Digital Prophets

“The supreme mission of these ‘illuminati,’ whose energies are destined to expire, is the pleasure of a narcissistic existence, governed by a selfishness rooted in contempt for their fellow human beings.”

The twenty-first century has brought us a sinister new means of instilling fear among peoples, through one of the most formidable instruments of our age: the digital world and its social networks. It was a remarkable triumph in the history of human discovery—or invention—for human beings, essentially social creatures, embraced this innovation wholeheartedly. And, like so many other advances, it carries both its blessings and its burdens.

The Portuguese voyages of rediscovery in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries brought undeniable benefits to the world, yet they also unleashed servitude, slavery, exploitation, the seizure of other peoples’ lands, and the alienation of ancient cultures and civilizations, subjected and decimated by the will of conquerors. And still, their positive legacy was equally immense: the encounter with new frontiers, the exchange of knowledge and experience, and the widening realization that we are all children of the same Universe.

In these times we are privileged—or condemned—to witness, comfortably seated in our homes before the miraculous little box of television, we absorb events with dizzying speed: catastrophes, upheavals, and news of every imaginable kind. We are in direct contact with the protagonists of the global stage. We have become participants and stakeholders. Our opinions carry weight, sustained by the knowledge that vast multitudes may stand behind us through social networks. We participate instantaneously in the world unfolding around us, and individual consciousness has attained a degree of civic awareness that, only a few years ago, would have seemed inconceivable. Yet it is precisely along this path that some believe they can manipulate the collective mind.

Amid this landscape emerge the eternal opportunists, insatiable in their hunger for power and control over the masses. Their supreme art is the manipulation of ideas. To confuse. To sow discord, hatred, and rebellion without a cause, only to reappear as prophets of social salvation. To them, the established order, founded upon the peaceful coexistence of peoples, is fundamentally flawed. They, and they alone, claim to know what humanity needs. They are prophets of disorder who seek, in its aftermath, to impose their own order, conceived as uniform, exclusive, and unquestionable. It is nothing less than the personification of power.

The old saying that “virtue lies in the middle” is being swept beneath the carpet of collective consciousness. Increasingly, extremisms pursue the utopian ideals of absolute communism or absolute capitalism, without respite, without limits, and without the slightest sense of decency. The human being, supposedly the highest value to be defended, becomes little more than an instrument of subtle and ingenious dialectical argument, conveyed through language carefully fashioned to seduce at the beginning and enslave at the end. The supreme mission of these self-appointed illuminati, whose energies are destined to expire, is the indulgence of a narcissistic existence, driven by a selfishness nourished by contempt for their fellow human beings.

They are found in South and North America, in Western and Eastern Europe, across the Orient, in China and India. In one form or another, they have always existed. The difference is that today they command the formidable instruments of the digital age, which carry their rhetoric across the globe and amplify their voices beyond all former boundaries.

With a grandiose and pretentious manner, some employ persuasive rhetoric, while others descend beneath the standards of ethics and even the dignity of the offices they claim to represent. They have exploited the vulnerabilities of democracy itself, taking advantage of the openings that free political systems, through their own carelessness, have afforded them. And through those openings they have climbed the steps of leadership—into a realm increasingly murky, clouded, and obscured.

José Soares is a regular columnist in the Azorean Press.