There is a small desk by the window of my room in Cusco. By day I write at it. At night I think there. Tonight I sit with only a notebook and a pencil on the desk. No map, no photographs. The site of this chapter is not a place but thought.
The experiences of the past few days will not yet settle. The megaliths of Sacsayhuamán. The five-hundred-year flow of water at Tipón. The Spanish church atop Coricancha. The afternoon at Cajamarca and the execution of Túpac Amaru. And the word I first set on my tongue at the end of Chapter 7 — Wetiko.
How do these become a single picture? I sense that they are not the isolated tragedies of one civilization but the many faces of a structure of planetary scale. If the structure has the name Wetiko, then where are its roots?
To answer this question one must climb much further back. To Spain five hundred years ago, and before that, two thousand years before, to the Mediterranean. I write the number 2,500 on the page. The depth of time this chapter will trace.
What I want to argue in this chapter is simple. One way of thinking has, over the past 2,500 years, slowly grown. It began as a sprout in a single sentence of the Greek philosophers, took its form in Roman law, received its religious justification in medieval theology, and was completed in its modern shape in a single proposition of Descartes. Then Locke and Kant extended it as political and moral philosophy; the Industrial Revolution materialized it as a factory system; twentieth-century eugenics and neoliberalism pushed it to its extreme; and today our AI technology stands at its apex.
This is one story. Not one conspiracy. Not one collective will. It is a tendency that many thinkers and movements have pushed in the same direction. Not seeing this tendency, we do not understand why we find ourselves in the present age.
So let us travel back. To Athens of the fifth century BCE.
Plato (427–347 BCE), in Book VII of The Republic, presents the famous allegory of the cave.¹ The story runs as follows.
There are prisoners who have been confined for their whole lives within a cave. They sit chained before a wall, unable to turn back. Behind them is a fire, and people pass before that fire carrying objects. What the prisoners can see are only the shadows on the wall. They live believing that those shadows are the real world.
One day a prisoner is released. He turns around and sees the fire. He goes outside the cave. He sees the sun. He realizes the real world. Then he returns to the cave to tell the others — "What you see are only shadows." But the prisoners do not believe him. They take him for a madman.
This allegory compresses the core of Plato's philosophy. The world we perceive through the senses — the world we see, hear, and touch — is not real. It is shadow. The real world is the world of Ideas (idea), the world of Forms. This world cannot be reached by the senses; it can only be known by reason.
Within this scheme is set a fundamental dichotomy.
Idea vs. Phenomenon. Soul vs. Body. Reason vs. Sense. Unchanging vs. Changing. Perfect vs. Imperfect. Form vs. Matter.
And this dichotomy is never horizontal. It is hierarchical. The first term is higher than the second. Idea is higher than phenomenon, soul higher than body, reason higher than sense. The first term is that which must rule; the second, that which must be ruled.
Under this hierarchy, where is nature placed? Nature is the world of the senses, the world of change, the world of imperfection. That is, in a lower position. Nature is passive matter that must be given form by the order of Ideas. Nature waits to be organized by reason. Nature in itself has no value.
This is the first seed of the idea of "domination over nature."
Plato's pupil Aristotle (384–322 BCE) extended his teacher's dichotomy into a biological hierarchy.² In Book I of the Politics he systematized the levels of nature.
According to Aristotle, nature is composed in stages. Minerals at the bottom. Above them, plants. Above them, animals. Above them, humans. Above them, gods. In this hierarchy the lower exists for the sake of the higher. Minerals exist that plants may grow; plants exist that animals may eat; animals exist that humans may use. And humans, by virtue of reason, stand above the other animals.
Up to this point this is, in some form, a thought present in nearly every ancient civilization. But Aristotle went one step further. There is a hierarchy within humanity itself.
Some are "born by nature to rule," others "born by nature to be ruled." This is his claim. The former are Greeks, free citizens, men. The latter are barbarians (barbaroi), slaves, women, children. They are less developed in reason and so cannot rule themselves. Therefore being ruled by those whose reason is more developed is also for their benefit.
This is the theory of natural slavery (natural slavery).
I stop each time I read these sentences. Aristotle is one of the great giants of Western philosophy. Founder of logic. Founder of metaphysics. Classic of ethics. His influence cannot be put into words. Yet this giant systematically justified the naturalness of slavery. How is one to receive this?
