Dr. Simona Merkinaitė. From the Doubting Human to the Reasoning Machine: Prospects for Human Freedom and Democracy in the Post-Enlightenment Era
The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious questions of the day. We refer to the question what sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organization; we are daily giving them greater power, and supplying, by all sorts of ingenious contrivances, that self-regulating, self-acting power, which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.
Inferior in power, inferior in that great moral quality of self-control, we shall look up to them as to the acme of all that the best and wisest man can ever dare to aim at. No evil passions, no jealousy, no avarice, no impure desires will disturb the serene might of those glorious creatures. Sin, shame, and sorrow, will have no place among them. Their minds will be in a state of perpetual calm, the contentment of a spirit that knows no wants, is disturbed by no regrets.
[…] Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.
These lines are from an 1863 letter by Samuel Butler to the editor in the New Zealand daily The Press, titled “Darwin Among the Machines.”1 Butler’s idea, further developed in his utopian novel Erewhon2, is straightforward: humanity, frail in body and weak, rose to the top of the evolutionary chain by using the power of the mind. If a form of life more intelligent than humans were to emerge, then, at best, humans would become its tools, at worst – its slaves. Moreover – because it is humans who, using their intellect, create new things rather than merely harvesting nature’s fruits and materials – this new stage of evolution would emerge from human activity itself.
What makes Butler remarkable is his Darwinian insight that we should not view evolution and selection solely through a biological lens: non-living entities can insert themselves into the process. Today, Silicon Valley’s elite not only dream of rule by machines freed from human error, frailty, temporality, and limits, but also nurture a vision of digital immortality – a future in which human consciousness can be uploaded to a medium and preserved beyond our body’s decay. Ultimately, each individual could merge into a shared digitized consciousness. This raises a fundamental question about the meaning of individual life: what is the value of our own and our loved ones’ personal experience that cannot be replaced by a virtual, digitized, flattened world-mind? Why do we cherish our own and our people’s stories even as they fade and may be forgotten? Only by confronting the moral meaning of human existence can we create a counterweight to artificial intelligence and preserve our political and personal freedom.
The Enlightenment Promise: A Revolution of Reason and the Foundations of Just Order
The thinkers of the Enlightenment shared a radical faith in the exceptional power of human reason. In science, the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo showed that sensory experience can be false and misleading, diverting us from the truth: beyond our senses there are laws of the universe and nature invisible to the human eye. Enlightenment philosophers believed that through systematic doubt and verification, the human mind could attain certainty in knowledge. René Descartes argued that certain knowledge rests on the human capacity to think and reflect, using doubt as a method.3 Accordingly, the only way for humans to free themselves from error and misfortune – famine, disease, violence – and to harness destructive forces of nature for our benefit is the cultivation of reason.
Reason allowed us to master natural processes so they would not destroy us. Patient inquiry helped repel nature’s threats and rein in forces that devastate humankind – from natural disasters to epidemics. The power of reason produced unprecedented improvements in human life. The British economist Angus Maddison calculated that while world GDP per capita barely doubled from 1 CE to 1820, between 1820 and 2008 it increased more than tenfold. This remarkable growth was accompanied by equally striking social and economic gains. For example, average global life expectancy rose in just two centuries from 31 to nearly 73 years.
Such progress could only be achieved by abandoning predatory behavior – replacing aggression and violence with cooperation and making joint action with others a foundational principle of human coexistence. In other words, by rejecting their animal nature and employing intellect, humans can create a new political order.
Like many Enlightenment philosophers, Descartes believed society could be organized according to rational – or at least reason-guided – principles: reason meant emancipation from opinion, superstition, and the chains of authority. No wonder Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the most penetrating thinkers of modern democracy, called Descartes’s method “the method of democracy.”4 Reason is a universal capacity that creates equal opportunities to know reality and, accordingly, to act on the basis of knowledge.5 Thus there is no argument left for why others must rule us. All of us, endowed with thought, are capable of deciding for ourselves.
