself incredibly fortunate to be granted yet again the opportunity to play a part at the beginning of a historic change. This special feeling of euphoria I experienced for the first time as a teenager, when I began to realise how cheap and efficient computers would be one day ... One of the reasons why I was so determined to take part in the development of the personal computer, was certainly the wish to have one myself".5
Addiction to the Future - and Destruction of the Environment
This extreme drive towards mechanisation', combined with the typical ahrimanic addiction to the future we have referred to, brings about the environmental destruction of living nature. And this destruction is the destruction of that which comes down to us from past ages; for nature is the result of past cycles of evolution. It is the tangible proof of the fact that in the past an infinitely grandiose process of evolution took place. Every tree, every animal, the human body and the whole cosmos are filled with such exalted intelligence, wisdom and beauty, that by comparison all mechanical intelligence appears as no more than an amateurish imitation. Materialistic science may try with however involved and over-complicated arguments to prove the opposite - nature is still, and, so long as it is there, remains in its unsurpassed genius a proof of the existence of a creative reality working (within it) invisibly. And it is thus - together with all the works of art produced by man - the means whereby, at any time, we can experience a meeting with spiritual reality through penetrating the surface of the everyday world. In this it is a bridge to the realm of the eternal, to the divine-creative sphere, which also lives in the human being (because he has his source in it).
Environmental destruction destroys this bridge, that is to say, it cuts off the path of the human being to the divine. Ahriman refuses to allow us to find the way back to the reality of the creator-spirit. Through the computer civilisation for which Gates so ardently strives the human being will be imprisoned ever deeper in a mechanical world of appearance, which seals him off from the creative forces of outer nature, and at the same time actually destroys it.
Whether Gates did this deliberately or not, the landscape depicted on his book is nothing other than what would remain if the Ahrimanic goal of environmental destruction were to be realised: namely, desert and machine (motorway). If the whole of living nature is destroyed, then only what is dead remains, as shown on the cover. Only mineral, measure, number and weight remain. The mathematical lines and proportions of the road are like an image of the realm of measure, number and weight of the actual sphere of Ahriman. Thus the cover of the book is an exact representation of the ahrimanic one-sidednesses and thereby a caricature of the book's content. For this content is nothing other than an endlessly repetitive hymn in praise of a world of wonderful computers, an expression of the longing for a machine-planet of the future.
As we said, it is part of the ahrimanic intention to remove not only living and animal nature from the Earth, but "particularly, to take away human beings from the Earth", so that they could then live on - on a machine-planet. This removal of the human being from the Earth would be the ultimate aim to be achieved by Ahriman, it would be the final chapter of his world history of the future. When the reader of Gates' The Way Ahead has read this (hi)story in spirit, chapter by chapter, to the very last page, he closes the book and sees the illustration on the back cover. It is (in mirror-image) exactly the same landscape as on the front cover - only with one difference: the human being who was standing there before, is now missing; he has been "taken away from the Earth". The cover of the book gives an exact picture of the consequences which would be bound, in the end, to follow upon the realisation of the book's contents.
Footnotes
1. Since the beginning of the year Bill Gates has handed over the daily running of his company to his manager Steve Ballmer. From now on he wants to devote himself to his preferred activity, namely as visionary and software architect.
2. Rudolf Steiner: "The Responsibility of Man for World-Development" (GA 203), Lecture of 11th March 1923.
3. It goes without saying that such "true pictures" can only be somewhat trite within the context of a commercial science-fiction film.
4. To speak of the overcoming of Ahriman (here we are actually speaking only of Ahriman's realm) by means of the expression "exploding" is of course highly misleading, and is only understandable figuratively in terms of the picture-world of science-fiction. Here too no anachronistic technophobia is meant. All that is necessary is a healthy balance between outer and inner development.
5. Bill Gates: The Way Ahead. These references to Bill Gates are not intended to set up any superficial hate-objects. Nor do they mean to arouse an overbearing antipathy towards Bill Gates as a person, which would be quite out of place. It is only an attempt to contribute to a spiritual understanding of events in our time. Gates is merely an illustration of something that takes place in each one of us in countess different ways.
Ingo Hoppe studies philosophy and History in Basle. He is co-founder of the Association for Free Spiritual Life, whose aim is to encourage more (ethical) individualism in, for example, the field of adult education.
Acknowledgements
This article was translated by Graham Rickett from Das Goetheanum Weekly, Nr. 32-33, August 6th, 2000 and slightly edited by Tom Raines. We would like to thank the author, Ingo Hoppe and Das Goetheanum Weekly for permission to publish this translated version.
© New View 2001
