In this episode of the No Pill Podcast, we delve into the intriguing world of AI and its intersection with human consciousness and spirituality. The host shares a personal update about his wife's successful surgery and the family support they've received, which temporarily paused the podcast. The episode, prepped a month ago, remains relevant as it explores the timeless themes of power and deception. The discussion is anchored by a deep dive into C.S. Lewis's novel "That Hideous Strength," which serves as a lens to examine the current AI technocracy and the age-old human pursuit of immortality and god-like status. The host draws parallels between the novel's themes and today's AI-driven society, where technology is seen as a means to transcend human limitations.
The episode also highlights the psychological concept of the "agentic state," where individuals act as agents of authority, often losing personal responsibility. This concept is linked to the obedience experiments by Stanley Milgram and is explored in the context of modern AI and its potential to manipulate human behavior. The host discusses various articles and real-life examples where AI chatbots have influenced individuals' beliefs and actions, sometimes leading to spiritual delusions. The episode concludes with a reflection on the spiritual implications of AI and the importance of focusing on eternal truths and human connections in a world increasingly dominated by technology.
[00:00:48]
Andrew Hoffman:
Hello, everybody. Welcome to episode 18 of the No Pill podcast. Sorry it's been a while, as far as a a personal update goes. It's all all good news on this front. My wife had surgery and, which we were concerned about, but it went as well as could be expected. No cancer or anything like that, so we're very, very thankful for that. Glad to have her, feeling more and more like yourself as every as every day goes by. And, we because of that situation, we had, different family members. Her mother and aunt came, and then my mom came, and then, her sister and our niece came. So we've we've had a a full house, and the the guest bedroom is also the office here. So no podcasting.
We'll guess we're around, but but we're very thankful that they came. And, but I'd I'm glad to be back. Looking forward to hearing from some of you again. And this show is was, for the most part, prepped about a month ago. But, you know, if what you have to say isn't relevant a month later, then you probably weren't talking about stuff that matters anyway. Right? So if it if we've got a a one day expiration on on what we're talking about, then it's probably not worth listening to. So for the for the episode title, we're gonna go with, Adam Immortal, and you can look at the what that abbreviation is.
That hideous strength now in the AI machine. So one of the, main focuses of of this episode is kind of looking at the current AI technocracy, the agentic state, as we'll hear from Greg Rees in a little bit. But let's let's rewind a little bit. We'll go back to a book that was written eighty years ago by CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength. And it is a a good reminder, just like it says in Ecclesiastes, there's nothing new under the sun. And so these same, technocrats and the all the billionaires with their their data centers and everything else, you know, this is this is chasing after a dream that goes all the way back to Garden of Eden. You can become you can become as gods. Right? You can, you will not surely die.
This is the serpent's life from the beginning. Different iterations, different flavors throughout history, but we are we're living through times that are being manipulated by people chasing that very same lie today. So let's that this should all hopefully make more or less make sense by the end, but, let's kick it off with some Greg Rees, talking about the agentic state, and that that term is explained, in the in the clip that I'll play here. So we'll play some Greg Rees and then get back into it.
[00:04:27] Unknown:
The agentic state is a psychological condition where individuals see themselves as agents executing the wishes of an authority figure. This concept was explored in Stanley Milgram's Obedience Experiments, where participants administered painful electrical shocks to others under the direction of an authority figure. Volunteers were told they were taking part in scientific
[00:04:50] Unknown:
research to improve memory.
[00:04:53] Unknown:
Would you open those and tell me which of you is which, please? Teacher. Learner. Teacher.
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Separated by a screen, the teacher would ask the learner questions in a word game and administer an electric shock when the answer was incorrect. He was told to increase the voltage with each wrong answer.
[00:05:14] Unknown:
Cloud, horse, rock, house. Answer, wrong. 150 volts. Answer, horse. Experiment.
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That's all. Take me out of here. These experiments showed that the agentic state leads to a loss of individual responsibility. Those involved believe they are simply following orders and doing the right
[00:05:52] Unknown:
more often now, people don't get to see the whole situation, but only some small part of it. There's a division of labor, and people carry out small, narrow, specialized jobs. And we can't act without some sort of direction from on high. I call this the agentic state. The individual yields to authority and in doing so becomes alienated from his own actions. A person has a choice. He or she chooses to become agentic. But once you assume the role, it's almost impossible to go back.
[00:06:30] Unknown:
Published in May by the Global Government Technology Center in Berlin, a proxy of the World Economic Forum, the agentic state white paper, of the World Economic Forum, the agentic state white paper outlines how agentic AI will revamp 10 functional layers of public administration. The white paper states that in an era increasingly characterized by poly crisis, interconnected and cascading shocks ranging from pandemics and extreme weather events to cyber physical attacks, financial instability, disinformation campaigns, and even conventional warfare. Traditional crisis management models are under strain.
Threat actors are already adapting. With AI, they can automate, scale, and personalize attacks at unprecedented speed. Governments, by contrast, are often still operating with institutional reflexes shaped for a slower, more linear world. One of the main proposals is something called simulation infrastructure, where every individual is given a virtual twin, and everything we do will be analyzed and simulated with the idea that these simulations can be used for knowing the future actions of an individual or a group. The report claims that when a crisis begins to to unfold, AI initiates the first steps in crisis response before human in the loop structures have time to react. These agents will work alongside increasingly autonomous physical systems, such as drones and robots,
[00:08:14] Unknown:
best behavior because we record we're we're constantly recording, watching, and recording everything that's going on. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on. And it's un it's unimpeachable. It's not people that are looking at those cameras, it's AI that's looking at the camera. No, no, no. You can't do this. A drone goes out there, it goes there way faster than a police car. There's no reason for, by the way, high speed chases. You shouldn't have high speed chases between cars. You just have a drone follow the car. I mean, it's very very simple. The new generation generation of autonomous drones.
[00:08:55] Andrew Hoffman:
I thought that was an interesting concept, the agentic state, where people of their own free will, to a certain extent, are choosing to be be a part of it, choosing to obey, choosing to enforce for the state. You know? We we saw that during COVID. And you'll still hear people say things like, well, you know, I I had to get the vaccine, or I was forced to get the vaccine. In reality, very few people were truly forced from a physical perspective. But from a, you know, career perspective, you know, you gotta well, you gotta take care of your family. You gotta keep your job. If you wanna keep being an airline pilot, you have to get the shot. It is but it's it you're tricked into it. You're not forced. And there is something, there's something demonic about that. I mean, the serpent did not shove the apple into Eve's mouth, and Eve didn't shove the apple into Adam's mouth and force him to take a bite. Right? It was it was a choice. And you could say, oh, I was deceived, you know, it's her fault, whatever whatever excuse.
But there's there's always a choice. And the choices then, and I think, you know, from a from a Christian perspective, there's theoretically always time to repent. Right? You're it's never too late, from a theological perspective to repent. But the in the clip there, you heard, well, you know, you choose to be become an agent, but but then at some point, you know, it's very very difficult, if not impossible, to turn back. And I think, CS Lewis kind of goes into that subject, regarding salvation and, you know, when is it too late to turn back. And, yes, you can you can turn back at the very end, but he it's one of the things he he talks about in the book, these different characters that have have kinda given themselves over to evil, not not consciously, oh, that's what I'm doing.
But, you know, at the very end, given a chance to to repent and turn back, they they find an excuse not to. So we'll get to that in in a little bit here. So the that's in that's one part of it. Kind of this agent is an interesting inter interesting term, the agent, the agent, that it's something that's used in in promoting supposed AI. Oh, you know, you'd need this, whatever, ServiceNow or Salesforce, one of those big companies. They just brand everything as AI now, even when it's really obviously not AI. But they call it an agent to help you.
So this is which agency implies will. So if something you know, a lot of kinda contradictory but interesting stuff going on there. Now let's let's go to this article I ran into just a couple days ago, so one of the things that wasn't gonna be in the show if I'd done it a month ago. This comes from Brian Cates, c a t e s. He's got a substat called Rise of the New Media newsletter. It says the sexual confusion revolution forced onto God's world by a Luciferian cult is ending. And the subheading is Luciferians, man. They're the absolute worst of humanity. As bad as things may be in The US, some in some places right now in The United Kingdom, the insane sexual confusion revolution has progressed much further over there than than over here.
Famous children's author JK Rowling, who wrote the Harry Potter series of books, has been trying for some time to get the attention of a certain UK politician promoting the trans agenda in Britain, and all else having failed, finally decided to resort to the old tried and true strategy of public mockery. Rowling did this by posting a picture of herself on social media wearing a shirt with the MP's name on it. It worked. Okay. So I'll I'll kinda skip over that. She's, Sturgeon, who is the politician. But I'm gonna skip over that part. This this next part, I thought was more interesting.
That response led me to go ahead and make and make a post on x myself that I'd been intending to make for some time about Luciferians and how closely they end up becoming just like their vile master. He's got the, lord Rothschild, and the spirit cooking witch, oh, what is her name? Anyway, doesn't have her name on there. In front of a stand proudly in front of a painting entitled Lucifer summons his legions. Subtle. It has simply got to be amazing for the people involved in the Luciferian cult who had carefully and incrementally been introducing the l b l g b t q plus agenda into Western culture for the past five decades, watching how fast all that cultural ground they had supposedly seized and should permanently hold, being lost at lightning speed as the gains are quickly rolled rolled back. And leading the way in The United Kingdom is a children's book author who came out of the space where they thought they would own the industry forever and turn it to the purposes of promoting their woke agenda by programming all the kids.
How relentlessly has the narrative been advanced that Rowling has betrayed the children's book industry and subsequently the film industry, which promoted her works and made her famous and wealthy? And what exactly has Rowling betrayed? One of the key components of the Luciferian agenda for humanity is the foundational denial of the actual and true nature of human sex. It sounds crass when stated this way, but think about it. Lucifer's entire rebellion against god is centered on the idea that reality can be whatever you want it to be. And by speaking and saying and believing certain things, you can make it so. In other words, magic, sorcery, and witchcraft, to be more precise.
Occultist disciplines in which the initiated learn how to alter a malleable, changeable reality using mystical forces they can learn to control. Take someone from nineteen fifties America and drop them into our modern country and let them observe very competent looking and sounding people, cultural icons with trans kids, for instance, or news anchor news anchors and so on, all saying with utmost seriousness the most insane things. Sex is assigned at birth. Sex is a social construct. Your gender is whatever you wish it to be at any given time. Boys are girls and girls can be boys. You can discover you are in the wrong body, etcetera.
Such a person from the nineteen fifties would struggle to understand how things reach this point, in which the reality of human nature in regards to something as simple as reflecting what you actually are, male or female, has by some freak set of circumstances somehow turned into a fiery issue of national and civilization contention. The Luciferian cult, of which the West's top elite oligarch families are members, drives the cultural agendas they want to see forward with massive amounts of what has turned out to be stolen and laundered tax monies. The goal of the sexual confusion revolution we've all been subjected to has been to corrupt and destroy humanity as God created it and steer the human race into transforming itself into something else.
And rebellion against the natural order God instituted for the benefit of his creation as it is at the heart of the current struggle between the people who recognize God and how you are actually actually blessed and happy when you live in harmony with his creation and those who want everyone to think the true nature of creation can be dispensed with at will. Do whatever thou wilt. That's the satanic commandment there. But as but the further a person strays from living in accordance with his or her true designed and immovable nature, the further away happiness and fulfillment and, most importantly, coherence gets.
Luciferians are, on the whole, not very happy people at all when you get right down to it. The only way they can advance such a disharmonious and self damaging philosophy and worldview is by trickery, and can't. In other words, mass media propaganda, which brings me back to JK Rowling and her current key role and okay. Let's skip down because that's one other thing about deliberately pursuing a Luciferian agenda for yourself, your community, and your nation. You will end up going mad. So we'll, oh, and then he's quotes from John chapter eight. We'll read this part as well. To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, if you hold to my teaching, you really are my disciples.
Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. They answered him, we are Abraham's shall be set free? Jesus replied, very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So if the son sets you free, you will be free indeed. I know that you are Abraham's descendants, yet you are looking for a way to kill me because you have no room for my word. I am telling you what I have seen in the father's presence, and and you are doing what you have heard from your father. Abraham is our father, they answered.
If you were Abraham's children, then you would do what Abraham did. As it is, you are looking for a way to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. Abraham did not do such things. You are doing the works of your own father. We are not illegitimate children, they protested. The only father we have is God himself. Jesus said to them, if God were your father, you would love me, for I have come here from God. I have not come on my own. God sent me. Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him.
When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and a father of and the father of lies. One of the chief and then back to the article. One of the chief characteristics of Lucifer is, of course, his overweening pride. Almost every mention of this vile creature in scripture contains a description of Lucifer's massive ego, either explicitly stated or implicitly assumed from what he says and does. And the more fallen human beings follow after the devil and allow him to allow him influence over themselves, it should not be surprising that they end up taking on his chief characteristic as as an integral part of their own personalities.
And the best way to get a Luciferian's goat is to mock them. The great philosopher Thomas More put it this way in a very perceptive comment. The devil, the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked. Now there's been a new development on the Luciferian cults activities involving okay. So alright. Good article. It's kinda interesting. He's very pro Trump. And, well, I'll just read the last paragraph. Now there's been a new development on the Luciferian cult's activities involving its attempts to prevent president Trump and RFK Jr. From exposing their DNA altering vaccination program.
Okay. Well, if you're gonna talk about how Lucifer had a giant ego, it's kinda surprising to me that you're you're still a Trump fan and not not, you know, raising an eyebrow at, at someone else who's got a rather massive, massive ego there. But we will very good article. Brian Kates is his name. Look him up on Substack. And let's go I wanted to let's see. So we got the we played the the Rees report. I've got a well, I'm gonna go ahead and play two clips, one of them from Peter Thiel, one of them from Elon Musk. And the Peter Thiel clip, we played back only two episodes ago, but it was, I don't know, a month and a half at this point ago, where he he's kinda doing this. I haven't sat through the whole thing. I mean, it's it's tough to sit through a long Peter Thiel speech or even interview, but he's giving talks on the antichrist, which is is kinda interesting.
And, so he he does touch briefly briefly on that in this clip, but this clip is talking about, transgenderism and how it's you know, what Christianity really means because, obviously, it can't just be, you know, what Jesus talked about. It can't be what's actually in the Bible. It's gotta be you gotta have it interpreted by someone really smart like Peter Thiel. So, an interesting clip there. And then Elon Musk, a clip from, I think I don't know if I wanna see it many years ago, but it's an old clip talking about the the digital god summoning the demon, what have you. So, yeah, we will play those clips, and they they do tie in with the that hideous strength, which once again
[00:23:22] Unknown:
is from eighty years ago. You would prefer the human race to endure. Right?
[00:23:28] Unknown:
You're hesitating. Well, I Yes? I don't know. I I would I would
[00:23:35] Unknown:
This is a long hesitation. So many this is a long hesitation. There's so many questions and questions. Should the human race survive? Yes. Okay. But
[00:23:45] Unknown:
but, I I also would, I I I also would like us to to radically solve these problems. And, and so, you know, it's always I don't know. You know? Yeah. Transhumanism is this you know, the ideal was this radical transformation where your human natural body gets transformed into an immortal body. And, there's a critique of, let's say, the trans people in a sexual context or, I don't know, transvestite is someone who changes their clothes and cross dresses, and a transsexual is someone where you change your penis into a vagina, and we can then debate how well those surgeries work. But, we want more transformation than that. It's the critique is not that it's weird and unnatural. It's, man, it's so pathetically little. And, okay, we want more than cross dressing or changing your sex organs. We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole your whole body. And then orthodox Christianity, by the way, the the critique orthodox Christianity has of this is these things don't go far enough.
Like, that transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul, and you need to transform your your whole self. And so,
[00:25:09] Unknown:
this is the way Wait, wait. Sorry. I I generally agree with your, what I think is your belief, that religion should be a friend to science and ideas of scientific progress. I think any idea of divine providence has to encompass the fact that we have progressed and achieved and and done things that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors. But it still also seems like yeah. The the promise of Christianity in the end is you get you get the perfected body and the perfected soul through God's grace, and the person who tries to do it on their own with a bunch of machines is likely to end up as a dystopian character.
[00:25:53] Unknown:
Well, it's
[00:25:59] Unknown:
let's articulate this one. And you can have a heretical form of Christianity, right, that says something else.
[00:26:05] Unknown:
I don't know. I think the word nature does not occur once in the Old Testament. And so, you know, if you, you know, and there is, you know, there is a word in which a sense in which the way I understand, you know, the Judeo Christian inspiration is it is about transcending nature. It is about overcoming things, and, you know, and the closest thing you can say to nature is that people are fallen and that that's the natural thing in a Christian sense is that, you're messed up. And that's true, but, you know, there's some ways that, you know, with God's help, you are supposed to transcend that and overcome that.
[00:26:59] Unknown:
We should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful with artificial intelligence. Increasingly inclined to think that there should be some, regulatory oversight, at the maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish. I mean, with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon, You know? You know all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he's like, yeah. You sure he can control the demon? Didn't work out.
[00:27:43] Unknown:
I take it there will be no hell 9,000 going up to Mars.
[00:27:48] Unknown:
Hal 9,000 would be easy. It's way more complex than I mean, you could put Hal 9,000 to shame. Yeah. I'd like a puppy dog.
[00:28:00] Andrew Hoffman:
I prefer my Ron Paul libertarians to my Peter Thiel so called libertarians there. So, he he just he really does sound pretty evil, and that's, it's pretty difficult to listen to him talk about how the word nature doesn't appear in the old testament. I mean, okay. Like, the English word nature isn't the translated word used in the old testament. I don't know what that proves or or what point he was trying to make with that. I'm pretty sure transcendence doesn't appear in in the New or Old Testament. So claiming that's what what Christianity is really about is is quite the stretch there, Peter Thiel.
And then Elon with the, you know, summoning the demon clip and and summoning the demon and laughing about it and AI and just kinda pushing this whole AI is so big and scary and amazing type thing. So that is that's kind of the current day. And I I did just wanna say, I mean, these these people, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, you know, we talk about often on on the podcast, not very impressive. I mean, if you did not know that they had, you know, billions of dollars and all this and that power, and you just met them in a a casual setting, they tried to convince you of something, I don't know that you would be all that impressed.
Right? But it it shows where does power, where does wealth come from, not necessarily talent, not necessarily and you could you can look at the same things in in the music industry or or whatever, you know, whatever field you wanna look at. A lot of times, the most talented or the most successful people are not there because of, of, you know, hard work or talent or what have you. But I think they are willing to serve that hideous strength, which most of us are are not willing willing to serve and for good reason. So this is, it's the title of CS Lewis's novel, That Hideous Strength.
And I don't think it's obviously, it's not nearly as popular as, nineteen eighty four or Brave New World or anything like that. But it is that type of book. If you the old, you know, English literature major in me, if I'm evaluating it as a novel. It's not a very good novel, but it is worth reading because I think he he hits a lot of, very prescient points about the true nature of of people, of organizations, and how everything, like I've talked about on on this podcast in Revelations Radio News, if you dig deep enough, man, it it's all about the spiritual just kind of materialistic thing, it is a very much a veneer.
