Thrownness-out as Post-thrownness-in

Translator's note: In the original Russian text, the author distinguishes two terms: заброшенность — the classical existentialist condition of being "thrown into the world" (Heidegger's Geworfenheit), and выброшенность — a new condition of being "thrown out of the world" or cast out by others. To preserve both the etymological kinship and the conceptual opposition, заброшенность is rendered as thrownness-in and выброшенность as thrownness-out.*

The theme of being thrown into this world without our desire or knowledge preoccupied the philosophical minds of the last century. We choose neither our time, nor our place, nor our language, nor our culture. We arrive in a world where the boundaries of being and meaning have already been rigidly drawn before us.

The first to point toward this phenomenon, though not yet naming it "thrownness-in", were Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Kierkegaard's philosophy is an experience of loneliness and anxiety in the face of existence. Freedom becomes synonymous with uncertainty. Yet we cannot live in uncertainty. We are almost entirely determined from birth. Every desire for certainty is a desire for determinedness. Every desire for freedom is merely a desire to exchange one certainty for another, one determinedness for another. For Kierkegaard, we are also sinful and under constant surveillance from above. The way out is faith. As if two millennia of attempts to find a solution in faith had never happened. As if philosophy were not born precisely from dissatisfaction with faith.

Nietzsche closes this loophole. God is dead. Rejoice! Now you have neither meaning nor values. You are one step freer than Kierkegaard, one step more anxious, one step more lonely. What is to be done? Become the ;bermensch. Create something great, and thereby win your award of freedom.

Heidegger is the first to call this thrownness-in (Geworfenheit), and he identifies as its consequences: the awareness of one's own finitude (which, of course, no one chooses), anxiety, sense of no purpose, futility, the groundlessness of being. For Heidegger, thrownness-in is partially resolved through the "project." That which at first weighed upon us with its uncontrollability is gradually brought under control through planning and designing one's own life. For the majority, this is, frankly, a mediocre solution. The Nietzschean ;bermensch may be able to create a new time, a new place, and a new culture. They cannot make their body immortal, although they can prolong the life of their works. Make them, if not entirely immortal, then at leas lasting beyond their own life. For the vast majority, such opportunity is closed. In fact, for the majority, most opportunities are closed. Besides the cultural-historical context, yet another ;bermensch in power imposes his will upon them.

Sartre, though not as cynical as Nietzsche, is nonetheless merciless toward God believers. Heidegger never says that we are thrown into a world in which God does not and never did exist. Sartre says it for him. There is no pre-given essence of things, no meaning, no objective morality. Sartre speaks of the experience of absolute freedom and, as a consequence, absolute responsibility. That very ordinary person who, according to Heidegger, had no opportunities, is now, on top of that, burdened with absolute responsibility. Mostly for what they did not choose. Yes, Sartre grants them the absolute freedom, but the ordinary person who, for twelve years of school, could not go to the toilet without a teacher's permission, has no idea what freedom means. What they does know very well is the responsibility for an unauthorized trip to the toilet.

How can one have no freedom yet be responsible for everything? Camus comes up with an answer. It is absurdity. The world is indifferent to you. People are not. They pull you, each in their own direction. It is precisely this multidirectional Brownian motion of intentions, originally alien to you, that generates absurdity. You want to reduce everything that happens to some understanding, to some meaning, but to do that you would need to stop the Earth and its inhabitants. Not going to happen. The creation of more or less long-lived meanings is impossible. As soon as you form some concept, someone else has already used it, the concept has been substituted, and you are sold a different one in its place. "But you had free choice, didn't you? You made it. Now, take responsibility." How a person can be free of their own understanding of things is not explained. They don't teach that in school. Figure it out yourself. The world is indifferent to your problems. Camus's answer is rebellion: accept the absurd, accept the impossibility of certainty in anything, maintain your dignity. In short, be a good boy, resist reality. We have no answer for you, but hang in there.

For Jaspers, thrownness-in manifests itself most acutely in borderline situations: death, suffering, struggle, war, guilt. Situations with which one cannot live, but which also cannot be resolved. Jaspers's solution is transcendence. How are we to understand this? Do are not supposed to. The transcendent is that which lies beyond being, beyond cognition and comprehension. It is not an ordinary object, cannot be scientifically proven, cannot be fully described, cannot be reduced to a specific religious dogma. So now live with that. According to Jaspers, a person encounters the transcendent in religion, philosophy, art, and existential experience. Go ahead, enjoy encountering it.

Thus: a being (a concretely existing entity) continues to exist as long as it maintains the unity of change and self-preservation in its interactions with its environment. What unites all existentialists is that the human being (the entity) is good, while the world (the environment) is bad. In other words, the world is cruel; the human being did not choose it, yet found themselves in it. They then have a choice: either to become a part of the cruel world, or preserve themselves, their freedom, their own vector of development.

