“Among the prebureaucratic types of domination the most important one by far is patriarchal domination. Essentially it is based not on the official’s commitment to an impersonal purpose and not on obedience to abstract norms, but on a strictly personal loyalty.”
Max Weber[i]
***
“The evolution of mankind toward the rationality of positive science was for Comte a distinctly progressive development; for [Max] Weber it was a process of disenchantment and de-divinization of the world. By the overtones of his regret that divine enchantment had seeped out of the world, by his resignation to rationalism as a fate to be borne but not desired, by the occasional complaint that his soul was not attuned to the divine, he rather betrayed his brotherhood in the sufferings of Nietzsche – though in spite of his confession, his soul was sufficiently attuned to the divine not to follow Nietzsche into his tragic revolt. He knew what he wanted but somehow could not break through to it. He saw the promised land but was not permitted to enter it.”
Eric Voegelin[ii]
***
“Permanent agencies, with fixed jurisdiction, are not the historical rule but rather the exception. This is even true of large political structures such as those of the ancient orient, the Germanic and Mongolian empires of conquest, and of many feudal states. In all these cases, the ruler executes the most important measures through personal trustees, table-companions, or court-servants. Their commissions and powers are not precisely delimited and are temporarily called into being for each case.”
Max Weber[iii]
***
Socrates thought it was “the grossest deception if a good-for-nothing person conveyed the false impression that he was capable of directing the State.”[iv] Given the inept policy shifts of President Donald Trump, given his demands that President Zelenskyy resign, Given the withholding of antimissile weapons already purchased by Ukraine, or the bungled war against Iran, we clearly see before us a good-for-nothing who has practiced gross deception. However sharp Trump’s instincts may have been, his grotesque lies are no longer excusable, no longer explicable as three dimensional chess. Trump has shown that a good-for-nothing can win power through demagogy and media charisma, where “charisma” signifies not the grace of God but a parody of grace; and when this parody is not seen as parody by his followers, this man-as-parody declares himself a national hero while millions cheer. And then, the many-too-many, blinded by self-conceit, follow the monster to his monstrous end (and perhaps to their end as well). What was politically ordered now falls into disorder. Solid ground disappears from beneath our feet. The high tower of civilization, along with our system of checks and balances, faces its ultimate test.
Under the Trump presidency our defensive structures are being wiped away. Our economy is disrupted. How is this possible? Our bureaucracy opened the door to all of it. We eliminated tradition and embraced bureaucracy, the “rules-based-order,” only to find that the inferior man has taken charge of that order, leading us into chaos. This inferior man is a new type, with no moral grounding, with a dilapidated intellect, with inordinate ambition and limited imagination. These inferior men are weak and ineffectual, best represented by Friedrich Nietzsche’s Last Man. What inferior men understand by “rules-based-order” is not what the superior man understood. Inferior men have no personal loyalty and therefore no loyalty to rules. Who, after all, is loyal to his own whip hand? For rules are a whip in the hand of the bureaucrat. When bureaucracy is sovereign, the bureaucrat is above the rules (as the people of the Soviet Union discovered). Whether the inferior man is a Soviet bureaucrat, a Red Chinese bureaucrat, or a Washington, D.C. bureaucrat, power tends to corrupt that which is already weak. Furthermore, the bureaucratic state is the coldest of all cold monsters, which leads to general disenchantment and the advent of dark mythologies (i.e., conspiracy theories). Enter the charismatic spellbinder and his fellow travelers.
Consider the case of a charismatic fellow traveler, Marjorie Taylor Greene; she, a self-admitted know-nothing and sometime Republican congresswoman, now disillusioned – no longer loyal to the spellbinder Donald Trump. In late 2025 Greene pushed for the full release of the Epstein files. Naughty girl, she was summoned to the White House where Trump barked at her. His friends would be hurt if the files were released. Trump demanded that she remove her signature from the offending petition. But she was defiant. Trump then labeled her a lunatic, calling her Majorie Traitor Greene. Death threats are heard from Trump’s yapping dogs, even against Greene’s college-aged son. Trump then revokes his endorsement of Greene and threatens to back a primary challenger to oust her. Greene resigns from Congress. Her most poignant swipe against Trump on leaving Congress? “They all hate him.”
