Easter Robot

I try to keep in mind that today’s conflicts may look very different with historical hindsight. Political factions that read as “opposites” in the early 21st-century—say, liberalism and conservatism—may look nearly indistinguishable to 22nd-century students of history, hard as that may be for us to believe. Similarly, few people today can easily intuit what distinguished various factions of 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers.

Even within our own lifetimes, we’ve watched coalitions form that were initially hard to imagine, such as psychedelics-loving tech innovators linking arms with “trad wife”-seeking rural masculinists—linking arms so firmly that people are already forgetting there was once a large cultural fault line there.

It seems like only yesterday, by which I mean the 1990s, that we celebrated this sort of eclecticism as a nearly-always-good thing, and good in a liberal, diversity-enhancing way: fusion cuisine, etc. But then I think about the Nazis. Who would’ve guessed in the mid-19th century that less than 100 years later, a future proudly pagan/occult and pastoral movement full of nature-lovers and hikers would also build war machines, including rockets, and dream of herding millions of people into death-factories?

You can never say with confidence which crazy political ideas will get stitched together to foster a broader coalition and what that coalition will then decide to do. Hodge-podge philosophies are chaotic.

I shouldn’t be too shocked, then, by a recent Rasmussen poll showing a majority of young conservatives—and even a majority of Christians—say they’d favor an A.I. dictatorship over current human leaders (liberals agree, but that’s somewhat less surprising given their self-conscious science-boosterism). I think the would-be machine-followers may get their wish—without even sacrificing the religiosity part. If you thought recent hints of techno-fascism were bad, how would you feel about techno-theocracy?

In much the same way there appears to be tension within the establishment right now over whether to think of UFOs as likely extraterrestrials, foreign drones, or (as hinted by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna and Vice President Vance) demons, I could easily imagine the long history of the U.S. government’s dabbling in occult matters getting slightly rewritten one day soon to blend talk of psychic spies, scientifically-respectable algorithmic prediction-by-computer, and old-fashioned divine insight.

Over the past several decades, for instance, there really have been successive government programs called Stargate, of which Trump’s cabal of newly government-adjacent, government-subsidized tech companies by that name is only the latest. A government program called Stargate in the 1970s sought alleged psychics, remote viewers, and clairvoyants who might give the U.S. an edge in warfare or economics. Rumor also had it at one time that military forays into the Arab world were inspired in part by the desire to find archaeological evidence there of a possible alien-made teleportation or hyperspace gateway that might offer glimpses of other worlds or times, much as in the sprawling Stargate sci-fi franchise.

Maybe the pragmatic common thread there connecting the hippie-era psychics to the present-day tech moguls, from government’s perspective (which is very different from the average citizen’s perspective, especially since government is happy to burn billions of other people’s dollars on highly speculative ideas), isn’t so much an effort to learn new things about the cosmos that may transcend conventional notions of physics or transform human spirituality but just to get a leg up on predicting, by whatever means, what markets and political agents will do next.

What does the government care, really, whether it’s experimentally consorting with demons, Venusians, Large Language Models, Bill Gates, the Oracle at Delphi, or Larry Ellison of Oracle computers—just so long as in the end, maybe, they can do a five percent better job of predicting the movements of stocks or troops or votes? 

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If the political calculations involved are indeed that crass, and they usually are, it starts to seem less strange that surveillance-tech mogul Peter Thiel is lecturing at the Vatican about the Anti-Christ. Wouldn’t it be great, from the perspective of authorities hoping to see all and predict all, if they could get the masses to embrace that nosy and creepy mission with moral fervor, or at least with very passive, bowed-heads acceptance? Despite the conservative pretense that religion’s reliable and stable, you never know for sure what current political cause it will be summoned to justify, and one of the main causes at the moment is tech. Another is war.

According to political reporter Michael Tracey, Sen. Ted Cruz says Trump told him God spared him from being gunned down in Butler, Pennsylvania for a purpose, and that purpose is defeating Iran. Whether Trump is sincere or not, you can imagine this religious rationale adding a few weeks or decades to the U.S.’s determination to fight the war. But then, political people have been consciously going through the motions of fulfilling prophecies since Jesus’ time, much as we absent-mindedly pretend everyone was too ignorant to act with multilayered motives or theatrical irony in the distant past. That which appears predestined is an easier political sell.

But these political mixed motives, much like the hodge-podge coalitions described above, can have gyroscopically chaotic and unpredictable cultural side effects. Tracey makes the interesting argument that the recent uptick in anti-Semitism on the right is a sort of an unintended bank-shot caused by the Trumpist right’s (initial) dislike of going to war in Iran. If the war’s a bad idea, they have to blame someone for it, but their devotion to Trump can’t budge and many of them swore he’d be the antiwar president, so they have to look around for other scapegoats—especially if, like Tucker Carlson, their careers largely depend upon keeping Trump supporters happy by echoing all of Trump’s shifting messages.

Thus, focusing on Israel’s role in stoking war with Iran becomes the (potentially anti-Semitic) new version of the old political practice of saying the leader who can’t be directly criticized must’ve been led astray by “bad advisors.” The current right is too subordinated to Trump to summon the courage to condemn him directly.

I think Tracey’s dissection of Tucker Carlson and others on that point is mostly fair, though he may go too far when he dismisses reporter Whitney Webb, continued investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, and conspiracy theorizing in general. And even if such theorizing could be shown beyond a shadow of a doubt to be psychologically paralyzing or endemic on the fringey right, it might still yield accurate information from time to time.

In any case, it’s wise to assume that political authorities (including politics-entangled business authorities such as Thiel) always hunger for a religious philosophy, if any, that buttresses their existing political goals. If the past few millennia have seen many a king saying God’s on our side in this battle, with anywhere from one to three of the major Abrahamic faiths being at times yoked together in the process to combat one or two of the other ones, or to fight communism (as in Afghanistan in the 1980s), there’s no reason to doubt that with a little more nuanced, 21st-century-style thinking, the authorities can soon enough have the faithful arguing about whether God wants us to sign up for universal digital i.d. or merely wants us to hire surveillance robots as household servants.

Political authority keeps being resurrected to menace us even as we celebrate escaping prior political authorities with older, staler rationales.

—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey.