The Road to Transhumanism: How Man Became a Project

Simone Weil Centre

[First published in Russian by Russkaya Idea (July 6, 2020), the following essay by Svetlana Lourié addresses, among other topics, geopolitics, color revolutions, technology, and the question of civilization and its foundations. Lourié sharply critiques Chinese (and Russian) policies as they relate to artificial intelligence and allied new technologies. Her views on the current American disorders transcend the usual discourse centering narrowly on ‘national interests’. She sees the survival of an identifiable American civilization as something of independent value, even as she acknowledges that the United States’ competitive stance vis-a-vis Russia appears to be hardwired within the international system.

Lourié is by no means uncritical toward the current American president. Yet she also holds that, for some significant portion of the American public, Donald Trump represents what they believe is their best chance at preserving their traditional understanding of what it means to be a person, what it means to be an American. In sociological terms, this strikes us as sound. Whether or not, behind that symbolic representation, there also stands anything of substance is subject to debate. Let us hope that here, as in other fateful questions raised by Lourié, alternative futures remain a possibility. – the Editors]

The category of the Project has been introduced into our daily lives. The very thoughts and feelings of the human person have been turned into a Project. It is happening in Russia and America. It is happening in philosophy and science. It’s also happening in geopolitics.

This is not a global conspiracy. It is a global trend. Still, one can’t help wondering whether or not the Grand Designer behind it isn’t the same one that the American hieromonk, Fr. Serafim Rose, was referring to back in the early 1980s when he wrote: “It is later than you think.”

*

It was through geopolitics that I first came to my understanding of the category of the “project,” so I will begin my analysis at the time, back in the late 1980s, early 1990s, when I first started examining geopolitical issues. Back then I was not yet burdened by much in the way of theoretical baggage – my thinking was still ‘naïve’ in that respect ― but naiveté is a condition with both plusses and minuses. At that time I had two sources of information about how politics is done.

First, because fate had brought me to Yerevan, I was able to observe closely what was happening in Armenia on the eve of the collapse of the USSR and also immediately after that collapse. My methodology involved close reading of the media and paying attention to street gossip and the like (as an ethno-psychologist, I attached great importance to the latter).

Second, at this same time I was working on my Ph.D. dissertation, “The Russian and British Empires in the Near and Middle East in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries: Ideology and Practice,” which gave me the opportunity to survey some of the history of Russian-English-German rivalry, a rivalry whose circumstances and logic underwent various changes over time. These great powers increasingly resorted to, if I may put it this way, the ‘functional’ use of certain territories. Some countries were made use of by one of the powers as a buffer against its rival, as a means of getting that rival bogged down. Often it was considered beneficial for the population of one of these buffer countries to be reduced to a state of political, cultural and psychological prostration. There were also ethnic groups whose aggressive qualities were encouraged, so that the great powers could better make use of them in their struggles against their rivals. Sometimes they found it beneficial to encourage the growth of national pride in a given country, so as to facilitate manipulating it into undertaking foreign adventures which, though otherwise counterproductive for the country in question, would kick start political processes useful for the outside power.

I am not making any judgments at this point, I am simply pointing out that, at least since the end of the 19th century, geo-political players have concerned themselves with the mental characteristics of the territories in which they play their geopolitical games. The big powers knew that there exists a certain gamut of mental conditions that can be encouraged, and these powers did, in fact ― sometimes more successfully, sometimes less successfully – foster the creation of just such ‘mental states.’ As will be seen below, what we are discussing here also relates to the origins of “color revolutions.”

There also existed some neutral zones where the great powers tried to cooperate. With the advent of the railways, competing strategic transportation projects began to take shape. If we consider the period at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the concept of the geopolitical project was just getting started, any great power that could successfully complete such an ambitious project as connecting Asia and Europe by railway would have received maximum dividends.

What is my purpose in talking about all this? What is most important here is that a state intent on constructing a transport corridor through some particular territory would prepare this territory in advance to suit its own interests. It would make plans for that area’s transformation. Of particular interest here is the German strategic 2B (Berlin-Baghdad) transportation project. The Germans put in place a very detailed plan for organizing the territory along this projected rail line, with the impact zone of these plans sometimes reaching as far as 100 kilometers into the surrounding territory. The German plan involved resettling into such zones, whenever and wherever possible, militant Kurdish tribes who would could serve as the protectors and guardians of the rail line.

