The Tower of Babel

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The story of the Tower of Babel wasn’t a recounting of a long forgotten historical event; it was a prophecy. The foundation of the tower was laid with the enlightenment, and it was further built by the industrial revolution after it, and the digital revolution after that. But the foundation is crumbling, and so is humanity’s faith in it. As it crumbles, we will further split ourselves into smaller and more exclusionary groups. Those who we once called friends, comrades, brothers even, will become enemies. And it will seem to us that everyone who is not with us is part of a mass, interconnected conspiracy against us. We will begin to identify anyone who is not one of us as being part of an all powerful, all pervasive cult that is spreading faster than the plague. The more we separate ourselves into smaller groups, the less able we are to communicate, and thus, the less powerful we are, and the less of a threat we are to the hegemonic power of God.

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That, anyway, is the obvious analysis. But is it correct? Here is the alternative;

The destruction of the Tower of Babel by God represents disciplinary society’s crackdown on the free flow of people, resources and communication. In the story, God successfully topples the tower and spreads humanity all across the Earth, setting up both physical and linguistic barriers that keep human beings from working together to such an extent ever again.

That is not how the story plays out in our timeline. In our timeline, God is not a judge. He is not a policeman, a prison warden or a monarch; he is a communications executive. He does not limit what you can and can’t say and where you can and can’t say it. In fact, he does quite the opposite; he encourages communication. He encourages speech and organization and communication. Rather than strike down the Tower of Babel, he lets it be built, aids in its construction even. And by allowing his subjects to access the joys of heaven, he ever so slowly tightens his grip on the leash he has around their necks. 

With every word spoken, every opinion voiced, with every communication network maintained and made possible by the Tower of Babel, God’s strength grows. “Power can express itself as violence or repression,” Byung-Chul Han writes in Psychopolitics. “But it is not based on force. Power need not prohibit, exclude or censor. Nor does it stand opposed to freedom. Indeed, power can even use freedom to its own ends… Today, power is assuming increasingly permissive forms.” (12).

God no longer has to force his subjects to submit to his will. By allowing them to freely enter into the gates of heaven, he can more easily control them than if they were kept on earth by observing them in their everyday lives and collecting data on them. 

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Reality operates as a patchwork of various fictional systems that come together to form it - religion, law, government, morality, family structures, artificial hierarchies - they all come together to form the “reality” we live in. As time passes, this reality changes. Today’s reality is a reality dominated by the One God Universe. The CCRU, drawing from Burroughs, says that the OGU is the “monopolistic dominion upon the magical power of the word... OGU establishes a fiction which operates at the most fatal level of reality, where questions of biological destiny and immortality are decided.” (CCRU, 37).

The OGU is what forms the background of all existing social order, which is precisely why it must be overthrown. The OGU consists of a series of interconnected systems of belief, all of which must be subverted silently, without notice, for if our attempts at revolution are discovered they will be suppressed violently.