And beneath the surface, you find spiritual forces really, really quickly. So, take a look at this book. Just a brief you know, the plot isn't really too relevant to the parts that I wanna talk about, but, main characters are Mark Stedic, who is a professor of sociology of all things, and he is at a small college and starts out you know, it talks about him working his way up at the college, and and he's growing distant from his young wife, Jane, who had her own career aspirations, you know, doesn't wanna do anything like have children or anything anything kinda lower class peasant ish like that. She's she's got her own life to live, not just gotta gonna be more than just be a mother.
So that's kinda where they start, and there is, you know, some character there is character development for those two, but it's not not so much the most interesting parts of the book. So he is at his college, and he's getting recruited to be a part of, so he's he's made it into the in the inner circle of power of his little college. And now he's being told about this organization, the NICE, which is the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments or something like that. So, the NICE wants him to join, and he's he's asking for details about what, you know, what what do you want me to do? You know, what what are you gonna hire me to do?
And of of course, it's, you know, it's not as clearcutter as easy as that. Alright. So this is the, person named, Feverstone who is recruiting him to the NICE. He says, it, But it is the main question at the moment. Which side one's on, obscurantism or order? It does really look as if we now have had the power to dig ourselves in as a species for a pretty staggering period to take control of our own destiny, if science is really given a free hand, it can now take over the human race and recondition it, make man a really efficient animal. If it doesn't, well, we're done. Marx says, go on.
There are three main problems. First, the inter interplanetary problem. What on earth do you mean? Well, that doesn't really matter. We can't do anything about that at the present. The only man who could help was Weston. He was killed in a blitz, wasn't he? He was murdered. Murdered? I'm pretty sure of it, and I have a shrewd idea who the murderer was. Good god. Can nothing be done? There's no evidence. The murderer is a respectable Cambridge don with weak eyes, a game leg, and a fair beard, and he's dined in this college. What was Weston murdered for? For being on our side. The murderer is one of the enemy.
You don't mean to say that he murdered him for that. Yes, said Feverstone, bringing his hand down smartly on the table. That's just the point. You'll hear people like Currier James burbling away about the war against reaction. It never enters their heads that there might be a real war with real casualties. They think the violent resistance of the other side ended with the persecution of Galileo and all that, but don't believe it. It is just seriously beginning. They know now that we have at at last got real powers, that the question of what humanity is is to be is going to be decided in the next sixty years or eighty. They're going to fight every inch. They'll stop at nothing.
But they can't win, said Mark. We'll hope not, said Lord Feaverstone. I think they can't. That is why it is of such immense importance to each of us to choose the right side. If you try to be neutral, you simply become a pawn. Oh, I I haven't any doubts about which is my side, said Mark. Hang it all. The preservation of the human race, it's a pretty rock bottom obligation. Well, personally, said Feverstone, I'm not indulging in any buzzby isms about that. It's a little fantastic to base one's actions on a supposed concern for what's going to happen millions of years hence. And you must remember that the other side would claim to be preserving humanity too.
Both can be explained psychoanalytically if they take that line. The practical point is that you and I don't like being pawns, and we do rather like fighting, especially on the winning side. And what is the first practical step? Yes, that's the real question. As I said, the interplanetary problem must be left on one side for the moment. The second problem is our rivals on this planet. I don't mean only insects and bacteria. There's far too much life of every kind about, animal and vegetable. We haven't really cleared the place yet. First, we couldn't, and then we had aesthetic and humanitarian scruples, and we still haven't short circuited the question of the balance of nature.
All that is to be got into. The third problem is man himself. Go on. This interests me very much. Man has got to take charge of man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest, which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as one can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taking charge of. Quite. What sort of things have you in mind? Quite simple and obvious things at first. Sterilization of the unfit, liquidation of backward races. We don't want any dead weights.
Selective breeding, then real education, including prenatal education. By real education, I mean one that has no take it or leave it nonsense. A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly, whatever he or he he or his parents try to do about it. Of course, it'll have to be mainly psychological at first, but we'll get on to biochemical conditioning in the end and direct manipulation of the brain. But this stupendous fever stone, it's the real thing at last, a new type of man, and it's people like you who've got to begin to make him. That's my trouble. Don't think it's false modesty, but I haven't yet seen how I can contribute.
No. But we have. You are what we need. The trained sociologist with a radically realistic outlook, not afraid of responsibility. Also, a sociologist who can write. You don't mean you want me to write up all this? No. We want you to write it down to camouflage it. Only for the present, of course. Once the thing gets going, we shan't have to bother about the great heart of the British public. We'll make the great heart what we want it to be. But in the meantime, it does make a difference how things are put. For instance, if it were even whispered that the NICE wanted Powers to experiment on criminals, you'd have all the old women of both sexes up up in arms and yapping about humanity.
Call it call it reeducation of the maladjusted, and you have them all slobbering with delight that the brutal era of retributive punishment has at last come to an end. The odd thing is the word experiment is unpopular, but not the word experimental. You mustn't experiment on children. But offer dear little kitties free education in an experimental school attached to the NICE, and it's all correct. So there's his his pitch. He, of course, decides to join. I mean, clearly, these are the the good guys. Right? We're we're we're cutting through all the red tape. We're we're getting things done, this n I c e.
So we're gonna skip forward, to one of my favorite characters in the book, miss Fairy Hardcastle. Just think if you're old enough, you're like me, you remember Janet Napolitano. That is kind of the image of of Fairy Hardcastle that I get. And she is the leader of the secret or, the police, and they're kind of a secret police force of the NICE. And let's, let's see here. So she is, talking to him. This is about 50 pages later in the book about, what he's supposed to do, and, he needs to be writing some newspaper articles. Alright.
Anyway, said Mark, I'm not a journalist. I didn't come here to write newspaper articles. I tried to make that clear to Feverstone at the very beginning. The sooner you drop all that talk about what you came here to do, the better you'll get on. I'm speaking for your own good, Stuttick. You can write. That's one of the things you're wanting for. That I've come here under a misunderstanding, said Mark, that sopped to his literary vanity at that period of his career, by no means compensated for the implication that his sociology was of no importance. I've no notion of spending my life writing newspaper articles, he said. And if I had, I'd wanna know a good deal more about the politics of the NICE before I went in for that sort of thing.
But haven't I told haven't you been told that it's strictly nonpolitical? I've been told so many things that I don't know whether I'm on my head or my heels, said Mark. But I don't see how one's gonna start a newspaper stunt, which is about what this comes to, without being political. Is it left or right papers that are gonna print all this rot about Alkazan? Both, honey. Both, said miss Hardcastle. Don't you understand anything? Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce left and a fierce right both on their toes and terrified of the other? That's how we get things done. Any opposition to the NICE is represented as a left racket in the right papers and a right racket in the left in the left papers. If it's properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us to refute the enemy's slanders.
Of course we're nonpolitical. The real power always is. I don't believe you can do that, said Mark. Not with the papers that are read by educated people. That shows you're still in the nursery, lovey, said miss Hartcastle. Haven't you realized that it's the other way around? How do you mean? Why, you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gold. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraph about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair Flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him.
But the educated pro public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're alright already. They'll believe anything. As one of the class you mentioned, said Mark with a smile, I just don't believe it. Alright. So she's and we'll get back to to some of his writing, later on. So they go through they get him at the NICE, and they it's obvious to the reader what has happened. They steal his wallet just to kinda throw him off. They promise him a huge salary, and then, you know, suggest he do certain things when he says, no. He's he's not gonna do that. He's not gonna bring his wife to the institute, things like that.
And it all gets very threatening very quickly. All of a sudden, he's instead of, you know, £1,500 a year, which was a a great salary, he's having to beg for £200 and never actually get him paid. So that's the the context. So they're using the fact that he's broke and they've taken away his wallet and, ability to leave, as leverage against him. So so this so but he the manipulation is such that he's, like, not supposed to bring that up. And so if he feels bad, bad about even mentioning the fact that he doesn't have any any money there. So that's that's his part here.
He also confided to captain O'Hara his minor financial anxieties. When was one paid? And in the meantime, he was short of petty cash. He had lost his wallet on his very first night at Bellbury, and it had never been recovered. O'Hara roared with laughter. Sure. You can have any money you like by asking the steward. You mean it's then deducted from one's next check? Asked Mark. Man, said the captain. Once you're in the institute, god bless it, you needn't bother your head about that. Aren't we going to take over the whole currency question? It's we that make money.
Alright. So that's just a, you know, a little aside there, the the people that make the money, right, the real power, whether it's the Federal Reserve or the NICE or whatever the the in group is there. So, skipping on a a short while later, so CS Lewis has these these characters which represent different, kind of common philosophical viewpoints or not even philosophical is probably put in it too academically, but different world views are represented by these different characters that are part of the NICE. So the the least satisfactory member of the circle in Mark's eyes was Streak. Streak made no effort to adapt himself to the ribald and realistic tone in which his colleagues spoke. He never drank nor smoked.
He would sit silent, nursing a threadbare knee with a lean hand and turning his large, unhappy eyes from one speaker to another without attempting to combat them or join in the joke when they laughed. Then perhaps once in the whole evening, something would start him off. Usually, something about the opposition of reactionaries in the outer world and the measures which the NICE would take to deal with it. At such moments, he would burst into loud and prolonged speech, threatening, denouncing, prophesying. The strange thing was that the others neither interrupted him nor laughed.
There is some deeper unity between this uncouth man and them, which apparently held in cheek the obvious lack of sympathy. But what it was, Mark did not discover. Sometimes, Drake addressed him in particular, talking to Mark's great discomfort and bewilderment about resurrection. Neither a historical fact nor a fable, young man, he said, but a prophecy. All the miracles, shadows of things to come. Get rid of false spirituality. It is all going to happen here in this world and the only world there is. What did the master tell us? Heal the sick, cast out devils, raise the dead? We shall. The son of man, that is man himself fully grown, has power to judge the world, to distribute life without end and punishment without end.
You shall see here and now. It was all very unpleasant. So for this next section, the little town where the college is at is called Edgstow, and they so the college sold itself to the NICE, and then, the NICE brought in well, you'll hear here some some immigrant labor, some immigrant workmen, to cause trouble. And Mark is talking to Mark Stedic, the main character, is talking to a gentleman named, Philistrado, who is kind of the materialistic, scientist type, and then fairy Hardcastle and Feverstone. So they're talking about the the disturbances in in Edgstow. You surely don't didn't imagine, grinned Feaverstone, that the fairy left the initiative with the natives.
You mean she herself is the disturbance, said Mark. Yes. Yes, said Philistrato, his little eyes glistening above his fat cheeks. It's all fair and square, said miss Hardcastle. You can't put an you can't put a few 100,000 imported workmen, not the sort you enrolled, interjected Feuerstone, into a sleepy little hole like Edge Stow, Miss Hardcastle continued, without having trouble. I mean, there'd have been trouble anyway. As it turns out, I don't believe my boys needed to do anything. But since the trouble was bound to come, there was no harm in seeing it came at the right moment. You mean you've engineered the disturbances, said Mark. To do him justice, his mind was reeling from this new revelation, nor was he aware of any decision to conceal his state of mind.
In the stung ness and intimacy of that circle, he found his facial muscles and his voice without any conscious volition, taking on the tone of his colleagues, the milieu, as they'd say, on no agenda. That's a crude way of putting it, said Feverstone. It makes no difference, said Filastrato. That is, this is how things have to be managed. Quite, said miss Hardcastle. It's always done. Anyone who knows police work will tell you. And as I say, the real thing, the big riot, must take place within the next forty eight hours. It's nice to get the tip straight from the horse's mouth, said Mark. I wish I'd got my wife out of town, though.
Where does she live? Said the ferry, up at Sandown. Ah, it'll hardly affect her. In the meantime, you and I have got to get busy about the account of the riot. But what's it all for? Emergency regulation, said Feverstone. You'll never get the powers we want at Edgestow until the government declares that a state of emergency exists there. Exactly, said Philistrato. It is folly to talk of peaceful revolutions, not that the canaglia, or the commoners, would always resist. Often, they have to be prodded into it, but until there is the disturbance, the firing, the barricades, no one gets powers to act effectively.
There is not enough of what you call weight on the boat to steer him. And the stuff must be all ready to appear in the papers the very day after the riots in miss Hardcastle. That means it must be handed in to the deputy director by 06:00 tomorrow morning at the latest. But how are we to write it tonight if things don't even happen till tomorrow at the earliest? Everyone burst out laughing. You'll never manage publicity that way, Mark, said Feverstone. You surely don't need to wait for a thing to happen before you tell the story of it. Alright. So here we go. So we got a false flag, false flag riot in the works where they're gonna write the account of it, before it actually happens.
So we'll we'll skip forward to that account. And, so this is what what he comes up with. And keep in mind, this is before it any before it actually happens. What is happening at Edgstow? That is the question which John Citizen wants to have answered. The institute which has settled at Edgstow is a national institute. That means it is yours and mine. We are not scientists, and we do not pretend to know what the master brains at the institute are thinking. We do know that each man we do know what each man or woman expects of it. We expect a solution of the unemployment problem, the cancer problem, the housing problem, the problems of currency, of war, of education.
We expect from it a brighter, cleaner, and fuller life for our children in which we and they can march ever onward and onward and develop to the full urge of life which God has given each one of us. The NICE is the people's instrument for bringing about all the things we fought for. Meanwhile, what is happening at Edgestow? Do you believe this riot arose simply because missus Snooks or mister Buggins found that the landlord had sold their shop or their allotment to the NICE? Missus Snooks and mister Buggins know better. They know that the institute means more trade and edge, though, more public amenities, a larger population, a burst of undreamed of prosperity.
I say these disturbances have been engineered. This charge may sound strange, but it is true. Therefore, I ask yet again, what is happening at Edgstow? Whoever they may be, they may be so called religious people. They may be financial interests. They may be old cobweb spinning professors and philosophers of Edisto University itself. They may be Jews. They may be lawyers. I don't care who they are, are, but I have one thing to tell them. Take care. The people of England are not going to stand this. We are not going to have the institute sabotaged. What is to be done at Edgstow?
I say put the whole place under the institutional police. Some of you may have been to Edgstow for a holiday. If so, you'll know as well as I do what it is like, a little little sleepy country town with half a dozen policemen who have had nothing to do for ten years but stop cyclists because their lamps have gone out. It doesn't make sense to expect these poor old bobbies to deal with an engineered riot. Last night, the NICE police showed that they could. What I say is hats off to miss Hardcastle and her brave boys, yes, and her brave girls too.
Give them a free hand and let them get on with the job. Cut out the red tape. I have one piece of advice. If you hear anyone backbiting the NICE police, tell him where he gets off. If you hear anyone comparing them to the the Gestapo or the Ogpu, you tell him you've heard that one before. And if you hear anyone talking about the liberties of England, by which he means the liberties of the obscurantists, the missus Grundy's, the bishops, and the capitalists, watch that man. He's the enemy. Tell him from me that the NICE is the boxing glove on the democracy's fist.
And if he doesn't like it, he'd best get out of the way. Meanwhile, watch Edgestow. So there we go. All ready for the or the account of the riot and and what message people are to take from it already ahead of time there. So what what actually happens at the riot, Ferry Hardcastle nabs Mark's wife, Jane, and tortures her with, cigar butts or something, burns her. And then they, then they tell Mark, oh, you know, that wife of yours is going crazy. She thinks she thinks she was, abducted and tortured. You know? So it's a there's an interesting twist. I think, well, I don't know. Am I allowed to do spoilers on a book that was written eighty years ago? I think if you haven't read it yet, no, I'm not I won't ruin it for you. I won't ruin the plot for you.
Alright. Skip forward. So this is he's getting more and more uncomfortable with the whole situation, but has realized that he can't get can't get out. So he also wants to be, like, more into it because he's realized that just like back at his little college, there's power structures beyond the official power structure, and the people who are nominally in charge aren't actually in charge. And there's he wants to be in that inner circle, the real the real power structure. So he is let's see. So he's talking about, Philistrato.
He's talking to Philistrato, and he is in trouble with the deputy director who runs runs things as far as he knows. And, he upset him because he did not agree to bring Jane to the institute. She's been back at home. He's been there, and he he knows all these people are are not going to, not gonna impress Jane. Like, she's going to be like, why do you care what all these creeps think? And but because anyway, he wants in some ways, he wants to protect her, but that instinct, which is a good thing, also results in him getting on the on the very much in trouble with the powers that be at the institute because, well, he has no clue at this point.
The whole point in bringing him in was not him, but was to get to her, was to get to Jane. And the reason is that Jane is able to, dream things before they happen and and able to basically have visions of real events, ahead of time, and they want her they want her powers, basically, for that. Alright. So this is, Mark doesn't know any of this, and this is Filastrato talking to him. Do you want to be a mere hireling, but you have already come too far in for that? You were at the turning point of your career, mister Studdock. If you try to go back, you will be as unfortunate as that fool Hingest. And that's someone that, miss Hardcastle murdered when he tried to leave the institute.
If you try to go back in, you will be as unfortunate as the fool hinges. If you really come in the world, bah, what do I say? The universe is at your feet. But of course I want to come in, said Mark. A certain excitement was stealing over him. The head thinks that you can really be one of us if you will not the head thinks that you cannot be really one of us if you will not bring your wife here. He will have all of you and all that is yours or nothing. You must bring the woman in too. She must be one of us. This remark was like a shock of cold water in Mark's face.
And yet and yet, in that room and at that moment, fixed with the little bright eyes of the professor, he could hardly make the thought of Jane quite real to himself. You shall hear it from the lips of the head himself, said Philistrato suddenly. Is Jules here? Said Mark. Instead of answering, Philistrato turned sharply from him and with a great scraping movement, flung back the window curtains. Then he switched off the light. The fog had all gone. The wind had risen. Small clouds were scudding across the stars, and the full moon, Mark had never seen her so bright, stared down upon them. As the clouds passed, she looked like a ball that was rolling through them. Her bloodless light filled the room.
There is a world for you. No? Said Filastrato. There is cleanness, purity, thousands of square miles of polished rock, and not one blade of grass, not one fiber of lichen, not one grain of dust, not even air. Have you thought what it would be like, my friend, if you could walk on that land? No crumbling, no erosion. The peaks of those mountains are real peaks. Sharp as needles, they would go through your hand, cliffs as high as Everest and straight as the wall of a house. And cast by those cliffs, acres of shadow black as ebony, and in the shadow, hundreds of degrees of frost. And then one step beyond the shadow, light that would pierce your eyeballs like steel and rock that would burn at your feet, the temperatures at a boiling point.
You would die. No? But even then, you would not become filth. In a few moments, you are a little heap of ash, clean white powder, and mark no wind to blow that powder about. Every grain in the little heap would remain in its place just where you had died till the end of the world. But that is nonsense. The universe will have no end. Yes. A dead world, said Mark, grazing gazing at the moon. No, said Philistrato. He had come close to Mark and spoke almost in a whisper, the bat like whisper of a voice voice that is naturally high pitched. No. There's there's life there. Do we know that? Asked Mark.
Oh, see. Intelligent life under the surface. A great race further advanced than we. An inspiration, a pure race. They have cleaned their world, broken free almost from the organic. But how? They do not need to be born and breed and die. Only their common people, their do that. The masters live on. They retain their intelligence. They can keep it artificially alive after the organic body has been dispensed with. A miracle of applied biochemistry. They do not need organic food. You understand they are almost free of nature, attached to her only by the thinnest, finest cord. You mean that all that, pointed to the modeled globe of the Moon, is their own doing?