Descartes thus sketched an egalitarian, universalist political ontology: unlike wealth or social status, reason is given to all. Each person is capable of judging what is good, desirable, just, and true – of contributing equally to building a wise order. This universal power of reason provides a durable foundation for democracy, in which the right to a voice belongs to everyone regardless of race, nationality, religion, or political beliefs. Historically, the revolution of reason inspired two monumental political revolutions that sought to enshrine equality, liberty, and the conviction – grounded in the power of reason – that all citizens can govern themselves: the ideals of the Enlightenment inspired the French to rise against Louis XVI and helped set the American Revolution in motion.
A new, better, and fairer order can be built only through collaboration: research, sharing information, and reflecting together on unfolding processes. Such cooperation is the beginning of the human political condition and the embryo of the state. The human capacity to reflect on our condition made it possible to replace hierarchical social order, based on the power of the stronger, with new forms of political organization – such as democracy – that require trust in everyone’s ability to decide on matters of common life. The search for orders grounded in universal justice and human dignity is distinctly human trait.
The Enlightenment instilled the belief that moral and political progress could go hand in hand with scientific progress – or, more precisely, that science would naturally lead to a more just, better, more moral political condition. We live in historically unprecedented times: scientific discoveries drive wave after wave of experimentation and advancement. Conditions look ideal for the triumph of universal reason. In the 18th century, the search for truth was an especially complex, long process requiring time, effort, and education. Not so in the 21st century: virtually all information is available instantly, and knowledge is nearly costless. So what happened that, over the last two centuries, as information has exploded and become widely accessible, we have not managed to enshrine justice as the foundation of political order – and in the West we are experiencing a crisis of freedom and self-government? How did doubt – meant to lead us closer to truth – become the solvent of our social bonds, leaving each of us living in a pseudo-reality of our own illusions?
Paradoxically, as smart technologies advanced, we handed over the power of our own minds – the power to think and decide based on knowledge “produced” by us – to machines. Today artificial intelligence (AI) already exists that surpasses humans in rationality, knowledge, and durability. The ongoing automation and autonomy of reason has enabled AI to achieve what the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century once sought: control of the human mind. Given the tools and channels now available – through which people are pumped full of disinformation and fictions – and algorithms that keep us within the frames constructed by AI itself, freedom would stand no chance against tyranny. It is no surprise, then, that the rise of AI at the expense of human thinking and decision-making evokes fears of a new tyranny.
By placing reason at the summit of evolution, Enlightenment thinkers believed the only obstacle to a just order was a lack of information and knowledge and their unequal distribution – knowledge monopolized by privileged strata. The persecution of philosophers like Socrates or scientists like Galileo suggested that real social progress required the universal education of reason through the spread of knowledge and the cultivation of thought. If knowledge could be equalized – if everyone had access to information about reality – then all could not only decide for themselves but make better decisions. Error stems from ignorance, and all forms of domination likewise stem from false or restricted knowledge – whether constrained by power, scarcity, or limited access. Put simply: knowledge processed by the human mind enables resistance to forms of subjugation and the overcoming of tyrannies. Hence Enlightenment authors first sought to elevate the authority of science, which they saw as the source of knowledge expansion and multiplication.
Yet the underlying assumption is mistaken: that every person who can distinguish truth from error will, accordingly, choose good over evil – that knowing the truth means people will care for it and choose it. As knowledge expands and becomes instantly available – when encyclopedias and reference books fit in a device in our pocket – we need a whole different kind of commitment to truth: not political or methodological, but moral. When we consider how to bolster societal resilience today, we must return to foundational moral questions about truth’s place in the order of human affairs.
The Counter-Revolution of Reason: Radical Doubt and the Enslaved Mind
The clearest manifestations of Butler’s dystopia were the two totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, which showed that, by targeting the mind, total domination becomes possible in ways unattainable through violence and terror alone. Comprehensive control over human life – including the mind – was an unprecedented element of tyranny.
