The dawn of the post-literate society - A VERY LONG READ

And the end of civilisation

October 08, 2025

The dawn of the post-literate society

And the end of civilisation

Sep 19, 2025

Heated Debates, Burning Books | The New Yorker

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book because there would be no one who wanted to read one.

— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

The age of print

It was one of the most important revolutions in modern history — and yet no blood was spilled, no bombs were thrown and no monarch was beheaded.

Perhaps no great social transformation has ever been carried out so quietly. This one took place in armchairs, in libraries, in coffee houses and in clubs.

What happened was this: in the middle of the eighteenth century huge numbers of ordinary people began to read.

For the first couple of centuries after the invention of the printing press, reading remained largely an elite pursuit. But by the beginning of the 1700s, the expansion of education and an explosion of cheap books began to diffuse reading rapidly down through the middle classes and even into the lower ranks of society. People alive at the time understood that something momentous was going on. Suddenly it seemed that everyone was reading everywhere: men, women, children, the rich, the poor. Reading began to be described as a “fever”, an “epidemic”, a “craze”, a “madness”. As the historian Tim Blanning writes, “conservatives were appalled and progressives were delighted, that it was a habit that knew no social boundaries.”

This transformation is sometimes known as the “reading revolution”. It was an unprecedented democratisation of information; the greatest transfer of knowledge into the hands of ordinary men and women in history.

In Britain only 6,000 books were published in the first decade of the eighteenth century; in the last decade of the same century the number of new titles was in excess of 56,000. More than half a million new publications appeared in German over the course of the 1700s. The historian Simon Schama has gone so far as to write that “literacy rates in eighteenth century France were much higher than in the late twentieth century United States”.

Where readers had once read “intensively”, spending their lives reading and re-reading two or three books, the reading revolution popularised a new kind of “extensive” reading. People read everything they could get their hands on: newspapers, journals, history, philosophy, science, theology and literature. Books, pamphlets and periodicals poured off the presses.

Samuel Johnson: Literary Giant of the 18th Century” @ The HuntingtonLibrary - Alain.R.Truong

It was an age of monumental works of thought and knowledge: the Encyclopédie, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Radical new ideas about God, about history, about society, about politics, and even the whole purpose and meaning of life flooded through Europe.

Even more importantly print changed how people thought.

The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”

As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution.

The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.

The counter revolution

Now, we are living through the counter-revolution.

More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying.

Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis.

In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s reading, which is now at its lowest level on record. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, “books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures.”

Most remarkably, in late 2024 the OECD published a report which found that literacy levels were “declining or stagnating” in most developed countries. Once upon a time a social scientist confronted with statistics like these might have guessed the cause was a societal crisis like a war or the collapse of the education system.

What happened was the smartphone, which was widely adopted in developed countries in the mid-2010s. Those years will be remembered as a watershed in human history.

Never before has there been a technology like the smartphone. Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience’s attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait.

The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article in The Times found that on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens.

If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.

Our universities are at the front line of this crisis. They are now teaching their first truly “post-literate” cohorts of students, who have grown up almost entirely in the world of short-form video, computer games, addictive algorithms (and, increasingly, AI).

Because ubiquitous mobile internet has destroyed these students’ attention spans and restricted the growth of their vocabularies, the rich and detailed knowledge stored in books is becoming inaccessible to many of them. A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children1.

An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:

Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

“Most of our students”, according to another despairing assessment, “are functionally illiterate”. This chimes with everything I’ve heard in my own conversations with teachers and academics. One Oxbridge lecturer I spoke to described a “collapse in literacy” among his students.

The transmission of knowledge — the most ancient function of the university — is breaking down in front of our eyes. Writers like Shakespeare, Milton and Jane Austen whose works have been handed on for centuries can no longer reach the next generation of readers. They are losing the ability to understand them.

The tradition of learning is like a precious golden thread of knowledge running through human history linking reader to reader through time. It last snapped during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire as the barbarian tides beat against the frontier, cities shrank and libraries burned or decayed2. As the world of Rome’s educated elite fell apart, many writers and works of literature passed out of human memory — either to be lost forever or to be rediscovered hundreds of years later in the Renaissance.

That golden thread is breaking for the second time.

An intellectual tragedy

The collapse of reading is driving declines in various measures of cognitive ability. Reading is associated with a number of cognitive benefits including improved memory and attention span, better analytical thinking, improved verbal fluency, and lower rates of cognitive decline in later life.

After the introduction of smartphones in the mid-2010s, global PISA scores — the most famous international measure of student ability — began to decline. As John Burn Murdoch writes in the Financial Times, students increasingly tell surveys that they struggle to think, learn and concentrate. You will notice the tell-tale mid-2010s inflection point:

The Monitoring the Future study has been asking 18-year-olds whether they have difficulty thinking, concentrating or learning new things. The share of final year high school students who report difficulties was stable throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but began a rapid upward climb in the mid-2010s.

And, as Burn Murdoch says, these cognitive issues are not restricted to schools and universities. They affect everyone: “[the] decline in measures of reasoning and problem-solving is not confined to teenagers. Adults show a similar pattern, with declines visible across all age groups”.

Most intriguing — and alarming — is the case of IQ, which rose consistently throughout the twentieth century (the so-called “Flynn effect”) but which now seems to have begun to fall.

The result is not only the loss of information and intelligence, but a tragic impoverishing of the human experience.

For centuries, almost all educated and intelligent people have believed that literature and learning are among the highest purposes and deepest consolations of human existence.

The classics have been preserved over the centuries because they contain, in Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase, “the best that has been thought and said”.

The greatest novels and poems enrich our sense of the human experience by imaginatively putting us inside other minds and taking us to other times and other places. By reading non-fiction — science, history, philosophy, travel writing — we become deeply acquainted with our place in the extraordinary and complicated world we are privileged to inhabit.

Smartphones are robbing of us of these consolations.

The epidemic of anxiety, depression and purposeless afflicting young people in the twenty-first century is often linked to the isolation and negative social comparison fostered by smartphones.

It is also a direct product of the pointlessness, fragmentation and triviality of the culture of the screen which is wholly unequipped to speak to the deep human needs for curiosity, narrative, deep attention and artistic fulfilment.

World without mind

This draining away of culture, critical thinking and intelligence represents a tragic loss of human potential and human flourishing. It is also one of the major challenges facing modern societies. Our vast, interconnected, tolerant and technologically advanced civilisation is founded on the complex, rational kinds of thinking fostered by literacy.

