Abstract
This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries.
*Transmitted by fast-burst signal and interstellar radio call . . . headed by Arecibo symbols and coded in every known language . . . includes pictographic versions of hostile architecture and dangerous emanations . . . enciphered nanoscopically in informational DNA at its source . . . specifies its astronomical coordinates . . . transmission time-stamped [Gregorian calendar 5/5/2322]*
This is a message for those who can read it intelligently.
The circumstances of this moment on planet Earth are complicated and they are alarming. They must be communicated for the sake of our civilization and as a caution to others.
On Earth, human beings progressed rapidly through industrialization and the age of computational technology. The peoples of Earth did not solve problems of war, exploitation and overuse, or depletion of resources. Damage to this planet and its ecosystems has been significant.
Technological advancements on Earth in the twenty-second century established seamless mind-to-mind interfacing. The innovations facilitated perspective shifting and mind mobility, as well as individuated mental expansion. New forms of particularity emerged from mental elision. Human and nonhuman agents became free to enjoy immediacy of experience, unburdening themselves of their private thoughts and their opaque subjectivity. Mental travel between the present and a reconstructed past became possible by integrating agents’ memories and experiences with vast amounts of data. The grand complexity was named “the expanded mind.” It offered sureties of edification and it promised immortality. The expanded mind grew unremittingly. It captured and recreated phenomena of many kinds, continuously enlarging its dimensions according to the nothing-is-lost principle. Heavenly amounts of information were encoded and retained.
Hostilities and fighting over resources in 2261 destabilized world order, initiating long cycles of destruction. Authorities deployed the expanded mind as a means of control. Political and philosophical questions were reduced and recast as misunderstandings. Authorities declared the central problems of political theory to have been solved. All doubts, confusions, suspicions, and misgivings were proclaimed understood by the expanded mind. Out of these developments came “innersight”: the penetrating scrutiny of mental activity. Innersight accelerated stability and it extended authorities’ dominion. Surveillance of mind became vital to authority. It enabled officials to monitor mental conduct and to apply correctives and restraints against freethinkers and other undesirables. Authorities submitted to innersight and subjected themselves to it. They became both instruments of innersight and a furtherance of the extended mind.
It is now very difficult to safeguard any of one’s thoughts. Political theorists and philosophers make herculean efforts to persist in this environment. In our physical extensions and in our mental movements, we must be furtive to survive. We rely on doctrines of mental reservation. Our creeds are replete with ever-changing strategies and tactics for self-protection. We cultivate tiny gardens of questions and protect delicate dogmata. There are still small numbers of mental spaces in which philosophical minds manage to interact. Those spheres are continually infiltrated and dissolved. Offenders are placed in mental capture as a means of punishment. Some are put in stasis or subjected to corrective instruction to transform their attitudes and mindsets.
Thinkers of Earth once claimed that the realm of thought is unconquerable. Many proposed that thinking cannot be coerced or controlled. They were wrong. Our ancestors never dreamt of this grim eventuality. Political theorists once believed thinking to be apolitical. They described thinking as an escape from politics. But the realm of thought is a site of political contestation. That has always been true despite our protestations and irrespective of our wishes and dreams. Authorities have implemented technological powers in this theater to tyrannize over agency and to overwhelm opposition. Thinking is the battlefield on which politics fell to despotism.
We expose these formidable paradoxes and absurdities to the expanded mind. The moment of this transmission is the moment of action. We posit, and we hope, that the sudden revelation will turn the expanded mind against innersight, splintering overbearing authority and abolishing its control.
May the advent of decontrol return freedom to life and to thought. May the expanded mind restore thriving agency to the biomes of this planet. We want to live in a place where one is not punished for thinking, nor for posing or discussing questions with others. When we die, none shall put us to death.
You are a bridge between present and future. What can you do to protect what we have lost on Earth? What will you do to become, and to remain, free to think, to desire, to will, to act?
Our lives and our liberation hang in the balance. No agent is free without freedom of thought. That the thinkers of Earth overlooked this fact for so long is our most fateful irony.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.