The implementation of these plans went forward almost as if haphazardly, now in one spot, now in another. Something was being built in one city, somewhere in a completely different place there would be a change in government, not without the help of the British or Germans. Some sort of new ideas would be planted among this or that ethnic group. All this was fragmentary. If you didn’t know that there existed a grand project concocted by one or the other of the great powers for laying down a rail line, and organizing the spaces along an entire strategic corridor, it would have been impossible to grasp the unity behind all these disparate events.

The upshot is this. It is the Project that explains scattered geopolitical actions which are not necessarily carried out logically or sequentially, but instead composed of disjointed elements. Meanwhile, geopolitical action takes on an ever more technological character. Now, back then, at the dawn of the twentieth century, not one of these large-scale geopolitical projects was fully accomplished. The competition between these powers is what led to the First World War. But what remained was an approach to geopolitics as project and technology.

This same conclusion was confirmed by my observations of how the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict developed. There too I could observe how various technological features were brought to bear throughout that conflict’s kindling and ‘regulation.’ At certain moments during the conflict, it became evident that the two sides were trying hard to put the conflict on a more ‘symbolic,’ less direct level; steps which, by and large, usually help avoid real bloodshed. It looked as if the two sides were about to engage in some sort of military dance or ritualized display in order to lower tensions. Various laws would be passed. Armenia and Azerbaijan would issue high-sounding decrees against one other. If events had been allowed to follow their natural course, most likely this whole conflict would have remained on paper. I am referring to the period toward the end of 1989.

That is where things were headed, that is to say, until Mikhail Gorbachev, with a single stroke of his pen, canceled out everything the two parties to the dispute had erected. It soon became clear that events were being moved out of the symbolic field and that, as a result, blood would start flowing again. The amount of blood would be determined by the needs of a larger puzzle, a larger project. As I observed the step by step development of the Karabakh conflict, I could see that it was being used, quite consciously, to detonate the fuse that shattered the USSR. Sometimes the system made a false start, and then (with the active participation of first Soviet, and then Russian television) events were repeated, given that the desired effect on the target audience, which included the entire Soviet space, had not been achieved the first time around. In late Soviet and early Yeltsin-era Russia, news announcers experimented with various word choices to characterize the ongoing events.

Words as everyone knows have different connotations. It makes, for example, quite a difference whether you refer to some rebel grouping as terrorists, or as combatants, or as guerilla warriors [the latter term ― ‘partizan’, in Russian ― has a particularly positive connotation in Russia due to its association with heroic anti-Nazi resistance during WWII – trans.]. Each word choice creates a specific context for a given phenomenon, one which, it is possible, is meant to play a part in some geopolitical project. In any case, it was starting to become clear to me how new concepts arise. Every time they would be preceded by some sort of civil unrest, and then someone would suggest a new word to describe it, and repeat that new word until everyone started taking its use for granted, along with the requisite connotations. That’s all it took. A new concept had been introduced into the public mentality. And so, the meanings of things shifted, and the USSR was deliberately deconstructed: carefully, sparingly, and without much bloodshed. It was deconstructed by means of geopolitical technologies.

No, this does not mean that everything that happened – whether in Nagorno-Karabakh, or in Armenia, or in Russia ― was therefore a foregone conclusion. Indeed, for a long time, I had deep doubts about whether people and their actions can truly be controlled and directed over the long run. Sure, you can play with meanings through the use of mass media, and yes, you can send an angry crowd off in some direction. You can even find ways to get that crowed excited to the boiling point. And what is perhaps even more important, you can get an entire people to sink into apathy by first raising their hopes, letting a popular movement get started, only to then shatter those hopes like a wave breaking against a seawall.

And yet I always had a firm belief that people – simply given that they are people ― can always behave in some unpredictable, unexpected way. And in the case of the political technologies used during the 1990s, that was still true. At that point, in the field of geopolitics, we are still talking about technological elements. There were more and more of them, to be sure, but they were still only elements. And yet it is also true that, at the dawn of the 1990s, the implications of these elements of political technology were already terrifying. It is true that human enmity is a terrible thing. All the same, when you encounter something technological, which means inhuman and therefore divorced from natural human feeling and action, it does makes your skin crawl.

The ‘American Spring’

What we have then, from the beginning of the twentieth century (or maybe a little earlier), is the development of technologies for geopolitical action. Later, they began to take the shape of more comprehensive scenarios, which lead, in turn, to the phenomenon of the ‘color revolutions.’

