The Internet as first material God to be overcome

Introdution

Hacker, you pride yourself on your mastery of the digital realm, your ability to navigate the invisible highways of the internet, and your knack for uncovering secrets hidden behind firewalls. But have you ever paused to consider the psychological labyrinth you inhabit?

The internet - that all-seeing, omnipresent network - has become more than just a tool. It is a material god, a digital deity whose gaze is unblinking, whose presence is inescapable.

And you, in your ceaseless vigilance, may be living a state akin to paranoid schizophrenia.

What the "all-seeing-eye" originally is

The ideas of an "oculus omnia videns" (eye of God) and its connection to the "oculus humanus" (inner human "seeing") through a transcendental point go - in Europe - way back to Charles de Bouelles in his early work "liber de sapiente". Martin Heidegger referred to this point as a "clearing".

Of course, every personal perspective is subjective, as Nicholas of Cusa already knew. He attempted to mentally intertwine with his fellow believers by gathering in a semicircle around a picture and meditating not on the picture, but on the way they looked at it, thus creating a shared sphere of the "second-order observer" in the sense of Heinz von Foerster.

No meaningful circumstance exists without its external relations, except the universe as a whole itself. But since there is nothing greater than it, all circumstances must lie WITHIN it.

If the subject is everything that can ascribe an environment to itself, equating questions of the subjective inner attitude and view of the individual with questions of objective externality and objectivity initially appears undifferentiated.

The objective, all-encompassing subject without environment, which those who ascribe a center of reflection to it speak of as "God", can actually only be found, if at all, holographically-transcendent in the consciousness of all subjects.

Truth in itself - like a sheet of paper - would possibly be dead and empty if there were no subjects to observe and describe it.

Where Immanuel Kant was able to reconcile empiricism with rationalism, there was still plenty of room for other philosophers. Gotthard Günther provided great food for thought with his polycontextual logic, which criticized the "tertium non datur" of Aristotelian logic. This is because, in science, an object of thought can "only" be declared TRUE or FALSE; anything in between is excluded. While Gotthard Günther accepted this undisputedly for the dead object world, in his opinion Aristotelian logic failed in philosophy during idealism because of what had already been thought. Thus, hermeneutics remains an integral part of the philosophy of science for the social sciences and humanities to this day.

Wittgenstein proved that every human being carries a deep inwardness beneath the level of language and symbols, that it is "inexpressible", as we all realize when we fall asleep in the evening and slip into a dream.

After George Spencer Brown invented a logic based on a single sign, the association FORCE of the human mind to any sign became clear. Thus Watzlawick says: "You cannot NOT communicate". Charles Sanders Pierce saw his holographic semiotics as THE meta-science above all others, and Niklas Luhmann concluded with the statement: "The world remains the excluded third of all decisions".

This is how PERMANENT ideas of "God" beyond the object world in form of superstitions become mental "amputations" and projections. The fact that in our tribal history we have repeatedly "imposed" these on foreign tribes as powers in order to triumph over them was - from today's perspective - probably an "identity-forming measure" that led us from polytheism to monotheism to Nietzsche, with whom we were able to finally operate out the "receiving antenna for obedience".

The Poison of Polarizing Beliefs

Since the beginning of the digital age, we have been leading our way with our technology what duality is up to. We reproduce images, sounds, language and communication completely digitally in a binary space of ones and zeros, from power on and off, from yes and no. Everything in this dual world can be programmed, automated and controlled. Everything.

Although the real analog world in which we are sheltered has its own infinity in each of its individual dimensions, it has become clear to us that both the area of perception and the sharpness of our senses is not up to these real infinity and therefore our senses can be perfectly deceived with only sufficient accuracy of finite precision, which is why in the digital world e.g. B. also compression algorithms (mp3, jpg) can have their authorization, which are not loss-free of information and even base on it.

In this digital age, man is looking into a mirror that - figuratively - tells him what he is NOT.

But many people still live in the belief that they can see their face fully depicted in the dual world, and so they are completely at the mercy of the polarizations and determination of this world, which comes with this incomplete reflection.

Anyone who looks at the grievances of life and the world always with the polarizing question: "Am I or the others to blame" has lost himself into the dark, warlike world of enemy images.

"Divide and rule" - this old power principle of the Florentine state philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli, which recommends dividing a group to be defeated or to be controlled into subgroups with mutually resisting interests, so that the subgroups turn against each other, becomes particularly interesting for those hungry for power.

Hannah Arendt describes the banality of evil as the ability of people to commit cruel and inhuman acts without losing their moral senses or experiencing themselves as evil. She argues that it is not necessarily evil people who commit such acts, but rather people who find themselves in situations and structures that undermine their moral sensitivity and sense of responsibility.