Totalitarian tyranny is distinctly modern. After Enlightenment’s political revolutions brought universal freedoms and political rights, modern tyrannies had to create the illusion that they arose from society itself – unlike premodern tyrannies, which imposed themselves by force. The falsification of consent through seduction and control of the mind – ideology, propaganda, and disinformation – is a defining feature of this tyranny, stemming from modern political thought’s ambition to include every individual in political life.6 Totalitarian power takes root not as an external force but crystallizes from within; it not only invites people to join a political program but dictates what constitutes beauty, courage, patriotism, honor, marriage, motherhood, or death. Machines played their part here too – first through radio waves reaching millions, mechanically repeating messages, infiltrating everyday life, and shaping the aesthetic appeal of ideology. By invoking the “true” interests of the nation, race, or people, ideologues erased the line between tyrannical rule and the will of the nation, race, class, or people – until it became nearly impossible to distinguish the executioner from the victim, the persecuted from the persecutor.
Hannah Arendt, one of the 20th century’s foremost philosophers, wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism that the main goal of totalitarian ideology and propaganda is not to persuade with lies – that is, to replace reality with a convincing fiction – but to sow doubt about the very existence of reality and the possibility of knowing it. Where nothing is true, everything becomes possible. When people can no longer tell where truth ends and lies begin, persuasion is unnecessary. More crucially, when a person can no longer distinguish the real from the unreal, they become pliable material. The ideal subject of a totalitarian regime, Arendt noted, is not the convinced Nazi or Communist, but the person for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood, no longer exists.7 Arendt thus identified a new, distinctive feature of totalitarianism: the derangement of the mind.
Show trials in the Soviet Union – well known to Lithuanians – aimed to undermine confidence in reality and confuse the mind. Their purpose was to create total dissonance between facts and meaning: resistance to slavery was branded as treason against the nation, the people, the state; truth-telling became heresy. Forcing dissidents – writers, scholars – to confess to fabricated crimes, the trials did not seek to demonstrate judicial fairness, but to break the unity between action and meaning. The growing gap between deed and significance breeds distrust – in norms, laws, and courts. For defendants, the intended effect was to shake confidence in their own actions, judgments, and thoughts; for observers – to create a rift between what is seen and felt and what is understood.
When nothing is certain – say, when we cannot event be sure that the imprisonment of a neighbor of another faith or ethnicity is unjust – then we cannot trust our inner moral convictions or decisions either. Totalitarianism’s aim is to make the human wholly subservient to the regime by cultivating constant uncertainty, ignorance, and loss of control – when it seems that nothing depends on one’s actions and no decision can change injustice or lies. This breeds apathy, passivity, and self-limitation: you can never be sure that tomorrow won’t bring accusations of treason, deportation, or torture for what seemed like a fight for truth or justice. By targeting minds, modern tyrannies not only silenced dissidents but sowed self-doubt – about moral sense, ability to judge reality, and to act as free citizens endowed with will and political power.
A common distinction is drawn between 20th-century totalitarian regimes, rooted in fixed ideologies (however illusory the promise of a better future), and today’s postmodern tyrannies, which operate without a clear ideological core. Just as Enlightenment thinkers, following Copernicus and Galileo, urged skepticism toward deceptive sense impressions, 21st-century dictators and authoritarians persuade us that what happens before our eyes isn’t real. Writer Peter Pomerantsev adapted Arendt’s phrase – “where nothing is true, everything is possible” – to describe Putin’s 21st-century nihilist dictatorship: the current Russian regime consolidates its power through the very absence of ideology and fixed meaning – where war can be peace, subjugation can be freedom, and occupation can be liberation.8
Historian Timothy Snyder speaks of Russia’s “strategic relativism.”9 After the February 24, 2022 invasion, Russia advanced many mutually contradictory explanations: the war was simultaneously a “special military operation,” a metaphysical struggle against evil, and NATO aggression against Russia. One of the most “successful” claims was that Ukraine is not a “real state,” even as, nearly three years in, Russia continues to fight the very real Ukrainian army. This dissonance between proclaimed “reality” and reality itself disorients. We find ourselves in a surreal world where the norms of interaction and cooperation no longer apply. Disorientation leads first to passivity: the world looks like a malleable mass that deforms at the slightest touch.
