Where Do We Go: part 1

Predicting the future is everyone’s favorite pastime. From Harari with his famous paradoxical title Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow to every single tech billionaire trying to sell you AI or blockchain as what the future looks like. The obverse of these people, Marxism, also attempts to predict the future, exemplified by none other than its central thesis: the world will eventually evolve into communism. The question, then, is: are any of them successful, or, perhaps better formulated, are any of them trustworthy?

Since all predictions could pull the classic "well, the time is not right yet" (or "the current misalignment is only a small kink in the path to the final future"), it is not possible to examine any predictions of the future through an empirical method—unless provided with a specific date, which often is not the case with such predictions, it is impossible to prove them wrong. The method, perhaps, is a pure abstract, “metaphysical” investigation into the fundamental logic of such predictions or the world itself. One of Deleuze’s pivotal claims—the distinction between arborescent thinking, the paradigm of thought rooted in rigid, coherent formulas and concepts, and rhizomatic thinking, the fragmented, differential paradigm of thought centered on fluidity and multiplicity—sheds light on this topic.

A Tree: the concepts come from a root and grow to the branches

Arborescent thinking is what we are most familiar with: in schools, we differentiate between concepts, build relations between things, and determine how an object of nature fits into disparate categories (a wooden building block is in the same group as a plastic building block). Moreover, we construct a grand schema between the concepts, categories, and relations we formulate through various means (i.e., causal relations), and this grand schema takes the form of a tree, thus the name—arborescent. The best example is that we look at the world starting from basic building blocks—atoms—then progress toward the more complex—the universe. Then, along the road, there are branches we could branch out to—physics to biology, biology to cells, and cells eventually to organisms. Arborescent thinking is not limited to natural sciences or the nominal conceptions of the world; it is also evident in philosophy. Is not Husserl, with his proclamation of Phenomenology as First Philosophy, the best example? In claiming Phenomenology as the source, the foundational recognition of all sciences, Husserl establishes a hierarchy within philosophy itself, an arborescent hierarchy.

A Rhizome: the concepts are interconnected with each other, there is no clear form/hierarchy

The opposite of arborescent thinking would be rhizomatic thinking. It rejects a single root grounding for a system, involves the haphazard formulation and dissolution of connections and relations, and defines difference between concepts as its ontology. An exact example of rhizomatic thinking is hard to pin down, as it is, by its nature, decentralized and even formless. More precisely, it is impossible to pin down a concrete example of rhizomatic thinking because no one thinks like that, and Deleuze, like any continental philosopher, can write a whole book defining its nuances (and he did). But to imagine one, it would perhaps be social media, more specifically, information on social media. One piece of gossip on the internet does not spread like school knowledge, through rigid concepts and structures, but instead instantly, haphazardly, in all directions at the same time. The users of X are not going to rest while 4Chan talks all about Emma Watson dating Taylor Swift (this is definitely false, and I have no intention of slandering). One person in this interconnected web will receive and send information in all directions, piquing many others to do the same. This process is decentralized and formless. Not only so, the impacts of this act are hard to pin down in an arborescent way: we don’t know who this will influence or what this will influence by just looking at the process, if that is even possible in the first place.

The point with the contrast between arborescent and rhizomatic thinking is precisely the premise from which this antagonism was constructed: the world, by its nature, is chaotic, and our cognition is merely a feeble attempt to reason with it—and fails all the time. Just think about all the chaotic systems out there: every single factor relates to other factors—it does not stand isolated and able to be controlled. The death of chivalry is neither due to guns nor to a change in social structure, nor is it both at the same time. Instead, it is contingency that brought guns to light, which then, along with other factors, influenced the change in social structure. But without a radical change in social structure, how could guns reach the point where they could influence the social structure of things? It appears circular. Then, is there a third or even fourth factor? Sure, but we could do the same with that very third or fourth factor. In fact, we can identify an infinite approximation of factors (provided we even can in the first place), and it will still be as the example demonstrated: arborescent thinking fails completely at cognizing the world fully.

It is perhaps for this reason that we cannot predict the future in any sense: it is not only that the content of the prediction is wrong, but the act of prediction itself. In predicting, we are setting up a glass onion for ourselves: in assuming there is something “first” that “causes” something “second,” which leads to an “absolute answer,” we are engaging in the most arborescent thought possible, and it cannot deviate from actual reality further. In other words, all attempts at predicting the future end at step zero, as the premise—the mode of thinking it relies on—is false from the start.

Does this end our investigation into the future, with a convoluted “nope” as the answer to our question in the first paragraph? Not really. Other thinkers have faced the same premise—the madness of cognition, the impossibility for us to know the world—and have arrived at a different conclusion. A new challenger enters the ring—Slavoj Žižek and G.W.F. Hegel.