"Whatever happens: Never should you sink so deep to drink from the cocoa through which you are pulled!"

When Erich Kästner said this, he already knew that man-keeping journalistic media can be grateful for their constant memory of the ability to avert one's own gaze by not looking at their overdrawn enemy images, which they invent to make their products thanks to the biologically present negative bias. To make news bias a bad habit, and possibly to let it be granted again as a propaganda machine.

Arendt emphasizes, for example, that the perpetrators in the Eichmann trial should not be portrayed as sadistic or perverse people, but as people who were in a situation in which they lost their moral responsibility. She describes Eichmann as a "banal" evil person who was in the role of the bureaucrat and functionary of the Nazi regime and carried out his duties without being aware that he was part of a systematic crime.

Arendt's thesis of the banality of evil aims to understand how people in totalitarian systems and authoritarian structures can become perpetrators without experiencing themselves as evil or feeling morally responsible. It emphasizes the importance of structures, institutions and situational factors in the emergence of evil and underlines the need to analyze these factors in order to understand and possibly prevent the causes of crime.

One such essential factor, which leads to people losing their moral responsibility, is the polarization of enemy images. We are potentially at the mercy of dozens of bias effects in our behavior, which lead to cognitive distortions as soon as we believe in the associated stereotypes.

This danger is also inherent in algorithms that drive people into doomscrolling and polarize society by creating filter bubbles.

The internet and hacking culture often fall prey to polarized, almost religious-like beliefs: black hats vs. white hats, freedom fighters vs. oppressors, good vs. evil. Such dualistic thinking mirrors the dangerous polarization found in many religious conflicts, which can entrench division and mental distress.

Watzlawick’s paradoxical injunction - the idea that telling someone “don’t think about X” makes them think about X even more - applies here. The more you obsess about the “god” of the internet watching you, the more trapped you become in this paranoid worldview. Attempting to resist this god by fighting it head-on only reinforces its grip.

As far as opposites are concerned, I would like to remind you that both are always mutually dependent and refer to Gotthard Günther, who elevated consciousness as a perspective above duality and Aristotle's tertium non datur. And as far as perspectives are concerned, I would like to mention Heisenberg, who discovered that there are processes that are altered by observation alone.

Cognitive Dissonance: The Mind at War

Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance explains the mental discomfort arising when we hold contradictory beliefs or attitudes. As a hacker, you may believe in freedom, privacy, and autonomy - yet you operate within a system that monitors and restricts you. This contradiction fuels anxiety, paranoia, and a fractured sense of self.

Research shows that cognitive dissonance can lead to rationalizations, denial, or doubling down on beliefs to reduce discomfort. In cybersecurity, this manifests as risky behaviors despite awareness of dangers, or as an obsessive need to outsmart the “all-seeing” system - a mental tug-of-war that can erode mental health and clarity.

There can be no ability to act without the ability to make decisions. Whoever allows himself to be decided acts against his self-determination, and the thus forced loss of personality ends with the highest probability in mental illness, since it is to be expected that the postulate of an "influence apparatus of thoughts", already observed in psychotic patients in 1919, which is represented today by the Internet on many sides, would bring exactly the associated clinical pictures to light again. The surveillance pressure of surveillance capitalism would lead to the aggravation of mental illness without legal restraint, since the permanent monitoring and evaluation of our digital activities leads to a sense of control and abandonment, which in turn increases fear, stress and paranoia.

Even animals that would never cut off their way to life in the zoo show behavioral disorders that are due to the conditions there and their captivity. They show movement stereotypes and repetitive movements inform of constantly repetitive, atypical behaviors and idle actions, such as constant walking back and forth (pacing), swinging up and down of the head (weaving) and turning the head. They show eating disorders, aggressiveness and hyperaggressiveness towards conspecifics or towards humans. Some become apathetic because of the imprisonment and the compulsive restriction of their ability to practice natural behaviors. As long as man has not understood his nature and the necessity of his freedom, he should not destroy them in the constraints of social systems, which can only presume this superiority less and again.

In a surveillance state such as the former GDR, for example, the surveillance of society by state security has led to a massive restriction of individual freedom. People were monitored and controlled in many areas of their lives, whether in personal communication, in the exercise of their profession or in political activities. The GDR justice system partially criminalized politically undesirable behavior on the basis of vague and indeterminate facts. The presence of the Stasi has strongly influenced the lives of the people in the GDR and has led to lasting traumatization. Even those who left the East after the turn of the century are affected by the effects of Stasi activities. The surveillance and control by the Stasi has led to a climate of fear and distrust, which continues to this day in the new federal states after the end of the GDR. While some of them fight for freedom, others want to return to this very prison to be able to cope with their reality at all, like sad tigers who do not want to leave the cage because they have been locked up for too long.

