The End of the Myth of Man: The Limits of Human Supremacy and Its Historical Background (2020s)

The End of the Myth of Man: The Limits of Human Supremacy and Its Historical Background (2020s)

During the 20th and 21st centuries, humanity thrived under the grand myth of anthropocentrism. It was the idea that "human emotions and choices are the absolute standard of value, and that all ethics, politics, and economics should serve individual happiness. Modern education, capitalism, and democracy have all been built on that belief system. Whether nationalism focused on the state, communism on class, or human rights ideology on the individual, they all had a structure that placed "human agency" at the top.

In the 2020s, however, we are beginning to learn through advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience that human behavior and emotions are not due to "free will" but can be explained by "the interaction of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin. When algorithms could predict purchasing and voting trends, and even romantic decisions could be statistically processed, the belief that "human emotions are sacred" was shaken to its foundations.

This is not just a philosophical shift, but a serious problem that will overturn the assumptions of politics, economics, and law. If human judgment is more erroneous than that of machines, democracy, which places "human choice" at its center, threatens to lose its legitimacy as a governing principle. Yuval Noah Harari warns that at such a turning point in our times, "we must reconstruct the very system of ethics centered on human beings."

This problem is different in quality from the structural problems created by "alienation by capital," which Marx criticized. Marx spoke of "alienation by external forces" in which the means of production are taken away and labor loses its meaning, but the "end of human supremacy" in our time is the "dismantling of the self" that occurs from within one's own brain and emotions. AI is not a capitalist exploiting the proletariat, but one that "renders human beings useless while exploiting no one," and is therefore more serious.

Related debates have also been addressed in transhumanism and posthuman ethics. In Silicon Valley in the United States, for example, the idea of "evolving humans into gods (homo-deusification)" is discussed with more emphasis on technological feasibility than on ethics and politics. In this context, the premise of "transcending the human framework itself" is already gaining acceptance.

Given this background, "the limits of human supremacy" is an extremely practical and serious issue that will shake the very foundations of the future society. Just as the ethical vacuum became an issue when it was once said that "God is dead," in an age when "man is no longer the center," intellectual efforts to build a new value system and social adjustments will be indispensable.