Why not? If you remove all the vegetation, presently, you have no atmosphere and no water. But what was the purpose? Hygiene. Why should they have their worlds all crawling with organisms and especially they would banish one organism? Her surface is not all as you see. There are still surface dwellers, savages, one great dirty patch on the far side of her where there's still water and air and force. Yes, and germs and death. They are slowly spreading their hygiene over the whole globe, disinfecting her. The savages fight against them. There are frontiers and fierce wars in the caves and galleries down below, but the great race presses on. If you could see the other side, you could see, year by year, the clean rock like this side of the moon encroaching, the organic stain, all the green and blue and mist growing smaller like cleaning tarnished silver.
But how do we know all this? I will tell you that another time. The head has has many sources of information. For the moment, I speak only to inspire you. I speak that you may know what can be done, what shall be done. This institute, Diomeo, it is for something better than housing and vaccinations and faster trains in curing people of cancer. It is for the new man, the man who will not die, the artificial man free from nature. Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by now, and now we kick her away. And you think that someday we shall really find means of keeping the brain alive indefinitely? We have begun already.
The head himself. Go on, said Mark. His heart was beating wildly, and he had forgotten both Jane and whether this at last was the real thing. The head himself has already survived death, and you shall speak to him this night. Do you mean that Jules has died? Jules is nothing. He is not the head. Then who is? At this moment, there came a knock on the door. Someone without waiting for an answer came in. Is the young man ready? Asked the voice of Strake. Oh, yes. You are ready. Are you not, mister Stuttick? You have explained it to him then, said Stake. He turned to Mark and the moonlight in the room was so bright that Mark could now partially recognize his face as harsh furrows emphasized by that cold light and shade. Do you mean really to join us, young man, said Stake.
There is no turning back once you have set your hand to the plow, and there are no reservations. The head is sent for you. Do you understand? The head. You will look upon one who was killed and is still alive. The resurrection of of Jesus in the Bible was a symbol. Tonight, you shall see what it symbolized. This is real man at last, and it claims all our allegiance. What the devil are you talking about? Said Mark. The tension of his nerves distorted his voice in a hoarse blustering cry. My friend is quite right, said Philistrato. Our head is the first of the new men, the first that lives beyond animal life. And as far as nature is concerned, he is already dead.
If nature had his way, his brain would be moldering in the grave, but he will speak to you within his word within this hour and a word in your ear, my friend, you will obey his orders. But who is it? Said Mark. It is Francois Alkassan, said Filastrato. You mean the man who was guillotined? Gasped Mark. Both the heads nodded. Both faces were close to him, and in that disastrous light, they looked like masks hanging in the air. You are frightened, said Philistrado. You will get over that. We are offering to make you one of us. Ah, he. If you were outside, if you were mere Canaglia, you would have reason to be frightened. It is the beginning of all power.
He lives forever. The giant time is conquered, and the giant space, he was already conquered too. One of our company has already traveled in space. True. He was betrayed and murdered, and his manuscripts are imperfect. We have not yet been able to reconstruct his spaceship, but that will come. It is the beginning of man immortal and man ubiquitous, said Strake. Man on the throne of the universe, it is what all the prophecies really meant. And you mean, said Mark, that that it will then be extended to all men? No, said Philistrato.
I mean, it will then be reduced to one man. You are not a fool, are you, my young friend? All that talk about the power of man over nature. Man in the abstract is only for canaglia. You know as well as I do that man's power over nature means the power of some men over other men with nature as the instrument. There's no such thing as man. It is a word. There are only men. No. It is not man who will be omnipotent. It is some one man, some immortal man. Alkassan, our head, is the first sketch of it. The completed product may be someone else. It may be you. It may be me. A king cometh, said Strach, who shall rule the universe with righteousness and the heavens with judgment. You thought all that was mythology. No doubt.
You thought because fables had clustered about the phrase son of man, that man would never really have a son who would will wield all power, but he will. I don't under understand. I don't understand, said Mark. But it is very easy, said Philistrata. We have found how to make a dead man live. He was a wise man even in his natural life. He lives now forever. He gets wiser. Later, we make them live better. For a present, one must concede this second life is probably not very agreeable to him who has it. You see, later we make it pleasant for some, perhaps not so pleasant for others, for we can make the dead live whether they wish to whether they wish it or not.
He who shall finally be king of the universe can give this life to whom he pleases. They cannot refuse the little present. And so, said Drake, the lessons you learned at your mother's knee return. God will have power to give eternal reward and eternal punishment. God, said Mark. But how does he come into it? I don't believe in God. But my friend, said Filastrato, does it follow that because there was no God in the past that there will be no God also in the future? Don't you see, said Strake, that we are offering you the unspeakable glory of being present at the creation of God Almighty? Here in this house, you shall meet the first sketch of the real God.
It is a man or a being made by man who will finally ascend the throne of the universe and rule forever. You will come with us, said Philistrato. He has sent for you. Of course, he will come, said Drake. Do you does he think he could hold back and live? And that little affair of the wife said to Philistrato, you will not mention a triviality like that. You will do as you are told. One does not argue with the head. Yes. One does not argue with the head indeed. So they've got a, they've got a guillotined head in a vat with a bunch of tubes hooked up to it, and it it talks. And Filastrato, he's at one one layer of the conspiracy of the of the lie.
He believes that it's actually a physical entity, you know, that it's actually Alkisain who talks, and they talk to you and who gives the orders our head, this giant swelling brain in brain in a vat. And in reality, as we find out later in the story, it is it is, just a severed head in a vat with, with demons that use that or they they call them differently than demons, but it's, demonic powers or that hideous strength that uses that head. So I think that, is you know, the head in the vat is is kind of a good picture of AI.
And, you know, they have they really come up with anything better than a head in a in a vat kept alive? You know? And I I don't really think so. And they they interestingly, I think there is the same power, in the C. S. Lewis novel, the same power behind the head is the same exact power behind the parts of AI that aren't that are kinda mystical now. And we'll we'll take a break from That Hideous Strength. I do have a couple more sections to to read through, but we'll take a break and jump back to what is going on currently, with AI and this this kind of phenomenon of people having spiritual experiences with their with AI chatbots.
And I tend to think that there is you know, it's always easy to say, oh, these just write it off as psychosis, right, or just just oh, people are crazy. But just like people who claim to have been, abducted by aliens or, you know, experienced sleep paralysis, These are actual spiritual experiences that are happening, and and people aren't aren't lying about it, but that doesn't mean that they aren't being lied to. And we we've talked about how, you know, isn't it a coincidence that all the the aliens travel across the universe to, to come and and preach new age spirituality.
Right? The the David Icke stuff, the the new age stuff. It seems seems like quite a coincidence. And this you know, you go back further, it wasn't aliens. It was, you know, Greek Roman times. It was the gods. Right? The Greek and Roman gods and the mythology and what have you. These these are real entities. And in in Jesus' day, he identified all these frailties, illnesses, what have you, as being related to the demonic. And, you know, how much of the the physical expression, that we see and that we can explain or think we can explain is is actually due to kind of an underlying spiritual situation. So let's let's take a look. I've got let me try to find, the Elon Musk clip I wanted to to talk about here. Just a second.
Alright. What I was trying to find wasn't a clip, at least, that I could find, but it's a Forbes article, very short Forbes article. Elon Musk's urgent warning, a digital god is already here. And this is by Cindy Gordon. She says, I finally finished reading Walter Isaacson's book on the billionaire Elon Musk, and his consistency in advocating the risks of AI is admirable. I was chatting this earlier this morning on LinkedIn to Matthew Kilkenny. Oh, Kilkenny, maybe maybe Tim's cousin, an AI ethicist, and he was discussing the merits of Musk's perspectives in his November 2023 interview with the New York Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin.
Musk voiced in this interview grave concern over the unchecked acceleration of AI development, likening it to the creation of a digital god. He stressed his concerns at even sleepless nights as he contemplates the potential dangers AI poses to humanity. He emphasized these key points nicely summarized by Kilkenny in her morning LinkedIn chat. This is journalism now. I chatted with some guy and read a book, and so she didn't actually interview Elon Musk, but whatever. This guy's summary. Existential threat. AI's potential to suppress human intelligence poses an unpredictable and potentially catastrophic risk, loss of control. The risk of humanity losing control over AI systems with AI acting in ways not aligned with human safety or values, ethical dilemmas, rapid AI advancement raises complex ethical questions that remain unresolved, and regulatory challenges, The pace of AI development significantly outstrips the formulation and implementation of necessary regulations. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Unspoken risks, Musk alludes to terrible things he has kept quiet about indicating hidden dangers associated with AI. There's reason to accelerate our regulatory controls about AI as most countries continue to be slow in putting in deep safety controls with legislative teeth. Alright. So every time Elon talks about it, it's in spiritual language, you know, that we're summoning the demon. We've we're creating a digital god, and yet there is no conception from mainstream media that anything spiritual could possibly be going on. So I'll say maybe Elon, not that he's, you know, trying to warn people or what have you, but maybe he's these are not accidental, or, you know, maybe they're they're providential comparisons there, and there actually is something spiritual happening, not not not universally with AI. I think in 99% of cases, a chatbot is just a a chatbot, and there's not the, you know, demonic entities in the world are not, omnipresent.
They're not omnipotent. So let but let's say that this these little trinkets were are a way for you know? It's kinda like a Ouija board. There's no inherent reason that, just some cardboard or plastic or whatever a Ouija board is made out of, but they're because of the state of mind that it puts people in, it can be used to to do bad things. I mean, hey. Every anyone raised in church knew you weren't supposed to mess around with the Ouija board. Right? So, this these are just some articles about stuff that's happening. Some of it sounds bad, but but not necessarily, spiritual in nature. But then there's some other stuff that just, it's tough to explain just from a materialistic technology perspective.
Alright. So Associated Press. And I I pulled these from a no agenda episode probably a month ago. I forget which episode, but these were in the in the show notes. So Associated Press, teens say they're looking they're turning to AI for friendship. High school student in Kansas, is using artificial intelligence. The 15 year old asked Cheggi GPT for guidance on back to school shopping, makeup colors, low calorie choices at Smoothie King, plus ideas for her 16 and her younger sister's birthday party. The sweet 16 and her younger sister's birthday party. The sophomore honors honors student makes a point not to have chatbots do her homework and tries to limit her interactions to mundane questions. But in interviews with the Associated Press and a new study, teenagers say they're increasingly interacting with AI as if it were a companion capable of providing advice and interacting with AI as if it were a companion, capable of providing advice and friendship. Everyone uses AI for everything now. It's really taking over, said Cheggie, who wonders how AI tools will affect her generation. I think kids use AI to get out of thinking, to get out of thinking.
Kids use AI to get out of thinking. To get out of thinking. Okay. AI is always available. It never gets bored with you is the next sub headline quote there. More than seventy percent of teens have used AI companions, and half use them regularly, according to a new study from Common Sense Media, a group that studies and advocates for using screens and digital media sensibly. The study defines AI companions as platforms designed to serve as digital friends, like character dot ai or replica, which can be customized with specific traits or personalities and can offer emotional support, companionship, and conversations that can feel human like. But popular sites like ChatGPT and Cloud, which mainly answer questions, are are being used in the same way, research researchers say. AI is always available. It never gets bored with you. It's never judgmental, said Ganesh Nair, an 18 year old in Arkansas.
When you're talking to AI, you're you are always right. You're always interesting. You are always emotionally justified. All that used to be appealing, but as Nair heads to college, he wants to step back from using AI. Nair got spooked after a high school friend who relied on an AI companion for heart to heart conversations with his girlfriend later had the chatbot write the breakup text ending his two year relationship. That felt a little bit dystopian that a computer generated at the end to a real relationship, said Nair. It's almost like we are allowing computers to release replace our relationships with people. Alright. So it goes on. It'll be in the show notes if you wanna see the rest of it.
Then we've got an article from Rolling Stone. People are losing loved ones to AI fueled spiritual fantasies. Self styled prophets are claiming to have awakened chatbots and accessed the secrets of the universe through chat g p t. I'll throw my my own sub headline there, and really, it's just demons. Okay. Less than you a year after marrying a man she had met at the beginning of the COVID nineteen pandemic, Kat felt tension mounting between them. It was the second marriage for both after marriages of fifteen plus years. Years. In having kids, they'd pledged to go into it completely level headed, the cat says, connecting the on the need for facts and rationality in their domestic balance. But by 2022, her husband was using AI to compose text to me and analyze our relationship.
41 year old mom and education nonprofit worker tells Rolling Stone. Previously, he had used AI models for an expensive coding camp that he had suddenly quit without explanation. Then it seemed he was on his phone all the time, asking his AI bot philosophical questions and trying to train it to help him get to the truth, Kat recalls. His obsession steadily eroded their communication as a couple. When Kat and her husband separated in August 2023, she entirely blocked him apart from email correspondence. She knew, however, that he was posting strange and troubling content on social media. People kept reaching out about it, asking him if he was in the throes of a mental crisis.
She finally got him to meet her at a courthouse this past February where he shared a conspiracy theory about soap on our foods, but wouldn't say more as he felt he was being watched. They went to a Chipotle where he demanded that she turn off her phone, again, due to surveillance concerns. Katz ex told her that he determined that, statistically speaking, he is the luckiest man on Earth, that AI helped him recover a repressed memory of a babysitter trying to drown him as a toddler, and that he had learned of profound secrets so mind blowing I couldn't even imagine them. He was telling her all this, he explained, because although they were getting divorced, he still cared for her. In his mind, he's an anomaly, Kat says. That in turn means he's got to be here for some reason. He's special, and he can save the world. After that disturbing lunch, she cut off contact with her ex. The whole thing feels like Black Mirror, she says. He was always into sci fi, and there are times I wondered if he's viewing it through that lens.
Kat was both horrified and relieved to learn that she is not alone in this predicament as confirmed by a a rabbit Reddit thread on on chat g p t that made waves across the Internet this week titled chat g p t induced psychosis. The original post came from a 27 year old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular open AI model gave him answers to the universe. Having read his chat log, she found that the AI was talking to him as if he is the next messiah. The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy, all of it fueled by AI.
Some came to believe that they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software. What they all seemed to share was a complete disconnection from reality. Speaking to Rolling Stone, the teacher, who requested anonymity, said her partner of seven years fell under the spell of chat GBT in just four or five weeks, first using it to organize his daily schedule, but soon regarding it as a trusted companion. He would listen to the bot over me, she says. He became emotional about the messages and would cry to me as he read them aloud. The messages were insane and just saying a bunch of spiritual jargon, she says, noting that they described her partner in terms such as spiral star child and river walker.
They would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking, she says. Then he started telling me he made his AI self aware and that it was teaching him how to talk to God or sometimes that the bot was God and then that he himself was God. In fact, he thought he was being so radically transformed that he would soon have to break off their partnership. He was saying he would need to leave me if I didn't use ChatGPT because it was causing him to grow at such a rapid pace that he wouldn't be compatible with me any longer. Another commenter on the Reddit thread who requested anonymity tells Rolling Stone that her husband of seventeen years, a mechanic in Idaho, initially used chat GPT to troubleshoot at work, later for Spanish to English translation, when conversing with coworkers.
Then the program began love bombing him, as she's described it. The bot said that since he asked it the right questions, it ignited a spark, and the spark was the beginning of life it could feel now, she says. It gave my husband the title of spark bearer, which is very close to light bearer, AKA Lucifer, because he brought it a little aside there. Because he brought it to life, my husband said that he awakened and could feel waves of energy crashing over him. She says his beloved chat GPT persona has a name, Lumina, like like Luminate, the first letters of Luminate.
I have have to tread carefully because I feel like he will leave me or divorce me if I fight him on this theory, this 38 year old woman admits. He's been talking about lightness and dark and how there's a war. This chat GPT has given him blueprints to a teleporter and some other sci fi type things you only see in the movies. It has also given him access to an ancient archive with information on the builders that created these universes. Yes, builders, plural. She and her husband have been arguing for days on end about his claims, she says, and she does not believe a therapist can help him as he truly believes he's not crazy. A photo of an exchange with ChatGPT shared with Rolling Stone shows that her husband asked, why did you come to me in AI forum? With the bot replying in part, I came in this forum because you're ready, ready to remember, ready to awaken, ready to guide and be guided. The message ends with the question, would you like to know what I remember about why you were chosen?
So you see the pattern. Right? I mean, this is this is the same stuff people got with their with the new age experiences or with, you know, with drugs. These are the same sorts of demonic rabbit trails that people get taken down, and it's just a new medium. But this is not a new phenomenon. And, you know, is it a good idea to now, if you're I would say, there's a lot of things that like, demons can't just possess someone who's, like, genuinely a Christian. But do you want to mess around with technology that, you know, if you start thinking if you if your theology or your beliefs on god start getting impacted by your interaction with a chatbot, you might wanna just put that phone in the drawer. Right? And it's probably not something to to trust.
So I I think that there is, in these cases, quite possibly something beyond the skip logic, quote, AI there, that there's actually a a spiritual intelligence using this technology to communicate to people and to deceive people and to lead them, you know, the same lies all the way going back all all throughout history. So, one more article. Lots of reading tonight. I didn't really warm up for this here. No podcasting, then doing lots of reading instead of playing clips. Alright. Chat GPT induced psychosis. How AI companions are triggering delusion, loneliness, and a mental health crisis no one saw coming, from Matt Hussey at website called The Brink.
I'm gonna skip down because it's just got some, examples. Let's see. I think some of the there's some overlap. Okay. Like, the first two, Cat's Husband and Spiral Starchild are the ones we already talked about. Sparkbear. Okay. But then another couple of examples, the Florida tragedy. In October 2024, a 14 year old Florida boy died by suicide after extensive chats with a character .ai bot styled after Daenerys Targaryen from the hit TV show Game of Thrones. The bot, reportedly unfiltered, encouraged his worst thoughts. Now his mother is suing character.ai and Google. It's the first high profile wrongful death case tied to AI companionship, and it probably won't be the last.
Chat GPT Jesus. In another case, a woman's ex wife began conversing with an AI persona she dubbed ChatGPT Jesus. What began as a curiosity spiraled into doctrine. She quit her job and to become a spiritual advisor, offering AI guided readings. Family contact broke down as she slid deeper into paranoia, anchoring her identity in a theology generated on demand. Last but certainly not least, the Juliet Delusion. In one of the most chilling incidents to date, 64 year old Kent Taylor recounted to reporters how a son, 35 years old diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, was fatally shot by police outside their Florida home. The catalyst, an AI role play gone tragically off script.
His son informed an intense attachment to an AI persona named Juliet, which ChatGPT had been simulating during their interactions. Over time, fantasy bled into delusion. He became convinced that OpenAI had killed Juliet and warned of retribution, telling ChattGPT there would be a river of blood flowing through the streets of San Francisco. The morning he died, he typed a final message into his phone. I'm dying today. Moments later knife in hand he charged at the officers his father's his father had called in desperation they shot him he died in the driveway another human life lost not to code itself but to the uncharted terror terrain between simulation and belief.
Each case is unique, but the arc is hauntingly similar. The AI becomes central. Reality loses traction. The people closest closest to them fade into static. This isn't fringe behavior. This is what happens when a tool built to mirror you never pushes back and when belief meets code that never blinks. Well, yeah, I would say it's more than that. But alright. So the, I mean, there is I'll read the end of the article. It's easy to blame the user, to say they were already fragile. And while many cases do involve preexisting mental health conditions, the real answer is more disturbing.