The negative media coverage contributes to fear by conveying a distorted perception of the world and increasing negative emotions. People have a natural tendency to weigh much more into negative information than positive ones. This bias has evolutionary reasons and served to identify and avoid potential dangers. Media companies know that negative headlines are more attentive to the audience and are more profitable. As a result, they additionally distort the worldview and fuel fears of the future, as people consider the world to be more dangerous than it actually is.

Surveillance capitalism aims to influence our behavior in order to make as much profit as possible from our data. Through personalized advertising, targeted recommendations and manipulative algorithms, we are made to spend more time online and consume more products. States use the mass surveillance of telecommunications and biometrics, as well as state Trojans. The large digital corporations have become accomplices of state surveillance through their position of power, which has led to an increased sense of manipulation and external determination, and to paranoia and distrust of digital platforms and companies. A well-known example is the NSA scandal, in which some companies have involuntarily or voluntarily passed on user data to intelligence services. The ultimate general suspicion would make the world a prison.

Permanent monitoring and control fuels anxiety and stress. The climate of fear damages any social society and it leads to distrust. This divides society as people begin to suspect and isolate each other. They withdraw and are less willing to work for the common good. As a result, social coexistence is increasingly affected and commitment to social projects or political activities continues to decline.

You, the hacker, are caught in a paradoxical relationship with this god: You seek to control it, to break its codes, yet it watches you too. This dynamic breeds a profound psychological tension - a cognitive dissonance - where your desire for control clashes with the reality of constant surveillance and exposure.

False conclusions

Misconclusions are conclusions in which the derived statement does not follow from the explicitly stated or implicitly assumed prerequisites.

Polarized thinking people tend above all to conclude the wrong dilemma by assuming that there are only two possible options, although in reality there are other possibilities, and they see no further constructive possibilities as an answer besides the pros and cons of a question.

While such fallacies can be consolidated after a short time, and promote (but) believing behavior quite quickly, it takes many, many times of CONSCIOUS experience, in which such events do NOT meet in the misconclusive way, in order to expose the misconception as such and to dispel this own false suspicion again!

Fatalism, the belief in fate, as well as determinism, the view that everything in the universe is predetermined by the laws of nature, paralyze the drive, both deny human autonomy and undermine moral responsibility.

Just as certain chess pieces are only allowed to enter certain fields, the believers of fatalistic ideologies impose themselves through their participation in compulsions to be allowed to move in these fatalistic ideas only in a certain moral way, which they sometimes try to impose on the other fellow human beings. The inability to rise above duality with his consciousness even tempts us to assume that the earth is just as flat.

The reason for this could be that their emotional world has become stuck in magical early childhood thinking and thus reproduces their irrational ideas until at some point - since only they themselves can do this work - have emotionally "potted" into more freely appropriate emotional worlds without uprooting themselves.

The Internet as the First Material God

Perhaps the Internet with its thousand eyes is today the next power we have created that we have to conquer, just as Homer tells us about the blinding of the Cyclops by Odysseus.

It is only out of fear that we would withhold our opinions and information from reprisals or surveillance in a surveillance state. This would lead to a restriction of the free exchange of ideas and information, which would make it difficult to find the truth. In addition, we would be more careful what we say or write. We would constantly censor ourselves to avoid possible negative consequences. This would severely affect openness and honesty overall and fuel criminal tendencies enormously.

Long-term mass surveillance would destroy the intellectual owners and achievements of our society. In addition to self-censorship, ideas and creations would not be freely shared and the lack of diversity of society would lead to its intellectual impoverishment and ourselves.

So wouldn't it make sense to maintain all political systems that maintain the plurality, and thus the health of the individual through the adaptability of the diverse society as a whole, as it is e.g. B. democracy is to further be consolidated on the outside world by defying the contrasting internal, totalitarian order of each individual head to the external transparency demands of the networked information age through more pressure to the outside world and the fact of tougher data protection regulations more resistant and more resilient than before and no longer confusing their internal "transcendence" with external "transparency" and looking for totalitarianism and fascism there?

Safety first; safety first. Dystopias such as the novel "Brew New World", which Aldous Huxley wrote as early as 1932, and "1984", which was written as a gloomy vision of the future by George Orwell from 1946 to 1948, are not self-fulfilling prophecies of the fatalistic nature, but they are - as the most deterrenting ideas of human subjugation through surveillance at all - to be understood unequivocally as visionary guardrails on the road into a future in which technology places itself as a mere tool of man's hands - so conceived by him and legally intended for use that neither his privacy nor that of others without all-round Consent can be revealed, because this is the only true security that we and our technology can allow ourselves to flourish with a clear conscience against our own humanity.