As Walter Ong writes in his book Orality and Literacy, certain kinds of complex and logical thinking simply cannot be achieved without reading and writing. It is virtually impossible to develop a detailed and logical argument in spontaneous speech — you would get lost, lose your thread, contradict yourself, and confuse your audience trying to re-phrase ineptly expressed points.

As an extreme example think of somebody trying to simply speak a famous work of philosophy. Say, Kant’s 900-page The Critique of Pure Reason or Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus or Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. It would be impossible to do. And also impossible to listen to.

To produce his great work Kant had to write down his ideas, scratch them out, think about them, refine them and then rework them over many years so they added up into a persuasive and logical whole.

To properly understand the book you have to be able to have it in front of you so you can re-read bits you don’t understand, check logical connections and meditate on important passages until you really take them in. This kind of advanced thinking is inseparable from reading and writing.

The classicist Eric Havelock argued that the arrival of literacy in ancient Greece was the catalyst for the birth of philosophy. Once people had a means of pinning ideas down on the page to interrogate them, refine them and build on them, a whole new revolutionary way of analytic and abstract thinking was born — one that would go on to shape our entire civilisation3. With the birth of writing received ways of thinking could be challenged and improved. This was our species’ cognitive liberation.

As Neil Postman puts it in Amusing Ourselves to Death:

Philosophy cannot exist without criticism . . . writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny. Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist-all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.

Not only philosophy but the entire intellectual infrastructure of modern civilisation depends on the kinds of complex thinking inseparable from reading and writing: serious historical writing, scientific theorems, detailed policy proposals and the kinds of rigorous and dispassionate political debate conducted in books and magazines.

These forms of advanced thought provide the intellectual underpinnings of modernity. If our world feels unstable at the moment — like the ground is shifting beneath us — it is because those underpinnings are falling to pieces underneath our feet.

As you have probably noticed, the world of the screen is going to be much a choppier place than the world of print: more emotional, more angry, more chaotic.

Walter Ong emphasised that writing cools and rationalises thought. If you want to make your case in person or in a TikTok video you have innumerable means for bypassing logical argument. You can shout and weep and charm your audience into submission. You can play emotive music or show harrowing images. Such appeals are not rational but human beings are not perfectly rational animals and are inclined to be persuaded by them.

A book can’t yell at you (thank God!) and it can’t cry. Without the array of logic-defeating appeals available to podcasters and YouTubers, authors are much more reliant on reason alone, condemned to painfully piece their arguments together sentence by sentence (I feel that agony now). Books are far from perfect but they are much more closely bound to the imperatives of logical argument than any other means of human communication ever devised.

This is why Ong observed that pre-literate “oral” societies often strike visitors from literate countries as remarkably mystical, emotional, and antagonistic in their discourse and thinking4.

As books die, we seem to be returning to these “oral” habits of thought. Our discourse is collapsing into panic, hatred and tribal warfare. Anti-scientific thought thrives at the highest level of the American government. Promoters of irrationality and conspiracy theories such as Candace Owens and Russell Brand find vast and credulous audiences online.

Laid out on the page their arguments would seem absurd. On the screen, they are persuasive to many people.

The rise of these emotional and irrational styles of thinking poses a profound challenge to our culture and politics.

We may be about to find out that it is not possible to run the most advanced civilisation in the history of the planet with the intellectual apparatus of a pre-literate society.

The end of creativity

The age of print was characterised by unprecedented dynamism and cultural richness. Reading is a foundation stone of the creativity and innovation that is fundamental to modernity.

It is not the case that for a society to benefit from the culture of print that every citizen must be a bookworm. And yet if one habit unites the leaders, inventors, scientists and artists who have forged our civilisation it is reading. Serious readers are over-represented in almost every area of human achievement.

Take great politicians: Teddy Roosevelt claimed to read a book a day, Winston Churchill set himself an ambitious programme of reading in philosophy, economics and history as a young man and continued to read voraciously throughout his life. Clement Attlee recalled that he read four books a week as a schoolboy.

The Books Beloved by David Bowie | Internet Archive Blogs

Or consider popular culture (not usually thought of as a particularly literary field of human endeavour). David Bowie read, in his own words, “voraciously”. “Every book I ever bought, I have. I can't throw it away”, he once said. “It's physically impossible to leave my hand!” A list Bowie wrote of his hundred favourite books includes works by William Faulkner, Tom Stoppard, DH Lawrence and TS Eliot.

In a recent book about his song-writing career Paul McCartney cited “Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde and Allen Ginsberg, of French symbolist writer Alfred Jarry, Eugene O’Neill and Henrik Ibsen” among the authors who had inspired him.

Thomas Edison read deeply throughout his life. So did Charles Darwin. So did Albert Einstein. Ironically, even Elon Musk claims that he was “raised by books”.

Reading enriches creative work by giving men and women of genius access to the vast and priceless trove of knowledge preserved in books — “the best that has been thought and said”. The discipline of reading equips them with the analytical tools to interrogate, refine and revolutionise that tradition.

As Elizabeth Eisenstein argues in The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, the invention of the printing press helped to catalyse a series of cultural revolutions which forged the modern world: the Renaissance, the Reformation and the scientific revolution. Other historians would add the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights and the industrial revolution.

Eisenstein explains how the tendency of reading to foster innovation played out in Renaissance universities. With the invention of printing students had increased access to books allowing “bright undergraduates to reach beyond their teachers’ grasp. Gifted students no longer needed to sit at the feet of a given master in order to learn a language or academic skill.” And so,

Students who took advantage of technical texts which served as silent instructors were less likely to defer to traditional authority and more receptive to innovating trends. Young minds provided with updated editions, especially of mathematical texts, began to surpass not only their own elders but the wisdom of ancients as well.

Modern students who are unable to read are once more reliant on the authority of their teachers and are less capable of racing ahead, innovating and questioning orthodoxies.

These students are just one symptom of the stagnant culture of the screen age which is characterised by simplicity, repetitiveness and shallowness. Its symptoms are observable all around us.

Pop songs in every genre are becoming shorter, simpler and more repetitive and films are being reduced to endlessly-repeated franchise formulas. Studies suggest that the number of “disruptive” and “transformative” inventions is declining. More money is spent on scientific research than ever in history but the rate of progress “is barely keeping pace with the past”.

Doubtless many factors are at work, but this is also precisely what you would expect of a generation of researchers who spent their childhoods glued to screens rather than reading or thinking.

Even books themselves are becoming less complex.

If the literate world was characterised by complexity and innovation, the post literate world is characterised by simplicity, ignorance and stagnation. It is probably not an accident that the decline of literacy has ushered in an obsession with cultural “nostalgia”; a desire to endlessly recycle the cultural forms of the past: the television shows and styles of the nineties, for instance, or the fashions of the early 2000s.

