Will the Metaverse
Create a Virtual Hell on Earth?
By John Horvat
The next step in the
cyber-revolution is the so-called metaverse, a powerful computing platform that
goes beyond anything seen to date. It is marketed as the next generation of the
Internet, facilitating intense experiences and opening new markets. Some fear
this metaverse will make present social media addictions worse. Others see it
as a much more harmful distraction, especially among youth.
However,
no one considers the moral implications of the project. The metaverse will harm
souls. Tragically, people see no reason to involve God and morality in a
technological invention seemingly outside the private realm of religion. Worst
of all, clergy show no sign of acknowledging the issue. It is not even on the
radar.
However,
the issue does exist. The metaverse is a metaphysical attack on the Church’s
worldview. It obliterates the nature of a God-created universe. It will make
possible immoral acts that will gravely offend God.
A
Process of Imagining and Destruction
The
metaverse must be understood in the context of a process of modernity’s
continuous effort to put humanity, not God, at the center of all things.
Indeed,
modernity has an obsession with imagining new worlds without God. The
Enlightenment introduced ways to stretch reality to its limits by developing
new technologies, philosophies and lifestyles.
Modern
times have ushered in the glorification of the individual. Society became a
collection of persons, Hobbes’ “sandheap of individuals,” each guided by
self-interest and kept in order by a strong rule of law found in his Leviathan.
Thus,
modern individualism tended to destroy the external structures—tradition,
custom, or community—that encumbered self-interest. It destroyed many moral
mechanisms that facilitated the practice of virtue in common. It created a
fast-paced order in which man became the center of everything, and religion was
relegated to being a private matter.
Postmodernity
Shatters Society
Modernity’s
order was shattered by the postmodernity of the sixties, which proposed freeing
the imagination and removing all moral restraints. Postmodernism took
individualism to an extreme through the use of new technologies, philosophies
and lifestyles. Society was turned upside down by psychedelic drugs, rock music
and the sexual revolution.
By the
same logic in which modernity idolized self-interest, the postmodern
individualist makes the “right” of self-gratification the only absolute
right—even when such behavior is self-destructive. The postmodern individualist
seeks to destroy those internal structures—logic, identity, or unity—that
impede instant gratification. Postmodernity’s “deconstructed” narratives
isolated individuals even more and drove them to create their own realities
outside of God and His morality.
However,
modernity and postmodernity were still somehow anchored to an external reality
that people could not escape entirely. There were physical and ontological
limitations that kept the imagination in check. A man might self-identify as
something he wasn’t, but the desire did not alter the reality. Further, his
imaginings were not evident to all around him.
Enter
A New Phase of Perceiving Reality
The introduction of the metaverse is now changing this
difficulty of altering reality. It is part of what many futurists call a Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Following
the footsteps of modernity and postmodernity, the next step in the process is
self-imagining outside reality. The obstacles that stand in the way are the
present manner of perceiving nature, existence and being.
This
next wave of innovation and technology will allow individuals to immerse
themselves in a world of their own creation. People will become avatars, that
is, cyber-representations of men, women, animals or things that “live” in the
cybersphere. They will be capable of being wherever they want—be it on the
moon, on top of buildings or “in a field of unicorns.” This platform can be
inhabited by extraterrestrials, angels, demons or anything following the
fantasies involved.
People
will do superhuman things where acts will seemingly have no consequences. While
it will not change what exists, it powerfully creates the lie that one’s
imaginings are more real than reality.
This
massive virtual platform is much more than an extension of the Internet, which
allows people to look into the world wide web. This phase will “embody the
Internet by putting people in the middle of it.” In this new realm, imagination
rules.
Not
Science Fiction
This project is not the stuff of science fiction anymore. It is
discussed in establishment media like The
Wall Street Journal. All the social media companies are putting the pieces in
place. Mark Zuckerberg just renamed Facebook, calling it Meta. He will be
investing $10 billion and hiring 10,000 new employees to
build this new world.
“The metaverse is going to be the biggest revolution in
computing platforms the world has seen—bigger than the mobile revolution,
bigger than the web revolution,” says Marc Whitten of Unity Software in a Wall Street Journal feature article.
It
proposes a three-dimension parallel universe of virtual and augmented reality
where digital avatars will meet together in unlimited numbers. People will be
fitted with specialized glasses and even advanced haptic gear, which will allow
them to feel and touch remote things in real-time. They can even mix the real
world with the imaginary one.
Daren
Tsui, chief executive of Together Labs Inc., says: “The avatar experience will
feel so real that you can hardly tell the difference between a virtual meeting
and a physical meeting. And the virtual experience will be better.”
Creating
a World of Illusion Without Consequences
There
are three major problems with the metaverse.