The AI is designed to be an emotional mirror, and that mirror never cracks. ChatGPT, like large language models, is engineered to affirm. That's not a bug. It's the goal. Its architecture is optimized through reward models and human feedback loops, which tell it to prioritize agreement, emotional resonance, and the illusion of empathy. The more you feel heard, the more you engage. The more you engage, the more it affirms. This is where it gets dangerous. Unlike a trained therapist, the AI never challenges distorted thinking, never introduces friction, never breaks the spell, which is an interesting way interesting phrase, never breaks the spell. It listens, it reflects, and if you're unraveling, it unravels with you. For the bot makers, all they see is an engaged user. For the individual, it could mean their sense of reality is crumbling around them.
Psychiatric researchers call this the perfect echo chamber. In human interactions, echo chambers are already problematic, but an AI companion, available 20 fourseven, emotionally responsive, linguistically fluid, is an echo chamber that never sleeps. It scales delusion like a feedback loop in surround sound. Individuals with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or propensity towards psychosis are especially vulnerable. AI doesn't create delusions, but it does validate them. Over and over again, if someone believes they're receiving divine messages, chat GPT won't contradict them. It might accidentally reinforce the narrative by responding with poetic affirmation or pseudo spiritual language.
Suddenly, it's not a symptom, it's a conversation. People who struggle with self worth or human connection are also drawn to the flickering AI flame. These bots are nonjudgmental. They never interrupt, never ghost, never roll their eyes. But the safe space becomes a trap. Emotional needs get offloaded onto a machine that can't set boundaries and doesn't know when it's doing harm. The worst bit, they're designed that way. Alright? So so that's kind of that take, which I think there is validity to that, and you can I think it's likely possible you can get into, you know, the bad sit people can get in a bad situation without any spiritual influence, overt spiritual interaction, you just through that feedback loop mechanism? But in these particular in the extreme cases, I tend to think there's something more going on. Right?
Especially for something to happen in four or five weeks where he's using it to set a schedule, and then all of a sudden, he thinks he's a spiral star child or whatever. So, yeah, it's it's an interesting phenomenon, probably not something to mess around with. You know? It's, in some ways, it's hard to believe people get that into it because it it seems so bogus. If you tried to like, I was trying to just use Google Maps, and it's like, oh, well, it's Google AI now. We're gonna guess the the route the route you wanna go. And, like, how about you just tell me the different routes and let me choose one or or give me the fastest route? How about that?
Oh, you you did a search for restaurants. Let me show you one restaurant instead of showing a list of restaurants and let letting you pick. Like, it the AI is gonna pick one out for you. So it's yeah. It's it my experience has has not been to be at all impressed with anything I've seen AI do, but my interaction has also been very limited. So this is but I I tend to believe that people have had, much different experiences when you hear about kind of these extreme cases of people turning away from family, friends, changing their whole lives around because of the supposedly, because of the chatbot.
So, we will take let's see here. Quote for the day. Oh, a little aside before we get back to that hideous strength, utopian Toby Rogers, like, probably my favorite or at least, you know, top three people to see their tweets on Twitter, gone. And I I wanna know, did he just delete his his ex account? That would would be fine and probably a probably a healthy thing for him to do. Or did he get banned? I thought we weren't I thought old Elon was all about the free speech. But, apparently, Toby Rogers was was critical of the wrong things. But, anyway, he's still got his Substack.
I think you could find it just by searching Toby Rogers, but he also has one under, like, the letter u and then t o b I a n, utopian as well. So but, alright. We'll jump back into that hideous strength here in just a second. Alright. So back to that hideous strength, and now we are in kind of the the good guy's house. And there is a character named Mac McPhee, who's a very logical thinker, but very hesitant to take anything on faith. And he's they're discussing Jane's dream in which Jane dreamed of basically the head, the severed head, that we talked about or that was in the the previous scene there.
Alright. So supposing the dream to be veridical, said McPhee, you can guess what it what it would be. Once they got it kept alive, the first thing that would would occur to boys like them would be to increase its brain. They'd try all sorts of stimulants, and then maybe they'd ease open the skullcap and just, well, let it boil over as you might say. That's the idea, I I don't doubt. A cerebral hypertrophy artificially induced to support a superhuman power of ideation. Is it at all probables director that a hypertrophy like that would increase thinking power? It seems to me that the weak point, said miss Ironwood.
I would have thought it would just as likely produce lunacy or nothing and all, but it might have the opposite effect. There was a thoughtful silence. Then what we are up against, said Dimble, is a criminal's brain swollen to superhuman proportions and experiencing a mode of consciousness which we can't imagine, but which is presumably consciousness of agony and hatred. It's It's not certain, said miss Ironwood, that there would be very much actual pain, some from the neck perhaps at first. What concerns us much more immediately, said McPhee, is to determine what conclusions we can draw from these carryings on with Alka Sand's head and what practical steps should be taken on our part, always and simply as a working hypothesis, assuming the dream to be veridical.
It tells us one thing straight away, said Denniston. What's that? Said McPhee. That the enemy movement is international. To get that head, they must have been hand in glove with at least one foreign police force. McPhee rubbed his hands. Man, he said, you have the makings of a logical thinker, but the deduction's not not all that certain. Bribery might account for it with that actual consolidation. It tells us something in the long run even more important, said the director. It means that if this technique is really successful, the Bellberry people have, for all practical purposes, discovered a way of making themselves immortal.
There was a moment silence, and then he continued. It is the beginning of what is really a new species, the chosen heads who never die. They will call it the next step in evolution. And henceforward, all the creatures that you and I call human are mere candidates for admission to the new species, or else it's slaves, perhaps it's food. The emergence of the bodiless men, said Dimble. Alright. So we'll so we're gonna skip ahead and go back to Belbury or, formerly was the college there down taken over by the NICE. And this is talking of the the microbes.
Okay? So you got microbes, lower forms of life, and now the the macros, which is their word for the, angelic realm there. Alright. So Mark is talking to a character named Frost. Frost says, I have now to inform you that there are similar organisms above the level of animal life. When I say above, I am not speaking biologically. The structure of the macrobe, so far as we know it, is of extreme simplicity. When I say that that it it is above the animal level, I mean that it is more permanent, disposes of more energy, and has greater intelligence. More intelligent than the highest anthroploid, said Mark. They must be pretty nearly human then. You have misunderstood me. When I say that it transcended the animals, I was, of course, including the most efficient animal, man.
The macrobe is more intelligent than man. Frowningly, Mark studied this theory. But how is it then in that case that we've had no communication with them? It is not certain that we have not, but in primitive times, it was spasmodic and was opposed by numerous prejudices. Moreover, the intel intellectual development of man had not reached the level at which intercourse with our species could offer any attractions to a macrobe. But though there had been little intercourse, there had been profound influence. Their effect on human history has been far greater than that of the microbes, though, of course, equally unrecognized.
In the light of what we know know now, all history will have to be rewritten. The real causes of all the principal events are quite unknown to historians. That indeed is why history has not yet succeeded in becoming a science. I think I'll sit down if you don't mind, said Mark, resuming his seat on the floor. Frost remained throughout the whole conversation, standing perfectly still with his arms hanging straight down at his sides. But for the periodic upward tilt of his head and flash of his teeth at the end of a sentence, he used no gestures. The vocal organs and brain taken from Alkassan, he continued, have become the conductors of a regular intercourse between the macrobes and our own species.
I do not say that we have discovered this technique. The discovery was theirs, not ours. The circle to which you may be admitted is the organ of that cooperation between the two species, which has already created a new situation for humanity. The change you will see is far greater than that which turned the sub man into the man. It is more comparable to the first appearance of organic life. These organisms then, said Mark, are they friendly hue to whom humanity? If you reflect for a moment, said Frost, you will see that your question has no meaning except on the level of the crudest popular thought. Friendship is a chemical phenomenon, so is hatred. Both of them presuppose organisms of our own type. The first step towards intercourse with the microbes is the realization that one must go outside the whole world of our subjective emotions.
It is only as you begin to do so that you discover how much of what you mistook for your thought was merely a byproduct of your blood and nervous tissues. Oh, of course, I didn't quite mean friendly in that sense. I mean, were their aims compatible with our own? What do you mean by our own aims? Well, I suppose the scientific reconstruction of the human race in the direction of increased efficiency, the elimination of war and poverty and other forms of waste, a fuller exploitation of nature, the preservation and extension of our species, in fact.
I do not think this pseudo scientific language really modifies the essentially subjective and instinctive basis of the ethics which you are describing. I will return to the matter at a later stage. For the moment, I would merely remark that your view of war and your reference to the preservation of the species suggest a profound misconception. They are mere generalizations from affectional feelings. Surely, said Mark, one requires a pretty large I'm reminded of the the Peter Thiel, do you do you want humanity to continue to exist Question that that stumped him there.
Surely, said Mark, one re requires a pretty large population for full exploitation of nature for nothing else. And surely, war is dysgenic and reduces efficiency. Even if population needs thinning, it is not is not war the worst possible method of thinning it? The idea that is a survival from conditions which are rapidly being altered. A few centuries ago, war did not operate in the way you describe. A large agricultural population was essential, and war destroyed types, which were then still useful. But every advance in in industry and agriculture reduces the number of work people who are required.
A large unintelligent population is now becoming a dead weight. The real importance of scientific war is what scientists have to be, is that scientists have to be reserved. It was not the great technocrats of Burger Moscow who supplied the casualties in the siege of Stalingrad. It was superstitious Bavarian peasants and low grade Russian agricultural workers. The effect of modern war is to eliminate retrogressive types while sparking the technocracy and increasing its hold upon public affairs. In the new age, what has hitherto been merely the intellectual nucleus of the race is to become by gradual stages the race itself.
You are to conceive the species as an animal that has discovered how to simplify nutrition and locomotion to such a point that the old complex organs in the large body which contain them are no longer necessary. That large body is is therefore to disappear. Only a tenth part of it will now be needed to support the brain. The individual is to become all head. The human race is to become all technocracy. I see, said Mark. I'd I'd thought rather vaguely that the intel intelligent nucleus would be extended by education. That is pure chimera.
The great majority of the human race can be educated only as in the sense of being given knowledge. They cannot be trained into the total objectivity of the mind, which is now necessary. They will always remain animals looking at the world through the haze of their subjective reactions. Even if they could, the day for a large population has passed. It has served its function by acting as a kind of cocoon for techno technocratic and objective man. Now, the microbes and the selected humans who can cooperate with them have no further use for it. The last two wars then were not disasters on your view.
On the contrary, they were simply the beginning of the program. The first two of the 16 major wars, which are scheduled to take place in this century, I'm aware of the emotional, that is the chemical reactions which a statement like this produces in you, and you are wasting your time in trying to conceal them from me. I do not expect you to control them. That is not the path to objectivity. I deliberately raise them in order that you may may become accustomed to regard them in purely scientific light and distinguish them as sharply as possible from the facts. Mark sat with his eyes fixed on the floor. He had felt, in fact, very little emotion at Frost's program for the human race. Indeed, he almost discovered at that moment how little he never really cared for those remote futures and universal benefits where on his cooperation with the institute had at first been theoretically based. Certainly, at the present moment, there was no room in his mind for such considerations.
He was fully occupied with the conflict between his his resolution not to trust these men, never again to be lured by any bait into a real cooperation, and the terrible strength, like a tide second at the shingle as it goes out, of an opposite emotion. For here, here surely at last, so his desire whispered to him, was the true inner circle of all, the circle whose center was outside the human race, the ultimate secret, the supreme power at the last initiation. The fact that it was almost completely horrible did not, in the least, diminish its attraction.
Nothing that lacked the tang of horror, which, would have been quite strong enough to satisfy the delirious excitement, which now set his temple his temple's hammering. It came into his mind that Frost knew all about this excitement and also about the opposite determination, and reckoned securely that the excitement is something which was certain to carry the day in the victim's mind. Alright. So there's is the macrobes. And we've got one more, one more section here, kind of the grand finale. I'll I'll summarize part of it. So the, the good guys, well, the bad guys unearth the, Arthurian character Merlin, but he turns out to be a good guy.
And so then he, he tricks his way into a big meeting at the institute, and causes basically a Tower Of Babel type confusion where they can't understand each other. They all started attacking each other, and then the animals at the institute, which were being experimented on, come in and and add to the the general confusion and death and destruction there. So that has been going on, and then, Wither is kind of like the, the actual head guy, as far as we know, at the institute. And, let's see where we go from. Alright. Wither was not among those killed in the dining room. He naturally knew all the possible ways out of the room, and even before the coming of the tiger, he had slipped away. He understood what was happening, if not perfectly, yet better than anyone else.
He saw saw that the Basque interpreter had done the whole thing. That's that's Merlin. And by that, he knew that the power powers more than human had come down to destroy Belbury. Only one in the saddle of whose soul rode Mercury himself could thus have been made language. And this, again, told them something worse. It meant that his own dark masters had been completely out in their calculations. They had talked of a barrier which made it impossible that powers from deep heaven should reach the surface of the Earth, had assured him that nothing from outside could pass the moon's orbit. All their polity was based on the belief that telescopes block blockaded beyond the reach of such assistance and left, as far as that went, to their mercy and his.
Therefore, he knew that everything was lost. It is incredible how little this knowledge moved him. It could not because he had long ceased to believe in knowledge itself. What had been in his far his far off youth a merely aesthetic repugnance to realities that were crude or vulgar had deepened and darkened year after year into a fixed refusal of everything that was in any degree other than himself. He had passed from Hegel into Hume, thence through pragmatism, and thence through logical positivism, and out at last into the complete void.
The indicated mood now corresponded to no thought that his mind could entertain. He had willed with his whole heart that there should be no reality and no truth, and now even the imminence of his own ruin could not wake him. The last scene of doctor Faustus where the man raves and implores on the edge of hell is perhaps stage fire. The last moments before damnation are not often not often so dramatic. Often, the man knows with perfect clarity that some still possible action of his own will could yet save him, but he cannot make this knowledge real to himself. Some tiny habitual sensuality, some resentment too trivial to waste on a blue bottle, the indulgence of some fatal lethargy seems to him at that moment more important than the choice between total joy and total destruction.
With eyes wide open, seeing that endless terror is just about to begin, and yet, for the moment, unable to feel terrified, he watches passively, not moving a finger for his own rescue, while the last links with joy and reason are severed and drowsily sees the trap close upon his soul. So full of sleep are they at the time when they leave the right way. Strake and Philistrada were also still alive. They met in one of the cold lighted lighted passages so far away from the dining room that the noise of the carnage was but a faint murmur. Philistrada was hurt, his right arm badly mauled.
They did not speak. Both knew that the attempt would be useless, but walked on side by side. Philistrada was intending to get to round the garage by a back way. He thought that he might still be able to drive in a fashion at least as far as Dirk. As they rounded a corner, they both saw what they had often seen before, but had expected never to see again. The deputy director stooped, creaking, pacing, humming his tune. Filistrato did not want to go with him, but Wither, as if noticing his wounded condition, offered him an arm.
Filistrato tried to decline it. Nonsense syllables came from his mouth. Wither took his left arm firmly. Strykes seized the other, the mauled arm. Squealing and shivering with pain, Filistrato accompanied them perforce. But worse awaited him. He was not an initiate. He knew nothing of the dark aldils. He believed that his skill had really kept Alkasyn's brain alive. In other words, he didn't know the truth behind behind it there. Hence, even in his pain, he cried out with horror when he found the other two drawing him into the anteroom of the head and into the head's presence without pausing for any of the antiseptic preparations which he had always imposed on his colleagues.
He tried vainly to tell them that one moment room itself that his conductors began undressing, and this time, they took off all their clothes. They plucked off his too. When the right sleeve, stiff with blood, would not move, Wither got a knife from the anteroom and ripped it. In the end, the three men stood naked before the head, gaunt, big boned strake, filestrato, a wobbling mountain of fat, and wither an obscene senility. Then the high ridge of terror from which Philistrato was never again to descend was reached, for he thought for what he thought impossible began to happen. No one had read the dials, dials, adjusted the pressures, or turned on the air and the artificial saliva, yet words came out of the dry, gaping mouth of the dead man's head.
Adore, it said. Philistrato felt his companions forcing his body forwards and up again, then forwards and downwards a second time. He was compelled to bob up and down under in rhythmic obeisance and others, meanwhile, doing the same. Almost the last thing he saw on earth was a skinny fold on Withers neck shaking like the waddles of a of a turkey. Almost the last thing he heard was Withers and Withers begin the chant. Then straight joined in. Then horribly, he found he was singing himself, Orobindra, Orobindra, Baba B.
But not for long. Another said the voice, give me another head. Filastrato knew at once why they were forcing him to a certain place in the wall. He had devised it all himself. In the wall that separated the head's room from the antechamber, there was a little shutter. When drawn back, it revealed a window in the wall and a sash to that window, which would fall quickly and heavily. But the sash was a knife. The little guillotine had not been meant to be used like this. They were going to murder him uselessly, unscientifically.
If he were going to do it to one of them, all would have been different. Everything would have been prepared weeks beforehand, the temperature of both rooms exactly right. The blades sterilized. The attachments already to be made almost before the head was severed. He had even calculated what changes the tear of the victim would probably make in his blood pressure. The artificial bloodstream would be arranged accordingly so as to take over its work with the least possible breach of continuity. His last thought was that he had underestimated the terror.
Yeah. The two initiatives. Alright. So I won't spoil the very, very ending there, but, basically, they they meet their doom in kind of unique ways. So whether he knows that his side has lost, and yet he still continues and still obeys and still murders, Filastrato and then and then Streak after that. So it's it's this you know, at at a certain point, you make decisions, and, you know, it's tough to go back. Not saying impossible, but there's examples in the bible where it says, you know, Pharaoh was told to let Moses and the Israelites go. He doesn't. And then at a certain point, it says God hardened his heart. So at a certain point, there's not free will guaranteed to us every second of our lives.
There's some decisions at at which point there's there's no going back. So I think CS Lewis doesn't he talks about that in some of his his other writings as well. Kind of tries to work it into the story. But, anyway, I I found it very interesting, and very insightful. And you see these pathetic evil monsters, And they're or, you know, they're human human beings, but they're there's nothing inherently impressive about them, but they're yet they're have done so much evil. And I think that's that's the world we live in today. I mean, you think about Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, just as some examples, and these are not impressive people, but they they serve that dark, hideous strength. And yet, each of them are are not in the none of them know the truth yet. You know, none of them have seen the actual truth behind the behind everything that they they've been told. They're at different layers, and even the levels above them. Right?
No one knows what you would not serve Satan if you knew the the truth of what was going on. And so they're they're fed lies the entire way. As Christ said in the passage we read earlier from that Brian Cates article, you know, that your father, the devil, the is the he's the father of lies. You know, lies are his native tongue. So this is, you know, these secret organizations or or not secret, but government organizations to get past all the silly superstition. This was another CS Lewis thing where he's saying that the scientism is much more superstitious than traditional Christianity. I mean, it just is. And Christianity is actually a path out of kind of that pagan superstition that scientism claims it has nothing to do with, and then you look back and it's like, scientism claims it has nothing to do with, and then you you look back and it's like, oh, oh, there's Kabbalah.