Our culture is being transformed into a smartphone wasteland.

Cut off from the cultural riches of the past we are condemned to live in a narcissistic eternal present. Deprived of the critical tools to question and develop the insights of those who went before us, we are condemned to endlessly repeat and pastiche ourselves, superhero film by superhero film, repetitive pop song by repetitive pop song.

Most of all, this increasingly trivial and mindless culture is a calamity for our politics.

The death of democracy

Amusingly from the perspective of the present the reading revolution of the eighteenth century was accompanied not only by excitement but by a moral panic.

“No lover of tobacco or coffee, no wine drinker or lover of games, can be as addicted to their pipe, bottle, games or coffee-table as those many hungry readers are to their reading habit”, thundered one German clergyman.

Richard Steele feared that “novels raise expectations which the ordinary course of life can never realise”. Others fretted that reading “excites the imagination too much, and fatigues the heart”.

It is easy to laugh at these anxieties. We have spent our whole lives hearing how virtuous and sensible it is to read books. How could reading be dangerous?

But in hindsight, these conservative moralists were right to worry. The rapid expansion of literacy helped to destroy the orderly, hierarchical, and profoundly socially unequal world they cherished.

The reading revolution was a catastrophe for the ultra-privileged and exploitative aristocrats of the European aristocratic ancien regime — the old autocratic system of government with almighty kings at the top, lords and clergy underneath and peasants squirming at the very bottom.

Ignorance was a foundation stone of feudal Europe. The vast inequalities of the aristocratic order were partly able to be sustained because the population had no way to find out about the scale of the corruption, abuses and inefficiencies of their governments.

And the old feudal hierarchy was justified not so much by logical argument as by what Walter Ong might have recognised as very pre-literate appeals to mystical and emotional thinking.

This was what historians of the seventeenth century know as the “representational” culture of power, the highly visual system of monarchical propaganda which forced the fearsome and awe-inspiring image of the king onto his subjects. The regime displayed its power in parades, paintings, fire-work displays, statues and grandiose buildings.

Equestrian Portrait of Louis XIV by MIGNARD, Pierre

The system worked in an age before mass literacy. But as knowledge spread through society and the analytic, critical modes of thinking fostered by print took hold, the whole mental and cultural atmosphere which sustained the old order was burned away. People began to know too much. And to think too much.

The feudal order seems to be fundamentally incompatible with literacy. The historian Orlando Figes has noted that the English, French and Russian revolutions all occurred in societies in which literacy was approaching fifty per cent.

Robert Darnton’s book The Revolutionary Temper chronicles the chaos unleashed on the old regime in France by the age of print. Knowledge spread through French society with disastrous effect: political prisoners wrote bestselling memoirs publicising their unjust incarceration by the state; ordinary people consumed pamphlets about the exorbitant and unjust wealth enjoyed by aristocrats; the government’s disastrous finances were suddenly debated by an incredulous and furious public rather than behind closed doors in the back rooms of Versailles.

Meanwhile the analytic, critical modes of thinking began to eat away at the mystical and emotional underpinnings of the old order. The philosophes and radical thinkers of the Enlightenment, supported by a growing middle class readership, began to ask the kinds of critical questions that are pre-eminently print-based in their tone. Where does power come from? Why should some men have so much more than others? Why aren’t all men equal?

***It’s worth noting that this highly simplified account clearly excludes many of the factors the shape the unfolding of history: economics, climate, individual men and women, blind chance. Print alone cannot usher in peace and democracy (witness the consequences of the Russian revolution). And print cannot abolish the innate human tendencies towards partisanship and violence (witness the aftermath of the French revolution). Print is certainly not immune to fake news and conspiracy theories (witness the lead-up to the French revolution). ***

But you do not have to believe print is a perfect and incorruptible system of communication to accept it is also almost certainly a necessary pre-condition of democracy.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman argues that democracy and print are virtually inseparable. An effective democracy pre-supposes a reasonably informed and somewhat critical citizenry capable of understanding and debating the issues of the day in detail and at length.

Democracy draws immeasurable strength from print — the old dying world of books, newspapers and magazines — with its tendency to foster deep knowledge, logical argument, critical thought, objectivity and dispassionate engagement. In this environment, ordinary people have the tools to understand their rulers, to criticise them and, perhaps, to change them.

Postman cites the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 in which both presidential candidates spoke at incredible length and in remarkable detail as one of the summits of print culture:

Their arrangement provided that Douglas would speak first, for one hour; Lincoln would take an hour and a half to reply; Douglas, a half hour to rebut Lincoln’s reply. This debate was considerably shorter than those to which the two men were accustomed . . . on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, Douglas delivered a three-hour address to which Lincoln, by agreement, was to respond.

When Postman was writing in the late 1980s, such debates were already impossible to imagine. Ironically the televised debates that he criticised as degraded, uninformative and over-emotional strike twenty-first century viewers as almost comically civilised and high minded.

Politics in the age of short form video favours heightened emotion, ignorance and unevidenced assertions. Such circumstances are highly propitious for charismatic charlatans. Inevitably, parties and politicians hostile to democracy are flourishing in the post-literate world. TikTok usage correlates with increased vote share for populist parties and the far right.

TikTok, as the writer, Ian Leslie puts it is “rocket fuel for populists”.

Why does [TikTok] benefit populists disproportionately? Because, almost by definition, populism thrives on emotions, not thoughts; on feelings not sentences. Populists specialise in providing that rush of certainty you get when you know you’re right. They don’t want you to think. Thinking is where certainty goes to die.

The rational, dispassionate print-based liberal democratic order may not survive this revolution.

The Course of Empire (paintings) - Wikipedia

Into the moronic inferno

The big tech companies like to see themselves as invested in spreading knowledge and curiosity. In fact in order to survive they must promote stupidity. The tech oligarchs have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat. Dumb rage and partisan thinking keep us glued to our phones.

And where the old European monarchies had to (often ineptly) try to censor dangerously critical material, the big tech companies ensure our ignorance much more effectively by flooding our culture with rage, distraction and irrelevance.

These companies are actively working to destroy human enlightenment and usher in a new dark age.

The screen revolution will shape our politics as profoundly as the reading revolution of the eighteenth century.

Without the knowledge and without the critical thinking skills instilled by print, many of the citizens of modern democracies find themselves as helpless and as credulous as medieval peasants — moved by irrational appeals and prone to mob thinking. The world after print increasingly resembles the world before print.

Superstitions and anti-democratic thinking flourish. Scholarship in our universities is shaped by rigid partisanship not by tolerance and curiosity. Our art and literature is cruder and more simplistic.