Russia infiltrates democratic states in the same way, spreading propaganda that there is no essential difference between Western democracies and Russian authoritarianism: everywhere, politics is corrupt, the rule of law and fair elections are fictions masking power and minority interests. If anything is “real,” it is crude power – guns, money, oil. Politicians everywhere share the same motives – lust for power and fame, greed and egoism. Thus, even in free societies we drift back toward nihilism: no regime is better or worse politically or morally than any other, since behind each lurks the same will to power and hypocrisy. Defending democracy becomes harder; the world begins to resemble a battlefield where the only question is who grabs more first.
This systematic, unbroken derangement of the mind not only replaces reality but relieves us of responsibility – especially when the regime can raise the “price” of truth by persecuting those who speak it. It may feel safer to convince yourself that Ukrainians aren’t fully human or that a Mexican migrant is evil incarnate than to risk your comfort. Modern tyrannies have discovered subtler forms of mind control that prevent us from deciding and acting freely.
The Machine and the Will to Power
The People’s Republic of China illustrates what totalitarian rule means in the age of artificial intelligence, building a digital panopticon used to systematically monitor and control certain groups. Uyghurs in China must install smartphone apps that function like a social credit system, measuring productivity and obedience to the regime. The apps not only track movements but also transmit all phone data to authorities. Through smart devices, police monitor electricity use – changes can signal unusual activity (gatherings, hidden persons) – and collect information on purchases and leisure. The goal is to strip the person of subjectivity altogether, suspending freedom of choice and action, even the hope of evading the “Big Brother” gaze.
This extends beyond crude control of specific groups. Modern technologies enable a robotized “thought police” across the world’s second-largest nation. More than a decade ago, China’s “Great Firewall” began preventing citizens from seeing or searching words and phrases like “Tiananmen” or “1989.” Various comment-management tools automate content blocking: programs – like digital policemen – suppress information that could “harm state security or national interests.”
AI can now process and analyze, at lightning speed, volumes of data beyond human grasp. Smart machines not only allow unprecedented data collection but draw conclusions from quantities inaccessible to us, creating extraordinary possibilities for controlling people – even their inner world. Unlike the 20th-century totalitarianism, control is now fully autonomous: it is not the policeman or warden (as in tyranny) or even the court (as in democracy) but the machine that decides what is acceptable, what is true. It functions as an instrument of thought control, tracking habits, predicting hopes, views, actions, and choices – including potential political dissent. The aim is to preempt opposition before it even arises, preventing the very formation of ideas contrary to the regime’s aims. Modern information technologies need no overseer who must still weigh conscience before repression. They reduce their subject – the human being – to a pattern, predicting worldviews and behaviors and inserting corrections.
Thus, perfected information technologies – intended to liberate us – have become new instruments of subjugation, blurring the line between free, democratically governed societies and nondemocratic regimes. The machine-generated flood of information itself becomes a primary form of disinformation. In democracies, we willingly surrender our will to machines: rather than seeking information actively, we get lost in abundance and trust algorithms to “feed” us. The machine aims to please: by reading our data, it projects our values and political leanings and serves content that confirms them. This not only heightens self-satisfaction but also provides moral justification for political violence. If we see only stories about crimes by migrants, racial conflict, and political corruption, we begin to rationalize violence, discrimination, and cruelty.