The authority that Trump and Greene have with voters is what the German sociologist Max Weber would call “charismatic authority.” Yet, it is not the gift of grace as much as the gift of combative vitality. Donald Trump is America’s big daddy, insisting that the American system revolve around him. Greene is the latter-day mommy, seeking protection for her babies. Everything here is visceral, even primitive. It is also feudalistic, resembling what we see in crime families, monarchies, and tribal politics. Of course, the United States is not a monarchy. Trump would like to be a monarch, of course, but he is limited by the Constitution and by the Separation of Powers; that is, by Congress and the judiciary. He is also limited by his own stupidity.
However much Donald Trump, as spellbinder, would like to supplant George Washington and frame himself as America’s re-founding father, he cannot achieve such a distinction. He figures in Socrates’ admonition that the greatest fraud is the person who deceives others by persuading them that he is competent although he is worthless. And as the mask of competence is torn from his sagging face, he will find himself embattled on multiple fronts. The more he reaches for greatness, the more apparent his fraud. Not only is Greene against him. The whole system is about to turn on him. Of course, Trump has made enemies. He has also broken promises. Full of braggadocio, he has not delivered on his promises.
Great hopes were projected onto Trump. He promised to make American great again. He said he was a winner. “Under my presidency you will be sick of winning,” he bragged. Some hoped he would restore tradition. Some hoped he would defeat the Washington bureaucracy and “drain the swamp.” Millions were disenchanted with the bureaucratic state. There was disenchantment with open borders. There was disenchantment with leftist elites. Trump promised to take the country back from woke crazies and socialists. What began with applause, however, might well end with impeachment; for Trump partook of that same corruption afflicting the bureaucracy.
We are advised, however, to see this situation as part of a larger crisis that civilization is passing through (i.e., the crisis of modernity). Max Weber said that bureaucracy is the exception in history. Patriarchal authority is the rule. You may have a Roman bureaucracy, for example, but without the fatherly figure of the emperor it disintegrates into feudalism. Then you have charismatic authority, which can revive declining institutions, or modify them. Charismatic authority signifies a chaotic and revolutionary process. Its arrival coincides with the crisis of modernity. Trump’s fraudulence does not invalidate the need for renewal. Neither does it cancel the process of returning to patriarchy; rather, the election of Trump shows that a reversion to patriarchy is now inescapable; that his wickedness does not cancel human nature; that however many false starts and setbacks, patriarchy will return – in ten years or one hundred.
How can this be validated? The authority of the man will return because this authority preserves the woman as woman. Therefore, it also guarantees the child (i.e., the future). Masculine authority is intrinsic to nature. It is written into religion. It is effective in war. The first and original form of authority is that of the man acting as husband and father. If our social engineers think they can destroy patriarchy without destroying themselves, watch how quickly their unnatural order crumbles in the midst of war and economic collapse. Nature always has its revenge on the unnatural.
In this context, Trump signifies an attempted return to patriarchy. Of course, it is a dysfunctional attempt because Trump is psychologically abnormal. Yet the country was receptive; so much so that Trump managed to stop feminism in its tracks on two notable occasions: first, when he stopped Hillary Clinton from being elected president in 2016; the second time, when he stopped Kamala Harris. In both instances a Marxist-feminist was kept out of the White House. The late Barbara Olson, shortly before dying on 9/11, wrote of Hillary Clinton,
“Once the headlines about the pilfered [White House] furniture, the ostentatious and unseemly giftfest, and the last-minute deluge of indefensible pardons receded from view … Hillary was anxious for the moment when she could reassert her position on the national stage, a position she seems to regard as hers by divine right.”[v]
It is also worth remembering how Peggy Noonan, writing in the Wall Street Journal, explained that Hillary was unstoppable:
“You lock the door and she comes in the window, you lock the window and she comes through the floor boards. This is like Alien – she lives in Tom Daschle’s stomach … and then she bursts out of Tom and darts through the room.”