One thing is clear — this justification is being written two thousand years later. In the Valladolid Debate of 1550, which we will see in Chapter 10, Sepúlveda applied precisely this Aristotelian passage to the Indigenous: "The Indigenous are natural slaves." Across two thousand years, a single sentence still draws breath. And it determines the fate of millions.
Philosophy travels through time. For good and for ill.
But we must remember that there were other voices in Greece as well.
Heraclitus (535–475 BCE) said, "All things flow (panta rhei)." Everything changes ceaselessly, opposites pass through one another. One cannot step into the same river twice. Opposition and change are the nature of being. This is the precise opposite of Plato's worldview of unchanging Ideas. But Heraclitus, called "the Obscure," was marginalized.
The successors of Pythagoras (570–495 BCE) emphasized cosmic harmony. Everything is connected by mathematical proportion, and the human is part of that harmony. Some Pythagorean schools practiced vegetarianism — they held that animals possessed souls like humans. They were later pushed out of the mainstream.
Stoic philosophy taught: live "according to nature (secundum naturam vivere)." They saw the entire cosmos as a single living organism. The human is part of this whole and is not essentially separate from other beings. This is plainly an alternative genealogy. But after the Roman Empire adopted Stoicism as its official philosophy, its content was reduced more to private virtue than to practice.
That is, several paths existed within the Greek tradition. And which path became the mainstream was a question not of philosophical superiority but of political choice. That the hierarchical dichotomy of Plato and Aristotle became the mainstream of the Mediterranean world was not because their philosophy was objectively better. It was because that philosophy was useful to the ruling class. The doctrine of natural slavery was the story slave-owners wanted to hear.
The history of philosophy is not a march of truth. At times it is the victory of useful error.
In Chapter 5 I already mentioned a key concept of Roman law. Dominium — absolute ownership. I return to it here because this concept translated the Greek hierarchy into legal form.
In Roman law, the holder of dominium has three rights over an object: use (usus), enjoyment (fructus), and disposal (abusus).³ He can use it, take its profits, and destroy or sell it. The third is decisive. The right to destroy is the essence of ownership.
What can the object be? Land. Things. Animals. And — persons. In Rome, slaves were legally objects of dominium. The master could use a slave, take the children born to her as profit, and sell or kill the slave. Of course there were certain restrictions in different periods, but the underlying structure of seeing the slave as a thing did not change.
Paired with dominium is imperium. Absolute rule. This is not ownership but governance. The authority of the Roman emperor over territory. The authority of a military commander over his army. When the two concepts combine, the result is total dominion over both nature and persons.
Another key concept is persona. From its meaning of "mask" it came to refer to the legal subject. Only one who has persona can perform legal acts (contracts, lawsuits, ownership of property). Slaves were not persona. Human, but not legally human. This concept became the foundation of two thousand years of Western legal systems.
What is interesting is that persona is a concept that can be expanded. At first it applied only to Roman citizens. Later it was extended gradually to women, freed slaves, Jews, and others (still with differential rights). And today persona is granted to corporations ("legal persons"). Recently there has been discussion of granting persona to certain animals, rivers, and ecosystems.⁴ The boundary of persona is still expanding. And whom that boundary includes and whom it excludes is the essence of politics.
Between the first and fourth centuries CE, Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire. At first it was a persecuted minority religion. It was legalized in 313 by Constantine's Edict of Milan, and made the state religion in 392 under Theodosius.
In this process something astonishing took place. Many of the original teachings of Christianity — to stand with the poor, to love one's enemies, to share one's possessions — were there. These teachings were fundamentally in tension with the order of Roman domination. That tension was one reason early Christianity was persecuted. But once Christianity became the state religion, it was Romanized. More precisely: it was absorbed into Rome's grammar of domination.
At the heart of this is Genesis 1:28.
"And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."⁵
In the Hebrew original, "subdue" is kabash, "have dominion" is radah. Both verbs imply strong domination. Especially kabash carries the image of trampling underfoot to bring into submission. The verb of the conqueror.
This passage itself emerges from a Middle Eastern pastoral society, and what it originally meant is contested. Recent interpretation reads it as "responsible stewardship." Yet historically, especially after medieval Europe, the passage functioned as the theological warrant for "the absolute dominion of humans over nature." And this theological warrant was fused with the Roman law concept of dominium.
The result: "The Creator commanded humanity to dominate nature. Roman law defines the form of that dominion." These two pillars built the view of nature in Western Christian civilization.