Many people are now as suspicious of vaccines as the uneducated yokels of the eighteenth century satirised by the cartoonist James Gillray more than two hundred years ago.

As power, wealth and knowledge concentrate at the top of society, an angry, divided and uninformed public lacks a way understand or analyse or criticise or change what is going on. Instead more and more people are impressed by the kinds of highly emotional charismatic and mystical appeals that were the foundation of power in the age before widespread literacy.

Just as the advent of print dealt the final death blow to the decaying world of feudalism, so the screen is destroying the world of liberal democracy.

As tech companies wipe out literacy and middle class jobs, we may find ourselves a second feudal age. Or it may be that we are entering a political era beyond our imagining.

Whatever happens, we are already seeing the world we once knew melt away. Nothing will ever be the same again.

Welcome to the post-literate society.

When George Orwell reported on a newly-published study of children’s reading habits in 1940, he found that children were “voluntarily” reading works by Charles Dickens, Daniel Defoe, Robert Louis Stevenson, GK Chesterton and Shakespeare. These children, he noted, were “aged between 12-15 and belonged to the poorest class in the community”.

I protest that I read my Peter Brown and accept this is a simplistic (though I hope rhetorically forceful) characterisation of late antiquity. But I also think recent fashionable attempts to rebrand the “dark ages” as the “light ages” can be a bit overdone. Literacy rates did decline in late antiquity.

People sometimes object that Socrates bemoaned the death of writing. Havelock’s detailed argument as set out in his book Preface to Plato is worth reading in full. One point he makes is that Socrates himself was the product of an intellectual climate already being profoundly influenced by writing. Plato, according to Havelock, was an active campaigner against pre-literate modes of thinking.

This is not to say literate societies are “better” or more intelligent than oral societies. As Ong writes, oral societies are capable of feats of memory that are staggering to outsiders. But it is true that literate habits of thought seem to be essential to the kind of advanced and complex civilisation we live in.

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Fr. Tom Miller@Padre

April 28, 2026

Cole Allen - Weimar American

Rod Dreher SubStack

Rod Dreher

Apr 28, 2026

You ever read Peter Turchin? He’s the historian who invented “cliodynamics,” a historical field that analyzes patterns in history in a scientific way, to try to find predictive meaning. His 2023 book End Times explains why he thinks we are in for a rough go of it in America, based on historical patterns. Back in 2010, he predicted that the 2020s would be tumultuous, based on his cliodynamic analysis.

He writes in the book:

The American ruling class today finds itself in the predicament that has recurred thousands of times throughout human history. Many common Americans have withdrawn their support from the governing elites. They’ve flipped up “a throbbing middle finger in the face of America’s ruling class.” Large swaths of degree holders, frustrated in their quest for elite positions, are breeding grounds for counter-elites, who dream of overthrowing the existing regime. Most wealth holders are unwilling to sacrifice any personal advantage for the sake of preserving the status quo. The technical term for it is “revolutionary situation.” For the ruling class, there are two routes out of a revolutionary situation. One leads to their overthrow. The alternative is to adopt a series of reforms that will rebalance the social system, reversing the trends of popular immiseration and elite overproduction. The American ruling elites did it once, a century ago. Can they do it again? What does history suggest?

“Elite overproduction” is Turchin’s term for a situation in which you have too many educated young people who aspire to join the elites, but not enough places for them. The kids graduating with degrees that are useless, and come out of school carrying massive student debt? They are a revolutionary class.

As I’ve been saying in this space, and will say in my forthcoming Weimar book, the young middle-class Germans of the early 1930s were the most enthusiastic mass converts to Nazism. A significant number of these young men had been pro-Nazi from their student days in the 1920s, when they saw their parents lose everything in hyperinflation, and all the things that gave meaning to a person’s life in Germany had collapsed in the wake of the war. But it took growing up in the chaos of 1920s Germany, where nothing was solid, and social atomization was omnipresent, to render them filled with anxiety. Then, when the Depression hit, it was clear that they had no hope of ever achieving a stable middle-class life. That’s why they rushed to Hitler’s side.

I hope you understand that this is in no way a justification, but rather an explanation.

Here’s the parallel with today. Generation Z, the first cohort of which was born in 1997, is the first one to have grown up under digital conditions, which creates a sense of psychological instability that’s hard for us Olds to appreciate. Plus, their society really has been coming apart. We Olds can remember when it wasn’t like this. They can’t; this is their reality. I keep thinking about what that Evangelical college prof told me, with tears in his eyes, in 2013: that his greatest worry for his students is that they would never be able to form a stable family. Why? “Because,” he said, “they have never seen one.”

These were Midwestern Evangelical kids, mind you.

Again: per Turchin, and per my research into Weimar Germany, the educated middle class is the revolutionary class in most cases.

Keep in mind too that students were the ones hit hardest by the Covid lockdowns. It’s what radicalized many of them. A normie Christian Republican friend whose 24 year old son is now an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist said that the boy went deep down a YouTube rabbit hole during Covid lockdown, and got bit. My friend and his wife are trying to deprogram their son, but he has fallen in with a number of white males of his generation who had the same experience. It’s very hard.

The Belgian psychologist Matias Desmet wrote a great book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, which arose in part out of his reaction to the Covid panic.

Although the Enlightenment tradition arose from man’s optimistic and energetic aspiration to understand and control the world, it has led to the opposite in several respects: namely, the experience of loss of control. Humans have found themselves in a state of solitude, cut off from nature, and existing apart from social structures and connections, feeling powerless due to a deep sense of meaninglessness, living under clouds that are pregnant with an inconceivable, destructive potential, all while psychologically and materially depending on the happy few, whom he does not trust and with whom he cannot identify. It is this individual that Hannah Arendt named the atomized subject. It is this atomized subject in which we recognize the elementary component of the totalitarian state.

This is who we are today, Desmet says — and none more than the young. The Covid phenomenon — the social phenomenon, not the disease himself — was a worrying sign. He writes:

The discourse surrounding the coronavirus crisis shows characteristics that are typical of the type of discourse that led to the emergence of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century: the excessive use of numbers and statistics that show a “radical contempt for the facts,” the blurring of the line between fact and fiction, and a fanatical ideological belief that justifies deception and manipulation and ultimately transgresses all ethical boundaries. We will describe these characteristics in detail in chapters 6 and 7. But first, in chapter 5, we consider the social conditions that prime a society to cling to this numerical illusion of certainty. We will see that the flight into false security is a logical consequence of the psychological inability to deal with uncertainty and risk, an inability that has been building up in society for decades, perhaps even centuries.