By winning the election of 2016, Trump triumphed over a Gorgon, over a monster that had already burst out of the stomach of the Democratic leadership. Trump was like a mirror, reflecting and amplifying the Gorgon’s nastiness. Hillary Clinton looked at Trump and was turned to stone. Then came Kamala Harris, who burst out of Joe Biden’s stomach and darted through 2024. Trump dispatched this second Gorgon, whose signature laugh produced lethal “subsonic frequencies.” These frequencies did not affect Trump because he is an unnatural creature in his own right. In what does this consist? It is one thing to be a Gorgon, it is another thing to wish the Milky Way Galaxy renamed as the Donald Trump Galaxy.
In the last three elections society reached for a patriarch. Trump projected that image and was elected twice. Deep down America wants a patriarch, however inverted or perverted he might be. For those who remember the iconic television series Father Knows Best, there exists a recollection of what fathers are supposed to be. This ideal has been eclipsed by a distorted feminist portrayal of patriarchal authority as violent, tyrannical, and predatory. Yet even this distorted image of male authority is preferred by voters to the Gorgon. Trump is everything the feminists think of as masculine, having none of the qualities portrayed by the character Jim Anderson (played by Robert Young). Trump is too loud, too brazen, too combative to be like Jim Anderson, who was the mid-century American archetype of the idealized father: calm, self-sacrificing, deeply patient, able to de-escalate difficult situations, and rooted in traditional morality. Trump, on the other hand, is emotionally unrestrained, impatient, and always ready to escalate in a tit-for-tat situation. Jim Anderson never employed public shaming, name-calling, open mockery, or assigning nicknames. Trump constantly employs shaming, name-calling, open mockery, etc. Unlike Donald Trump, Jim Anderson frequently apologized to his wife and children for his own shortcomings, or when his advice failed. His own flaws were used as a teaching tool. With Donald Trump mistakes are never admitted. Someone else is always to blame. During a campaign rally in Bullhead City, Arizona, Trump called himself a “freaking genius.” This is how Trump wants to be seen. For Jim Anderson it was enough to be a good father.
Trump’s more recent female antagonist, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is not a feminist in the conventional sense and represents a special case. She is no Donna Stone (the titular character of The Donna Reed Show). While Donna Reed represented the ideal mother of the 1950s, Marjorie Taylor Greene represents something different. Donna Stone’s strength was defined by her diplomacy, composure, and emotional intelligence. She wielded influence within her home and community through soft persuasion, wit, and by serving as a steady moral compass. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s political brand is built on unfiltered aggression and conflict. Rather than projecting calm, she projects grievance with fiery rhetoric and public confrontations with colleagues. Her strength is in her willingness to burn bridges.
If the German sociologist Max Weber were to analyze the shift from the 1950s TV archetypes (Jim Anderson and Donna Stone) to modern political figures (Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene), he might view it as a textbook example of a major transition or reversion by way of charismatic authority. It is a transition dictated by our “disenchantment with the world.” Out of this comes a new cult (i.e., the cult of Donald Trump). Traditional society is patriarchal. Charismatic authority is revolutionary. Trump mimics what is traditional, occasionally paying lip service to it. The same can be said for Marjorie Taylor Greene. Yet he overrides tradition even as he destroys the rationale of the bureaucratic administrators. The masses cheer him because they are dissatisfied with socialism’s bureaucratic engineers (i.e., the ruling mandarin class). Bureaucratic rationalizations are not as nurturing as a father’s love. Trump presents the image of a father who wants to “Make American Great Again.” At the very least he pretends to love his followers (though this love is transactional). According to Weber,
“The mere fact of recognizing the personal mission of a charismatic master establishes his power. Whether it is more active or passive, this recognition derives from the surrender of the faithful to the extraordinary and unheard-of, to what is alien to all regulation and tradition and therefore is viewed as divine – surrender which arises from distress or enthusiasm. Because of this mode of legitimation genuine charismatic domination knows no abstract laws and regulations and no formal adjudication. It’s ‘objective’ law flows from the highly personal experience of divine grace and god-like heroic strength and rejects all external order solely for the sake of glorifying genuine prophetic and heroic ethos. Hence, in a revolutionary and sovereign manner, charismatic domination transforms all values and breaks all traditional and rational norms: ‘It has been written …, but I say unto you….’”[vi]
To portray oneself as a prophet and hero, a leader must believe in himself, believe in his self-proclaimed mission, believe that he possesses godlike powers to achieve godlike ends. One must evangelize the masses, proclaiming not only the “good news” that salvation is at hand but that the leader is God (or God-like). One must have the nerve to take credit for everything and claim the power to do anything. “I alone can do it,” Trump has said.