In the 20th century, the boundary between person and power vanished because power was everywhere – kindergartens, schools, sports clubs, marriage halls, funeral homes, national holidays, shops. In the digital age, power becomes depersonalized, automated, self-replicating – a political force turned inward upon itself. It lacks the attributes of genuine political power – vision, agenda, purpose. It functions as an information-replication mechanism indifferent to meaning, accuracy, or truth. If the counter-revolution of reason destroys the rule of law and democratic self-government, we may discover there is nothing behind it – no one to accept responsibility or propose a vision for rebuilding the world.
Looking at populist movements across democracies – from the United States to Hungary – we can fairly say that populists have adopted the machine’s methods. Their modus operandi is relentless criticism of the present without any positive vision or plan. Populist leaders often mimic AI: they sow doubt and mistrust, attack existing institutions, flaunt open aggression, yet rarely rally around a forward-looking vision. Instead, they manipulate nostalgia. Their only promise is destruction, not creation. Where there is no clear vision or agenda, there can be no responsibility.
Smart information technologies also create unprecedented conditions for simulating the democratic process. We can form opinions about the most distant countries and events, yet lose connection to our immediate surroundings. Online, we are encouraged to be humane and civic-minded and to “take a stand”: sign petitions, raise funds, join campaigns – concern for endangered species, views on protests in the U.S., or migration in German provinces are presented as reflections of our moral character and political awareness. In truth, we increasingly simulate political will, focusing on matters beyond our influence rather than those we might alter, however slightly – a signature or “like” is only a proxy for the will democracy requires. Today’s information bubbles and radicalized doubt about everything around us lead to loneliness.
The world draws closer, yet identity and information bubbles leave people feeling cut off: the World Health Organization has declared loneliness a global health problem.10 We can watch events unfold in real time thousands of miles away yet become ever more isolated from one another, captive to worldviews crafted by algorithms. These tools strip us of privacy and, by feeding algorithms, restrict our will and freedom, narrowing to a minimum the world we see through our devices. The virtual town square does not provide the communal closeness born of direct interaction. Smart technologies bring the world closer, yet make it feel alien – no longer speaking to us or bearing meaning. As Jan Patočka put it, the “meaning of the world” is no longer “humanly centered”11: it does not arise from our immediate experience but is generated and imposed by the algorithm.
The pursuit of total control always goes hand in hand with the elimination of direct experience and relations with others by pushing people into isolation and restricting their ability to act. Isolation is achieved not only by physical separation – say, restricting freedom of assembly. It is achieved by sowing doubt about reality and the meaning of events before our eyes. Protest can be labeled treason; a violent assault on legitimate institutions can be celebrated as a “day of love,” as with the 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol. When the ability to understand reality is undermined, we cease to share a common world – the same events mean different things to different people. This is the essence of today’s smart technologies: not only to mislead but to isolate. We see this now in the United States: some feel they live in a dystopia; others believe a golden age has dawned – without no common ground. Politically, citizens lose their ability to mobilize, creating conditions for uncontrolled expansion of power. As Arendt observed, a totalitarian regime seeks maximal isolation – not only limiting people’s ability to act freely alongside others but also fostering mutual distrust. Absolute loyalty can be expected only from a completely isolated person who, lacking ties of family, friendship, or community, derives meaning solely from belonging to a movement or party.12
The Promise of Freedom: A Virtue Ethics for the Age of AI
Facts alone do not produce a better society. The assumption that merely knowing the truth ensures its establishment and care is fundamentally wrong. Truth requires a moral commitment. There will always be situations where it is easier and safer to abandon it; in plain terms, truth is often not the most “rational” choice. Truth demands humility – we must conform ourselves to it. History – especially its painful chapters – makes this clear. Once we acknowledge the Holocaust and its scale, we must also accept that it could not have occurred without local collaboration, meaning that our own citizens were complicit. The only way to avoid that responsibility is to deny the truth. Commitment to truth also entails commitment to other people. Denying a historical event goes hand in hand with refusing to recognize the value of another person’s life. Only by recognizing equal human dignity – accepting the Holocaust as absolute evil – does the fact itself, the six million murdered, speak to us with the weight truth carries.
