AI Summary
5 min readThe Unconscious Religion of Technology
In his book Jung vs. Borg, Dr. Glenn Slater argues that the tech industry’s faith in artificial intelligence and the merging of humans with machines functions as an unconscious religion. “When you’ve got an unconscious religion, it becomes a sort of fanaticism or something obsessive compulsive,” Slater explains. He distinguishes between techne — the ancient Greek concept of craft, a natural human propensity to shape the world — and the modern technological attitude, which, following philosopher Martin Heidegger, he describes as objectifying, manipulative, and exploitative. The danger, from a Jungian perspective, is one-sidedness: when we place all our eggs in the basket of technological control, we suppress other psychic propensities, creating a collective neurosis.
The Horizontal and the Vertical
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What you'll learn
- 1 Jung vs. Borg: Staying Human in the Age of AI
- 2 (00:00) **Introduction: Technology as Unconscious Religion** - The hosts introduce the episode's central warning that trust in technology can function as an unconscious religion, leading to fanaticism.
- 3 (01:03) **Guest Introduction: Dr. Glenn Slater** - Lisa introduces Dr. Glenn Slater, author of *Jung Versus Borg: Finding the Deeply Human in a Posthuman Age*, and his background in comparative religion and clinical psychology.
- 4 (03:04) **Defining Transhumanism/Posthumanism** - Slater explains the core idea: merging with technology through brain-computer interfaces, physical augmentation, and the belief that we are "natural born cyborgs."
- 5 (07:13) **The Inner Ecology Crisis** - Slater draws a parallel between industrial-era ecological collapse and today's crisis of "inner ecology" or "ecology of mind."
- 6 (12:16) **Technology as Unconscious Religion** - Slater and the hosts discuss how belief in technology's inevitability functions as an unconscious religion.
- 7 (16:37) **The Horizontal vs. Vertical Axis Framework** - Lisa introduces Slater's key framework for understanding our relationship to the world.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
Are we living through a tech-driven collapse of the ecology of mind? In his new book, Jung vs. Borg, author, psychologist and Jungian scholar GLEN SLATER Ph.D suggests that industrial disruption of the outer world is now being followed by a post-industrial disruption of the inner world.
Yet, there is hope. Much depends on our capacity to remain conscious of the effect each stage of innovation has on the psyche and on the social and cultural changes that will follow. Becoming conscious of the non-neutral operation of algorithms and big tech’s focus on profit over people is crucial, for example.
We can also look to Jungian psychology for a countercultural turn toward the deeply human and the sacred. We can seek out connection to spirit and place, to counteract life in a world that can feel mostly transactional and exploitative. What’s required is a “guerrilla operation” to redirect the technological juggernaut, by maintaining a symbolic life, working with our dreams and honoring art, history and culture, not just science and technology.
Glen Slater, Ph.D. is the author of Jung vs Borg: Finding the Deeply Human in a Posthuman Age. For the past 25 years he has taught in the areas of depth psychology and mythological studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Glen is also the editor of the third volume of James Hillman’s Uniform Edition, Senex and Puer (2005), and co-editor of the essay collection, Varieties of Mythic Experience (2007).
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