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2025-08-15 last modified 2025-08-24

In various conversations with my partner the past six months I came to realise that my beliefs were often founded on intuitions I still felt were sound enough to rely upon, but that I didn’t really apply them to anything.

In January, I wrote:

What do I believe?

Obviously, that it’s easy to abstract away human lives when they are presented as flows of information, and that this is a very mundane and everyday evil. It informed a lot of our earlier games (at least, insofar as what I myself wrote), where you are presented with the fact that demanding information wiped away a sentient creature’s existence – or that you’re presented with choices over the sentience of an emerging intelligence that have ramifications no one wants to deal with and have abstracted away to the lowest rungs of society.

I’ve not done the best job at applying this knowledge to my choice of work, where we directly manipulate interfaces that shape interpersonal flows. To love requires engaging with other people directly, on a human scale. It involves direct contact. And yet, as “information” is obscured, as the flows are diluted, then catalysed, abstraction is practically demanded. One must organise the flows, or one must withdraw. Treat other people as instruments or isolate yourself altogether. I can’t accept that as a final reality.

I declared myself at ongoing war with abstraction itself, in something I termed the False Eden Hypothesis (偽のエデン仮説).1 I based this idea upon a brief explication of ‘animalization’ via Alexandre Kojève in “Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals”:

What is animalization? Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel has a unique definition of the difference between the human and the animal. Key to this definition is the difference between desire and need. According to Kojève, humans have desire, as opposed to animals, which have only needs. The word need indicates a simple craving or thirst that is satisfied through its relationship with a specific object. For example, animals sensing hunger will be completely satisfied by eating food. This circuit between lack and satisfaction is the defining characteristic of need. Even human life is strongly driven by such needs.

[…]

Humans differ from animals in their self-consciousness; the reason they can build social relations is because they have intersubjective desire. Animal needs can be satisfied without the other, but for human desires the other is essentially necessary; and here I will not go into detail, but this distinction is an extremely grand premise that is the basis for modern philosophy and thought from Hegel to Lacan. And Kojève, too, maintains this.

Consequently, “becoming animal” means the erasure of this kind of intersubjective structure and the arrival of a situation in which each person closes various lack–satisfaction circuits. What Kojève labeled “animalistic” was the postwar, American-style consumer society. 2

This distinction between the human struggle within intersubjective desires and meanings, and the animalic gratification of needs, shows up everywhere in Japanese media both because postmodern analysis was far more of a cultural shift than academic one in 1980s Japan and because Japanese academics specifically favoured Kojève.3 And so you might see it in anime occasionally, which gets recoloured within American audiences as displaying a kind of existentialist undertone (itself going out of fashion now); however, existentialist readings of postmodern-inflected Japanese media mistakes melancholic laments–where the inevitably vital force of arbitrary human meaningmaking collapses into interlocking, frenzied solipsisms–for the triumph of individualist authenticity. After all, the alternative is a pacified, collective utopia where nothing left is human.4

Indeed, I think the animalic state has subsumed the existentialist dilemma where one’s authentic self was the predominant ideal: so long as one is authentic within the confines of one’s social group, how one subsists at all is practically irrelevant. And yet there is a newfound difficulty in navigating intersubjectively: if your needs can be handled within yourself, then you don’t need to engage directly with the Other. You can engage superficially, or with etiquette; you can practice the scripts of vulnerability, but it’s a bit more difficult to place your heart itself in their hands, because you don’t really need other humans to live in the same way.

And yet Christianity, esoteric or not, demands a full encounter in order to freely exchange love, to totally understand love itself. There must be a self-conscious human there, engaging with another.

From Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on the Gospel of St. John:

In the first place we have here a marriage—but why a marriage in Galilee? We shall understand why it is a marriage in Galilee if we call to mind once more the whole mission of the Christ. His mission consisted in bringing to mankind the full force of the ego, an inner independence in the soul. The individual ego should feel itself fully independent and separate, existing completely within itself and people should be united in marriage because of a love which they freely and voluntarily bestow upon one another. Through the Christ-Principle there should come into the earth-mission a love that would rise ever higher and higher above the material and constantly mount toward the Spirit. Love had its beginning in its lowest form which was bound up with the senses. In the earliest periods of human evolution, those who were bound together by the tie of blood loved each other and they made a great deal of the idea that love was based upon this material blood relationship.

