the human completion project

i'm trying to sort shit out in my head but it's getting hard to do that without writing things down so here are unfiltered unedited unordered uninhibited thoughts

not sure if my audience of five friends i forced to subscribe has watched neon genesis evangelion, but in that show there’s something called the human instrumentality project that seeks to blend all humans into an orange goo, becoming a primordial sea of merged consciousnesses that achieve a sort of utopia? i guess because we’re free from hunger and pain and sickness and death and all those things everyone agrees are bad. the argument in the show regards individuality vs perceived “perfection” when we all merge. is it worth trading our individuality to achieve actual real perfection? eternal life in bliss? anyways that’s gay/dumb.

what i thought was interesting is that the japanese name for it is actually more similar to human completion rather than human instrumentality. do we only become complete when we are joined with others? is greatness only found in other people?

i actually recently rewatched ghost in the shell and NGE. also watched pantheon for the first time. pantheon includes a lot of very very intentionally obvious references to the first two works i mentioned and probably others (CIs or the digital children or whatever are a lot like the “ice” of the AIs in neuromancer, for one). i finished pantheon very quickly - two seasons of eight 45 minute episodes in two days.

it unsurprisingly explores many of the same themes as the stories it refers. it’s based on some short stories by an author, so i’d have to assume the influences are a combination of the author’s and director’s favorite media. i don’t want to say anything about it in the slim hope that someone reading this will be intrigued enough to watch. you shouldn’t have expectations going in. it was possibly in my top 5 favs. anyways i promise this is going somewhere.

i also saw an instagram reel (it’s winter break) about how the reason immigrants don’t believe therapy works on them is due to the individualized nature of western/american psychology. this extends to all medicine of course, and ummm yeah i’ve read foucault. neoliberalism is to blame obviously. america is so new compared to the rest of the world and really its identity as a country is built on neoliberal post-capitalism because there has been no other real significant history or evolution. it stands to reason that this “identity” dictates not only the economy but also the flow of information, art, and medicine.

okay so how do we get rid of neoliberalism? post-capitalism calls for a postmodern approach but postmodernism is kind of confused. anyways with the therapist situation we can start looking at immigration. immigration is accelerationist at its core. having immigrated, i’m quite aware of the fact that western psychology ignores structures and society (such as the structure of the family). btw not an accelerationist, or at least not really.

foucault was in the “west” and realized it not by being an immigrant but by being gay? well regardless he wrote about it too in his history of sexuality as well as in other texts. he’s famously quoted for a response to a psychoanalyst who diagnosed him with homosexuality. foucault diagnosed the psychoanalyst with psychoanalysis. i guess it’s these sorts of qualities that in fact separate us from society and enlightenment-era conformist structures that allow us to step back and see it all from a distance. that’s how we’re able to understand things like this better, or at least differently than others.

not too practical to turn each other gay although some say it’s already happening. instead, let’s look at immigration. isn’t immigration in some ways similar to human completion/human instrumentality? if we look at our racial ethnic cultural backgrounds as our individuality, and immigration as a way of merging them with others’, isn’t immigration kind of like what shinji’s dad wanted? just kidding but also not fully kidding because yeah immigration is not only accelerationism in that it extricates us from arborescent thought and structures. (+arborescence does not prove to be compatible with immigration-related issues) i think immigration is also kinda “merge ur minds” in a way like the CIs in pantheon, the major and AI in ghost in the shell, or human instrumentality.

by combining or merging, the weaknesses of one complement the strengths of another, ideally approaching relative perfection or a singularity but not the scary kind. ugh cliche

but hey it’s cool because yeah im saying that immigration is like the human instrumentality project from the anime and that it will fix neoliberalism. gtg read more books about it

p.s. again with the foucault though i think it's worth mentioning that from a foucauldian perspective the birth of the clinic would inhibit anti-structure political activity in post-modern medical achievement. im not smart enough to really pinpoint the underlying framework behind these ideas yet but stay tuned