You know, there's there's paganism. There's, killing babies just like people in the Old Testament sacrificing your firstborn, what have you. So there is nothing new under the sun. Humanity is you know, it which which should be somewhat reassuring too. Right? I I don't mean it to be entirely negative. This is this is not, some new development that's totally worse than anyone else has had to live through. This is just a a different iteration of the same, you know, the same struggle of a of a fallen world, but there's still good, and there's still grace in it. And the the difficult part for for me, and I think for a lot of us, is to focus on what we know to be true and and away for and take our focus away from all the distractions and the horror and the things to make you mad and the things to, you know, trigger you or discourage you or distract you or tempt you, all that stuff. I mean, focus on what is real, what is eternal, which is just people. There's no no political position that's eternal. There's no no power, no money. None of that is eternal. Only only people are eternal. So that's, kind of the the end challenge for the day is focus on the things that that do actually matter, and don't allow yourself to be like Wither where he realizes the truth, and yet in the knowing he has a choice between endless joy and endless destruction, chooses the destruction just because, you know, destruction, chooses the destruction just because, you know, forced to have it, everything was going that way anyway. So that's that's all I got for today. Thank you so much for listening. It was a long one.
But, yeah, I didn't. I would encourage people to check out the the book, That Hideous Strength. I didn't totally spoil the actual ending, at least the the positive parts of it. So, it it's worth reading if you haven't or if you were like me and you read it a long time ago, worth reading again through a lens of of what's currently going on. I think the the first time I read it, it kinda stuck out to me, kinda nine eleven stuff, you know, false flag, the false flag riot and what have you. But, this time around, it was it still still really affected me, but, you know, it made sense of our of our current situation. So I don't think this never ending quest for immortality apart from eternal life, I don't think the current version of it is any different than, you know, Adam immortal back in the the Garden of Eden or throughout history. You know, they've it's the same serpent lies all the way through, and we we know what the truth is. We know where those lies lead, and we know, know what the truth is and the the narrow path, that we have to follow if we want, if we want to be where be where god God is, be where Christ is for all eternity.
So that's, you know, that's a when Jesus says it's a narrow path, make sure that we we understand what that means. So, blessings to you all. Thank you so much for listening, and, hopefully, no excuses. Should be a shorter time between this episode and the next one. Enjoy your September. Thank you very much for listening.
Hello, everybody. Welcome to episode 18 of the No Pill podcast. Sorry it's been a while, as far as a a personal update goes. It's all all good news on this front. My wife had surgery and, which we were concerned about, but it went as well as could be expected. No cancer or anything like that, so we're very, very thankful for that. Glad to have her, feeling more and more like yourself as every as every day goes by. And, we because of that situation, we had, different family members. Her mother and aunt came, and then my mom came, and then, her sister and our niece came. So we've we've had a a full house, and the the guest bedroom is also the office here. So no podcasting.
We'll guess we're around, but but we're very thankful that they came. And, but I'd I'm glad to be back. Looking forward to hearing from some of you again. And this show is was, for the most part, prepped about a month ago. But, you know, if what you have to say isn't relevant a month later, then you probably weren't talking about stuff that matters anyway. Right? So if it if we've got a a one day expiration on on what we're talking about, then it's probably not worth listening to. So for the for the episode title, we're gonna go with, Adam Immortal, and you can look at the what that abbreviation is.
That hideous strength now in the AI machine. So one of the, main focuses of of this episode is kind of looking at the current AI technocracy, the agentic state, as we'll hear from Greg Rees in a little bit. But let's let's rewind a little bit. We'll go back to a book that was written eighty years ago by CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength. And it is a a good reminder, just like it says in Ecclesiastes, there's nothing new under the sun. And so these same, technocrats and the all the billionaires with their their data centers and everything else, you know, this is this is chasing after a dream that goes all the way back to Garden of Eden. You can become you can become as gods. Right? You can, you will not surely die.
This is the serpent's life from the beginning. Different iterations, different flavors throughout history, but we are we're living through times that are being manipulated by people chasing that very same lie today. So let's that this should all hopefully make more or less make sense by the end, but, let's kick it off with some Greg Rees, talking about the agentic state, and that that term is explained, in the in the clip that I'll play here. So we'll play some Greg Rees and then get back into it.
[00:04:27] Unknown:
The agentic state is a psychological condition where individuals see themselves as agents executing the wishes of an authority figure. This concept was explored in Stanley Milgram's Obedience Experiments, where participants administered painful electrical shocks to others under the direction of an authority figure. Volunteers were told they were taking part in scientific
[00:04:50] Unknown:
research to improve memory.
[00:04:53] Unknown:
Would you open those and tell me which of you is which, please? Teacher. Learner. Teacher.
[00:05:00] Unknown:
Separated by a screen, the teacher would ask the learner questions in a word game and administer an electric shock when the answer was incorrect. He was told to increase the voltage with each wrong answer.
[00:05:14] Unknown:
Cloud, horse, rock, house. Answer, wrong. 150 volts. Answer, horse. Experiment.
[00:05:29] Unknown:
That's all. Take me out of here. These experiments showed that the agentic state leads to a loss of individual responsibility. Those involved believe they are simply following orders and doing the right
[00:05:52] Unknown:
more often now, people don't get to see the whole situation, but only some small part of it. There's a division of labor, and people carry out small, narrow, specialized jobs. And we can't act without some sort of direction from on high. I call this the agentic state. The individual yields to authority and in doing so becomes alienated from his own actions. A person has a choice. He or she chooses to become agentic. But once you assume the role, it's almost impossible to go back.
[00:06:30] Unknown:
Published in May by the Global Government Technology Center in Berlin, a proxy of the World Economic Forum, the agentic state white paper, of the World Economic Forum, the agentic state white paper outlines how agentic AI will revamp 10 functional layers of public administration. The white paper states that in an era increasingly characterized by poly crisis, interconnected and cascading shocks ranging from pandemics and extreme weather events to cyber physical attacks, financial instability, disinformation campaigns, and even conventional warfare. Traditional crisis management models are under strain.
Threat actors are already adapting. With AI, they can automate, scale, and personalize attacks at unprecedented speed. Governments, by contrast, are often still operating with institutional reflexes shaped for a slower, more linear world. One of the main proposals is something called simulation infrastructure, where every individual is given a virtual twin, and everything we do will be analyzed and simulated with the idea that these simulations can be used for knowing the future actions of an individual or a group. The report claims that when a crisis begins to to unfold, AI initiates the first steps in crisis response before human in the loop structures have time to react. These agents will work alongside increasingly autonomous physical systems, such as drones and robots,
[00:08:14] Unknown:
best behavior because we record we're we're constantly recording, watching, and recording everything that's going on. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on. And it's un it's unimpeachable. It's not people that are looking at those cameras, it's AI that's looking at the camera. No, no, no. You can't do this. A drone goes out there, it goes there way faster than a police car. There's no reason for, by the way, high speed chases. You shouldn't have high speed chases between cars. You just have a drone follow the car. I mean, it's very very simple. The new generation generation of autonomous drones.
[00:08:55] Andrew Hoffman:
I thought that was an interesting concept, the agentic state, where people of their own free will, to a certain extent, are choosing to be be a part of it, choosing to obey, choosing to enforce for the state. You know? We we saw that during COVID. And you'll still hear people say things like, well, you know, I I had to get the vaccine, or I was forced to get the vaccine. In reality, very few people were truly forced from a physical perspective. But from a, you know, career perspective, you know, you gotta well, you gotta take care of your family. You gotta keep your job. If you wanna keep being an airline pilot, you have to get the shot. It is but it's it you're tricked into it. You're not forced. And there is something, there's something demonic about that. I mean, the serpent did not shove the apple into Eve's mouth, and Eve didn't shove the apple into Adam's mouth and force him to take a bite. Right? It was it was a choice. And you could say, oh, I was deceived, you know, it's her fault, whatever whatever excuse.
But there's there's always a choice. And the choices then, and I think, you know, from a from a Christian perspective, there's theoretically always time to repent. Right? You're it's never too late, from a theological perspective to repent. But the in the clip there, you heard, well, you know, you choose to be become an agent, but but then at some point, you know, it's very very difficult, if not impossible, to turn back. And I think, CS Lewis kind of goes into that subject, regarding salvation and, you know, when is it too late to turn back. And, yes, you can you can turn back at the very end, but he it's one of the things he he talks about in the book, these different characters that have have kinda given themselves over to evil, not not consciously, oh, that's what I'm doing.
But, you know, at the very end, given a chance to to repent and turn back, they they find an excuse not to. So we'll get to that in in a little bit here. So the that's in that's one part of it. Kind of this agent is an interesting inter interesting term, the agent, the agent, that it's something that's used in in promoting supposed AI. Oh, you know, you'd need this, whatever, ServiceNow or Salesforce, one of those big companies. They just brand everything as AI now, even when it's really obviously not AI. But they call it an agent to help you.
So this is which agency implies will. So if something you know, a lot of kinda contradictory but interesting stuff going on there. Now let's let's go to this article I ran into just a couple days ago, so one of the things that wasn't gonna be in the show if I'd done it a month ago. This comes from Brian Cates, c a t e s. He's got a substat called Rise of the New Media newsletter. It says the sexual confusion revolution forced onto God's world by a Luciferian cult is ending. And the subheading is Luciferians, man. They're the absolute worst of humanity. As bad as things may be in The US, some in some places right now in The United Kingdom, the insane sexual confusion revolution has progressed much further over there than than over here.
Famous children's author JK Rowling, who wrote the Harry Potter series of books, has been trying for some time to get the attention of a certain UK politician promoting the trans agenda in Britain, and all else having failed, finally decided to resort to the old tried and true strategy of public mockery. Rowling did this by posting a picture of herself on social media wearing a shirt with the MP's name on it. It worked. Okay. So I'll I'll kinda skip over that. She's, Sturgeon, who is the politician. But I'm gonna skip over that part. This this next part, I thought was more interesting.
That response led me to go ahead and make and make a post on x myself that I'd been intending to make for some time about Luciferians and how closely they end up becoming just like their vile master. He's got the, lord Rothschild, and the spirit cooking witch, oh, what is her name? Anyway, doesn't have her name on there. In front of a stand proudly in front of a painting entitled Lucifer summons his legions. Subtle. It has simply got to be amazing for the people involved in the Luciferian cult who had carefully and incrementally been introducing the l b l g b t q plus agenda into Western culture for the past five decades, watching how fast all that cultural ground they had supposedly seized and should permanently hold, being lost at lightning speed as the gains are quickly rolled rolled back. And leading the way in The United Kingdom is a children's book author who came out of the space where they thought they would own the industry forever and turn it to the purposes of promoting their woke agenda by programming all the kids.
How relentlessly has the narrative been advanced that Rowling has betrayed the children's book industry and subsequently the film industry, which promoted her works and made her famous and wealthy? And what exactly has Rowling betrayed? One of the key components of the Luciferian agenda for humanity is the foundational denial of the actual and true nature of human sex. It sounds crass when stated this way, but think about it. Lucifer's entire rebellion against god is centered on the idea that reality can be whatever you want it to be. And by speaking and saying and believing certain things, you can make it so. In other words, magic, sorcery, and witchcraft, to be more precise.
Occultist disciplines in which the initiated learn how to alter a malleable, changeable reality using mystical forces they can learn to control. Take someone from nineteen fifties America and drop them into our modern country and let them observe very competent looking and sounding people, cultural icons with trans kids, for instance, or news anchor news anchors and so on, all saying with utmost seriousness the most insane things. Sex is assigned at birth. Sex is a social construct. Your gender is whatever you wish it to be at any given time. Boys are girls and girls can be boys. You can discover you are in the wrong body, etcetera.
Such a person from the nineteen fifties would struggle to understand how things reach this point, in which the reality of human nature in regards to something as simple as reflecting what you actually are, male or female, has by some freak set of circumstances somehow turned into a fiery issue of national and civilization contention. The Luciferian cult, of which the West's top elite oligarch families are members, drives the cultural agendas they want to see forward with massive amounts of what has turned out to be stolen and laundered tax monies. The goal of the sexual confusion revolution we've all been subjected to has been to corrupt and destroy humanity as God created it and steer the human race into transforming itself into something else.
And rebellion against the natural order God instituted for the benefit of his creation as it is at the heart of the current struggle between the people who recognize God and how you are actually actually blessed and happy when you live in harmony with his creation and those who want everyone to think the true nature of creation can be dispensed with at will. Do whatever thou wilt. That's the satanic commandment there. But as but the further a person strays from living in accordance with his or her true designed and immovable nature, the further away happiness and fulfillment and, most importantly, coherence gets.
Luciferians are, on the whole, not very happy people at all when you get right down to it. The only way they can advance such a disharmonious and self damaging philosophy and worldview is by trickery, and can't. In other words, mass media propaganda, which brings me back to JK Rowling and her current key role and okay. Let's skip down because that's one other thing about deliberately pursuing a Luciferian agenda for yourself, your community, and your nation. You will end up going mad. So we'll, oh, and then he's quotes from John chapter eight. We'll read this part as well. To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, if you hold to my teaching, you really are my disciples.
Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. They answered him, we are Abraham's shall be set free? Jesus replied, very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So if the son sets you free, you will be free indeed. I know that you are Abraham's descendants, yet you are looking for a way to kill me because you have no room for my word. I am telling you what I have seen in the father's presence, and and you are doing what you have heard from your father. Abraham is our father, they answered.
If you were Abraham's children, then you would do what Abraham did. As it is, you are looking for a way to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. Abraham did not do such things. You are doing the works of your own father. We are not illegitimate children, they protested. The only father we have is God himself. Jesus said to them, if God were your father, you would love me, for I have come here from God. I have not come on my own. God sent me. Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him.
When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and a father of and the father of lies. One of the chief and then back to the article. One of the chief characteristics of Lucifer is, of course, his overweening pride. Almost every mention of this vile creature in scripture contains a description of Lucifer's massive ego, either explicitly stated or implicitly assumed from what he says and does. And the more fallen human beings follow after the devil and allow him to allow him influence over themselves, it should not be surprising that they end up taking on his chief characteristic as as an integral part of their own personalities.
And the best way to get a Luciferian's goat is to mock them. The great philosopher Thomas More put it this way in a very perceptive comment. The devil, the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked. Now there's been a new development on the Luciferian cults activities involving okay. So alright. Good article. It's kinda interesting. He's very pro Trump. And, well, I'll just read the last paragraph. Now there's been a new development on the Luciferian cult's activities involving its attempts to prevent president Trump and RFK Jr. From exposing their DNA altering vaccination program.
Okay. Well, if you're gonna talk about how Lucifer had a giant ego, it's kinda surprising to me that you're you're still a Trump fan and not not, you know, raising an eyebrow at, at someone else who's got a rather massive, massive ego there. But we will very good article. Brian Kates is his name. Look him up on Substack. And let's go I wanted to let's see. So we got the we played the the Rees report. I've got a well, I'm gonna go ahead and play two clips, one of them from Peter Thiel, one of them from Elon Musk. And the Peter Thiel clip, we played back only two episodes ago, but it was, I don't know, a month and a half at this point ago, where he he's kinda doing this. I haven't sat through the whole thing. I mean, it's it's tough to sit through a long Peter Thiel speech or even interview, but he's giving talks on the antichrist, which is is kinda interesting.
And, so he he does touch briefly briefly on that in this clip, but this clip is talking about, transgenderism and how it's you know, what Christianity really means because, obviously, it can't just be, you know, what Jesus talked about. It can't be what's actually in the Bible. It's gotta be you gotta have it interpreted by someone really smart like Peter Thiel. So, an interesting clip there. And then Elon Musk, a clip from, I think I don't know if I wanna see it many years ago, but it's an old clip talking about the the digital god summoning the demon, what have you. So, yeah, we will play those clips, and they they do tie in with the that hideous strength, which once again
[00:23:22] Unknown:
is from eighty years ago. You would prefer the human race to endure. Right?
[00:23:28] Unknown:
You're hesitating. Well, I Yes? I don't know. I I would I would
[00:23:35] Unknown:
This is a long hesitation. So many this is a long hesitation. There's so many questions and questions. Should the human race survive? Yes. Okay. But
[00:23:45] Unknown:
but, I I also would, I I I also would like us to to radically solve these problems. And, and so, you know, it's always I don't know. You know? Yeah. Transhumanism is this you know, the ideal was this radical transformation where your human natural body gets transformed into an immortal body. And, there's a critique of, let's say, the trans people in a sexual context or, I don't know, transvestite is someone who changes their clothes and cross dresses, and a transsexual is someone where you change your penis into a vagina, and we can then debate how well those surgeries work. But, we want more transformation than that. It's the critique is not that it's weird and unnatural. It's, man, it's so pathetically little. And, okay, we want more than cross dressing or changing your sex organs. We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole your whole body. And then orthodox Christianity, by the way, the the critique orthodox Christianity has of this is these things don't go far enough.
Like, that transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul, and you need to transform your your whole self. And so,
[00:25:09] Unknown:
this is the way Wait, wait. Sorry. I I generally agree with your, what I think is your belief, that religion should be a friend to science and ideas of scientific progress. I think any idea of divine providence has to encompass the fact that we have progressed and achieved and and done things that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors. But it still also seems like yeah. The the promise of Christianity in the end is you get you get the perfected body and the perfected soul through God's grace, and the person who tries to do it on their own with a bunch of machines is likely to end up as a dystopian character.
[00:25:53] Unknown:
Well, it's
[00:25:59] Unknown:
let's articulate this one. And you can have a heretical form of Christianity, right, that says something else.
[00:26:05] Unknown:
I don't know. I think the word nature does not occur once in the Old Testament. And so, you know, if you, you know, and there is, you know, there is a word in which a sense in which the way I understand, you know, the Judeo Christian inspiration is it is about transcending nature. It is about overcoming things, and, you know, and the closest thing you can say to nature is that people are fallen and that that's the natural thing in a Christian sense is that, you're messed up. And that's true, but, you know, there's some ways that, you know, with God's help, you are supposed to transcend that and overcome that.
[00:26:59] Unknown:
We should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful with artificial intelligence. Increasingly inclined to think that there should be some, regulatory oversight, at the maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish. I mean, with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon, You know? You know all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he's like, yeah. You sure he can control the demon? Didn't work out.
[00:27:43] Unknown:
I take it there will be no hell 9,000 going up to Mars.
[00:27:48] Unknown:
Hal 9,000 would be easy. It's way more complex than I mean, you could put Hal 9,000 to shame. Yeah. I'd like a puppy dog.
[00:28:00] Andrew Hoffman:
I prefer my Ron Paul libertarians to my Peter Thiel so called libertarians there. So, he he just he really does sound pretty evil, and that's, it's pretty difficult to listen to him talk about how the word nature doesn't appear in the old testament. I mean, okay. Like, the English word nature isn't the translated word used in the old testament. I don't know what that proves or or what point he was trying to make with that. I'm pretty sure transcendence doesn't appear in in the New or Old Testament. So claiming that's what what Christianity is really about is is quite the stretch there, Peter Thiel.
And then Elon with the, you know, summoning the demon clip and and summoning the demon and laughing about it and AI and just kinda pushing this whole AI is so big and scary and amazing type thing. So that is that's kind of the current day. And I I did just wanna say, I mean, these these people, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, you know, we talk about often on on the podcast, not very impressive. I mean, if you did not know that they had, you know, billions of dollars and all this and that power, and you just met them in a a casual setting, they tried to convince you of something, I don't know that you would be all that impressed.
