By Mark Keenan
December 30, 2025
Freedom is not usually lost all at once through force. It is more often weakened first through forgetting.
As one year ends and another begins, many people sense that something essential has been lost in the way modern life is organized - not through catastrophe or coercion, but through gradual forgetting.
This essay argues that the greatest threat posed by automation is not overt control, but the quiet erosion of judgment-and that freedom survives only where judgment is actively exercised. By judgment, I mean the human capacity to pause, discern meaning, and take responsibility for a decision in context.
Before any system governs outward behavior, it reshapes inner orientation. Attention drifts. Judgment weakens. What once required presence and discernment is quietly replaced by procedure.
This is not a new danger, but it has taken a new form.
Modern systems promise efficiency. Decisions become faster, processes smoother, outcomes more predictable. In many domains-communication, work, administration, even inner life-efficiency is treated as an unquestioned good. Yet efficiency optimizes for speed and consistency, not for wisdom. Judgment operates differently. It is slow, contextual, and irreducibly human.
When contemplation and judgment are displaced, something essential is lost long before it is noticed. The rapid normalization of artificial intelligence and automated systems in everyday decision-making has accelerated this displacement, not by coercion, but by convenience.
The Inner Orientation That Shapes Judgment and Perception
All cultures, whether explicitly or implicitly, organize themselves around an inner point of orientation. When that orientation is clear and exercised, life tends to arrange itself coherently - as when individuals take responsibility for their work, families, and communities without needing constant supervision or regulation. When it is neglected or weakened by external or ulterior ideological forces, complexity multiplies and external centralized control tends to expand.
Historically, the most dangerous form of centralization is not bureaucratic authority alone, but the loss of personal judgment and inner orientation. When individuals no longer exercise discernment and responsibility at the personal level, systems arise to manage (or control) what people no longer manage themselves.
In this sense, the deepest and most effective form of decentralization is not political but perceptual. A society grounded in active human judgment accepts (or requires depending on your point of view) less external bureaucratic control. Control requires both the controllers and the controlled. Similarly when manipulation occurs there exists the manipulators and the manipulated - one cannot exist without the other.
Technology does not create this condition. It is just a tool. Yet, it enables its acceleration in the hands of those so inclined.
In spiritual language, the inner orientation is consciousness itself - the living source of awareness, discernment, and meaning. Different traditions name this inner orientation in different ways, sometimes as conscience or judgment. The label matters less than whether it is actively exercised. When that orientation fades, administrative, algorithmic, or procedural systems rush in to fill the vacuum, and attention is quietly claimed by forces that may not serve human freedom or truth.
A former U.S. president once joked that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were, "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." What is new today is not the impulse to govern, but the means. Governments and large institutions are now adopting automated and AI-driven systems at scale - not to persuade, but to configure. Decisions that once required human judgment are increasingly embedded into code, procedures, and interfaces, where they operate without explanation or appeal.
Systems Without Judgment
Artificial intelligence is often discussed as a revolutionary technology, but it can also be understood as an amplifier of existing tendencies. AI does not introduce new values into a system; it reinforces the values already embedded within it. It scales, accelerates, and automates what already exists. It reinforces prevailing dominant patterns, and makes existing biases faster and harder to notice. It excels at pattern recognition, probability, and optimization. It does not perceive meaning. It does not carry responsibility. It does not doubt.
And doubt is essential to judgment.
Judgment involves pauses. It requires uncertainty, the willingness to not know immediately, the capacity to weigh consequences beyond efficiency. Automated systems remove these pauses, collapsing the space where judgment and reflection forms. They deliver outputs without hesitation, conclusions without struggle, language without interior engagement.
The appeal is obvious. The cost is subtle.
As more decisions are mediated by systems designed to minimize uncertainty, human participation shifts from discernment to compliance. One is no longer asked to judge what is true, meaningful, or appropriate-only whether to accept or reject what has already been configured.
Over time, this conditions perception itself.
Language Without Presence
Language has always been a mirror of consciousness. When people speak from lived experience, language carries irregularity, hesitation, and depth. When speech becomes standardized, something interior has already flattened.
Systems trained on consensus produce language that is coherent but hollow. They reflect what has already been said, filtered through institutional norms, probabilistic likelihoods, and coded data boundaries. The result is speech that sounds informed but lacks authorship.
Over the holidays, I spoke with the CEO of a large design and media firm. Without prompting, he noted that his teams were producing far more AI-generated material than before - and that much of it, while polished, was proving shallow, hollow, and in need of careful human judgment and correction. The issue was not effort or intent, but judgment: knowing when an output was merely adequate and when it actually meant something. The tools had accelerated production, but they had not relieved responsibility.
When human beings rely on such systems to shape expression, they unconsciously adopt the limits of what those systems recognize as probable or acceptable. The issue is not deception. It is imagination. A system cannot imagine beyond what it has inherited.