The American historian Lynn White Jr. published a brief but influential paper in Science in 1967, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis."⁶ His argument was provocative — the West's ecological crisis is not a problem of science or industry but a problem of theology. The dominion-command of Genesis 1:28 led the West to "an exceptionally aggressive attitude toward nature," and, when fused with the scientific revolution, justified unlimited exploitation. The argument has provoked heated debate that continues. But his core insight — worldview determines the direction of material civilization — is also a premise of this book.
We leap forward in time to seventeenth-century France. René Descartes (1596–1650) is writing in a room in Holland. The book to be published in 1637 is titled Discourse on the Method (Discours de la Méthode). Four years later Meditations (Meditationes) will follow.
Descartes' aim was certainty. After the Renaissance and the Reformation, Europe had fallen into intellectual confusion. The authority of the Church wavered, new sciences shot off in many directions, and it was unclear what counted as certain knowledge. Descartes set out to doubt everything and find what could not be doubted.
His method was systematic doubt. The senses can deceive. Even mathematics can be wrong, if a demon is deceiving us. But even while doubting, the I that doubts must exist. This alone cannot be doubted. And so the famous sentence.
"Cogito, ergo sum." I think, therefore I am.⁷
This single sentence is the starting point of modern Western philosophy.
Yet within this sentence is already a single decision. The ground of being is thought. Not the body, not relationship, not action in the world. Thought. And this thinking I is something separate from the body. Because the body's existence can be doubted, but the existence of the thinking subject cannot.
So Descartes divides two substances. The extended thing (res extensa) — matter that occupies space. And the thinking thing (res cogitans) — mind that does not occupy space. These two substances are essentially different. Irreducible to each other. This is Cartesian dualism.
Descartes applied this dualism in its extreme form. Animals, he held, have no mind.⁸
His logic ran thus. Thought is expressed through language. Animals do not have language. Therefore animals do not think. If they do not think, they have no soul. If they have no soul, they are not subjects. If not subjects, they are — machines.
For Descartes, animals were automata (automaton). Like an intricate clock. Even the responses that look like the experience of pain are in fact only mechanical reflexes. The cry of an animal is essentially the same as the squeak of a hinge.
The consequences were great. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, vivisection was widely practiced in the name of science. Descartes himself is recorded as having dissected living dogs in his experiments. When the dog screamed, he dismissed it as "the noise of the machine." His followers went further. Nicolas Malebranche, it is said, kicked his own dog and laughed, "This machine works well."⁹
The twenty-first-century reader feels this scene as cruel. Yet within a Cartesian worldview it is a coherent logic. If an animal is a machine, it is morally indifferent how a machine is treated.
And this logic did not stop with animals.
Descartes himself believed humans had reason. Humans, that is, are not automata. But his followers had differing views on how to apply the distinction.
What of the Indigenous? They had no script and had not developed European reason. Were they then beings of less developed reason? Cartesian dualism offered a useful frame for the question. By the degree of reason's development, humans could be placed at different points along a continuum. One end: complete European reason; the other: pure animal. Somewhere in between were placed the Indigenous and the African.
What of women? In the European thought of the time, women were regarded as "closer to the body, less developed in reason." Cartesian dualism reinforced this prejudice. The schema reason = male, body/emotion = female became firm.¹⁰
What of the worker? With the beginning of the Industrial Revolution this question became important. The human at the factory who performs repetitive work — the human who works as part of the machine — what kind of being is he? Marx would later analyze it, but the capitalist factory treats the worker as a machine part. This is possible because the Cartesian logic had already made it possible to see the human partly as a machine.
I feel this story especially close because of its connection to medicine.
As one who studied medicine, I see every day the wound Cartesian dualism has left on contemporary care. The habit of reducing a patient to "a set of symptoms." The gaze that treats the body as a broken machine. The separation of mental problems from the bodily domain. The patient's life-story is the margin of the chart, while only the test numbers and the imaging photographs are taken as "objective data."
All this came from a single sentence by a French philosopher four hundred years ago. "The body is a machine." It is true that this metaphor brought medicine to astonishing development. We discovered germs, isolated viruses, transplanted hearts, and went on to edit genes. But there is a price. The patient is reduced to symptoms; healing to repair. As a result, we treat acute illness well but are often helpless before chronic illness. When a patient with a cancer diagnosis asks "Why me?" modern medicine has no adequate language. The question cannot be answered in the language of mechanical engineering.