Because the socializing bureaucrats have affected a revolution in human consciousness through schools and university education, through legal impositions and influence over the media, their destruction of tradition has no enchantments. They have made themselves boring, doctrinaire, and their policies produce feelings of revulsion in the masses. “By contrast,” noted Weber, “the power of charisma rests upon the belief in revelation and heroes, upon the conviction that certain manifestations … [rest] upon ‘heroism’ of an ascetic, military … magical [kind], according to its revolutionary will.”[vii]
Weber’s sociological framework – specifically his theory on the three types of authority (traditional, rational-legal, and charismatic) – offers a profound explanation for why the idealized mid-century “patriarch” has been replaced by the modern “political combatant” and self-proclaimed savior. Disenchantment is, for Weber, an historical process where cultural life has become rationalized, calculated, and stripped of sublime, mysterious values. Weber would argue that characters like Jim Anderson and Donna Stone represented a highly manufactured, romanticized synthesis of traditional authority (i.e., parental authority). The natural hierarchy of the family has been, indeed, a fundamental building-block of society for thousands of years. But now the bureaucracy stands against this traditional form of authority so that the balance has tipped in favor of big government and its the welfare state, with its rational-legal system of family courts and administrative law judges. In the 1950s people still believed in the family, in the authority of a father. But this belief has been undermined, leaving us in the bureaucratic “iron cage” (Stahlhartes Gehäuse) of a hyper-rationalized society that is, as Eric Voegelin argued, verging on absolute insanity. The quiet wisdom of a suburban father and the diplomacy of a caring mother are no longer idealized in our television dramas. Instead, we watch programs depicting female heroes beating men in hand-to-hand combat. This absurdity is repeated through the craft of television, rationalized by way of the egalitarian values taught in school. This perverse propaganda threatens to turn society into a fiasco. Women are now portrayed as the master sex. Sadly, there is nothing feminine in this mastery. Women have merely been masculinized. And just as a feminine man is ridiculous, a masculinized woman is also ridiculous. Only, we are not allowed to see how ridiculous this is. Even if mastery of the visual arts and related special effects gives feminist propaganda a lease on life, the ideology is nonetheless doomed. The lie continues, decade after decade, to the detriment of women; but this lie goes against the survival of the nation, and survival will assert its prerogatives. Then there is the unhappiness that results. As noted by Helen Andrews, “it would be hard to convince an impartial observer that boomer feminism has left women better off when one in five white women are on anti-depressants. Feminism … mostly meant channeling women into paid employment….”[viii]
Please remember that the bureaucracy has been the primary enforcer of feminism in day-to-day life; and there is no romance in bureaucracy, neither is there the love of father or mother. The nanny state is just a pack of nanny-bureaucrats. And who prefers the state as our parent? When people lose faith in the family, because it has been torn apart by a jealous bureaucracy, will they love and honor the bureaucrats? Charismatic figures like Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene now move into the vacuum. They personify father and mother. Our bureaucratic institutions cannot compete with these (and other) charismatic leaders, however dangerous or stupid they might be.