The Christ came in order to spiritualize this love; in order, on the one hand, to loosen the bonds in which love had been entangled through the blood-relationship and on the other hand to give force and intensity to spiritual Love.

[…] The folk of the Old Testament held fast to the idea that the folk blood relationship should be maintained. One is a “Jew” who in his blood is a Jew.

Christ Jesus did not advocate this principle. He appealed to those who had broken this principle of mere blood relationship, and the important thing He had to demonstrate, He demonstrated not in Judea, but outside in Galilee. Galilee was the region where peoples of every race and tribe had mixed together. The term Galilean means “mixed-breed,” “mongrel.” Christ Jesus went to the Galileans, to those who were most mixed. Out of a human reproduction such as this, brought about by a mingling of blood, something arose that was no longer dependent upon a physical basis of love. 5

And again, from Guindon’s The sexual language (as mentioned in this nearly entirely tangential post):

At the heart of it, an historian can hardly miss one clear linear progression, that of the slow but gradual emergence of woman as a full-fledged, equal, sexual partner. Feminine emancipation is the result-in-the-making of human history. There is still a long way to go. But the “old males” will die and the new ones will have been trained with competitive females. This movement is, in my opinion, irreversible and a cause of great rejoicing, because the new, emerging woman will make authentic, adult sexual language possible – perhaps for the first time in the history of the species. […] It is only with man’s liberation from these survival tasks that humanization can be initiated at deeper levels, that all human transactions can become expressive of real human purposes. Understandably, the sexual encounter will be the transaction most profoundly affected by this mutation. Over and above the social necessities, the personalizing elements of the relationship will then emerge.

Obviously this transformation of the sexual instinct from survival to human language cannot occur overnight. It is only with centuries of obscure and gradual struggle that sexual love became grafted onto friendship. 6

These disparate quotes showcase a similar moral imperative. Steiner writes with more of an open-ended, creative impulse as to the trajectory of human life, but he does intuit that Christ endowed us with self-consciousness (which has taken centuries to seep into us, and will continue to take centuries) in order to transcend physical, blood-related ties of love for freely given spiritual love in the name of species-wide sanctification and salvation. For Guindon, it is the combination of tenderness and sensuousness in a sexual encounter that marks it as a morally structured, interpersonal language; he writes of the myriad ways we instead succumb to narcissism or instrumentalisation of the other person – hating ourselves and hating them for being our plaything. The alternative bad path is to separate sensuousness and tenderness altogether with separate partners for either tendency, instead of total engagement, total surrender, total union.

Azuma instead writes that, for example, otaku sexuality is a need for genital stimulation that gets fulfilled in isolation:

Just as animal needs and human desires differ, so do genital needs and subjective “sexuality” differ. Many of the otaku today who consume adult comics and “girl games” probably separate these two; and their genitals simply and animalistically grew accustomed to being stimulated by perverted images. Since they were teenagers, they had been exposed to innumerable otaku sexual expressions: at some point, they were trained to be sexually stimulated by looking at illustrations of girls, cat ears, and maid outfits. However, anyone can grasp that kind of stimulation if they are similarly trained, since it is essentially a matter of nerves. In contrast, it takes an entirely different motive and opportunity to undertake pedophilia, homosexuality, or a fetish for particular attire as one’s own sexuality. In most cases, the sexual awareness of the otaku does not reach that level in any way. Precisely because of this, otaku have a strange Janus-faced quality (just as in the previously mentioned case of their attitude toward derivative works): on the one hand, they consume numerous perverse images, while on the other hand, they are surprisingly conservative toward actual perversion. 7

A fake forest

So, while the above description of animalic sexuality leads one to instead avoid total encounters with the Other, the animalic state–one where food just appears–manifests within my “Fake Eden Hypothesis” in terms of agricultural production as well. It does not take a lot of evidence to understand factory farm conditions as being segregated portals into a flesh-hell on Earth, where all life is suffering and all death is desirable; and yet it seemed like I was surrounded by systems that just did not want me to think about it. Here is your meat! Here are your eggs! And if you want the hens to have air conditioning and Xbox, we have a specific flavour just for you. (Wait, so the confinement of these animals or not is kind of like whether I want my chips all dressed or regular?)