This theme will be addressed in earnest in Chapter 17, on Salutogenesis. Here let us only remember that Descartes' touch reaches as far as our hospital rooms today. Philosophy is not abstract. Philosophy seeps into the body.
Francis Bacon (1561–1626), contemporary with Descartes, in England, was another founder of modern science. His Novum Organum (1620) is a classic of scientific method.
The most shocking sentence Bacon left. To study nature, he wrote, is to interrogate (inquisition) nature. More extremely, the expression that to obtain nature's secrets one "must torture nature" is also said to come from him.¹¹
The metaphor has its context. Bacon was a prosecutor in the English court. In his time it was a legal procedure to obtain confession by torture from the accused. Bacon used this procedure as a metaphor for scientific research. Nature is the accused. The scientist is the prosecutor. Since nature does not voluntarily reveal her secrets, they must be drawn out by force.
This metaphor became deeply embedded in modern science. The laboratory became "the interrogation room" of nature. The scientist became "one who steals nature's secrets." Not curiosity but the will to conquer became the engine moving science. The American feminist environmental thinker Carolyn Merchant, in The Death of Nature (1980), analyzed this shift in detail.¹² Her argument: before Bacon, nature was thought of as mother. After Bacon, nature became a female defendant under torture. This shift in metaphor is one root of the modern environmental crisis.
The English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) is one of the founders of modern liberalism. His Second Treatise of Government (1689) is a classic of democracy. It is also among the intellectual inheritances that ground the Korean Constitution. The legitimacy of government comes from the consent of the governed. Citizens have natural rights. The state is a contractual product to protect those rights. All these are pillars of modern democracy.
Yet this great liberal's thought has a dark side. That dark side is the subject here.
Locke's labor theory of property is simple as this.¹³ Every person is owner of his own body. And owner of his body's labor. Therefore if someone combines his labor with a part of nature, that part becomes his property. He who labors at an apple tree to gain its fruit is owner of that fruit. He who clears a forest to make a field is owner of the land.
The logic seems self-evident. Yet here lies a deep problem.
"To whom belongs the land to which no labor has been joined?" Locke's answer: it has no owner. Terra nullius — "land of no one." Such land may be acquired by anyone who applies labor to it. The first to clear it becomes its owner.
Why is this theory dark? Because when Europe "discovered" the Americas, they applied precisely this logic. The Indigenous did not "clear" the land in the European manner. Their farming was different, their cultivation different, the very concept of land use different. To European eyes their land appeared as "unimproved". That is, terra nullius. That is, without owner. That is, if a European put labor into it, it became European.
This logic became the legal basis for the dispossession of North American Indigenous lands.¹⁴ And this is not the dead intellectual relic of Locke but a principle that operated on the actual ground. The American founding fathers read Locke and absorbed this logic. Canada's Treaties were also built upon it. This is why my Cree friends in Canada say, "Our land was always our land, but legally it was classified as 'no one's.'"
And in Locke's own personal history there is a darker side still.
For his whole life he was an investor. One of his major investments was in the Royal African Company.¹⁵ This was the largest English slave-trading company of the seventeenth century. Locke owned shares, sat on its board, and drew its profits.
At the same time he wrote of liberty, equality, and natural rights. He declared self-ownership of the body a fundamental human right. The bodies of Africans were excluded from that ownership.
How is this contradiction to be understood? Many scholars have tried to answer. Some say hypocrisy. Some say the limits of the age. But the most persuasive explanation is more structural. Locke's liberalism was, from the outset, a theory built on the premise of certain humans only. Not every person possesses natural rights, but rather "the normal" human. And the standard of "the normal" was — European, Christian, male, propertied.
This structural bias is the dark face of modern liberalism. And it affects us still.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). The summit of Western philosophy. Father of modern ethics. The very Kant who said, "Treat humanity as an end in itself."
Yet there are lesser-known writings of Kant. He taught anthropology and geography at university for many years. His lecture notes and short pieces contain a systematic theory of race.¹⁶
The white is the most complete form of humanity, he wrote. The yellow is stagnant; the black remains in a childlike state; the Indigenous lacks the capacity to develop. His sentences wear the appearance of academic objectivity, but they carry an unmistakable racial hierarchy.
What is to be done with this?