This is why Trump was elected president twice. When traditional authority has been eroded away, when rational-legal authority is in the process of discrediting itself, Weber suggested the inevitability of charismatic leadership. Here authority comes to rest on “devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism, or exemplary character of an individual person.” While Trump and Greene do not possess sanctity or exemplary character, they nonetheless show courage and the appearance of conviction. Weber said that charismatic leaders are fundamentally disruptive. They reject established rules, codes, and institutional decorum. Trump and Greene are classic examples of charismatic leaders who derive their power not from acting like “respectable” institutional figures but from their rejection of institutional respectability.
The supporters of Trump and Greene, though these two figures are now at odds with each other, do not want calm, soft-spoken Jim Anderson or a diplomatic Donna Stone to manage the “iron cage.” They want fighters willing to smash the cage. The public trade-off for this disruption is the acceptance of highly emotional, combative, and unstable political actors.
Having lost faith in the promises of bureaucratic authority, the culture has retreated from mid-century civility and rationalism, choosing instead to invest its faith in the raw, disruptive power of political warriors who promise revolution to an alienated populous. It is here, in the word “alienation,” that we find something more dangerous. The people wanting to escape from the “iron cage” of bureaucratic authority have lost patience. Trump and Greene were elected, in part, to break the power of the bureaucracy and to oppose bureaucratic socialism. However, Trump and Greene are not sophisticated enough to break the cage. Because of their ignorance, and because they have fraudulently laid claim to a political competence when they are worth nothing, they cannot succeed. They are unable to follow through on their promises, even if sincerely made. They can, however, nurture a process that leads to violence. This violence will threaten until someone emerges with positive creativity and genuine competence. Of course, it is not easy to break the iron cage of an emerging socialist system. Max Weber famously wrote that the iron cage was the province of “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.” Only leaders with spirit and heart can overcome it. Yet the danger is great that false messiahs will emerge. We must remember that all revolutions devour their own children. Tyranny can emerge from the actions of charismatic leaders. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote,
“The Bolsheviks, for their part, quickly put the Russian character in irons and redirected it to their own ends. With their reverse selection, their deliberate destruction of all that was bright, remarkable, of a higher level – the Bolsheviks set about changing the Russian character root and branch, ripping, pulling, and twisting it.”[ix]
Rather than bringing about a better world, revolutions can make things worse. The socialist revolutions (Marxist and National Socialist) rule through a paralyzing fear, reinforced by a “revolutionary” bureaucracy. It was a fear not only of arrest, said Solzhenitsyn, but fear of an inescapable arbitrary power (i.e., bureaucratic power). Informants were everywhere. Secrecy and distrust were all-pervasive. Anyone who criticized the regime was viewed as an agent provocateur. According to Solzhenitsyn,
“[There was a] total, deafening indifference toward those who perished all around. An overwhelming plume of betrayal. It was unavoidable: If you want to survive, lie. Lie and pretend. In place of all the good that was dying away, ingratitude, cruelty, and a thoroughly rude self-centered ambition now rose….”[x]
Already, under the soft socialist banner – in the universities, in certain businesses – the socialists will destroy your career if you show any sign of active resistance or true independence (heart or spirit). The socialist bureaucrats have corrupted gender, education, science, and entertainment. You can keep your job if you go along and keep your mouth shut. And if you want a promotion you must pay lip service to socialist absurdities. In other words, you must lie and pretend. The emerging bureaucratic regime in the West is not as harsh as that of Lenin’s Russia, but the process of “reverse selection” is the same. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before American institutions become as tyrannical and bloody as the institutions of Soviet Russia, China, or North Korea.
If things get worse, people still crave meaning and moral purpose. However, survival comes first. The rationale of socialist bureaucracy – gently or not-so-gently – makes its prerogatives clear. There are sacred cows and not-so-sacred bulls. Intolerance cynically wears the mask of tolerance for a season. At some point disagreement may be criminalized. Freethinkers and dissidents will then be dragged into dungeons and torture chambers. This is the danger.
At present we are pushed into the iron cage by economic and military crises. Class warfare and sexual warfare leaves the individual stuck and isolated between warring camps and mad narratives. How can a solitary person survive under such circumstances? The answer is to join, to lie, to ignore those who are victimized. Unsurprisingly, this dynamic strips politics of its ethical center, normalizing bad-faith arguments and bad-faith leaders.