Consider an even harder case: citizens under National Socialism or Communism who refused lies and disobediently chose to live in truth, incurring persecution, deportation, or the gulag. In such circumstances, holding to truth may be not only irrational but dangerous. Yet many did so. The courage and resolve of that choice tell us something profound about a person who takes truth as the compass of moral and political judgement. Such a person refuses to be an instrument of lies or a pretender. This decision cultivates virtues – humility, responsibility, fidelity – and fortifies moral character. Butler rightly noted that machines can make decisions unburdened by emotion and thus may help avert tragedies born of pride, ambition, and egoism. But that also means our common life would no longer be shaped by positive springs of action: courage, solidarity, compassion, loyalty. Without these virtues there would be no Lithuanian state – no people willing to risk everything by living in truth. Today there might be no Ukrainian state without those who have bound themselves to life in freedom, even at mortal risk.
The aim of disinformation, propaganda, algorithms, and other tools of mind control is not only to convince with lies or confuse – to deprive us of the means to tell truth from falsehood. Their purpose is to grant a mandate to immoral impulses: to reject the other, evade hard truths, stoke radicalism over moderation, and legitimize violence. Russia’s regime is nihilist precisely because respect for truth has been maximally suspended; the supposed mark of a “strong” person becomes the ability to deny and openly reject it.
A moral commitment to truth means not only deciding for ourselves, but also owning our errors – when we misjudge information or draw faulty conclusions. Consider the dilemma of the self-driving car. A machine can model risks more precisely in a dangerous situation. Yet such a car does not exist because, at a fundamental level, we must program a principle: if a collision looms, should the car swerve toward an animal to spare a human life? What if a collision is unavoidable and the choice is between an elderly person and a young one? Between a child and a scientist who may discover a cure next week? In an extreme situation without algorithmic intervention, outcomes are largely determined by chance. Chance is part of the human condition. It often brings novelty into the world and forces us to adapt to events we cannot fully control. To admit that we cannot control everything is to acknowledge that freedom exists – and that reason and moral agency are ways of adapting ourselves to the world, not remaking it to fit an ideal structure imposed upon it. Misfortune is a possible fruit of contingency. But many discoveries also carry elements of ignorance and openness to the unexpected. Here we return to the ethical relation between people: what matters is openness and even the willingness to assume responsibility that allows us to rally around common tasks.
Butler’s warning – that artificial intelligence will enslave us – will come true if we reduce both AI and political life to the mere production and dissemination of knowledge. We have reached a point where our capacities for speed and scale of analysis have already been surpassed. What separates us from AI is the power of moral judgment: a machine lacks unpredictability; history cannot fill it with pride; the fragility of a meaningful life will not move it to fight, even at risk of death; facts will not awaken in it a sense of duty.
Freedom requires a distinctively human moral capacity – to decide for ourselves and take responsibility for the world around us. And it is precisely the space of freedom guaranteed by the legal, democratic state that ensures respect for human dignity and rests on justified trust in the human ability to decide, act, and govern. This moral core is the meaning of a democratic order and society.
References:
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Vilnius: Tyto Alba, 2022.
Batanova, Milena, Weissbourd, Richard, McIntyre, Joseph. Loneliness in America: Just the Tip of the Iceberg?:
Butler, Samuel. Erewhon, Adamant Media Corporation, 2000.
Darwin Among the Machines (To the Editor of the Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, 13 June, 1863): https://web.archive.org/web/20060524131242/http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-ButFir-t1-g1-t1-g1-t4-body.html.
Descartes, Rene. Discourse on the Method. Vilnius: Jonas ir Jokūbas, 2017.
Patočka, Jan. Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. Vilnius: Phi Knygos, 2021.
Pomerantsev, Peter. Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia. PublicAffairs, 2014.
Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. Vilnius: Hubris, 2024.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Vilnius: Amžius, 1996.
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