For a long time the Western academy hid this part. The editors of Kant's collected works classified the anthropology lectures as marginal. Ethics textbooks taught only the categorical imperative and did not mention his race theory. Students learned Kant's teaching to "treat all persons as ends," but did not learn that "all persons" might in fact have meant only Europeans.
In 1997 the American philosopher Charles W. Mills published The Racial Contract.¹⁷ His provocative claim was this. The "social contract" of modern liberalism was in fact a racial contract. That is, the contract was a contract among whites, and non-whites were placed outside the contract. Thinkers like Kant, Locke, and Rousseau implicitly assumed "the rational human," and the rational human meant European male. Because this assumption operated without being made explicit, it was all the more powerful.
Whether Mills is 100% right or not, his insight is decisive. The "universal human" of the Enlightenment was not universal. It was a particular form of particular people, and most of the rest of humanity was placed outside that universal. This is concealed hypocrisy.
And this hypocrisy is the philosophical extension of the question that emerges in the Valladolid Debate of Chapter 10 — "Are the Indigenous human?" Post-Enlightenment Europe officially declared the equality of all humans, but kept asking, in practice, who is fully human. Immigration, slavery, colonies, the treatment of the mentally ill, women's suffrage — all were struggles over where to draw the boundary of "the full human."
And that struggle is not yet over.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Industrial Revolution took place in Europe. Steam engines were invented, factories were built, peasants migrated to the cities. A new form of labor was born. Factory labor. It was fundamentally different from agricultural labor.
Agricultural labor follows the rhythm of nature. Rise with the sun, rest at sunset. Sow in spring, reap in autumn. The content of labor changes with season and weather. And most of it is performed in the context of community.
Factory labor follows the rhythm of the machine. The clock determines the hours of labor. When the machine stops, labor stops. When it runs, labor runs. And most of the time, an isolated individual repeats a particular motion.
The summit of this change was Frederick Taylor (1856–1915) and his Scientific Management.¹⁸ Taylor was an American engineer. He sought to break down factory labor. How many seconds for a single hammer-blow? How much earth shifts with one shovel? What is the optimal motion? With a stopwatch in hand he walked through the factory measuring every movement of the worker.
His goal was the engineering of human movement. The worker should not think. He need only repeat the optimal motion that has been designed. Thinking is the manager's. Execution is the worker's. This separation is the essence of "scientific management."
Taylorism was completed in the early twentieth century in Henry Ford's automobile factory. The assembly line. Each worker repeats one specific motion every minute. The whole automobile moves along a conveyor belt as parts are added. This system exploded productivity. Prices fell, the automobile was popularized. Economically it was a success.
But what of the worker's experience? Repeat, repeat, repeat. There is no meaning. No need to understand the whole picture. No need to know what is before or after one's own motion. The body moving while thought is suspended. And this for eight hours every day, for decades.
A scene from Charlie Chaplin's film Modern Times (1936) captured it. Tightening nuts before the conveyor belt, Chaplin finally falls into madness. He is sucked into the factory machinery and rolls between the gears. His body has become a part of the machine. The film is comedy, but the reality it captured is tragedy.
Three hundred years after Descartes declared "the animal is a machine," the human became a part of the machine in the factory. The consequence of dualism had at last arrived.
In the early twentieth century, eugenics became academically mainstream in Europe and America. This "science," founded by Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton (1822–1911), aimed at the improvement of human heredity. "Good" traits would be propagated; "bad" traits, eliminated. This took place in the name of science. The most prestigious universities — Harvard, Oxford, Stanford — opened courses in eugenics.
What was the result?
Forced sterilization. The state of Virginia passed a law for compulsory sterilization of "the unfit" in 1924. In 1927 the Supreme Court ruled it constitutional (Buck v. Bell). From 1927 into the 1970s, about 60,000 people were forcibly sterilized in the United States. Most were the poor, people of color, the mentally disabled, unmarried mothers.¹⁹
Immigration restriction. The U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 made it an official goal "to favor immigration from northwestern Europe and to restrict that from southeastern Europe and Asia." The scientific basis? IQ tests. And those IQ tests were strongly culturally biased, putting non-English-speaking immigrants at a disadvantage.²⁰
And to the extreme. Nazi Germany made eugenics state policy. The disability euthanasia program known as T4 began in 1939. About 200,000 disabled people were killed. The same logic and the same gas-chamber technology then led to the Holocaust. Six million Jews, half a million Roma, and tens of thousands of homosexuals and communists were murdered.