To break out of the iron cage we need truthfulness. Give the cynicism and corruption of today, where are we going to find honest people? What happens when honest people find themselves in a dishonest crowd? The experience is one of helplessness. Say something truthful to people who are untruthful and you will find yourself persecuted.
***
Frankenstein and His Monster
The classicist Peter Kingsley wrote, “The spirit of the depths will always be at odds with the spirit of our time, just as … personality will always be in conflict with … superficial wants and needs….”[xi] The truth, which is far from being simple, is sometimes indigestible. Our hold on truth is always fleeting, always momentary in the face of wickedness and stupidity. America is in a crisis that began a long time ago; and the crisis is now intensifying, entering a more dangerous phase.
In a book about “the secret forces guiding human destiny,” religious studies scholar D.W. Pasulka has suggested “that humanity approaches an apocalyptic horizon in which technological power will confront us with the necessity of what some have called sanctifying grace.”[xii] Given all that has gone awry, something more fundamental than technology is at work. It is, rather, the perversion of the users of technology; especially, the perverse mentality of those who are developing our technology. Among the horrors they have summoned, scientists and biotechnology startups have successfully developed a process to cultivate living human brain cells. They have mounted these cells into silicon microchips and they have connected them to traditional computer networks in a field known as biocomputing or organoid intelligence (OI).
The cultivation process for organoid intelligence is to take adult human tissue – such as skin or blood samples – and using genetic engineering, revert them into induced pluripotent stem cells. These stem cells are then coaxed and matured into functioning human neurons or three-dimensional mini-brain tissue spheres called organoids. This is not hardware or software. It is “wetware.” Hundreds of thousands of these lab-grown brain cells are placed into microelectric arrays (MEAs). The electrodes send electrical stimulation directly to the cells where they decipher the electrical impulses of the active neurons. Because these cells are alive, they require a specialized habitat. The microchips are housed inside shoebox-sized units equipped with a perfusion life-support circuit that continuously feeds the cells a warm, nutrient-rich broth of sugar and oxygen while filtering away wastes. This technology is in the process of transitioning from pure lab experiments into actual commercial infrastructure. As a sidenote, organoids can live far longer than scientists initially expected. Their lifespan depends entirely on how they are used. A breakthrough study in Nature revealed that researchers at Harvard successfully kept human brain organoids alive in Petri dishes for between five and seven years.[xiii]
A serious question arises about these human organoids. As they are living things, do they possess consciousness? Can they form a real organism? Are we reaching the point at which man and machine is being merged? What, then, is the result? Will it offer certain people the option of transcending the human condition by merging their minds with robot bodies that could (in theory) prolong their lifespan? Do the developers of this technology see it as a foundational bridge to immortality?
The answer is YES. Organoid technology is being actively researched as a foundational bridge to merge human and machine intelligence. Rather than keeping machines and biological tissue separate, researchers are exploring ways to combine the distinct advantages of both into a unified, interconnected network. It is possible to set up a hybrid intelligence system where a computer and the human organoid would operate in partnership. This partnership can do what computers do best, storing raw data, executing flawless mathematical calculations, and transmitting information at the speed of light. At the same time, it would do what human brains do best – learning new things instantly from very few examples, recognizing complex patterns in chaotic environments, and adapting organically without needing to be reprogrammed.
This is not science fiction. In current experiments like those conducted by biotech companies (see Cortical labs), the organoid tissue relies heavily on the machine to act as its eyes and ears. The computer provides the environmental data while the organoid provides the processing power to solve the problem. Meanwhile, companies like Neuralink are working to connect computers directly to living human brains (i.e., to the brain of a living human being). They are hoping to create a new hybrid entity that can think, learn, and solve problems in ways that neither pure silicon machines nor pure human biology can achieve on their own. Currently there are no laws restricting this kind of research. At the same time, the moral character of the developers has been corrupted in advance by the prospect of becoming something more than human. Organoids do not have legal status as persons and nobody knows whether these things, as living organisms, are conscious enough to count as a person. Furthermore, networks using human organoids need considerably less electricity to function.