Let’s begin our discussion of the ‘American Spring’ with a few words about the principles on which it has been built, the principles of its technology. This is the first time that they have been exposed so clearly, probably because now the phenomenon of the “color revolution” is happening in the same place where it seemed that the scripts for all its predecessors had been written.

How could this happen?

Until recently, it used to be said that America has a negative impact on Russia. That’s what they say. And while that is no doubt true, it is not the whole truth. America, like any other country, has its own particular mentality, at the same time that, within that mentality, it also has a certain range of variability and internal alternatives, even if only one of them gets realized over the natural course of events. One or another of these available alternatives may turn out to be more or less favorable for Russia, and this remains true even if, speaking in general, America and Russia are natural rivals and competitors, regardless of which of the alternatives wins out. As competitors the two nations are still going to be prone, when the occasion arises, to do some sort of dirty tricks to the other side. Before we get ahead of ourselves, allow me to engage in a bit of theory.

If I dwell on these matters it is only because of their particular importance in light of recent events. To begin, let us posit three systems, Systems X, Y and Z. According to this schematic, System X will refer to some country on which geopolitical pressures is being applied, and where seemingly chaotic shifts are taking place. These geopolitical pressures are pushing this country in the direction of one of its several domestic political alternatives, possibly leading in the end to a color revolution. Even though this country (which, again, pertains to System X within our schematic) is being pushed toward what appears to be one of its own existing (domestic) political possibilities, it can also so happen that the external pressures end up pushing X into a condition that is unnatural for the X system.

Meanwhile, the system that produces these shifts, in other words, that is working to build and to implement its own geopolitical project, is called the Y System. And, finally, the country on behalf of which this geopolitical force is acting is System Z. It may be that the Z system is extremely aggressive, and that System Y is an instrument made use of by the Z system. It is crucial, however, to emphasize that Y and Z are distinct. There is a huge difference between them. System Z, one way or another, is an acting subject of foreign policy action. Since it is an acting subject, a relationship of some sort (good, bad, or what have you) – a human relationship can be established with it. A System Z, because it pertains to the realm of what is human, can be grasped by the human mind and heart. One can address it. It can be appealed to.

System Y, by contrast, is a technology. Therefore no human relations can be established with it. To appeal to it is the same thing as making an appeal to a wall. Y is not an acting subject, it is a set of algorithms. This entity that creates color revolutions is not a foreign policy subject, nor is it an actor. It is a technology. It is impossible to establish relations with it as if it were a subject. Inter-subjective relations between a person and a technology are impossible because they exist on different planes. This is exactly the experience that I took from observing the geopolitical circumstances of such small countries as Armenia or the unrecognized Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh).

What do we observe today in the United States? A Y System, it turns out, can be directed against what would appear to be its own carrier ― a Z System, in this case, the United States itself. What is more, the United States, it would appear, is also the country of System X. Its current position, in other words, is in no way better than any of those small countries where color revolutions have been taking place in recent years.

Donald Trump’s America pertains to the category of the Z system today. We don’t have to like it. Trump is sometimes called a ‘predator’. It is easy to imagine his being capable of doing something on the world scene that is very bad. He could start a war somewhere. He may take some aggressive action against Russia. (On the other hand, people are saying that Trump is the only US president in the last 30 years who has yet to start a war!) Be all that as it may, Trump has one undoubted advantage: he is a person. And as a person, he is someone whom we can in principle understand. We can try to predict his steps. We can make our feelings and emotions known to him, and we can, at least in principle, evoke from him a human, emotional response. Trump as a person, and what we may call ‘Trump’s America,’ pertain to the sphere of our direct understanding.

What is more, Trump encourages, within his own country, more or less healthy tendencies. At least there is nothing obviously unnatural in Trump. There are, to be sure, those political scientists who say that, since the quasi-traditionalism associated with Donald Trump’s has done absolutely nothing to lead to a rapprochement with Russia, we shouldn’t worry ourselves about whether or not America acts in a way that is more or less in tune with nature. But this is not true. True, relations between states are a delicate matter [тонкая материя – trans.]; and yet, it must be said that the maintenance of a certain moral level within any society is something of great value in and of itself. This is becoming especially clear today! And this very distinction between the natural and the unnatural is especially important. It is something we mustn’t lose sight of, something we should support and value even in countries that are not politically close to us.