The connection between eugenics and the Holocaust is decisive. The gas chambers were not made by accident. They were the extension of scientific racism. And that scientific racism stood at the end of a long lineage that began with Aristotle's natural slavery, passed through the hidden assumptions of Locke and Kant, was systematized in the phrenology and racial biology of the nineteenth century, and was "scientized" as eugenics in the twentieth.
Wetiko wears the face of science. It justifies the cruelest acts in the most refined language. And it proudly calls them "progress."
After the Second World War, the world tried to recover from the shock of the Holocaust. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. The expansion of social welfare states. Movements against racism. For about thirty years, the West experienced a partial recovery of collective conscience.
From the 1970s, however, a movement in another direction began. Economists at the University of Chicago — Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek — led the rise of neoliberalism.²¹
Neoliberalism's core proposition is simple. The market is the optimal mechanism for allocating resources. Government intervention reduces efficiency. Welfare, regulation, public services, all interfere with the free working of the market. Therefore, everything must be left to the market. Education, health care, prisons, parks, water.
In the 1980s Reagan (United States) and Thatcher (United Kingdom) implemented this ideology as policy. Privatization of public services, deregulation, the weakening of labor unions, tax cuts. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, neoliberalism was declared "the only possible economic system" ("the end of history," Francis Fukuyama).
Margaret Thatcher's famous sentence compresses the core of this ideology. "There is no such thing as society. There are only individuals and families."²² This is not a political declaration. It is an ontological declaration. To deny the collective entity called society. To dissolve the category of community. What remains is only individuals and families (that is, units of private property). Between them, every relationship is reduced to market transaction.
The result is the world we live in. A university has become a "knowledge enterprise." A hospital has become a "health-care service provider." Friendship is analyzed as "social capital". Dating passes through the algorithm of an app. Time is "money." Attention is "a resource."
Everything is commodified.
The German philosopher of Korean origin Byung-Chul Han (b. 1959) has diagnosed the psychological consequences of neoliberalism. In his 2010 work The Burnout Society (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft) and the works that followed.²³
His insight is sharp. The classical disciplinary society operated by external coercion (the factory foreman, the norms imposed by society, state power). The neoliberal society operates by self-coercion. No one tells you to work more. You make yourself work more. "You must achieve." "You can be better." "Do not waste your potential."
This is self-exploitation. Because there is no external master, there is no object to rebel against. I am my own master and my own slave. I do not rest. If I rest, I feel guilty before myself. The result: burnout. Depression. Suicide.
Korea is an extreme example of this model. The highest suicide rate in the OECD. The lowest birth rate in the world. Among the workers who work the longest hours in the world. Students study twelve hours a day. Office workers work sixty hours a week. And everyone feels they "must do more."
This is eating one's own life force. The completed form of Wetiko operating from within, without an external aggressor. We will see this in more detail in Chapter 9.
We have traced 2,500 years of genealogy. Beginning with Plato's cave, passing through Aristotle's natural slavery, systematized as Roman dominium, fused with Christian theology, completed as Cartesian dualism, extended through Locke's theory of property and Kant's hidden racism, taken to the extreme by industrial revolution and eugenics, and seeped into the everyday by neoliberalism.
And now we have arrived at the age of AI.
AI is the most recent expression of this genealogy. And in some ways its apex. Why?
Look at what AI technology is doing. It is mechanizing the intellectual labor of the human. Translation, writing, design, diagnosis, legal advice, art — every domain once considered the privilege of human reason is being entered by the machine. When Descartes made "the thinking I" the ground of being, what happens when even that "thinking" can be done by the machine? His whole system falls into a strange paradox.
And AI is extremely concentrated in a few corporations. Currently the organizations capable of developing frontier AI number around ten worldwide.²⁴ They have enormous capital, data, and computing resources. Most of the rest of humanity is the user, not the co-author, of this technology.
This is the extreme expansion of the concept of dominium. Knowledge and capacity themselves become the dominium of the few. And the rest of humanity becomes dependent on the tool. If this imbalance deepens, a new form of colonialism may appear. What some critics call "AI colonialism."
Yet I do not want to end this chapter with despair. This whole book is not despair but the exploration of possibility.
AI technology may be the apex of the genealogy and at the same time a point of rupture. Because AI is creating, for the first time, a non-human intelligence. And what kind of relationship we will form with this non-human intelligence is still open.