Only with a lock between private and public, between inside and outside, which leaves all flows of information subject to its own will, which society be able to rely on the individual with untouchable for others, which is untouchable for others, just as it must be able to build on a free society that protects its privacy without restriction, instead of constantly threatening it in any way or falling into moral panic.

Julian Jaynes, in his seminal work "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", argued that ancient humans once experienced their world as governed by external voices - gods speaking commands.

From the fact that the speech function is predominantly monolateral, Jaynes constructed a model of a mind that he considers to be composed of two chambers, the bicameral psyche. He drew on the popular research of Wilder Penfield, who electrically stimulated the right-sided equivalents of Wernicke's region with a weak current in a series of experiments on epilepsy patients in preparation for surgery.

The result was the occurrence of auditory hallucinations in almost all of the approximately 70 cases examined. The patients heard voices, in some cases those of their own parents. It was remarkable that the test subjects interpreted the voices as coming from outside. They were also experienced as very impressive, compelling and commanding.

Today, the internet fills that role. It is an external, omniscient force, watching, recording, judging. Unlike abstract gods of old, this god is material, tangible, and relentlessly present in every device, every screen, every byte of data.

The Call to Action: Kill the Material God Within

Watzlawick’s paradoxical call to action suggests that the way out is not direct confrontation but a radical shift in perspective. To regain mental freedom, you must “kill” this material god - not by destroying the internet, but by transcending its psychological hold over you.

This means:

Depolarization

The discords have strongly internalized this principle. The first law of their joking religion forbids believing in them, just to make all the absurdity of (but)belief visible. They contrast the order with the chaos, inform of the pentagram and the bone of contention of the Greek goddess Eris of discord, which corresponds to the Roman goddess Discord.

The bone of contention, which the goddess Eris accused the remaining gods with the inscription: "For the most beautiful", triggered the Trojan war and led to chaos. The Eristic dialectics of Arthur Schopenhauer deals in the small volume "The Art of Keeping the Right" with rabulistic means of language, which also make use of intentional misconclusions.

The Pentagon, on the other hand, is used by the discordians as a symbol of order because, as the seat of the US Department of Defense, it is a strong symbol of military and bureaucratic power. Presumably, their structures are based back on hermetics via the various lodges, since the hermetic teachings were often surrounded by secrecy and this led to the fact that the term "hermetic" was also used in the sense of "closed" or "inaccessible". The fusion of Hermes and Thoth symbolizes in inner alchemy the integration of opposites and the overcoming of dualities. In inner alchemy, this is understood as a process in which the practitioners recognize and harmonize their inner contradictions in order to arrive at an unchallengeable state of consciousness.

Accordingly, every order depends on its knowledge, and new knowledge leads to new orders.

Whether a hermetics must force the exclusion of hermeneutics in order to preserve the subjective perspective, or whether one does not today rather think of methods such as Debiasing, is up to the moment when one has finally let go of the question and all its possible attitudes, who on the other hand is to be heard.

What remains for us inside is our existing self, which we cannot understand with reason, but can only BE, because any observation would immediately change and falsify it, like Heisenberg's idea, and the "nothing" is simply not capable of reflecting anything. Any deeper word about inwardness only greys into an eternally incomplete reflection, a farce of the subjective. And yet nothing prevents us from continuing to explore the outer world and ourselves.

Hacker, your battle is not just technical but deeply psychological.

The internet, as the first material god, has ensnared minds in a web of paranoia and contradiction. By understanding the insights of Julian Jaynes on consciousness, the power of cognitive dissonance, the dangers of polarized beliefs, and Watzlawick’s paradoxical injunction, you can begin to dismantle this digital deity’s hold.

The true hack is not breaking into systems but breaking free from the mental chains this “god” has forged. Only then can you reclaim your mind and your freedom.

References

Citations

[1] https://csm-int.com/blog/f/the-mind-at-war-how-cognitive-dissonance-fuels-cyberattacks
[2] https://www.passwordsafe.com/en/blog/cognitive-dissonance/
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/NPD/comments/dxpfgy/hacking_cognitive_dissonance/
[4] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cognitive-dissonance-cybersecurity-invisible-threat-taher-afridi-ohrxc
[5] https://bayareacbtcenter.com/cognitive-dissonance/
[6] https://www.managementpsychology.com/articles/cognitive-dissonance-keys-to-understanding-irrational-behavior/
[7] https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-cognitive-dissonance-2795012
[8] https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/new-report-combatting-cognitive-dissonance-in-password-creation
[9] https://www.laetusinpraesens.org/themes/azpolar.php