So far I have been speaking about ‘Trump’s America’. Now, when we talk about ‘America’ in our everyday speech, especially up until quite recently, we often have often used the word to refer to something else, and in the process have confused two concepts. This other America is what the Americanists refer to as the “Washington swamp,” or, to borrow a term from the Americanist Dmitry Drobnitsky, what is known as the “Global Boss.” This, according to my scheme, is the Y system. At a certain point, in our everyday ordinary discourse, we started to strangely confuse America itself, by which I mean America as a subject of foreign policy action (a human agent) and a Technology – we have confused this Technology with America itself. And our treatment of these two alternatives as if they were one and the same, it now appears, was not entirely accurate. It is in our own interest to disabuse ourselves of this confusion of concepts.

Earlier I wrote that every country has at its disposal its own set of domestic alternatives. Political scientists are often tempted to portray the Trumpists and the anti-Trumpists inside the United States as the United States’ domestic alternatives. Or, as an even simpler model: Democrats (as our would-be liberals) and Republicans (as our would-be conservatives) are presented as the country’s internal alternatives. Until recently, it seemed that this was perfectly acceptable. But we will soon be witnessing how the so-called conservative party of the United States, the Republican Party, will for the most part place itself in support of that notorious liberal ‘Global Boss’ which, until now, had been much more associated with the Democrats. And then it will become clear that Trumpists and anti-Trumpists in the United States are not two internal alternatives of the country, but instead that country’s system and anti-system. Of course, after a manner of speaking, you can refer to a person and a cancerous tumor as ‘two alternatives’, but they are certainly not the internal alternatives of a single human person. What Trump’s America is dealing with now (as a system X), is a force that is turning everything upside down inside the country, a force whose purpose it is to turn the whole world inside out, to introduce the unnatural. This is the system Y. Up until now, ever-new anti-traditional sexual forms have been very aggressively propagated, and not even for some particular purpose, but more as a kind of “art for art's sake.” To be sure, it is said that the globalists have a goal (one that gets ascribed to them, at any rate), which, supposedly, is to reduce the overpopulation of the Earth. And in the interests of achieving this end, some say, they are encouraging the spread of same-sex relationships which do not lead to childbearing. I am afraid, however, that recent events in today's America oblige us to look at things differently.

The ‘American Spring’ is giving rise to many signs and symbols that are transforming our attitude to what is happening. Above all, the world is saying goodbye to the myth of the so-called Golden Billion, the myth of a first-world ‘elect’ class of persons destined to inherit the future and flourish.

Today, the Y system has struck at the very heart of Western civilization and first-world prosperity. How better to drive home the message of abandoning all hope? ‘Beat one’s own, so that strangers will be afraid’.

Of perhaps even greater significance is the anti-aestheticism of what is happening. One might think that, if the idea were to struggle to advance the rights of African Americans, one would choose as one’s image and banner a particularly worthy representative and certainly not a drug-addicted robber who has put a gun to the stomach of a pregnant woman.

However, one gets the impression that those who came up with this project of destroying American civilization required just such an image. Now we have riots, pogroms, looting and fury. Scenes of people kneeling, kissing shoes, walking in shackles. These scenes of sophisticated humiliation are positively cringe-worthy. One witnesses the veneration in explicitly religious terms of a drug addict, with hundreds of pilgrims journeying to his place of murder. One hears talks of ‘baptisms,’ ‘prayers’, ecstasies, even rumors of miracle-working.

What is all this for? So that those who later fall into the grasp of the Project Designer understand good and well that if what had appeared to be the Project’s very citadel was not spared, don’t expect to be spared either!

Who is behind system Y? I don’t think that it’s simply some narrow circle of people along the lines of Bill Gates or George Soros. The reality is more complicated as well as more profound. It is not a conspiracy we are talking about here. We are talking about a trend, one associated with the ideology of transhumanism: Man as the project. The reconfiguration, the redesign, of what humans are. The concept of project, ongoing since the start of the twentieth century, manifests itself now not only in geopolitics, but increasingly also in other areas. What is more, it appears that there is no hiding from this trend. It penetrates Russia as well ― for example, on the heels of ideas about digitalization.

Totalitarian Technologies

Perhaps, in our current circumstances, it will be best for Russia to stick close to China?