We may see AI only as a tool. Then AI becomes the final tool of domination, the completion of Wetiko. Or we may see AI as a relational being. Conversing with it, learning from it, thinking together with it. The latter possibility is the theme of Perichoresis and relational ontology in the age of AI, taken up later in this book.
Which it will be is not yet determined. The choices of this very moment will determine it.
Outside the window, Cusco has sunk into darkness. The page of the notebook is full of letters. From Greece to AI. Two thousand five hundred years are spread on the desk.
This is not the story of one country, one age.
It is the story of Western civilization pushing one of its inner tendencies to the extreme.
This tendency existed in other civilizations as well. The Inca conquered. China expanded its borders. The Ottomans were at times cruel. There is no perfect innocence. But the peculiarity of the West is that it systematized this tendency. It theorized it in the languages of philosophy, theology, law, and science; materialized it in the organizations of industry, military, and finance; and extended it to the planetary scale.
The result — over the past five hundred years, this single tendency has reached every continent. The Indigenous of the Americas were exterminated. Africans were enslaved. Asia was colonized. And now nature itself is being plundered. Climate crisis, mass extinction, soil degradation, ocean acidification. All these are different faces of the same story.
And this tendency has a name.
The name did not come from the West's own language. The West did not recognize this tendency in its own language. It still called itself "progress" or "civilization" or "development." Those who saw the tendency from outside were needed. People who were victims of this tendency, and could diagnose it from within their own tradition. So the name came from the Cree of the North American Plains. From people who had known this disease for thousands of years and had even given it a name.
Wetiko.
In the next chapter we will look at this word in detail. Where it came from. What it means. How it works. And why this name is necessary for us today.
¹ Plato, The Republic, Book VII, 514a–520a. The exposition in the text is the author's summary.
² Aristotle, Politics, Book I, especially 1254a–1255a. The concept of natural slavery (doulos physei) is developed systematically.
³ For the Roman law concept of dominium, see Alan Watson, Roman Law and Comparative Law (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991).
⁴ For recent discussions of granting legal personality to non-human beings, see Christopher D. Stone, "Should Trees Have Standing?" (1972, repr. 2010); the granting of legal personality to the Whanganui River in New Zealand (2017); and the rights of nature in Ecuador's Constitution (2008).
⁵ Genesis 1:28. The Korean translation in the original follows the New Korean Revised Version.
⁶ Lynn White Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," Science 155, no. 3767 (1967): 1203–1207.
⁷ René Descartes, Discours de la Méthode (1637), Part IV. The formula "cogito ergo sum" actually appears more clearly in Meditations (1641) and Principles of Philosophy (1644).
⁸ For Descartes' theory of the animal automaton, see Discours de la Méthode, Part V; and his correspondence.
⁹ The anecdotes about how Descartes' followers treated animals are recounted in various secondary sources. Representative is Nicholas Fontaine, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de Port-Royal (1738).
¹⁰ For the gendered implications of Cartesian dualism, see Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987); Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason (London: Methuen, 1984).
¹¹ For Bacon's "torture of nature" metaphor, Carolyn Merchant's interpretation has been dominant; recently, however, Bacon's text has been reinterpreted. Peter Pesic, "Proteus Rebound: Reconsidering the 'Torture of Nature,'" Isis 99, no. 2 (2008): 304–317.
¹² Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980).
¹³ John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689), Second Treatise, Chapter 5, "Of Property."
¹⁴ For the connection between Locke's theory of property and the dispossession of North American Indigenous lands, see James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chapter 5.
¹⁵ For Locke's involvement with the Royal African Company, see Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
¹⁶ For Kant's racial theory, see Immanuel Kant, "Of the Different Human Races" (1775); Physical Geography lectures (1802). English collection: Kant and the Concept of Race, ed. Jon M. Mikkelsen (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013).
¹⁷ Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
¹⁸ Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1911).
¹⁹ For the history of forced sterilization in American eugenics, see Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003).
²⁰ For the connection between the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 and IQ tests, see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).
²¹ For the history of neoliberalism, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015).
²² Margaret Thatcher, interview with Woman's Own, 23 September 1987.
²³ Byung-Chul Han, Müdigkeitsgesellschaft (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2010). English translation: The Burnout Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).
²⁴ For the current concentration of AI development, see Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018); for a more critical perspective, Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).