As expression becomes mediated, experience itself begins to feel mediated. When one outsources words, one eventually outsources perception.
Curiosity and the Capacity to Wonder
Curiosity is not merely intellectual interest. It is a spiritual faculty. It arises from the recognition that reality exceeds one's current understanding. It depends on openness to the unknown and tolerance for uncertainty.
When answers are always immediately available, curiosity weakens. The habit of wondering erodes-not through prohibition, but through convenience. In stories, such as Plato's Cave of shadows or the modern story of The Matrix, human beings were trapped inside explicit illusions - confined within false realities imposed from outside and sustained by force. Today's version is becoming more subtle, yet, all encompassing. The walls are replaced by interfaces - no visible restraints, only systems that invite constant participation. Force has not disappeared, it functions as a backstop, while it seems the daily instrument is an inhabited technocracy.
Systems offer certainty, entertainment, and reassurance with remarkable efficiency. In exchange, the effort of questioning begins to feel unnecessary.
This is not enslavement in the traditional sense. It is accommodation.
And accommodation, when prolonged, reshapes the mind.
Prediction Is Not Thought
Machine systems operate through prediction. They estimate the most likely next word, action, or outcome based on prior patterns. This is not thinking in the human sense. Thought involves reflection, conscience, and the capacity to deviate from expectation. A mind that is always anticipating the next word never learns how to sit with silence.
Human creativity and inspiration have often emerged from that silence-from pauses where the script fails, where doubt opens space for insight, as when Archimedes famously cried "Eureka" upon realizing a solution, not at a desk, but while bathing.
When prediction replaces presence, originality diminishes. Culture begins to reflect itself back to itself, polished but increasingly uniform. What disappears is not intelligence, but inner authorship and discernment.
The Inner Displacement
The deepest shift brought about by automated systems is not external control, but internal displacement. As procedures decide more, the inner faculty of discernment is exercised less. Responsibility becomes diffuse. Meaning and guidance are increasingly supplied by systems rather than discerned by persons.
This is the true "Matrix"-and for many a voluntarily inhabited one. Not a machine, but a mindset that assumes there is nothing outside the system's outputs. As long as the system functions smoothly, its authority goes unquestioned.
Yet fluency is not understanding. Imitation is not human thought.
No system, however advanced, can care. No algorithm can ask why. Those capacities belong to consciousness itself.
Remembering the Source
All genuine knowledge begins not with data, but with awareness. Before any thought arises, there is the silent witness that perceives it. Spiritual traditions insist that this awareness is not produced by matter, but is what allows matter to be experienced at all. You don't become conscious after reality happens. Reality becomes known because consciousness is already there.
When this origin is forgotten, data is mistaken for wisdom and simulation for truth. The result is a hall of mirrors-information reflecting information, systems optimizing systems, with no living center.
Remembering the source of all knowledge and creation does not require rejecting technology. Some speak of a universal field of consciousness; many speak of God as a personal reality. What matters is not so much the terminology, but the orientation-whether consciousness is aligned with something higher than systems themselves. For many traditions, this inner orientation is not abstract. It is directed toward God-understood not as an idea, but as the living source of meaning, order, and responsibility. When that orientation fades, systems quietly move into its place.
What it requires is restoring proportion - between tools and judgment, assistance and responsibility. Tools may assist judgment, especially where knowledge is limited or experience is lacking, but they cannot replace the human responsibility to discern meaning, value, and consequence. Systems should support insight, not substitute for it - and where they weaken the habit of judgment, they ultimately diminish the very wisdom they claim to provide. The danger, then, is that people become unpracticed in judgment and discernment because these faculties have been steadily externalized.
This remembrance within human consciousness - oriented toward what gives meaning, value, and direction beyond systems - is not ideological. It is experiential. It begins wherever someone pauses before accepting an output and asks, quietly, Is this true ? Is this meaningful ? Does this thought, conclusion, or impulse arise from my own exercised judgment and that of my peers - or has it been supplied, nudged, or adopted without reflection?
At the turn of a new year, the most meaningful resolution may not be to adopt new tools or systems, but to recover the habit of judgment and inward attention that no system can supply.
Freedom as Presence
Freedom does not vanish all at once. It narrows as fewer people practice the interior act of deciding.
Yet freedom can return just as quietly.
In the pause between prompts.
In the moment before imitation.
In the decision to speak, think, or act from conscious judgment rather than optimization.
In the faculty that knows how to seek wisdom.
Artificial intelligence can answer questions. It cannot ask them. It can generate language. It cannot wonder. Those capacities remain human-if they are exercised.
The task before us is not to defeat technology, but to keep the inner center clear. When consciousness remains central, systems take their proper place as instruments rather than authorities.
This is not resistance. It is remembrance. And remembrance, once restored, reorganizes everything around it.