@ Orthodox
2025-05-28 15:31:22
The Digital State and the Dissolution of the Person
During the pandemic, a strict regime of control was imposed, based on the illusion that the state can guarantee human health and salvation through restrictions, prohibitions, and mass isolation. For the first time in modern history, the order of the Church, the faithful’s access to the Holy Mysteries, and to the normal life of the Church were forbidden. The person, both within and outside the Church, was treated as a dangerous vector, and society was transformed into a place of surveillance, mistrust, and isolation.
This experience was not temporary. It served as a precursor to a new reality: the electronic dictatorship, in which the same logic of universal surveillance is now applied to every aspect of life.
The so-called “digital state” does not come to serve the citizen, but to define, analyse, monitor, and ultimately manipulate them. The human being becomes a number, a set of data, a statistic. It loses its face. And this is the most tragic thing of all.
Contemporary threats to freedom are no longer confined to violent political regimes, but now infiltrate—in a much subtler and more universal way—the very structure of human existence under the guise of comfort, technology, and information. Thus, the human person becomes predictable and controllable through the continuous collection of biometric and psychological data.
Artificial intelligence and algorithms attempt to know the human being better than he knows himself. This is about a “control of the inner self,” where free will is not annulled through coercion, but through programming and suggestion.
Orthodox theology, however, does not see the person as a biological or social unit, but as a unique and unrepeatable existence. Saint Gregory the Theologian writes: “That which unites with God, this is the person.”
Today, the Church is called to defend this freedom. For, as Saint Athanasius the Great emphasises: “God did not create man as a slave, but free”; and Saint Maximus the Confessor adds: “The freedom of the person is the work of the divine commandment in the world.”
When a person loses the ability to choose, to confess, to live according to their conscience, then not only is their individual freedom at risk, but also their salvation.
Christ Himself says: “I am the good shepherd, and I know My sheep and My sheep know Me” (cf. John 10:14). This knowledge is relationship; it is recognition; it is personal love.
In the Christian understanding, especially within the Orthodox tradition, to "know" is not merely to possess information—it is to enter into communion. Christ’s words reveal a deep, living connection between the Shepherd and His sheep, one that is rooted not in surveillance or control, but in mutual love and freedom. This kind of knowledge respects the person as a mystery, not a mechanism—as a being called to love, not to be measured.
In a world increasingly shaped by data and digital definitions, this divine model of knowledge becomes all the more vital. It reminds us that true knowledge of the person cannot exist without love, without freedom, and without the recognition of the image of God in the other. https://image.nostr.build/9d00aa598f21bf262bd756b15d216c2bfd9a0ab2d4367d10134134547990d9d9.jpg