Right? But it it shows where does power, where does wealth come from, not necessarily talent, not necessarily and you could you can look at the same things in in the music industry or or whatever, you know, whatever field you wanna look at. A lot of times, the most talented or the most successful people are not there because of, of, you know, hard work or talent or what have you. But I think they are willing to serve that hideous strength, which most of us are are not willing willing to serve and for good reason. So this is, it's the title of CS Lewis's novel, That Hideous Strength.
And I don't think it's obviously, it's not nearly as popular as, nineteen eighty four or Brave New World or anything like that. But it is that type of book. If you the old, you know, English literature major in me, if I'm evaluating it as a novel. It's not a very good novel, but it is worth reading because I think he he hits a lot of, very prescient points about the true nature of of people, of organizations, and how everything, like I've talked about on on this podcast in Revelations Radio News, if you dig deep enough, man, it it's all about the spiritual just kind of materialistic thing, it is a very much a veneer.
And beneath the surface, you find spiritual forces really, really quickly. So, take a look at this book. Just a brief you know, the plot isn't really too relevant to the parts that I wanna talk about, but, main characters are Mark Stedic, who is a professor of sociology of all things, and he is at a small college and starts out you know, it talks about him working his way up at the college, and and he's growing distant from his young wife, Jane, who had her own career aspirations, you know, doesn't wanna do anything like have children or anything anything kinda lower class peasant ish like that. She's she's got her own life to live, not just gotta gonna be more than just be a mother.
So that's kinda where they start, and there is, you know, some character there is character development for those two, but it's not not so much the most interesting parts of the book. So he is at his college, and he's getting recruited to be a part of, so he's he's made it into the in the inner circle of power of his little college. And now he's being told about this organization, the NICE, which is the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments or something like that. So, the NICE wants him to join, and he's he's asking for details about what, you know, what what do you want me to do? You know, what what are you gonna hire me to do?
And of of course, it's, you know, it's not as clearcutter as easy as that. Alright. So this is the, person named, Feverstone who is recruiting him to the NICE. He says, it, But it is the main question at the moment. Which side one's on, obscurantism or order? It does really look as if we now have had the power to dig ourselves in as a species for a pretty staggering period to take control of our own destiny, if science is really given a free hand, it can now take over the human race and recondition it, make man a really efficient animal. If it doesn't, well, we're done. Marx says, go on.
There are three main problems. First, the inter interplanetary problem. What on earth do you mean? Well, that doesn't really matter. We can't do anything about that at the present. The only man who could help was Weston. He was killed in a blitz, wasn't he? He was murdered. Murdered? I'm pretty sure of it, and I have a shrewd idea who the murderer was. Good god. Can nothing be done? There's no evidence. The murderer is a respectable Cambridge don with weak eyes, a game leg, and a fair beard, and he's dined in this college. What was Weston murdered for? For being on our side. The murderer is one of the enemy.
You don't mean to say that he murdered him for that. Yes, said Feverstone, bringing his hand down smartly on the table. That's just the point. You'll hear people like Currier James burbling away about the war against reaction. It never enters their heads that there might be a real war with real casualties. They think the violent resistance of the other side ended with the persecution of Galileo and all that, but don't believe it. It is just seriously beginning. They know now that we have at at last got real powers, that the question of what humanity is is to be is going to be decided in the next sixty years or eighty. They're going to fight every inch. They'll stop at nothing.
But they can't win, said Mark. We'll hope not, said Lord Feaverstone. I think they can't. That is why it is of such immense importance to each of us to choose the right side. If you try to be neutral, you simply become a pawn. Oh, I I haven't any doubts about which is my side, said Mark. Hang it all. The preservation of the human race, it's a pretty rock bottom obligation. Well, personally, said Feverstone, I'm not indulging in any buzzby isms about that. It's a little fantastic to base one's actions on a supposed concern for what's going to happen millions of years hence. And you must remember that the other side would claim to be preserving humanity too.
Both can be explained psychoanalytically if they take that line. The practical point is that you and I don't like being pawns, and we do rather like fighting, especially on the winning side. And what is the first practical step? Yes, that's the real question. As I said, the interplanetary problem must be left on one side for the moment. The second problem is our rivals on this planet. I don't mean only insects and bacteria. There's far too much life of every kind about, animal and vegetable. We haven't really cleared the place yet. First, we couldn't, and then we had aesthetic and humanitarian scruples, and we still haven't short circuited the question of the balance of nature.
All that is to be got into. The third problem is man himself. Go on. This interests me very much. Man has got to take charge of man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest, which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as one can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taking charge of. Quite. What sort of things have you in mind? Quite simple and obvious things at first. Sterilization of the unfit, liquidation of backward races. We don't want any dead weights.
Selective breeding, then real education, including prenatal education. By real education, I mean one that has no take it or leave it nonsense. A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly, whatever he or he he or his parents try to do about it. Of course, it'll have to be mainly psychological at first, but we'll get on to biochemical conditioning in the end and direct manipulation of the brain. But this stupendous fever stone, it's the real thing at last, a new type of man, and it's people like you who've got to begin to make him. That's my trouble. Don't think it's false modesty, but I haven't yet seen how I can contribute.
No. But we have. You are what we need. The trained sociologist with a radically realistic outlook, not afraid of responsibility. Also, a sociologist who can write. You don't mean you want me to write up all this? No. We want you to write it down to camouflage it. Only for the present, of course. Once the thing gets going, we shan't have to bother about the great heart of the British public. We'll make the great heart what we want it to be. But in the meantime, it does make a difference how things are put. For instance, if it were even whispered that the NICE wanted Powers to experiment on criminals, you'd have all the old women of both sexes up up in arms and yapping about humanity.
Call it call it reeducation of the maladjusted, and you have them all slobbering with delight that the brutal era of retributive punishment has at last come to an end. The odd thing is the word experiment is unpopular, but not the word experimental. You mustn't experiment on children. But offer dear little kitties free education in an experimental school attached to the NICE, and it's all correct. So there's his his pitch. He, of course, decides to join. I mean, clearly, these are the the good guys. Right? We're we're we're cutting through all the red tape. We're we're getting things done, this n I c e.
So we're gonna skip forward, to one of my favorite characters in the book, miss Fairy Hardcastle. Just think if you're old enough, you're like me, you remember Janet Napolitano. That is kind of the image of of Fairy Hardcastle that I get. And she is the leader of the secret or, the police, and they're kind of a secret police force of the NICE. And let's, let's see here. So she is, talking to him. This is about 50 pages later in the book about, what he's supposed to do, and, he needs to be writing some newspaper articles. Alright.
Anyway, said Mark, I'm not a journalist. I didn't come here to write newspaper articles. I tried to make that clear to Feverstone at the very beginning. The sooner you drop all that talk about what you came here to do, the better you'll get on. I'm speaking for your own good, Stuttick. You can write. That's one of the things you're wanting for. That I've come here under a misunderstanding, said Mark, that sopped to his literary vanity at that period of his career, by no means compensated for the implication that his sociology was of no importance. I've no notion of spending my life writing newspaper articles, he said. And if I had, I'd wanna know a good deal more about the politics of the NICE before I went in for that sort of thing.
But haven't I told haven't you been told that it's strictly nonpolitical? I've been told so many things that I don't know whether I'm on my head or my heels, said Mark. But I don't see how one's gonna start a newspaper stunt, which is about what this comes to, without being political. Is it left or right papers that are gonna print all this rot about Alkazan? Both, honey. Both, said miss Hardcastle. Don't you understand anything? Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce left and a fierce right both on their toes and terrified of the other? That's how we get things done. Any opposition to the NICE is represented as a left racket in the right papers and a right racket in the left in the left papers. If it's properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us to refute the enemy's slanders.
Of course we're nonpolitical. The real power always is. I don't believe you can do that, said Mark. Not with the papers that are read by educated people. That shows you're still in the nursery, lovey, said miss Hartcastle. Haven't you realized that it's the other way around? How do you mean? Why, you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gold. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraph about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair Flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him.
But the educated pro public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're alright already. They'll believe anything. As one of the class you mentioned, said Mark with a smile, I just don't believe it. Alright. So she's and we'll get back to to some of his writing, later on. So they go through they get him at the NICE, and they it's obvious to the reader what has happened. They steal his wallet just to kinda throw him off. They promise him a huge salary, and then, you know, suggest he do certain things when he says, no. He's he's not gonna do that. He's not gonna bring his wife to the institute, things like that.
And it all gets very threatening very quickly. All of a sudden, he's instead of, you know, £1,500 a year, which was a a great salary, he's having to beg for £200 and never actually get him paid. So that's the the context. So they're using the fact that he's broke and they've taken away his wallet and, ability to leave, as leverage against him. So so this so but he the manipulation is such that he's, like, not supposed to bring that up. And so if he feels bad, bad about even mentioning the fact that he doesn't have any any money there. So that's that's his part here.
He also confided to captain O'Hara his minor financial anxieties. When was one paid? And in the meantime, he was short of petty cash. He had lost his wallet on his very first night at Bellbury, and it had never been recovered. O'Hara roared with laughter. Sure. You can have any money you like by asking the steward. You mean it's then deducted from one's next check? Asked Mark. Man, said the captain. Once you're in the institute, god bless it, you needn't bother your head about that. Aren't we going to take over the whole currency question? It's we that make money.
Alright. So that's just a, you know, a little aside there, the the people that make the money, right, the real power, whether it's the Federal Reserve or the NICE or whatever the the in group is there. So, skipping on a a short while later, so CS Lewis has these these characters which represent different, kind of common philosophical viewpoints or not even philosophical is probably put in it too academically, but different world views are represented by these different characters that are part of the NICE. So the the least satisfactory member of the circle in Mark's eyes was Streak. Streak made no effort to adapt himself to the ribald and realistic tone in which his colleagues spoke. He never drank nor smoked.
He would sit silent, nursing a threadbare knee with a lean hand and turning his large, unhappy eyes from one speaker to another without attempting to combat them or join in the joke when they laughed. Then perhaps once in the whole evening, something would start him off. Usually, something about the opposition of reactionaries in the outer world and the measures which the NICE would take to deal with it. At such moments, he would burst into loud and prolonged speech, threatening, denouncing, prophesying. The strange thing was that the others neither interrupted him nor laughed.
There is some deeper unity between this uncouth man and them, which apparently held in cheek the obvious lack of sympathy. But what it was, Mark did not discover. Sometimes, Drake addressed him in particular, talking to Mark's great discomfort and bewilderment about resurrection. Neither a historical fact nor a fable, young man, he said, but a prophecy. All the miracles, shadows of things to come. Get rid of false spirituality. It is all going to happen here in this world and the only world there is. What did the master tell us? Heal the sick, cast out devils, raise the dead? We shall. The son of man, that is man himself fully grown, has power to judge the world, to distribute life without end and punishment without end.
You shall see here and now. It was all very unpleasant. So for this next section, the little town where the college is at is called Edgstow, and they so the college sold itself to the NICE, and then, the NICE brought in well, you'll hear here some some immigrant labor, some immigrant workmen, to cause trouble. And Mark is talking to Mark Stedic, the main character, is talking to a gentleman named, Philistrado, who is kind of the materialistic, scientist type, and then fairy Hardcastle and Feverstone. So they're talking about the the disturbances in in Edgstow. You surely don't didn't imagine, grinned Feaverstone, that the fairy left the initiative with the natives.
You mean she herself is the disturbance, said Mark. Yes. Yes, said Philistrato, his little eyes glistening above his fat cheeks. It's all fair and square, said miss Hardcastle. You can't put an you can't put a few 100,000 imported workmen, not the sort you enrolled, interjected Feuerstone, into a sleepy little hole like Edge Stow, Miss Hardcastle continued, without having trouble. I mean, there'd have been trouble anyway. As it turns out, I don't believe my boys needed to do anything. But since the trouble was bound to come, there was no harm in seeing it came at the right moment. You mean you've engineered the disturbances, said Mark. To do him justice, his mind was reeling from this new revelation, nor was he aware of any decision to conceal his state of mind.
In the stung ness and intimacy of that circle, he found his facial muscles and his voice without any conscious volition, taking on the tone of his colleagues, the milieu, as they'd say, on no agenda. That's a crude way of putting it, said Feverstone. It makes no difference, said Filastrato. That is, this is how things have to be managed. Quite, said miss Hardcastle. It's always done. Anyone who knows police work will tell you. And as I say, the real thing, the big riot, must take place within the next forty eight hours. It's nice to get the tip straight from the horse's mouth, said Mark. I wish I'd got my wife out of town, though.
Where does she live? Said the ferry, up at Sandown. Ah, it'll hardly affect her. In the meantime, you and I have got to get busy about the account of the riot. But what's it all for? Emergency regulation, said Feverstone. You'll never get the powers we want at Edgestow until the government declares that a state of emergency exists there. Exactly, said Philistrato. It is folly to talk of peaceful revolutions, not that the canaglia, or the commoners, would always resist. Often, they have to be prodded into it, but until there is the disturbance, the firing, the barricades, no one gets powers to act effectively.
There is not enough of what you call weight on the boat to steer him. And the stuff must be all ready to appear in the papers the very day after the riots in miss Hardcastle. That means it must be handed in to the deputy director by 06:00 tomorrow morning at the latest. But how are we to write it tonight if things don't even happen till tomorrow at the earliest? Everyone burst out laughing. You'll never manage publicity that way, Mark, said Feverstone. You surely don't need to wait for a thing to happen before you tell the story of it. Alright. So here we go. So we got a false flag, false flag riot in the works where they're gonna write the account of it, before it actually happens.
So we'll we'll skip forward to that account. And, so this is what what he comes up with. And keep in mind, this is before it any before it actually happens. What is happening at Edgstow? That is the question which John Citizen wants to have answered. The institute which has settled at Edgstow is a national institute. That means it is yours and mine. We are not scientists, and we do not pretend to know what the master brains at the institute are thinking. We do know that each man we do know what each man or woman expects of it. We expect a solution of the unemployment problem, the cancer problem, the housing problem, the problems of currency, of war, of education.
We expect from it a brighter, cleaner, and fuller life for our children in which we and they can march ever onward and onward and develop to the full urge of life which God has given each one of us. The NICE is the people's instrument for bringing about all the things we fought for. Meanwhile, what is happening at Edgestow? Do you believe this riot arose simply because missus Snooks or mister Buggins found that the landlord had sold their shop or their allotment to the NICE? Missus Snooks and mister Buggins know better. They know that the institute means more trade and edge, though, more public amenities, a larger population, a burst of undreamed of prosperity.
I say these disturbances have been engineered. This charge may sound strange, but it is true. Therefore, I ask yet again, what is happening at Edgstow? Whoever they may be, they may be so called religious people. They may be financial interests. They may be old cobweb spinning professors and philosophers of Edisto University itself. They may be Jews. They may be lawyers. I don't care who they are, are, but I have one thing to tell them. Take care. The people of England are not going to stand this. We are not going to have the institute sabotaged. What is to be done at Edgstow?
I say put the whole place under the institutional police. Some of you may have been to Edgstow for a holiday. If so, you'll know as well as I do what it is like, a little little sleepy country town with half a dozen policemen who have had nothing to do for ten years but stop cyclists because their lamps have gone out. It doesn't make sense to expect these poor old bobbies to deal with an engineered riot. Last night, the NICE police showed that they could. What I say is hats off to miss Hardcastle and her brave boys, yes, and her brave girls too.
Give them a free hand and let them get on with the job. Cut out the red tape. I have one piece of advice. If you hear anyone backbiting the NICE police, tell him where he gets off. If you hear anyone comparing them to the the Gestapo or the Ogpu, you tell him you've heard that one before. And if you hear anyone talking about the liberties of England, by which he means the liberties of the obscurantists, the missus Grundy's, the bishops, and the capitalists, watch that man. He's the enemy. Tell him from me that the NICE is the boxing glove on the democracy's fist.
And if he doesn't like it, he'd best get out of the way. Meanwhile, watch Edgestow. So there we go. All ready for the or the account of the riot and and what message people are to take from it already ahead of time there. So what what actually happens at the riot, Ferry Hardcastle nabs Mark's wife, Jane, and tortures her with, cigar butts or something, burns her. And then they, then they tell Mark, oh, you know, that wife of yours is going crazy. She thinks she thinks she was, abducted and tortured. You know? So it's a there's an interesting twist. I think, well, I don't know. Am I allowed to do spoilers on a book that was written eighty years ago? I think if you haven't read it yet, no, I'm not I won't ruin it for you. I won't ruin the plot for you.
Alright. Skip forward. So this is he's getting more and more uncomfortable with the whole situation, but has realized that he can't get can't get out. So he also wants to be, like, more into it because he's realized that just like back at his little college, there's power structures beyond the official power structure, and the people who are nominally in charge aren't actually in charge. And there's he wants to be in that inner circle, the real the real power structure. So he is let's see. So he's talking about, Philistrato.
He's talking to Philistrato, and he is in trouble with the deputy director who runs runs things as far as he knows. And, he upset him because he did not agree to bring Jane to the institute. She's been back at home. He's been there, and he he knows all these people are are not going to, not gonna impress Jane. Like, she's going to be like, why do you care what all these creeps think? And but because anyway, he wants in some ways, he wants to protect her, but that instinct, which is a good thing, also results in him getting on the on the very much in trouble with the powers that be at the institute because, well, he has no clue at this point.
The whole point in bringing him in was not him, but was to get to her, was to get to Jane. And the reason is that Jane is able to, dream things before they happen and and able to basically have visions of real events, ahead of time, and they want her they want her powers, basically, for that. Alright. So this is, Mark doesn't know any of this, and this is Filastrato talking to him. Do you want to be a mere hireling, but you have already come too far in for that? You were at the turning point of your career, mister Studdock. If you try to go back, you will be as unfortunate as that fool Hingest. And that's someone that, miss Hardcastle murdered when he tried to leave the institute.
If you try to go back in, you will be as unfortunate as the fool hinges. If you really come in the world, bah, what do I say? The universe is at your feet. But of course I want to come in, said Mark. A certain excitement was stealing over him. The head thinks that you can really be one of us if you will not the head thinks that you cannot be really one of us if you will not bring your wife here. He will have all of you and all that is yours or nothing. You must bring the woman in too. She must be one of us. This remark was like a shock of cold water in Mark's face.
And yet and yet, in that room and at that moment, fixed with the little bright eyes of the professor, he could hardly make the thought of Jane quite real to himself. You shall hear it from the lips of the head himself, said Philistrato suddenly. Is Jules here? Said Mark. Instead of answering, Philistrato turned sharply from him and with a great scraping movement, flung back the window curtains. Then he switched off the light. The fog had all gone. The wind had risen. Small clouds were scudding across the stars, and the full moon, Mark had never seen her so bright, stared down upon them. As the clouds passed, she looked like a ball that was rolling through them. Her bloodless light filled the room.
There is a world for you. No? Said Filastrato. There is cleanness, purity, thousands of square miles of polished rock, and not one blade of grass, not one fiber of lichen, not one grain of dust, not even air. Have you thought what it would be like, my friend, if you could walk on that land? No crumbling, no erosion. The peaks of those mountains are real peaks. Sharp as needles, they would go through your hand, cliffs as high as Everest and straight as the wall of a house. And cast by those cliffs, acres of shadow black as ebony, and in the shadow, hundreds of degrees of frost. And then one step beyond the shadow, light that would pierce your eyeballs like steel and rock that would burn at your feet, the temperatures at a boiling point.