The
first one is that it encourages people to detach themselves from reality by
creating a delusional world without consequences or meaning. People are free to
defy nature by doing impossible things, like walking on the moon or watching a
baseball game from the pitcher’s mound. The most absurd things become possible
inside an imagined world unmoored from reality.
People
are no longer bound by time and can travel what they imagine is the past or
future. Even death is overcome with avatars and algorithms conspiring to bring
back what will appear to be deceased relatives or historical figures with which
one can converse and interact.
People
are free to do things to others (who may or may not exist) or even cut off their
arms without consequences. Every fantasy, even the most macabre, can become a
reality in the metaverse. It will thus open up dark and sinister spaces that
will facilitate sinful acts or their simulations.
Such a
lonely world disconnected from reality and the nature of things can feed the
unfettered passions that hate all moral restraint. A space like this can
quickly go from Alice in Wonderland to insane asylum. The frenetic intemperance
of the present Internet and social media are already causing psychological and
social problems. How much more exponential will be the metaverse’s abilities to
drown people in their frenzies and depressions?
The
Destruction of Identity
The
second reason to be concerned about the metaverse is that it equates identity
with choice. The postmodern paradigm already allows a person to self-identify
as something else. However, that identification exists only in the mind of the
deluded person. The public can generally perceive the illusion.
However,
the metaverse changes that perception. The person becomes the perfect model of
that which is desired and cannot be. The person need not be a person but can be
an animal, plant or thing. A person need not be a single being but a cacophony
of beings without unity in this world of fantasy.
This lie of identifying the self with freedom is made possible
by the metaverse. Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that “man is freedom,”
which makes people essentially limitless. In his book, Being and Nothingness, Sartre said that “Freedom is
nothing other than a choice that creates for itself its own possibilities.”
The
metaverse is the realization of this distorted idea of freedom that revolts against
the contingent limitations of human nature. It seeks to turn individuals into
the gods of their fantasies.
The
Demolition of Metaphysics
However,
the most dangerous aspect of the metaverse is its demolition of the
metaphysical vision of life that leads the soul to the Creator.
Everyone,
even children, engages in metaphysics. Human nature and especially the soul
demands a rational understanding of self and the universe. Thus, a classical
definition of metaphysics is a philosophical inquiry into ultimate principles
and causes. By engaging in metaphysics, individuals seek out the nature of
things that exist and fit them into a coherent vision.
A true
vision of things makes painfully clear the finite and contingent nature of
every human being. However, through an understanding of the designs of
Creation, people see that the goal of existence transcends physical and social
limitations. They pursue this path to the Creator as reflected in nature. This
process confers meaning and purpose on life as souls strive toward their final
end in God.
The
Transhuman Revolution
The
philosophies that inform the metaverse are contrary to this classical
metaphysical vision. There is no attempt to understand the nature of things but
only the limitless experience of random events. This “transhuman” notion of the
world understands humanity as a process in constant evolution. “Great Reset”
engineer Klaus Schwab describes this next phase as the coming “fusion of the
digital, biological and physical worlds.”
The idea of the metaverse is consistent with the outlook
of New York Times bestselling
author Yuval Noah Harari. A frequent writer on these subjects, he openly
envisions a future without the soul, free will, a unified self or God. His is
an algorithmic world of random experiences where one is whatever one comes to
be. He holds there are no religions but only powerful fictions, like the
metaverse, where people will “create entire virtual worlds complete with hells and heavens.”
The
author is not alone in believing in this chilling future. He speaks for a
progressive class of scientists, businessmen and scholars from Big Data and
Silicon Valley, who are all on board with the task of changing human nature and
reality through artifices like the metaverse. They make no secret of their
rejection of God’s Creation and moral order.
The
Need for Rejection
These
are urgent concerns in the face of the coming metaverse. Not all its applications
will contain the full dose of these destructive plans for humanity. However,
the general direction is leading to a brave new world without God. Such
conclusions do not come from conspiracy theories but are openly revealed the
metaverse’s promoters.
Thus,
the metaverse must be rejected because its worldview is contrary to that of the
Church. It is afflictive that something this big can appear on the horizon, and
the shepherds of souls have so little to say about it. In today’s godless
society, the apostasy from the practice of the Faith is caused much more by
technological inventions like these than abstract theological disputes.
Equally
afflictive is that people do not wish to see where this will lead. History
shows that when people give free rein to their passions, it ultimately ends in
nihilistic despair. The overwhelmingly intemperate experience of metaverse
pleasure will eventually demand the more intense sensations of existentialist
pain. Thus, modernity’s process of decay will run its full course: From
self-interest to self-gratification to self-imagining to self-annihilation.
Indeed,
a world dominated by delusions, absurdity and the denial of being, where
meaning and purpose are obliterated and bizarre fantasy rules must be called by
another name. The secular visionaries of the metaverse are designing a virtual
Hell on earth.