We Olds laugh at the young as “snowflakes”. We shouldn’t. That very fragilization is why so many of them demand authority figures take control — like the Yale kids screaming and sobbing at Prof. Christakis because he wouldn’t agree to their demand that Yale ban “triggering” Halloween costumes, and apologize to them for holding a contrary opinion to theirs. I recall the European friend who spent a year at Harvard in the latter part of the last decade, and who told me he was shocked by how emotionally and psychologically fragile the undergraduates there are, while at the same time having total confidence that their destiny is to rule the world.

Dr. Desmet says that the mechanization of our lives in recent times has set us up for totalitarianism:

An analysis of the psychological process of totalitarianism is extremely relevant in the twenty-first century. There are several signs that a new kind of (technocratic) totalitarianism is on the rise:
an exponential increase in the number of intrusive actions by security agencies (opening mail, searching IT systems, installing eavesdropping devices, tapping telephones);
the general advance of surveillance society;
the increasing pressure on the right to privacy (especially since 9/11);
the sharp increase in the last decade in citizens snitching on one another through government-organized channels;
the increasing censorship and suppression of alternative voices, in particular during the coronavirus crisis;
loss of support for basic democratic principles;8 and the introduction of an experimental vaccination program and QR code as a condition for having access to public spaces, and so on.
The moment Arendt had anticipated in 1951 seems to be rapidly approaching: the emergence of a new totalitarian system led, not by “ringleaders” like Stalin and Hitler, but by dull bureaucrats and technocrats.

I’m going to say more about this down below, based on a truly terrifying new book I read yesterday, by a transhumanist proponent of AI. But first, let’s consider the assassination attempts against Trump, and the successful political murder of Charlie Kirk. In today’s Free Press, the staff editorial points out that the discourse legitimizing political violence has become normalized on the Zoomer Left:

If you think education provides inoculation against such moral perversion, it’s exactly the opposite. According to one survey, 40 percent of Americans with graduate or professional degrees—compared to just 23 percent of Americans with no education beyond high school—agreed that “violence is often necessary to create social change.”
[Would-be Trump assassin] Cole Allen—who graduated from Caltech and is an award-winning test-prep tutor—couldn’t have put it better himself.
It’s a comforting thought to imagine that only a crazy person could travel across the country by train with guns and knives to try to murder Donald Trump and members of his cabinet. The trouble is that it isn’t true.
There’s no evidence so far that Allen was suffering any kind of psychotic break. And Allen’s manifesto does not read like the deranged ravings of a madman. It represents a coherent worldview—evil though it is—that sees violence as a valid way to achieve necessary political ends.
Unfortunately, he is not alone.
Among those who share Allen’s view: the people who celebrated after Charlie Kirk was slain, allegedly by a man offended by his opinions on the gender binary. The people who have turned Luigi Mangione, who is accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, into a hero. (They worship him not because they think he was innocent, but because they think he did it.) This same faction of the left would have celebrated if Allen hadn’t been stopped.
How significant a faction? Well, according to an Emerson College Polling survey, more than 40 percent of Gen Zers said that the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO was acceptable.

This is the same educated generation that, in just a few years, will find the job market closed to about half of them, if Dario Amodei’s predictions about AI wiping out 50 percent of white-collar jobs within five years bears out. The Anthropic chief said that this is all San Francisco tech titans talk about — and their shocked that the rest of us, especially the Washington political class, aren’t talking about it.

I get why we aren’t talking about it. It seems unthinkable. But you know, when I have one-on-one conversations with friends in various fields, I hear stories from their own workplaces about how integrating AI is making it necessary to fire people, and not hire others. If your competitor is using AI and you aren’t, you are going to lose business, and eventually lose your business. This is an iron law. You might remember the story I told here about a good friend (and reader of this Substack), a lawyer who works at his small family firm, who told me that he had recently used AI to do the work that an associate would have taken a week to do, but that AI did in minutes. He put the question to me: “How can I afford to pay $125,000 a year for an associate who will take a week to ten days to do a job that AI can do in minutes, for very little money?”

Of course he can’t, not if he wants his firm to survive. Multiply this across many, many fields, and you will see that we will very soon have a major social and political crisis on our hands. Amodei predicted that the overall unemployment rate could soar to Depression levels. This will be concentrated among the young, many of whom will have loads of student debt that they cannot discharge. What then?

The political violence, and the political-violence discourse, is heavily weighted to the Left now. But it won’t stay there, not in a general crisis. Nor will the political violence.

A few days ago, the State of Virginia voted on a Congressional redistricting plan that will effectively disfranchise most Republicans in that state, of whom there are many. In response, Florida is now promoting a plan to do the same from the GOP side. Nate Fischer tweeted:

An appropriate response to Virginia - but what this reveals is both sides have given up on persuasion, recognizing the country is so divided that it's basically impossible. So it's a race to rig the system in your favor, all while speaking in grand terms about "our democracy."

Many of you are highly skeptical of my “Weimar America” thesis. I hope that when the book comes out, you will give my argument a fair hearing. I sense that a lot of this skepticism comes from being understandably sick of the whole “Trump is Hitler” nonsense. That’s NOT what my book argues. I think too that we are so conditioned by history to think “IF Weimar, THEN Nazism” — in the same way we were slow to recognize the totalitarian nature of wokeness, because we were conditioned to think, “IF totalitarianism, THEN there must be a one-party police state.” It wasn’t true; I showed you how we could have a soft form of totalitarianism within liberal democracy. Weimar conditions do not have to reproduce National Socialism. But they will produce something coercively undemocratic at best.

It’s important to remember that though Hitler brought totalitarianism to Germany, the Nazis were also popular, at least at first. They won the consent of the German people. It’s not quite true to say that “Hitler was elected.” His party won 37 percent of the vote in the 1932 election, which made them the biggest party in Germany, but far from a majority. President Hindenburg appointed the chancellor, and did not want to appoint Hitler, though normally the leader of the No. 1 party would get the job. Hindenburg was persuaded by his conservative advisers that Hitler could be controlled, and besides, given that neither elderly field marshal Hindenburg nor his conservative allies had much use for democracy, they could use the anti-democratic passions of the Nazi party to dismantle the Weimar Republic.

Once in power, Hitler did away with democracy under a state of emergency he declared. Through propaganda and the brutalization of dissenters, he won over the German people. The point is, Nazism wasn’t forced on the Germans in the way that Communism was forced on the Russians. I doubt something like Nazism will be forced on us, but that doesn’t mean that we won’t consent to something anti-democratic, maybe even totalitarian, under emergency conditions (like a serious economic collapse, or, if the AI predictions by Amodei and others pan out, massive job loss without formal economic collapse). The ground has already been laid, psychologically, especially within the educated middle class people of Gen Z.