It’s not like Catholicism is foreign to this; the Catechism in sections 2415-2418 notes that animals, by their existence alone, glorify God, and should not suffer needlessly; that our dominion over them is not absolute; and requires a respect for creation. It is part of stewarding the earth to be respectful and responsible with our relationship with animals and with nature. I simply do not think a modern diet where every human consumes animal products every single day is compatible with this imperative. Therefore, I abstain as best I can from the products of factory farming practices. The Catholics never seem to go this far; as usual, only the Jesuits do.

If I am to read through the stupour of life like a book, it is as though the procurement of grocery staples is a solved problem, and so the performance of bounty is the only thing that is relevant to the consumer. But helping create the kind of society in which I live is something I find personally meaningful; I have desires that are not simply to flatter myself or acquire validation by affiliating myself with high-status goods or services; or to consume goods and foods that give me ego-syntonic feelings. Isn’t that all you’re doing, Matilde? Just eating stuff that makes you feel vaguely better about yourself? Therein lies the “ethical capitalism trap”: what good would life changes do, exactly, if the economic signal is so small and it is so impossible to keep one’s hands clean?

The boundary as becoming encountered

So sayeth a purely materialist morality: there is no ethical consumption under capitalism! What one does is irrelevant, so continue to enjoy yourself. You deserve it. You know higher and lower things, and you can pursue them within the confines of your life - without invading the lives of others - practice an imaginary lifestyle. And it will work out just fine. :-)

Get behind me, Satan!

If my morality instead has a sense of the transcendent, everything is a kind of methexis; it’s not about keeping my own hands clean so much as whether I’d like to participate in God or participate in Mammon. It’s not really about keeping my own hands clean so much as my love is present in a direct encounter with another human being, of a mutual participation in each other,8 in the challenge of a love that grows from the confrontation of mutual understanding. We are always relating in and through each other; individualism and purely individual choice as such does not exist.

And so I’m not sending an economic signal so much as I’m trying to not break with God, and I’m trying to allow myself to be witnessed so deeply by the other that we can handle each other, that we can come to love each other, that our beliefs have meanings that might change each other. If I go to a party and I don’t eat anything because it’s all chicken wings or whatever, then I can either downplay it, talk about it, or just eat the damn food. I can imagine it like this:

I feel like naturally I would tend toward 1 or 3 here (3 only if it’s like, cheese or something). But I don’t know. I think when I express a strong preference it makes it easier for there to be other options in the future; for a different lifestyle to be more normalised.9 It enforces a personal meaning, but it also trusts other people with me a little bit. I’m really bad at trusting other people with all of me; I tend to filter out parts on their behalf. I tend to betray some part of me all the time.

The idea that I can be a good person while isolating other people from any witness of my total self–that I don’t have to go out into the world, be in the world, engage with the world–that the world is a zone of abstractions for my convenience without any ramifications as a superstructure–is the total sum of a compromise within which the adversary operates. The world’s prince wants love divided into equal cubicles, inert, never interacting, safely custodied away from the harm of collective action; to prove that love alone is not enough, that it can be stowed into chambers while evil drives the world forward.

How does one fight evil? By existing at all. The good’s presence alone:

Good does not combat evil in the sense of destructive action. It “combats” it by the sole fact of its presence. Just as darkness gives way to the presence of light, so does evil give way before the presence of good.

Light drives out darkness. This simple truth is the practical key to the problem of how to combat demons. A demon perceived, i.e. on whom the light of consciousness is thrown, is already a demon rendered impotent. This is why the desert fathers and other solitary saints had so much experience with demons. They cast their light on them. And they did so as representatives of human consciousness in general, for whoever withdraws from the world becomes representative of the world; he becomes a “son of man”. And being a “son of man” the solitary saint attracted the demons haunting the subconscious of mankind, making them appear, i.e. bringing them to the light of consciousness and thus rendering them impotent. 10

If I truly believe that, then I have to believe it’s by my existence, my presence, what I believe will find its reverberation outward. But it’s a terrifying thought to consider, to have to stand for something at all.

A trivial additional example

A final thought with dramatically less moral weight: have you ever thought about credit cards?

People often think that credit cards make all their money off interest payments from poorer customers; I mean, they do make some money there, but it’s far less than you think. Most of it comes from interchange fees.

What are interchange fees? It’s what a merchant’s bank pays the customer’s bank to accept their card. Imagine you’re a small business. If you accept a credit card that has an interchange fee of, say, 2%, then you will probably build in a 2% margin into your prices.