Then the 21st century arrives and turns everything upside down. The world becomes cozy and comfortable, but now the human beings find themselves unwanted in it. thrownness-in is replaced by thrownness-out. There are too many of us. This has caused inflation of the human: a fall in their value, their significance. Every living being, every corporation, every state develops their own set of rules for interacting with us. Those who violate these rules are banned (thrown out). People ban you in their accounts; states cancel visas to undesirable visitors; social networks delete your profiles; banks close your accounts. If you do not conform to the rules of your other half, you are thrown out of the marriage and out of the house. You are thrown out of work for violating the rules or because you have been replaced by AI. You may be denied entry to a store, physical or online, because they didn't like your behavior. You no longer interest anyone as a consumer. Your money is worthless to them. There are eight billion like you, while the one who bans you, who throws you onto the wayside of his life, considers themselves uniquely different. Entire social classes are thrown out of the economy, without the possibility of ever affording their own housing, minimal financial comfort, or a peaceful old age. They are thrown out into nothingness, into poverty.

Let us imagine what a society of total thrownness-out looks like and where it is headed in the limit. The loss of the former world passes through the ordinary stages of loss.

Stage one: denial. The bank closes your account, the store refuses to sell you apples, the magazine cancels your subscription, you are banned from a Facebook group. "This cannot be? What did I do? I just asked!" You look for the cause in yourself. Then you try to find a pattern in those who ban you. But there is no pattern. Or rather, there is no single systemic cause. Some dislike your face, others your manner of speaking, others your way of dressing. It is always a subjective choice of the banner, based on more or less arbitrary criteria. There is no quality in you that everyone would unconditionally like. And if such a quality exists, it is probably one you yourself dislike. But there is also nothing in common among those who ban you. Except one thing. Each of them has the right to ban without objective reasons. To ban simply because they ban.

Stage two: anger. At yourself or at those who ban you. "Ah, the bastards! I'll show them! I'll write reviews, I'll ruin their lives, I'll complain to the ombudsman, I'll ban everyone myself!" Or: "God, what a fool I am! Everyone bans me, life itself expels me, throws me out like garbage, like excrement." Both are useless. You have the right to be yourself, and they have the right to be themselves. And everyone chooses who to deal with and who not to, without needing objective grounds.

Stage three: habituation. You begin to discern general patterns. You are banned for how you ask questions, how you joke, how you defend your rights, what stance you take on various issue. You adjust your behavior. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but most often you simply see no point in changing yourself simply to avoid being banned.

Stage four: depression. "How can one live at all in a world where they control nothing? It wasn't like this before. Before, the world was kind and generous to me, and now it is cruel and evil."

Stage five: acceptance. Society becomes compartmentalized. Everyone gradually ends up in their own bubble, where there are only those who accept them and almost no one who ban.

From here, two scenarios emerge.

First scenario: society fragments into small shards, each an island of conditional acceptance. The world turns into an archipelago of micro-states, micro-communities, and solitary individuals with their personal ban-lists. Ultimately, this scenario leads to solipsism: you only interact with those who have already passed your filter and whom you yourself have passed. Communication outside the bubble becomes impossible.

Compartmentalization inevitably leads to hostility between compartments. This has all happened before in history. Such a situation is typically exploited by those who pit different compartments against each other, until larger compartments emerge. After which, wars cease to be local and become global.

Remarkably, it was precisely the hostile world, the thrownness in which troubled the existentialists, that produced integral, moral, creative individuals. Hatred became a consequence of the Second World War, not its cause. The causes were ideological. Our comfortable world is the complete opposite. We have no ideologies, but neither do we have personalities. Instead, we have such hatred of everyone for everyone, such a passionate desire to cancel, to ban, that if a great war were to break out now, people would joyfully cancel and ban each other by all means permitted in war. The local wars currently underway demonstrate this clearly. They have no long-term, lofty goals. Their goal is to manipulate markets, give free rein to aggression, impose one's own rules on others, and exterminate (physically ban) those who do not comply. This time, the cause of a world war will be precisely hatred. And ideologies will become its outcome. We will once again have to work out a shared semantics, but this time on new principles, and only for those who survive.

Second scenario: to avoid fragmentation, society will have to develop new rules and modes of interaction to minimize and regulate personal contacts. You will not be able to say what you think or act as you please, but only choose from a menu of pre-approved options of phrases and actions. What you choose is processed by artificial intelligence and only then conveyed to the addressee. There will be nothing left for which to ban you. You will be physically unable to do anything objectionable. Paradoxically, banning itself becomes an option that cannot be chosen. This is not freedom from the ban, but total predictability as a defence against rejection.

Which of these scenarios is better? We do not know. We preferred the society in which there existed a shared semantics, understood by all more or less the same way. Yet, the world moves inexorably forward. Things do not always turn out as we would wish.