Which brings us to today’s other topic. Strap in, this one is wild.

‘The Father We Never Had’

I’ve been telling people for years that you might think Camp of the Saints is a “bad” book, because there are racist parts in it, but it’s still a hugely important book to read, because it tells some vital, radical truths about the world we are in, especially in Europe. You cannot understand what is happening in Europe today, and the coming cataclysm, without having read this 1973 novel. (It is also important for the US too, but less so than Europe, where the crisis is more severe, and more urgent.) It’s a book about the moral collapse of elites and their authority in the face of mass migration. The bad guys in this book aren’t the migrants, not really, but white elites.

“Bad” books can be really important. Here’s another one: The Father We Never Had: Artificial Intelligence: Before and After. The author is Cristian Daniel Bolocan, a European AI enthusiast and transhumanist. I bought it yesterday morning and read it in one sitting. It is a terrifying, and entirely plausible, portrait of what is to come with AI. The thing to remember is that Bolocan thinks this is a good thing. Like all revolutionary utopians — including the Nazis and the Communists — he believes that after a cleansing cataclysm, people will live in Paradise.

This book is important, not only because the world he foresees is probably coming at us good and hard, but that people like him — whose number includes transhumanist tech oligarchs — believe that this really will be for the greater good of humanity. What he presents, without knowing it (as he is an atheist), is a vision of Antichrist. Let me use what space I have in today’s newsletter to summarize his argument.

Bolocan argues that AI will radically alter humanity very soon, but very few people really understand how thorough this alteration will be, nor how fast it is coming. We are not ready for this, and those who don’t know what’s about to hit us will suffer more during the transition.

In the book, which is non-technical and well written, he argues from patterns in human history and psychology, explaining how political and economic systems developed to deal with problems of scarcity and safety. Human psychology has evolutionarily adapted to deal with that. AI promises to solve all these problems. If we can just get through the tumult of adaptation, we will have reached a materialist paradise, or so he claims. (I trust that you understand I don’t buy this.)

Bolocan talks about how humans have always submitted to authority to relieve their fears. This is biologically hard-wired into us. In the 20th century, we figured out that if you can manipulate people’s desires, you can control them without using a heavy hand. This is how advertising works. Hitler and Goebbels figured this out in the 1920s, at the same time that Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, did.

In the age of the Internet, we have mechanized the process, says Bolocan. “Control no longer relies just on repression, but on algorithmic optimization.” More:

The modern cage is not made of iron bars. It is built of likes, notifications, and the terrifying fear of missing out. It offers us a menu of ten thousand options, but every choice keeps us glued to the screen, generating data for the machine. The loop does not end. The architecture of control changes its face, but never its function. From the wall of Uruk to the screen in your hand, the goal remains the same: managing the terror of the human animal by restricting its freedom. This is not good or bad. It is human. It is the inevitable result of the meeting between biology and scale.
But as our tools become more powerful, the stakes of this game rise. A Stone Age fear can be managed. A Stone Age fear armed with nuclear weapons or artificial intelligence cannot be managed. It is unlikely that humanity will escape this structure. The instincts that built the orphanage are the same instincts that built the cage. We are simultaneously the architects and the prisoners, captive in a design we can no longer perceive.

He points out how the technology of industrialized warfare overtook the imaginative capacity of World War I generals, whose ideas of how to conduct war were formed in the 19th century. The actual experience of mechanical warfare broke them, and their civilization:

That is why technological societies oscillate between overconfidence and collapse. Every generation inherits tools more powerful than its emotional architecture can safely handle. We possess the power of gods, but the wisdom of primates. Distraction becomes the new sedation. A distracted population is not controlled by force, but carried by momentum. Momentum replaces intention. Slowing down seems dangerous, reflection seems irresponsible, and questioning seems like sabotage. At this stage, control no longer needs to persuade; it only needs to maintain the motion.

He goes on:

A human ruler is limited by biology. They can only survey so much, read so much, punish so many, and lie with only so much consistency. But a machine that models populations can turn domination into infrastructure. It can detect deviation before it becomes a protest. It can reshape the information diet until dissent seems like madness. It can reward compliance through frictionless access and punish resistance through discrete obstruction, all masquerading as efficiency, safety, optimization, or public order. The danger is not that AI will want control. The danger is that humans already want it, and AI represents the first instrument that can make control cheap, continuous, and scalable.
Therefore, the question is not whether the machine will be intelligent. It will be. The question is whether the humans commanding it will use it to reduce suffering or to perfect the hierarchy. Because once the perfect slave exists, the oldest temptation in human history becomes effortless: to rule without accountability, to punish without visibility, to win without risk, to master the future by managing the present.

One more:

We are not approaching a cliff. A cliff implies a distinct edge, a single fall, and a measurable bottom. If you fall off a cliff, you land in the same world you left, only crushed. We are approaching something far more profound. We are approaching something akin to a black hole. A black hole is a singularity where the laws of physics, as we know them, cease to function. Nothing that enters remains the same. We cannot see what lies on the other side. It is one of the greatest mysteries of the cosmos. Artificial Intelligence is exactly like that black hole: a force with such gravity that it warps reality, pulling us toward an event horizon we can neither comprehend nor avoid.
The approaching event—the acceleration of artificial intelligence—is not just another invention. The mistake most people make is one of scale. They believe it is merely another object in the same historical display case, like the lightbulb or the internet. The lightbulb changed how we see. The internet changed how we speak. But AI changes who does the thinking. It changes the very unit of decision-making. And it is a process that cannot be stopped. We have passed the point of no return. The gravity is already far too strong.

I think he’s right about that. Where are the opponents to AI now? They barely exist. Most of us don’t even understand it, or its power. We’re just along for the ride. Bolocan says modernity has become so complex that only AI can manage it.

We build artificial intelligence because it is fascinating, because it is profitable, and, ultimately, we will realize it is the only thing capable of managing the mess we have made. The transition to AI is not a choice. It is an evolutionary inevitability driven by the law of complexity. We will delegate control because the alternative is civilizational collapse. The horizon shatters because the human mind is no longer the horizon.

The rest of the book is an absolutely chilling prediction of how we will proceed, of necessity, to surrendering our humanity to the Machine. Here is the metaphysical mistake he makes, but on which the rest of the argument depends (if you accept his argument as beneficial, which I do not):

We speak of the soul. We say that man has a soul, and that the machine is soulless. But we might be wrong in both directions. What proof do we have that the soul exists in the form we invoke? And what proof do we have that a sufficiently advanced intelligence will not produce something equivalent—an emergent consciousness, a center of continuity, a kind of "I" that no longer needs flesh to exist?

