The Force

Every time you let a screen think for you, Rudolf Steiner had a name for what takes over. During a lecture in 1913, he told his students to be present: to think along, to do the work themselves. “At a slide lecture, Ahriman is called upon to think for people.” But this didn't come from a personal dislike of projectors. He was pointing at a gesture of the soul: the moment images arrive by themselves, thinking stops arriving from within. Ahriman, in Steiner’s cosmology, is the spirit of cold intelligence: exact, mechanical and without warmth or freedom. He does not need to defeat human thinking. He only needs it handed over. In 1917 he went further. The human being, he said, would learn to lead “his intentions, his thoughts, into the forces of machines.” And “the welding together of human nature with machine nature” would be one of the great problems for the rest of earthly evolution. Then, in March 1925, in the last weeks of his life, he wrote that technology had become “sub-nature”: a world beneath nature, a shadow of the etheric realm. And so: “Man must find the strength, the inner power of knowledge, not to be overwhelmed by Ahriman in this technical culture.” Notice how he does not call for us to destroy the machine, but that we must rise in spirit as far above nature as technology has sunk below it. The danger is never the machine by itself. It is the soul that submits to its domination. Gurdjieff said it more brutally: “Man is a machine. All his deeds, actions, words, thoughts, feelings, convictions, opinions, and habits are the results of external influences, external impressions.” Dr. Steiner believed being mechanical is precisely what gives way to Ahrimanic infiltration. He said: "The masses of humanity go through life as if asleep, without thought." And so "the human intellect is to be taken over more and more by such powers." Humans fear the day where machines think like us, the more terrifying truth is that we have long thought like them; and in our sleep, we have handed over our thinking to them without noticing the handover. Thinking is the activity in which we become ourselves. Whatever we stop doing, we slowly lose the power to do. The machine thinks without knowing that it thinks. The human being must do the reverse: to know that he thinks, and to do it himself. No machine will take your thinking from you. You can only give it away.