Some tech billionaires dream of using this technology to merge their consciousness with machines to achieve superhuman status plus immortality. Some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent figures share a transhumanist worldview. For someone like Peter Thiel, death is no longer inevitable. It is a software bug that can be fixed. While this sounds like science fiction, several tech billionaires have poured hundreds of millions into technologies that are expected to bridge the human mind with digital frameworks to achieve “digital immortality.” These people also have the idea of uploading their consciousness into computers through whole-brain emulation. Their idea is to map the brain’s 86 billion neurons and trillions of synaptic connections and copy that data into a computer server. If successful, a person’s memories and personality would continue living digitally for an indefinite period. Of course, why would a mere copy of someone’s synaptic connections preserve that person’s consciousness as a living being? Only scientists holding to a materialist ontology would think of something like this.
There is willful blindness here that reduces the human soul to “data.” The project of merging man and machine emerges from a highly reductive view of existence. It treats the human soul and consciousness as nothing more than an algorithm. For this and other reasons “transhumanism” is dehumanizing. Furthermore, life is not code. Life is sacred. It is the experience of BEING. If there is the slightest chance that we might trap a living human organism within an artificial network, we should leave well enough alone. If we play God while showing a complete lack of reverence, there will be consequences. The desire for godlike status by way of technological innovation on the part of tech billionaires should be regarded as dangerously perverse. Only a fool could view death as a software problem. And it does not stop there. Already we are beginning to misuse computer technology to create false realities that overwhelm common sense and common decency.
In her book, Pasulka describes computer software designed to comfort the bereaved by pseudo-resurrecting deceased loved ones via chatbots. There is a growing industry in digitally simulating deceased persons. There is even something called “séance AI” which “invites users to converse with the dead in an explicitly necromantic register,” noted Pasulka.[xiv]
On top of this, there are those who believe that humanity must colonize other worlds, if only to escape an extinction-level event here on Earth. In the thinking of these science fiction aficionados there is a refusal to accept man’s bounded dominion on Earth. They are supposedly willing to live in a space suit, crawling through a desert without a breathable air, with temperatures that can melt plastic during the day or make a sea of liquid nitrogen by night. What does it profit a man if he loses his soul for such a world? And if we chanced to find a habitable world, what nightmare ensues after contact with alien organisms? What new bacteria would infect us on such contact? And what would be the spiritual consequences of intruding on someone else’s world? What calamity follows interactions with beings so trespassed against? And then there is this strange circumstance we have discussed before: Our radio telescopes have found no civilizations emitting radio signals after listening to 30,000 to 50,000 worlds. Enrico Fermi, one of the most brilliant physicists of the twentieth century, formulated his “paradox” on the following basis: Since the universe is unfathomably old and contains billions of stars like our Sun, countless civilizations should have already come into existence throughout our galaxy. The galaxy should show us many signs of life. Where are these signs? The solution to the Fermi Paradox leaves us with two pessimistic choices: (1) that no intelligent species survives very long after the advent of radio technology (because this technology coincides with technological self-destruction); or (2) other lifeforms have already traversed interstellar space and, finding it full of danger, hide from each other in radio silence. It is laughable that we are so bold, indeed, to broadcast our position every day, every hour – the interstellar equivalent of blood in the water for every interplanetary shark within sixty light years.
Technology is dangerous and our tech billionaires have no sense. Their own outsized egos, their own personal fear of death, their overestimation of their rationality, has driven them into a kind of madness. And here is a real danger; namely, that these people have a share in political power. What crazy schemes, what mischief awaits? What means will be excused to realize a hopeless tangle of misguided ends? Whereas the liberals and socialists have made themselves ridiculous by attempting to eradicate war and poverty, the new tech billionaires have shown themselves utterly insane attempting to reach immortality and celestial empire in the airless beyond.
Our limitations define us. This is how we know who we are, and where our destiny lies. To imagine we can become the immortal masters of the universe is to deny who and what we are. It is the denial of our history, of human nature and our intended purpose. These strange new ambitions indicate the opposite of self-knowledge. Here is the hubris of ignorance and willful self-deception. And yet, this hubris characterizes our technological elite today.