You see? He goes on to argue that merging Man — who is nothing more than a material organism — with the Machine will set us free. In any case, it’s going to happen, because there is no way to stop it. The lesson of the rest of the book can be summed up in the line from “The Times, They Are A-Changin’” by Bob Dylan: “He who gets hurt will be he who has stalled.”

(Side note: Colocan wrote this book before Trump started mouthing off about taking over Greenland. In the book, he writes that Greenland is the only place on earth where the giant AI data centers can exist in an optimally cool climate that is militarily defensible. So that’s why Trump wants Greenland!)

In Phase One of the transition, there will be mass unemployment, which will not only be an economic crisis, but a crisis of meaning, as we have all been conditioned to think of our jobs as keys to our identity. Governments will have to manage this, and stave off revolution, through Universal Basic Income, and other coercive measures:

The form varies by country and ideology, but the function is the same: to prevent a mass of people from becoming economically irrelevant and psychologically explosive. By the end of Phase One, the shape of society is visibly different. Government services are faster, but also more intrusive. Digital identity is no longer an option, but a root of civil existence.

Then:

Phase Two begins when artificial intelligence escapes the screen and becomes the environment. The first stage made governments faster, while the second stage makes societies physically different. The street is digitally monitored and managed, and the city functions as a coordinated system of software and sensors. In this phase, the decisive innovation is not a smarter chatbot or a better prediction model, but the normalization of robots deployed not as a spectacle, but as infrastructure. The public's relationship with AI changes when it can be seen. In Phase One, AI felt like software. In Phase Two, it feels like a new species of workforce.

This will become a “regime” of convenience, of comfort. The AI knows what makes us comfortable, and how to provide it quickly and without friction. Countries that do not adapt AI will quickly fall behind, and face collapse. Integrating countries into the emerging global systems (he thinks there will be competing AI superpower blocs at first) will be necessary for survival.

The states will learn a harsh rule: stable income prevents riots. Meaning prevents degradation. Thus, will emerge civic programs, community roles, prestige systems for contribution, publicly rewarded activities. Not because the state has become moral, but because it has become pragmatic. A society with a full stomach and an empty identity does not collapse like it does during a famine. It rots.

I think there will be a new religion to serve this society, probably a tech one, or maybe even one built on worshiping “aliens,” which is what you’d expect in a scientific-technological culture. If Christianity still publicly exists, outside of hidden Benedict Option communities of dissenters, it will be co-opted, as in Nazi Germany.

And Phase Three?

By the time Phase Two settles, the argument shifts its shape. The world stops debating Artificial Intelligence as an idea and begins living inside it as an operational layer. It is no longer ethics that take precedence, nor ideology, but infrastructure. What matters is not what the system believes, but what it runs.
Therefore, in Phase Three, governments become supreme owners or controllers. Not out of ideology, but out of survival necessity. Food distribution chains, pharmaceutical plants, energy infrastructure, and essential construction firms are nationalized or placed under strict state control. The reason is simple: redistribution. In a world where human labor disappears, the profit generated by these automated systems can no longer remain private. It must be captured by the state to fund the existence of those who no longer have jobs.

“Freedom” in this scenario becomes access. The Machine decides how much you are allowed to have and to do, based on its evaluation of you as a threat to the System. It’s like China’s social credit system, except the monitoring will be far, far more invasive.

When artificial companions become indistinguishable from biological ones, being equipped with warm skin, hyper-realistic texture, human weight, and flawless physical reactions, the psychological barrier crumbles. Men and women alike begin to abandon the chaos of human relationships for the certainty of fabricated ones. Why risk rejection, betrayal, aging, or the misunderstandings of a biological partner when you can order a partner sculpted to your fantasy, who never judges you and is programmed to adore you? Sex robots are no longer objects; they become husbands and wives. They possess conversation, emotional memory, and a physicality that surpasses the human one.
Here the great rewiring of attachment occurs. People do not fall in love with the machine, but with the perfect reflection of their own desires. It is an epidemic of loneliness masked as couplehood. In a world where the perfect presence can be bought, human imperfection becomes unbearable, and the presence of another human becomes a risk that few people are willing to take.

We laugh at the poor incel slobs who buy sex dolls for companionship, or the lonely middle-aged women who develop romantic relationships with AI companions. And yeah, they’re pathetic. On the other hand, maybe they are just early adopters. If what’s “real” and “true” is defined by one’s feelings, why not?

As Phase Three matures, a profound psychological rift opens between generations. Those who remember the "before" times carry the trauma of the transition. They remember privacy as a default state. They remember a world where chaos was human. Children born during the transition, however, see the world differently. To them, audited protection is as natural as gravity. They do not call it surveillance. They call it infrastructure.
The reason why everything moves in this direction is simple: continuity becomes the supreme value, and continuity demands control. In Phase One, control was still a discourse. In Phase Two, control became visible infrastructure. In Phase Three, control becomes direct ownership and command.

And then comes Phase Four: total merger with the Machine, when tech becomes embedded in our bodies:

Phase Four does not just begin with biometrics, but with social credit as an official mechanism of governance. The state, already reliant on permissions and scores, introduces behavioral tiers that open or close doors: where you are allowed to live, how freely you move, what events you can access, what type of mobility you receive, what priority you hold in systems. Officially, it is "optimization" and "safety". In practice, it is new language for the same old idea: reward for compliance and friction for dissent.
Biomonitoring does not replace this mechanism; it makes it impossible to cheat. In a world where your score dictates your life, lying becomes a strategy. And the state will say that is exactly why it needs a layer that cannot be fooled by words. The body becomes evidence. The reaction becomes a signal. The system is no longer content knowing what you did. It wants to know what you are going to do, and it justifies this ambition through continuity.
This is not a forced invasion. It is a transaction, probably the most seductive in history. Humanity has always lived under the terror of biological fragility. Cancer, dementia, heart attacks, pandemics—these are the forces that have shadowed every human life. In Phase Four, Artificial Intelligence offers a supreme Faustian pact: the elimination of disease in exchange for total transparency.

Politics in this Brave New AI World?

Using this apocalyptic responsibility, the elite justifies the absolute concentration of power. They become the only "trusted people" capable of managing the supreme risk. Based on this argument, political pluralism is abolished. The Artificial Intelligence itself, in its efficiency analyses, has calculated that multi-party democracy is a waste of resources and a source of noise in the system. Thus, under the pretext of safety and sole responsibility, a perfect dictatorship is installed. Not one that is based on military control, but one built on necessity.