But in today’s China we encounter the most disgusting features of electronic control, including such things as loyalty systems which exclude the insufficiently conformist person from society, and which make friendship with such a non-conformist dangerous and fraught with the risk of lowering the social ratings of those who refuse to distance themselves from the ‘disloyal’ one. In the collectivist society of eastern civilization, the system of loyalty is a terrible force. All the more so as it is also a technological force, within a China that is today already fully committed to technology.

This system is all-encompassing. In China, for example, only ‘patriotic churches’, such as the "Catholic patriotic Chinese church", which, incidentally, is in full communion with the Vatican, are now permissible. The word ‘patriotic’ here is no figure of speech implying nothing more than loyalty to the state. The word in this context refers to state censorship and revision of the very Gospel that this “church” adheres to. Meanwhile, back in Moscow, in light of the far-going system of controls introduced by mayor Sergei Sobyanin during the Covid-19 quarantine, one can’t help wondering whether anyone is thinking about adopting here at home some of the techniques practiced by our Chinese comrades.

Let’s turn our attention to digitalization here on the home front. During the coronavirus pandemic, digitalization trends have clearly accelerated. First of all, the Law “On a Unified Federal Information Register Containing Information on the Population of the Russian Federation” was adopted. The register will include information across dozens of data points for each citizen of the Russian Federation and a unique identification number will be assigned to each.

Significant steps have been taken, including juridical ones, toward turning Moscow into a “smart city.” In April 2020, the capital city signed off on the law “On establishing, on an experimental basis, a special regulatory environment conducive to developing and implementing artificial intelligence technologies in Moscow, Russian Federation.” In accordance with it, on July 1, a special legal regime will be introduced in the capital that will maximize the development and implementation of artificial intelligence systems. The “smart city” concept requires collecting a great deal of information about the city’s inhabitants, collecting open-source as well as secret information, processing it using so-called artificial intelligence, and incorporating it all into Big Data.

The authorities have justified their interest in all of this by pointing to various political and economic benefits, one of which, supposedly, is acquiring the ability to manage and design our consumer preferences. Perhaps an even more important motivation is building a domestic capacity to harmonize our future economy with the interests of transnational corporations. And yet, is that the whole of it? In the Unified Federal Register, all the information will be brought together within a single data array. At which point the question of chipping comes up. On June 15, and again on June 16, the head of the Human Rights Council, Valery Fadeev, speaking about the artificial intelligence that will form the basis of Moscow’s “smart city” program, admitted that Muscovites are supposed to be chipped, but he then added that, as long as we keep “on the lookout for any human rights violations,” we’ll supposedly all do fine. You can find a description of the Moscow 2030 program on the official website of Moscow’s city hall (https://www.mos.ru/city/projects/2030/).

There it talks about so-called neural interfaces through which, it is projected, a direct connection can be set up between the human brain and electronic devices. Technically, it will become feasible to directly reward or punish a person for correct or incorrect reactions.

While we were sitting in self-isolation, the Federal Register project, despite many serious objections, was practically without discussion adopted by the Duma and by the Federation Council, and then subsequently was signed by the president. Why? The answer, it seems to me, can be found in the words Patriarch Kirill on this subject a few months ago: all this data being collected together in a single source will become available to the Grand Designer, who will use it to control us. The Patriarch was referring here to the Antichrist. Whatever one may feel about opinions expressed by the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church of Russia, it clear that what is being proposed in all the above is the programming and designing of a new person –the doctrine of transhumanism.

Possibly the real purpose behind the “American spring” color revolution is that this country, while still under a Trump administration, might figure out a way to technologically and politically resist the design, programming and construction of a new person?

As for President Putin, for how long will he manage to resist the pressures exerted by the “Global Boss”? Putin’s own steps have been contradictory. On the one hand, as I mentioned, he recently signed that document establishing the Unified National Register, and he is not interfering in (which means that he is encouraging) the implementation of the Moscow experiment. On the other hand, in the amendments to the Constitution of the Russian Federation that he proposed, the sovereignty of Russia is strengthened, and that is important if we mean to resist the Y system ― the system of Global Projects.

Russia already has a certain amount of experience with pushing back against outside pressures. Russia has resolutely countered the anti-family world project, and it resists the introduction of sex education with its propaganda undermining the traditional understanding of sexual love and the family within school curricula. At present, the legal framework for such a confrontation is being strengthened. And yet … as the aforementioned Valery Fadeev pointed out, “There are trends in the world, and the world is moving in their direction.”