What does it mean to dream of colonizing other planets when Earth is itself disordered by wars of crime and folly. It is strange, as well, that we have condemned imperialism on Earth while preparing to embrace interstellar imperialism. If intelligent creatures exist in outer space, would they find us to be peaceful neighbors? Or would they find us untrustworthy and murderous? I think we know the answer to this question.
The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus wrote, “War is the father of all things.” While Heraclitus was undoubtedly using war as a cosmic metaphor, we may nonetheless admit that war marks the beginning of every nation and every advanced society. Even more disturbing, long periods of peace breed moral corruption and neuroticism in humans. Peace also fosters a soul-destroying hedonism. Such paradoxes point to the tragic nature of our existence, which cannot reach perfection through technology any more than through liberalism or socialism. For that matter, what peace could there be amid all this humbug, in a country that elected a perfidious egomaniac because the alternative was so terrifyingly worse?
***
Monsters Who Need Monsters
Are the Luckiest Monsters
Ideologists say the capitalists are to blame, the Military Industrial Complex is to blame, the white race is to blame, toxic masculinity is to blame, the Jews are to blame!
In the mind of the masses, history is something that did not happen told by people who were not there. In terms of history, therefore, any lie will do. Imagine the ideologist’s Frankenstein monster – built out of old dead things. And then comes Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a blood-drinking amalgam of Hitler and Stalin. In keeping with the season, monsters are everywhere. The future will grant us an acceleration of vampirism; but for now, the old washer woman from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life (played by Terry Jones in drag) faces the camera with her mop and bucket and says, furiously, “It’s the Jews!”
Consider the provocation of 7 October 2023. That horrific terrorist atrocity, carried out against Israel, was a birthday gift to Vladimir Putin. And now, with tankers being attacked around the Strait of Hormuz, that gift to Putin is the gift that keeps on giving. The troubles grow, the conflict enlarges, the strategists in Moscow and Beijing rub their hands. Next comes the unravelling of Donald Trump followed by a new lease on life for the American left (wearing new Stalinist undergarments).[xv]
One should not, however, take one’s eyes off the far right. Even as Americans collaborated with Moscow in the 1930s, there were Americans who also collaborated with the Nazis. And just as happened in August 1939, we should not be surprised to find the far right and far left engaged in joint projects. Back then they called it the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Today’s version will acquire another name, another set of ideological justifications, while serving the same old purpose. Power intermingles with power. and those who crave power are drawn to sacrificial fires lit for the Great Scapegoat. Embarrassment always follows, to some extent. Secrets must then be buried along with the scapegoated victims, staring up from the rubble, bewildered by the furious irrationality of malevolent stupidity, wondering why God allowed it. Evil is never quite done with us. A volcano may seem dead, but it can come back to life. It waits on its turn to resume. The volcano of Hitlerism has waited a long time. Many thought it perished in the Führerbunker – but a cyanide capsule and a bullet cannot kill an idea (however crazy it might be).
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[i] Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Chapter XII (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), p. 1006.
[ii] Eric Voegelin, Modernity Without Restraint, Vol. 5 of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2000), pp. 104-105.
[iii] Weber, p. 956.
[iv] Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.7.5
[v] Barbara Olson, Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1999), p. 319.
[vi] Weber, p. 1115.
[vii] Ibid, p. 1116.
[viii] Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster (New York: Sentinel, 2021), p. 4.
[ix] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Solzhenitsyn Reader (USA: ISI Books, 2006), p. 477.
[x] Ibid.
[xi] Peter Kingsley, Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity (London: Catafalque Press, 2021), p. 72,
[xii] D.W. Pasulka, The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny (New York: St. Martin’s Essentials, 2026), P. 11.
[xiii] https://phys.org/news/2026-08-oldest-human-brain-cells-grown.html
[xiv] Ibid, p. 169.
[xv] See Thomas Carlyle’s book, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh in Three Books.
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