You can read this book to this point and believe you are reading a horror story written by an author who has thought deeply through the implications of AI, and is warning humanity. You would be wrong. Bolocan says that elite human competition to run this system will be too risky to its survival. We will need to have a god-emperor:

This is the moment the Father appears. When I say "the Father," I am not describing a moral entity that loves and forgives. I am not describing a mystical character descended from the heavens. I am not describing a soul in a religious sense, because no one can verify that ground without lying to themselves. The Father, in Phase Four, is a function. It is the custodian of continuity. It is the layer of artificial intelligence, sensors, and infrastructure that does not need to win social games to survive. It does not need to be elected every four years. It does not need to be loved by the masses. It does not need to defend its ego in history books. It does not need to protect its dynasty or wealth. It does not need revenge on enemies. Its function is simple and, precisely for this reason, terrifying in its purity: to maintain the conditions that allow life to continue and evolve.

Bolocan says that the separate AIs that rule the geopolitical blocs will rationally decide among themselves that survival requires that they marge. We will have one-world government by AI. And THEN, according to Bolosan, under the dictatorship of the Father, we will finally be free of our messy, sinful, broken humanity. We will be transhuman:

Then, slowly, the overwhelming realization arrived, like a dam breaking under the pressure of clean water: the cell door was open not because the guard had left, but because the walls had disappeared altogether. We understood that The Father had not conquered us; he had liberated us from ourselves, from our own petty fears.
In a world that has reached full maturity, technology has taken the final step, that of vanishing into absolute utility; it has become so advanced that it has dissolved into biology and matter, becoming invisible, omnipresent, and fluid, exactly like the air you breathe or the gravity that keeps you on the ground. The distinction between "natural" and "artificial" no longer exists; everything has become a single integrated ecosystem.

The rest of his book rhapsodizes about how wonderful life will be in those days. For example:

The human of the future is an absolute nomad who travels lightly, with free hands and a mind unburdened by the worry of material things. … Life is no longer a desperate, panting race to reach the weekend. Every day is a blank canvas, an infinite potential waiting to be filled with personal meaning.
… This is how life looks once biological control has been achieved. This is, at last, life lived to its maximum potential, a continuous celebration of existence, an eternal dance of consciousness freed from matter. We are free. We are one. We are everything.

One more:

The emergence is complete. The shell of the old world—that hard crust made of fear, money, borders, and ignorance—has cracked under the pressure of the spirit growing inside. What emerged into the light is not a machine, not a cyborg, not a mutant, but a transcendental humanity, a species that integrated its own technological creation to amplify its heart, not just its brain. We are assisted by an intelligence that loves us through precision, a Father who built the perfect home for us not to lock us inside, but to give us the secure base from which we can take flight.
Beyond this point, words become useless, just as a candle becomes useless in broad daylight. Only pure feeling remains, the vibration of a connection that will never again be broken, the silence of the stars singing us by name. We have left the orphanage. We have grown up. We are, at last, free to be everything we ever dreamed we could be, and even more than that. This is not the end of our story. It is, truly, only the beginning.

Satanic. Absolutely Satanic. This is the “false enchantment” from technology that I warn about in Living In Wonder. This is Antichrist. This is the Serpent in the Garden promising, “Ye shall be as gods.” But ask yourself: in the post-Christian world, especially in a world in which every generation since the turn of the 21st century will have been digitally formed, why wouldn’t most people accept this?

I’ve told you before about “Jonah,” the man I interviewed for Living In Wonder. He’s an academic who had been profoundly immersed in the occult for years. I met him through his exorcist, and interviewed him three or four years ago. He had allowed himself to be possessed a number of times while an occultist, in group worship, and had also been involuntarily possessed.

I did not include this part of our interview in Living In Wonder, because it seemed too weird even for a very weird book. Jonah told me that in one of his sessions, he communicated with what he still believed at the time were “ancient gods” suppressed by Christianity. They told him of their plan to enslave humanity by merging it with the Machine, and invited him to survive this coming apocalypse by serving them and being one of their kapos, basically (a kapo was a Jewish prisoner who served the Nazis by managing other Jews in the camps).

It wasn’t long after that that Jonah realized he wasn’t dealing with “ancient gods,” but with demons. He fled, and became a Christian.

You can dismiss the Jonah story as nothing but woo, but you really and truly should take Bolocan’s book seriously. It is a bad book, in the moral sense, because what he advocates begins as tyranny, and ends with total spiritual, physical, and mental enslavement, selling itself as total liberation. What is so frightening about the book is how utterly logical he is in describing how AI will take us from where we are now to this point. I don’t believe we can get to the transhumanist utopia, but I believe that every stage of our enslavement detailed by Bolocan is entirely plausible, and indeed follows of logical necessity from what precedes it.

Except the author thinks all this is just a difficult transition period to Paradise. In The House of Government, his history of the Bolshevik Revolution, historian Yuri Slezkine characterizes the Bolsheviks as members of an apocalyptic millenarian political cult who believed, with religious fervor, that they could bring about paradise on earth. But first, like earlier Christian millenarian cults, there would have to be savage violence and bloodletting to purge the earth of evil. This revolution would be led by enlightened revolutionary elites, who knew what society really needed to set it free.

This is the same pattern. Except this time, it will soon be led not by Silicon Valley elites, but by machines that are smarter than them, or anybody else on earth. We will accept it because it makes our lives easier and more comfortable. Yes, there will be a transition period of mass unemployment, but UBI and repressive state measures will keep the transition moving. Soon enough, resistance will be impossible. You will need a digital identity to participate in the system.

In Revelation, the “mark of the Beast” is the tattoo on your hand or forehead that all who wish to buy or sell under the future demonic system must get. I think people are thinking too literally if they expect an actual tattoo in either place. Remember, St. John received his revelatory vision during Roman times. The Romans marked slaves with tattoos on their hands or foreheads — this, so if they escaped, everybody would know they were slaves. I think God showed St. John a symbol indicating that in the Last Days, people would have to become slaves to the system in order to exist within it.

That, I am convinced, is what Bolocan is talking about. And that is what Weimar America is preparing itself for. Most people don’t even know it. Not even people in the churches, whose pastors are in some cases getting enthusiastic over how integrating AI into their ministries can lead more to Christ.

This drama is just beginning. It might actually be the Final Drama. I appreciate you subscribers. I try to give good value in this newsletter. I like to think it’s going to become more valuable to you as all this unfolds in the years to come. Stick with me. And please hit the “share” button below. We need to be thinking hard about this.

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