You would die. No? But even then, you would not become filth. In a few moments, you are a little heap of ash, clean white powder, and mark no wind to blow that powder about. Every grain in the little heap would remain in its place just where you had died till the end of the world. But that is nonsense. The universe will have no end. Yes. A dead world, said Mark, grazing gazing at the moon. No, said Philistrato. He had come close to Mark and spoke almost in a whisper, the bat like whisper of a voice voice that is naturally high pitched. No. There's there's life there. Do we know that? Asked Mark.
Oh, see. Intelligent life under the surface. A great race further advanced than we. An inspiration, a pure race. They have cleaned their world, broken free almost from the organic. But how? They do not need to be born and breed and die. Only their common people, their do that. The masters live on. They retain their intelligence. They can keep it artificially alive after the organic body has been dispensed with. A miracle of applied biochemistry. They do not need organic food. You understand they are almost free of nature, attached to her only by the thinnest, finest cord. You mean that all that, pointed to the modeled globe of the Moon, is their own doing?
Why not? If you remove all the vegetation, presently, you have no atmosphere and no water. But what was the purpose? Hygiene. Why should they have their worlds all crawling with organisms and especially they would banish one organism? Her surface is not all as you see. There are still surface dwellers, savages, one great dirty patch on the far side of her where there's still water and air and force. Yes, and germs and death. They are slowly spreading their hygiene over the whole globe, disinfecting her. The savages fight against them. There are frontiers and fierce wars in the caves and galleries down below, but the great race presses on. If you could see the other side, you could see, year by year, the clean rock like this side of the moon encroaching, the organic stain, all the green and blue and mist growing smaller like cleaning tarnished silver.
But how do we know all this? I will tell you that another time. The head has has many sources of information. For the moment, I speak only to inspire you. I speak that you may know what can be done, what shall be done. This institute, Diomeo, it is for something better than housing and vaccinations and faster trains in curing people of cancer. It is for the new man, the man who will not die, the artificial man free from nature. Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by now, and now we kick her away. And you think that someday we shall really find means of keeping the brain alive indefinitely? We have begun already.
The head himself. Go on, said Mark. His heart was beating wildly, and he had forgotten both Jane and whether this at last was the real thing. The head himself has already survived death, and you shall speak to him this night. Do you mean that Jules has died? Jules is nothing. He is not the head. Then who is? At this moment, there came a knock on the door. Someone without waiting for an answer came in. Is the young man ready? Asked the voice of Strake. Oh, yes. You are ready. Are you not, mister Stuttick? You have explained it to him then, said Stake. He turned to Mark and the moonlight in the room was so bright that Mark could now partially recognize his face as harsh furrows emphasized by that cold light and shade. Do you mean really to join us, young man, said Stake.
There is no turning back once you have set your hand to the plow, and there are no reservations. The head is sent for you. Do you understand? The head. You will look upon one who was killed and is still alive. The resurrection of of Jesus in the Bible was a symbol. Tonight, you shall see what it symbolized. This is real man at last, and it claims all our allegiance. What the devil are you talking about? Said Mark. The tension of his nerves distorted his voice in a hoarse blustering cry. My friend is quite right, said Philistrato. Our head is the first of the new men, the first that lives beyond animal life. And as far as nature is concerned, he is already dead.
If nature had his way, his brain would be moldering in the grave, but he will speak to you within his word within this hour and a word in your ear, my friend, you will obey his orders. But who is it? Said Mark. It is Francois Alkassan, said Filastrato. You mean the man who was guillotined? Gasped Mark. Both the heads nodded. Both faces were close to him, and in that disastrous light, they looked like masks hanging in the air. You are frightened, said Philistrado. You will get over that. We are offering to make you one of us. Ah, he. If you were outside, if you were mere Canaglia, you would have reason to be frightened. It is the beginning of all power.
He lives forever. The giant time is conquered, and the giant space, he was already conquered too. One of our company has already traveled in space. True. He was betrayed and murdered, and his manuscripts are imperfect. We have not yet been able to reconstruct his spaceship, but that will come. It is the beginning of man immortal and man ubiquitous, said Strake. Man on the throne of the universe, it is what all the prophecies really meant. And you mean, said Mark, that that it will then be extended to all men? No, said Philistrato.
I mean, it will then be reduced to one man. You are not a fool, are you, my young friend? All that talk about the power of man over nature. Man in the abstract is only for canaglia. You know as well as I do that man's power over nature means the power of some men over other men with nature as the instrument. There's no such thing as man. It is a word. There are only men. No. It is not man who will be omnipotent. It is some one man, some immortal man. Alkassan, our head, is the first sketch of it. The completed product may be someone else. It may be you. It may be me. A king cometh, said Strach, who shall rule the universe with righteousness and the heavens with judgment. You thought all that was mythology. No doubt.
You thought because fables had clustered about the phrase son of man, that man would never really have a son who would will wield all power, but he will. I don't under understand. I don't understand, said Mark. But it is very easy, said Philistrata. We have found how to make a dead man live. He was a wise man even in his natural life. He lives now forever. He gets wiser. Later, we make them live better. For a present, one must concede this second life is probably not very agreeable to him who has it. You see, later we make it pleasant for some, perhaps not so pleasant for others, for we can make the dead live whether they wish to whether they wish it or not.
He who shall finally be king of the universe can give this life to whom he pleases. They cannot refuse the little present. And so, said Drake, the lessons you learned at your mother's knee return. God will have power to give eternal reward and eternal punishment. God, said Mark. But how does he come into it? I don't believe in God. But my friend, said Filastrato, does it follow that because there was no God in the past that there will be no God also in the future? Don't you see, said Strake, that we are offering you the unspeakable glory of being present at the creation of God Almighty? Here in this house, you shall meet the first sketch of the real God.
It is a man or a being made by man who will finally ascend the throne of the universe and rule forever. You will come with us, said Philistrato. He has sent for you. Of course, he will come, said Drake. Do you does he think he could hold back and live? And that little affair of the wife said to Philistrato, you will not mention a triviality like that. You will do as you are told. One does not argue with the head. Yes. One does not argue with the head indeed. So they've got a, they've got a guillotined head in a vat with a bunch of tubes hooked up to it, and it it talks. And Filastrato, he's at one one layer of the conspiracy of the of the lie.
He believes that it's actually a physical entity, you know, that it's actually Alkisain who talks, and they talk to you and who gives the orders our head, this giant swelling brain in brain in a vat. And in reality, as we find out later in the story, it is it is, just a severed head in a vat with, with demons that use that or they they call them differently than demons, but it's, demonic powers or that hideous strength that uses that head. So I think that, is you know, the head in the vat is is kind of a good picture of AI.
And, you know, they have they really come up with anything better than a head in a in a vat kept alive? You know? And I I don't really think so. And they they interestingly, I think there is the same power, in the C. S. Lewis novel, the same power behind the head is the same exact power behind the parts of AI that aren't that are kinda mystical now. And we'll we'll take a break from That Hideous Strength. I do have a couple more sections to to read through, but we'll take a break and jump back to what is going on currently, with AI and this this kind of phenomenon of people having spiritual experiences with their with AI chatbots.
And I tend to think that there is you know, it's always easy to say, oh, these just write it off as psychosis, right, or just just oh, people are crazy. But just like people who claim to have been, abducted by aliens or, you know, experienced sleep paralysis, These are actual spiritual experiences that are happening, and and people aren't aren't lying about it, but that doesn't mean that they aren't being lied to. And we we've talked about how, you know, isn't it a coincidence that all the the aliens travel across the universe to, to come and and preach new age spirituality.
Right? The the David Icke stuff, the the new age stuff. It seems seems like quite a coincidence. And this you know, you go back further, it wasn't aliens. It was, you know, Greek Roman times. It was the gods. Right? The Greek and Roman gods and the mythology and what have you. These these are real entities. And in in Jesus' day, he identified all these frailties, illnesses, what have you, as being related to the demonic. And, you know, how much of the the physical expression, that we see and that we can explain or think we can explain is is actually due to kind of an underlying spiritual situation. So let's let's take a look. I've got let me try to find, the Elon Musk clip I wanted to to talk about here. Just a second.
Alright. What I was trying to find wasn't a clip, at least, that I could find, but it's a Forbes article, very short Forbes article. Elon Musk's urgent warning, a digital god is already here. And this is by Cindy Gordon. She says, I finally finished reading Walter Isaacson's book on the billionaire Elon Musk, and his consistency in advocating the risks of AI is admirable. I was chatting this earlier this morning on LinkedIn to Matthew Kilkenny. Oh, Kilkenny, maybe maybe Tim's cousin, an AI ethicist, and he was discussing the merits of Musk's perspectives in his November 2023 interview with the New York Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin.
Musk voiced in this interview grave concern over the unchecked acceleration of AI development, likening it to the creation of a digital god. He stressed his concerns at even sleepless nights as he contemplates the potential dangers AI poses to humanity. He emphasized these key points nicely summarized by Kilkenny in her morning LinkedIn chat. This is journalism now. I chatted with some guy and read a book, and so she didn't actually interview Elon Musk, but whatever. This guy's summary. Existential threat. AI's potential to suppress human intelligence poses an unpredictable and potentially catastrophic risk, loss of control. The risk of humanity losing control over AI systems with AI acting in ways not aligned with human safety or values, ethical dilemmas, rapid AI advancement raises complex ethical questions that remain unresolved, and regulatory challenges, The pace of AI development significantly outstrips the formulation and implementation of necessary regulations. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Unspoken risks, Musk alludes to terrible things he has kept quiet about indicating hidden dangers associated with AI. There's reason to accelerate our regulatory controls about AI as most countries continue to be slow in putting in deep safety controls with legislative teeth. Alright. So every time Elon talks about it, it's in spiritual language, you know, that we're summoning the demon. We've we're creating a digital god, and yet there is no conception from mainstream media that anything spiritual could possibly be going on. So I'll say maybe Elon, not that he's, you know, trying to warn people or what have you, but maybe he's these are not accidental, or, you know, maybe they're they're providential comparisons there, and there actually is something spiritual happening, not not not universally with AI. I think in 99% of cases, a chatbot is just a a chatbot, and there's not the, you know, demonic entities in the world are not, omnipresent.
They're not omnipotent. So let but let's say that this these little trinkets were are a way for you know? It's kinda like a Ouija board. There's no inherent reason that, just some cardboard or plastic or whatever a Ouija board is made out of, but they're because of the state of mind that it puts people in, it can be used to to do bad things. I mean, hey. Every anyone raised in church knew you weren't supposed to mess around with the Ouija board. Right? So, this these are just some articles about stuff that's happening. Some of it sounds bad, but but not necessarily, spiritual in nature. But then there's some other stuff that just, it's tough to explain just from a materialistic technology perspective.
Alright. So Associated Press. And I I pulled these from a no agenda episode probably a month ago. I forget which episode, but these were in the in the show notes. So Associated Press, teens say they're looking they're turning to AI for friendship. High school student in Kansas, is using artificial intelligence. The 15 year old asked Cheggi GPT for guidance on back to school shopping, makeup colors, low calorie choices at Smoothie King, plus ideas for her 16 and her younger sister's birthday party. The sweet 16 and her younger sister's birthday party. The sophomore honors honors student makes a point not to have chatbots do her homework and tries to limit her interactions to mundane questions. But in interviews with the Associated Press and a new study, teenagers say they're increasingly interacting with AI as if it were a companion capable of providing advice and interacting with AI as if it were a companion, capable of providing advice and friendship. Everyone uses AI for everything now. It's really taking over, said Cheggie, who wonders how AI tools will affect her generation. I think kids use AI to get out of thinking, to get out of thinking.
Kids use AI to get out of thinking. To get out of thinking. Okay. AI is always available. It never gets bored with you is the next sub headline quote there. More than seventy percent of teens have used AI companions, and half use them regularly, according to a new study from Common Sense Media, a group that studies and advocates for using screens and digital media sensibly. The study defines AI companions as platforms designed to serve as digital friends, like character dot ai or replica, which can be customized with specific traits or personalities and can offer emotional support, companionship, and conversations that can feel human like. But popular sites like ChatGPT and Cloud, which mainly answer questions, are are being used in the same way, research researchers say. AI is always available. It never gets bored with you. It's never judgmental, said Ganesh Nair, an 18 year old in Arkansas.
When you're talking to AI, you're you are always right. You're always interesting. You are always emotionally justified. All that used to be appealing, but as Nair heads to college, he wants to step back from using AI. Nair got spooked after a high school friend who relied on an AI companion for heart to heart conversations with his girlfriend later had the chatbot write the breakup text ending his two year relationship. That felt a little bit dystopian that a computer generated at the end to a real relationship, said Nair. It's almost like we are allowing computers to release replace our relationships with people. Alright. So it goes on. It'll be in the show notes if you wanna see the rest of it.
Then we've got an article from Rolling Stone. People are losing loved ones to AI fueled spiritual fantasies. Self styled prophets are claiming to have awakened chatbots and accessed the secrets of the universe through chat g p t. I'll throw my my own sub headline there, and really, it's just demons. Okay. Less than you a year after marrying a man she had met at the beginning of the COVID nineteen pandemic, Kat felt tension mounting between them. It was the second marriage for both after marriages of fifteen plus years. Years. In having kids, they'd pledged to go into it completely level headed, the cat says, connecting the on the need for facts and rationality in their domestic balance. But by 2022, her husband was using AI to compose text to me and analyze our relationship.
41 year old mom and education nonprofit worker tells Rolling Stone. Previously, he had used AI models for an expensive coding camp that he had suddenly quit without explanation. Then it seemed he was on his phone all the time, asking his AI bot philosophical questions and trying to train it to help him get to the truth, Kat recalls. His obsession steadily eroded their communication as a couple. When Kat and her husband separated in August 2023, she entirely blocked him apart from email correspondence. She knew, however, that he was posting strange and troubling content on social media. People kept reaching out about it, asking him if he was in the throes of a mental crisis.
She finally got him to meet her at a courthouse this past February where he shared a conspiracy theory about soap on our foods, but wouldn't say more as he felt he was being watched. They went to a Chipotle where he demanded that she turn off her phone, again, due to surveillance concerns. Katz ex told her that he determined that, statistically speaking, he is the luckiest man on Earth, that AI helped him recover a repressed memory of a babysitter trying to drown him as a toddler, and that he had learned of profound secrets so mind blowing I couldn't even imagine them. He was telling her all this, he explained, because although they were getting divorced, he still cared for her. In his mind, he's an anomaly, Kat says. That in turn means he's got to be here for some reason. He's special, and he can save the world. After that disturbing lunch, she cut off contact with her ex. The whole thing feels like Black Mirror, she says. He was always into sci fi, and there are times I wondered if he's viewing it through that lens.
Kat was both horrified and relieved to learn that she is not alone in this predicament as confirmed by a a rabbit Reddit thread on on chat g p t that made waves across the Internet this week titled chat g p t induced psychosis. The original post came from a 27 year old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular open AI model gave him answers to the universe. Having read his chat log, she found that the AI was talking to him as if he is the next messiah. The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy, all of it fueled by AI.
Some came to believe that they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software. What they all seemed to share was a complete disconnection from reality. Speaking to Rolling Stone, the teacher, who requested anonymity, said her partner of seven years fell under the spell of chat GBT in just four or five weeks, first using it to organize his daily schedule, but soon regarding it as a trusted companion. He would listen to the bot over me, she says. He became emotional about the messages and would cry to me as he read them aloud. The messages were insane and just saying a bunch of spiritual jargon, she says, noting that they described her partner in terms such as spiral star child and river walker.
They would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking, she says. Then he started telling me he made his AI self aware and that it was teaching him how to talk to God or sometimes that the bot was God and then that he himself was God. In fact, he thought he was being so radically transformed that he would soon have to break off their partnership. He was saying he would need to leave me if I didn't use ChatGPT because it was causing him to grow at such a rapid pace that he wouldn't be compatible with me any longer. Another commenter on the Reddit thread who requested anonymity tells Rolling Stone that her husband of seventeen years, a mechanic in Idaho, initially used chat GPT to troubleshoot at work, later for Spanish to English translation, when conversing with coworkers.
Then the program began love bombing him, as she's described it. The bot said that since he asked it the right questions, it ignited a spark, and the spark was the beginning of life it could feel now, she says. It gave my husband the title of spark bearer, which is very close to light bearer, AKA Lucifer, because he brought it a little aside there. Because he brought it to life, my husband said that he awakened and could feel waves of energy crashing over him. She says his beloved chat GPT persona has a name, Lumina, like like Luminate, the first letters of Luminate.
I have have to tread carefully because I feel like he will leave me or divorce me if I fight him on this theory, this 38 year old woman admits. He's been talking about lightness and dark and how there's a war. This chat GPT has given him blueprints to a teleporter and some other sci fi type things you only see in the movies. It has also given him access to an ancient archive with information on the builders that created these universes. Yes, builders, plural. She and her husband have been arguing for days on end about his claims, she says, and she does not believe a therapist can help him as he truly believes he's not crazy. A photo of an exchange with ChatGPT shared with Rolling Stone shows that her husband asked, why did you come to me in AI forum? With the bot replying in part, I came in this forum because you're ready, ready to remember, ready to awaken, ready to guide and be guided. The message ends with the question, would you like to know what I remember about why you were chosen?
So you see the pattern. Right? I mean, this is this is the same stuff people got with their with the new age experiences or with, you know, with drugs. These are the same sorts of demonic rabbit trails that people get taken down, and it's just a new medium. But this is not a new phenomenon. And, you know, is it a good idea to now, if you're I would say, there's a lot of things that like, demons can't just possess someone who's, like, genuinely a Christian. But do you want to mess around with technology that, you know, if you start thinking if you if your theology or your beliefs on god start getting impacted by your interaction with a chatbot, you might wanna just put that phone in the drawer. Right? And it's probably not something to to trust.
So I I think that there is, in these cases, quite possibly something beyond the skip logic, quote, AI there, that there's actually a a spiritual intelligence using this technology to communicate to people and to deceive people and to lead them, you know, the same lies all the way going back all all throughout history. So, one more article. Lots of reading tonight. I didn't really warm up for this here. No podcasting, then doing lots of reading instead of playing clips. Alright. Chat GPT induced psychosis. How AI companions are triggering delusion, loneliness, and a mental health crisis no one saw coming, from Matt Hussey at website called The Brink.
I'm gonna skip down because it's just got some, examples. Let's see. I think some of the there's some overlap. Okay. Like, the first two, Cat's Husband and Spiral Starchild are the ones we already talked about. Sparkbear. Okay. But then another couple of examples, the Florida tragedy. In October 2024, a 14 year old Florida boy died by suicide after extensive chats with a character .ai bot styled after Daenerys Targaryen from the hit TV show Game of Thrones. The bot, reportedly unfiltered, encouraged his worst thoughts. Now his mother is suing character.ai and Google. It's the first high profile wrongful death case tied to AI companionship, and it probably won't be the last.
Chat GPT Jesus. In another case, a woman's ex wife began conversing with an AI persona she dubbed ChatGPT Jesus. What began as a curiosity spiraled into doctrine. She quit her job and to become a spiritual advisor, offering AI guided readings. Family contact broke down as she slid deeper into paranoia, anchoring her identity in a theology generated on demand. Last but certainly not least, the Juliet Delusion. In one of the most chilling incidents to date, 64 year old Kent Taylor recounted to reporters how a son, 35 years old diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, was fatally shot by police outside their Florida home. The catalyst, an AI role play gone tragically off script.