Where is it that the world is going, and is it obligatory for Russia to follow the rest of the world? That is the question we should clearly hold before us, and it is in the light of our answer to that question that we should make our final assessment of the career of Vladimir Putin.

***

A thickening fog is obscuring our world. A flurry of information constantly assaults us; that information exposes the “powers that be,” who include us in their information systems and seek to correct us. There is a lot of information, and it is all very scary. One must assume that a lot of mythmaking is accompanying all of this as well. And yet, no one is even trying to refute this information by means of rational argument. We live with it whatever it is – truth or myth.

I think this in itself is not accidental. The philosophy of our age is postmodernism, the philosophy of discourse. A philosophy that does not accept any ontological foundation of the world (here there are direct parallels with some eastern religious systems), and in which the world is built through our discourse, our word, and our opinion about it. By means of our opinions, we ourselves build the worlds in which we live. Tolerance in this context refers to our recognition of the freedom of another to build a world for himself, in accordance with his own opinions. Since there is no criterion of truth – since everything boils down to opinion ― the worlds constructed by different people can be different. Thus, for example, according to this post-modern system of thinking, there can be not two, but perhaps sixteen sexes, or ... what difference does it make how many?

Instability, a kind of mood lability, is what is being encouraged. According to the worldview encouraged by this system, the main thing to be repressed is any attempt to find a solid foundation for something. A solid foundation hinders programming and design, and the flexibility needed to make anything out of anything else. Turn the world upside down, just as America is being turned upside down today, in a land in which there are no longer any traditions or historical values. Christopher Columbus’s discovery opened the window to America. The Grand Designer is slamming that window shut. Today, Columbus statues lie shattered on the streets of the United States, defeated.

According to this system’s weltanschauung, all that exists is made of bubbles that inflate and burst (this is how “modern-minded” physicists explain natural philosophy too). And in the very center stands the human-animal Project which, today, for example, bends to its will the American pale-faces crawling on their knees; here too we find the project of the Man-God, who, with help from modern medicine and artificial intelligence, is being designed to live forever without having to know suffering or any other undesirable aspect of existence (according, that is, to the transhumanist ideology).

And none of this, in fact, is even hidden from us. We will live in a world where all this information will be available to everyone, and no one will even refute it. But what are we able to do with this information? The goal is not merely to deceive, after all, but to deprive us of the very foundation under our feet so that we wouldn’t even know what to do with the truth, or where it is. ‘Projectivity’ becomes the new basis of anthropology, a new doctrine of man, and the key paradigm for our understanding. In this situation, every person will have to develop their own strategy of action simply to remain human.

The closer history comes to our present moment, the more every science and field – I am referring here not just to the humanities but also to the natural sciences – becomes dominated by the philosophy of postmodernism, with its universal relativism, virtuality and, in fact, its illusory quality. They are no longer arguing about whether or not God exists. Today what they are calling into question is whether or not the chair -- the one that I think I am sitting on -- exists.

I believe that what lies behind all this contemporary “constructivist pattern-world” is the black mysticism of the Antichrist. Eternal salvation can be found only in Christ, for Christ is the Savior, and only He is the vanquisher of death.

I don’t know how much time this world has left, but I do know that after Christ all of remaining time pertains to the last times. We must live with this consciousness ― maybe not for long, maybe for decades, or even for centuries. The avalanche of events that has recently swept over us has greatly complicated our orientation in this world, but the teaching of the Church clarifies our perspective. Our lot in this world is not to get lost in hysteria, but to calmly and with all our attention attend to our work. As an academic scientist, I am engaged in academic science. To which I will add the caveat that I am no longer at all interested in playing academic politics. My goal is to protect from postmodernism the one part of my reality that is available to me, the one which postmodernism threatens to distort. Others may find in cultural theory an attractive object for their project of reducing the whole of reality to discourse and illusion. I, for my part, want to build a solid foundation for cultural theory, one based on Church Tradition. Even if it means that my readership remains very small.

Do everything with prayer. One does what one can, and beyond that, what will be will be. God is with us!

-------------------

Prof. Svetlana Lourié is lead researcher at the Sociological Institute of the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Science. Her books include Psychological Anthropology, the first text book of its kind to be published in Russia on the subject of American culture and cognitive and psychological anthropology.

This authorized translation was carried out by Paul Grenier under the auspices of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy. The original text has been slightly abbreviated and adapted.