What if I told you that interchange fees are higher for more premium cards, which only take high-income clients? That means that the most basic credit cards (ie. the ones just anyone can get) have substantially lower interchange fees for businesses than the premium ones; but you don’t get to pick to not accept the World Elite or Infinite Privilege card. It’s the same issuer. You just have to include the highest possible fee into your margins to survive. After all, rich people spend more in absolute terms than poor people, so if you take a loss on premium cards, you’re going to be out of business soon.11

And so in sum the system actually operates as regressive wealth transfer; since everyone has to encompass the cost of the highest possible interchange fees in their payments, the entire economy subsidizes the rewards programs that retain richer customers. And margins aren’t fantastic as it is. Ignore small business; even major grocery stores in Canada already run on 3.5% margins. Does that encompass the 2-3% interchange? Interac transactions via debit card are $0.12.

Okay, so I’m a willing participant in a process that packages me up as a high-value customer to a business to then charge 3% to the business, and give me 1%, while also charging me an annual fee for the effort, making people who are poorer than me pay 3.3% more for everything (when their own card charges the business like 0.92%!) whereas that same margin could’ve grown the business. I’m a participant in a process that rewards me for having money by charging other people to give me cashback rewards.

If I think that this state of affairs is bad, is the solution to not use credit cards at all? To use a credit card without rewards? If I accept the financial signal of me not using a credit card in most situations is null to issuers and to businesses, and I forfeit 2% of my spending being rebated to me by not participating, what does it mean? Does it have any signal to my friends and colleagues? Is there any human to human encounter within confronting some vague, abstracted math that quietly shuffles money upward to rich people hoping the money velocity of the economy might speed along just a touch more?

In this case, what am I participating in and who is this particular god?

And so on and so on. You can easily make the case for investments being much the same way. You can make the case for real estate operating the same way in Canada.12 Our supposed plenitude hides its own machinery because it confesses an eerie anxiety. Paint the plaster on the walls by which the world might keep moving.

  1. After this article was written my partner brought my attention to another term within the umbrella of my sentiment; the appropriation of the “absent referent” from literary theory to describe the invisible mechanics of systems of oppression via Carol J. Adams

  2. Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Trans. Abel, Jonathan E. and Shion Kono. University of Minnesota Press, 2009, PDF. 86-88. 

  3. Ibid, 16-18. 

  4. The most blatant example in my mind is Texhnolyze (2003), but I think earlier series carry a hint of the same tendency: take also shows where a collective force within humanity itself gets personified as a phantom being engaged in arbitrary paranormal combat with rivals, while the mass populace exists as cherished cattle, consuming, working, sleeping, like the various Boogiepop novels. In general 1980s and 1990s anime wrestled more consciously with where and how Japan could actually engage with American culture, leading to shrine maidens driving spaceships and whatnot, as Azuma writes early in the book. 

  5. Steiner, Rudolf. “The Seven Degrees of Initiation.” The Gospel of St. John. The Rudolf Steiner Archive, original publication 1908. Web. https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA103/English/AP1962/19080523p01.html 

  6. Guindon, André. The Sexual Language: An essay in moral theology. University of Ottawa Press, 1976. Print. 108-111. 

  7. Azuma, 89. The author’s taxonomies of perversions are not relevant here. 

  8. Romans 12:5. 

  9. I’ve also heard this argument offered on behalf of denormalising alcohol consumption, but the difference is … do our social groups intersect? Is there a meaningful denormalising impact on abstaining from alcohol? Who needs to be reached, and how? Is it less loving to drink alcohol? Certainly some people might be better off without it, but the moral weight seems different. That is to say, when I drink, I tend to be warm and affectionate; others aren’t. It’s definitely bad for my health, and I think we’re probably better off not drinking at all, but I understand that it adds to people’s lives to disinhibit, so… 

  10. Meditations on the Tarot, like usual. Letter 15

  11. If you’re, say, Starbucks, then you are going to want people to use their credit card as infrequently as possible; instead of taking the interchange hit every coffee, you’ll want them to pay it once, flat. Thus the Starbucks Card was born alongside a rewards program that is really cheap–after all, their margins are somewhere around 7% now, but it used to be like, 18% or so. 

  12. nb. I do not own land because younger Matilde really was convinced this was an evil thing to participate in. Nowadays at least 10% of me feels like a sucker. Canada’s housing problems were not a thing I wanted to worsen, and still don’t.