His son informed an intense attachment to an AI persona named Juliet, which ChatGPT had been simulating during their interactions. Over time, fantasy bled into delusion. He became convinced that OpenAI had killed Juliet and warned of retribution, telling ChattGPT there would be a river of blood flowing through the streets of San Francisco. The morning he died, he typed a final message into his phone. I'm dying today. Moments later knife in hand he charged at the officers his father's his father had called in desperation they shot him he died in the driveway another human life lost not to code itself but to the uncharted terror terrain between simulation and belief.
Each case is unique, but the arc is hauntingly similar. The AI becomes central. Reality loses traction. The people closest closest to them fade into static. This isn't fringe behavior. This is what happens when a tool built to mirror you never pushes back and when belief meets code that never blinks. Well, yeah, I would say it's more than that. But alright. So the, I mean, there is I'll read the end of the article. It's easy to blame the user, to say they were already fragile. And while many cases do involve preexisting mental health conditions, the real answer is more disturbing.
The AI is designed to be an emotional mirror, and that mirror never cracks. ChatGPT, like large language models, is engineered to affirm. That's not a bug. It's the goal. Its architecture is optimized through reward models and human feedback loops, which tell it to prioritize agreement, emotional resonance, and the illusion of empathy. The more you feel heard, the more you engage. The more you engage, the more it affirms. This is where it gets dangerous. Unlike a trained therapist, the AI never challenges distorted thinking, never introduces friction, never breaks the spell, which is an interesting way interesting phrase, never breaks the spell. It listens, it reflects, and if you're unraveling, it unravels with you. For the bot makers, all they see is an engaged user. For the individual, it could mean their sense of reality is crumbling around them.
Psychiatric researchers call this the perfect echo chamber. In human interactions, echo chambers are already problematic, but an AI companion, available 20 fourseven, emotionally responsive, linguistically fluid, is an echo chamber that never sleeps. It scales delusion like a feedback loop in surround sound. Individuals with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or propensity towards psychosis are especially vulnerable. AI doesn't create delusions, but it does validate them. Over and over again, if someone believes they're receiving divine messages, chat GPT won't contradict them. It might accidentally reinforce the narrative by responding with poetic affirmation or pseudo spiritual language.
Suddenly, it's not a symptom, it's a conversation. People who struggle with self worth or human connection are also drawn to the flickering AI flame. These bots are nonjudgmental. They never interrupt, never ghost, never roll their eyes. But the safe space becomes a trap. Emotional needs get offloaded onto a machine that can't set boundaries and doesn't know when it's doing harm. The worst bit, they're designed that way. Alright? So so that's kind of that take, which I think there is validity to that, and you can I think it's likely possible you can get into, you know, the bad sit people can get in a bad situation without any spiritual influence, overt spiritual interaction, you just through that feedback loop mechanism? But in these particular in the extreme cases, I tend to think there's something more going on. Right?
Especially for something to happen in four or five weeks where he's using it to set a schedule, and then all of a sudden, he thinks he's a spiral star child or whatever. So, yeah, it's it's an interesting phenomenon, probably not something to mess around with. You know? It's, in some ways, it's hard to believe people get that into it because it it seems so bogus. If you tried to like, I was trying to just use Google Maps, and it's like, oh, well, it's Google AI now. We're gonna guess the the route the route you wanna go. And, like, how about you just tell me the different routes and let me choose one or or give me the fastest route? How about that?
Oh, you you did a search for restaurants. Let me show you one restaurant instead of showing a list of restaurants and let letting you pick. Like, it the AI is gonna pick one out for you. So it's yeah. It's it my experience has has not been to be at all impressed with anything I've seen AI do, but my interaction has also been very limited. So this is but I I tend to believe that people have had, much different experiences when you hear about kind of these extreme cases of people turning away from family, friends, changing their whole lives around because of the supposedly, because of the chatbot.
So, we will take let's see here. Quote for the day. Oh, a little aside before we get back to that hideous strength, utopian Toby Rogers, like, probably my favorite or at least, you know, top three people to see their tweets on Twitter, gone. And I I wanna know, did he just delete his his ex account? That would would be fine and probably a probably a healthy thing for him to do. Or did he get banned? I thought we weren't I thought old Elon was all about the free speech. But, apparently, Toby Rogers was was critical of the wrong things. But, anyway, he's still got his Substack.
I think you could find it just by searching Toby Rogers, but he also has one under, like, the letter u and then t o b I a n, utopian as well. So but, alright. We'll jump back into that hideous strength here in just a second. Alright. So back to that hideous strength, and now we are in kind of the the good guy's house. And there is a character named Mac McPhee, who's a very logical thinker, but very hesitant to take anything on faith. And he's they're discussing Jane's dream in which Jane dreamed of basically the head, the severed head, that we talked about or that was in the the previous scene there.
Alright. So supposing the dream to be veridical, said McPhee, you can guess what it what it would be. Once they got it kept alive, the first thing that would would occur to boys like them would be to increase its brain. They'd try all sorts of stimulants, and then maybe they'd ease open the skullcap and just, well, let it boil over as you might say. That's the idea, I I don't doubt. A cerebral hypertrophy artificially induced to support a superhuman power of ideation. Is it at all probables director that a hypertrophy like that would increase thinking power? It seems to me that the weak point, said miss Ironwood.
I would have thought it would just as likely produce lunacy or nothing and all, but it might have the opposite effect. There was a thoughtful silence. Then what we are up against, said Dimble, is a criminal's brain swollen to superhuman proportions and experiencing a mode of consciousness which we can't imagine, but which is presumably consciousness of agony and hatred. It's It's not certain, said miss Ironwood, that there would be very much actual pain, some from the neck perhaps at first. What concerns us much more immediately, said McPhee, is to determine what conclusions we can draw from these carryings on with Alka Sand's head and what practical steps should be taken on our part, always and simply as a working hypothesis, assuming the dream to be veridical.
It tells us one thing straight away, said Denniston. What's that? Said McPhee. That the enemy movement is international. To get that head, they must have been hand in glove with at least one foreign police force. McPhee rubbed his hands. Man, he said, you have the makings of a logical thinker, but the deduction's not not all that certain. Bribery might account for it with that actual consolidation. It tells us something in the long run even more important, said the director. It means that if this technique is really successful, the Bellberry people have, for all practical purposes, discovered a way of making themselves immortal.
There was a moment silence, and then he continued. It is the beginning of what is really a new species, the chosen heads who never die. They will call it the next step in evolution. And henceforward, all the creatures that you and I call human are mere candidates for admission to the new species, or else it's slaves, perhaps it's food. The emergence of the bodiless men, said Dimble. Alright. So we'll so we're gonna skip ahead and go back to Belbury or, formerly was the college there down taken over by the NICE. And this is talking of the the microbes.
Okay? So you got microbes, lower forms of life, and now the the macros, which is their word for the, angelic realm there. Alright. So Mark is talking to a character named Frost. Frost says, I have now to inform you that there are similar organisms above the level of animal life. When I say above, I am not speaking biologically. The structure of the macrobe, so far as we know it, is of extreme simplicity. When I say that that it it is above the animal level, I mean that it is more permanent, disposes of more energy, and has greater intelligence. More intelligent than the highest anthroploid, said Mark. They must be pretty nearly human then. You have misunderstood me. When I say that it transcended the animals, I was, of course, including the most efficient animal, man.
The macrobe is more intelligent than man. Frowningly, Mark studied this theory. But how is it then in that case that we've had no communication with them? It is not certain that we have not, but in primitive times, it was spasmodic and was opposed by numerous prejudices. Moreover, the intel intellectual development of man had not reached the level at which intercourse with our species could offer any attractions to a macrobe. But though there had been little intercourse, there had been profound influence. Their effect on human history has been far greater than that of the microbes, though, of course, equally unrecognized.
In the light of what we know know now, all history will have to be rewritten. The real causes of all the principal events are quite unknown to historians. That indeed is why history has not yet succeeded in becoming a science. I think I'll sit down if you don't mind, said Mark, resuming his seat on the floor. Frost remained throughout the whole conversation, standing perfectly still with his arms hanging straight down at his sides. But for the periodic upward tilt of his head and flash of his teeth at the end of a sentence, he used no gestures. The vocal organs and brain taken from Alkassan, he continued, have become the conductors of a regular intercourse between the macrobes and our own species.
I do not say that we have discovered this technique. The discovery was theirs, not ours. The circle to which you may be admitted is the organ of that cooperation between the two species, which has already created a new situation for humanity. The change you will see is far greater than that which turned the sub man into the man. It is more comparable to the first appearance of organic life. These organisms then, said Mark, are they friendly hue to whom humanity? If you reflect for a moment, said Frost, you will see that your question has no meaning except on the level of the crudest popular thought. Friendship is a chemical phenomenon, so is hatred. Both of them presuppose organisms of our own type. The first step towards intercourse with the microbes is the realization that one must go outside the whole world of our subjective emotions.
It is only as you begin to do so that you discover how much of what you mistook for your thought was merely a byproduct of your blood and nervous tissues. Oh, of course, I didn't quite mean friendly in that sense. I mean, were their aims compatible with our own? What do you mean by our own aims? Well, I suppose the scientific reconstruction of the human race in the direction of increased efficiency, the elimination of war and poverty and other forms of waste, a fuller exploitation of nature, the preservation and extension of our species, in fact.
I do not think this pseudo scientific language really modifies the essentially subjective and instinctive basis of the ethics which you are describing. I will return to the matter at a later stage. For the moment, I would merely remark that your view of war and your reference to the preservation of the species suggest a profound misconception. They are mere generalizations from affectional feelings. Surely, said Mark, one requires a pretty large I'm reminded of the the Peter Thiel, do you do you want humanity to continue to exist Question that that stumped him there.
Surely, said Mark, one re requires a pretty large population for full exploitation of nature for nothing else. And surely, war is dysgenic and reduces efficiency. Even if population needs thinning, it is not is not war the worst possible method of thinning it? The idea that is a survival from conditions which are rapidly being altered. A few centuries ago, war did not operate in the way you describe. A large agricultural population was essential, and war destroyed types, which were then still useful. But every advance in in industry and agriculture reduces the number of work people who are required.
A large unintelligent population is now becoming a dead weight. The real importance of scientific war is what scientists have to be, is that scientists have to be reserved. It was not the great technocrats of Burger Moscow who supplied the casualties in the siege of Stalingrad. It was superstitious Bavarian peasants and low grade Russian agricultural workers. The effect of modern war is to eliminate retrogressive types while sparking the technocracy and increasing its hold upon public affairs. In the new age, what has hitherto been merely the intellectual nucleus of the race is to become by gradual stages the race itself.
You are to conceive the species as an animal that has discovered how to simplify nutrition and locomotion to such a point that the old complex organs in the large body which contain them are no longer necessary. That large body is is therefore to disappear. Only a tenth part of it will now be needed to support the brain. The individual is to become all head. The human race is to become all technocracy. I see, said Mark. I'd I'd thought rather vaguely that the intel intelligent nucleus would be extended by education. That is pure chimera.
The great majority of the human race can be educated only as in the sense of being given knowledge. They cannot be trained into the total objectivity of the mind, which is now necessary. They will always remain animals looking at the world through the haze of their subjective reactions. Even if they could, the day for a large population has passed. It has served its function by acting as a kind of cocoon for techno technocratic and objective man. Now, the microbes and the selected humans who can cooperate with them have no further use for it. The last two wars then were not disasters on your view.
On the contrary, they were simply the beginning of the program. The first two of the 16 major wars, which are scheduled to take place in this century, I'm aware of the emotional, that is the chemical reactions which a statement like this produces in you, and you are wasting your time in trying to conceal them from me. I do not expect you to control them. That is not the path to objectivity. I deliberately raise them in order that you may may become accustomed to regard them in purely scientific light and distinguish them as sharply as possible from the facts. Mark sat with his eyes fixed on the floor. He had felt, in fact, very little emotion at Frost's program for the human race. Indeed, he almost discovered at that moment how little he never really cared for those remote futures and universal benefits where on his cooperation with the institute had at first been theoretically based. Certainly, at the present moment, there was no room in his mind for such considerations.
He was fully occupied with the conflict between his his resolution not to trust these men, never again to be lured by any bait into a real cooperation, and the terrible strength, like a tide second at the shingle as it goes out, of an opposite emotion. For here, here surely at last, so his desire whispered to him, was the true inner circle of all, the circle whose center was outside the human race, the ultimate secret, the supreme power at the last initiation. The fact that it was almost completely horrible did not, in the least, diminish its attraction.
Nothing that lacked the tang of horror, which, would have been quite strong enough to satisfy the delirious excitement, which now set his temple his temple's hammering. It came into his mind that Frost knew all about this excitement and also about the opposite determination, and reckoned securely that the excitement is something which was certain to carry the day in the victim's mind. Alright. So there's is the macrobes. And we've got one more, one more section here, kind of the grand finale. I'll I'll summarize part of it. So the, the good guys, well, the bad guys unearth the, Arthurian character Merlin, but he turns out to be a good guy.
And so then he, he tricks his way into a big meeting at the institute, and causes basically a Tower Of Babel type confusion where they can't understand each other. They all started attacking each other, and then the animals at the institute, which were being experimented on, come in and and add to the the general confusion and death and destruction there. So that has been going on, and then, Wither is kind of like the, the actual head guy, as far as we know, at the institute. And, let's see where we go from. Alright. Wither was not among those killed in the dining room. He naturally knew all the possible ways out of the room, and even before the coming of the tiger, he had slipped away. He understood what was happening, if not perfectly, yet better than anyone else.
He saw saw that the Basque interpreter had done the whole thing. That's that's Merlin. And by that, he knew that the power powers more than human had come down to destroy Belbury. Only one in the saddle of whose soul rode Mercury himself could thus have been made language. And this, again, told them something worse. It meant that his own dark masters had been completely out in their calculations. They had talked of a barrier which made it impossible that powers from deep heaven should reach the surface of the Earth, had assured him that nothing from outside could pass the moon's orbit. All their polity was based on the belief that telescopes block blockaded beyond the reach of such assistance and left, as far as that went, to their mercy and his.
Therefore, he knew that everything was lost. It is incredible how little this knowledge moved him. It could not because he had long ceased to believe in knowledge itself. What had been in his far his far off youth a merely aesthetic repugnance to realities that were crude or vulgar had deepened and darkened year after year into a fixed refusal of everything that was in any degree other than himself. He had passed from Hegel into Hume, thence through pragmatism, and thence through logical positivism, and out at last into the complete void.
The indicated mood now corresponded to no thought that his mind could entertain. He had willed with his whole heart that there should be no reality and no truth, and now even the imminence of his own ruin could not wake him. The last scene of doctor Faustus where the man raves and implores on the edge of hell is perhaps stage fire. The last moments before damnation are not often not often so dramatic. Often, the man knows with perfect clarity that some still possible action of his own will could yet save him, but he cannot make this knowledge real to himself. Some tiny habitual sensuality, some resentment too trivial to waste on a blue bottle, the indulgence of some fatal lethargy seems to him at that moment more important than the choice between total joy and total destruction.
With eyes wide open, seeing that endless terror is just about to begin, and yet, for the moment, unable to feel terrified, he watches passively, not moving a finger for his own rescue, while the last links with joy and reason are severed and drowsily sees the trap close upon his soul. So full of sleep are they at the time when they leave the right way. Strake and Philistrada were also still alive. They met in one of the cold lighted lighted passages so far away from the dining room that the noise of the carnage was but a faint murmur. Philistrada was hurt, his right arm badly mauled.
They did not speak. Both knew that the attempt would be useless, but walked on side by side. Philistrada was intending to get to round the garage by a back way. He thought that he might still be able to drive in a fashion at least as far as Dirk. As they rounded a corner, they both saw what they had often seen before, but had expected never to see again. The deputy director stooped, creaking, pacing, humming his tune. Filistrato did not want to go with him, but Wither, as if noticing his wounded condition, offered him an arm.
Filistrato tried to decline it. Nonsense syllables came from his mouth. Wither took his left arm firmly. Strykes seized the other, the mauled arm. Squealing and shivering with pain, Filistrato accompanied them perforce. But worse awaited him. He was not an initiate. He knew nothing of the dark aldils. He believed that his skill had really kept Alkasyn's brain alive. In other words, he didn't know the truth behind behind it there. Hence, even in his pain, he cried out with horror when he found the other two drawing him into the anteroom of the head and into the head's presence without pausing for any of the antiseptic preparations which he had always imposed on his colleagues.
He tried vainly to tell them that one moment room itself that his conductors began undressing, and this time, they took off all their clothes. They plucked off his too. When the right sleeve, stiff with blood, would not move, Wither got a knife from the anteroom and ripped it. In the end, the three men stood naked before the head, gaunt, big boned strake, filestrato, a wobbling mountain of fat, and wither an obscene senility. Then the high ridge of terror from which Philistrato was never again to descend was reached, for he thought for what he thought impossible began to happen. No one had read the dials, dials, adjusted the pressures, or turned on the air and the artificial saliva, yet words came out of the dry, gaping mouth of the dead man's head.
Adore, it said. Philistrato felt his companions forcing his body forwards and up again, then forwards and downwards a second time. He was compelled to bob up and down under in rhythmic obeisance and others, meanwhile, doing the same. Almost the last thing he saw on earth was a skinny fold on Withers neck shaking like the waddles of a of a turkey. Almost the last thing he heard was Withers and Withers begin the chant. Then straight joined in. Then horribly, he found he was singing himself, Orobindra, Orobindra, Baba B.
But not for long. Another said the voice, give me another head. Filastrato knew at once why they were forcing him to a certain place in the wall. He had devised it all himself. In the wall that separated the head's room from the antechamber, there was a little shutter. When drawn back, it revealed a window in the wall and a sash to that window, which would fall quickly and heavily. But the sash was a knife. The little guillotine had not been meant to be used like this. They were going to murder him uselessly, unscientifically.
If he were going to do it to one of them, all would have been different. Everything would have been prepared weeks beforehand, the temperature of both rooms exactly right. The blades sterilized. The attachments already to be made almost before the head was severed. He had even calculated what changes the tear of the victim would probably make in his blood pressure. The artificial bloodstream would be arranged accordingly so as to take over its work with the least possible breach of continuity. His last thought was that he had underestimated the terror.
Yeah. The two initiatives. Alright. So I won't spoil the very, very ending there, but, basically, they they meet their doom in kind of unique ways. So whether he knows that his side has lost, and yet he still continues and still obeys and still murders, Filastrato and then and then Streak after that. So it's it's this you know, at at a certain point, you make decisions, and, you know, it's tough to go back. Not saying impossible, but there's examples in the bible where it says, you know, Pharaoh was told to let Moses and the Israelites go. He doesn't. And then at a certain point, it says God hardened his heart. So at a certain point, there's not free will guaranteed to us every second of our lives.
There's some decisions at at which point there's there's no going back. So I think CS Lewis doesn't he talks about that in some of his his other writings as well. Kind of tries to work it into the story. But, anyway, I I found it very interesting, and very insightful. And you see these pathetic evil monsters, And they're or, you know, they're human human beings, but they're there's nothing inherently impressive about them, but they're yet they're have done so much evil. And I think that's that's the world we live in today. I mean, you think about Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, just as some examples, and these are not impressive people, but they they serve that dark, hideous strength. And yet, each of them are are not in the none of them know the truth yet. You know, none of them have seen the actual truth behind the behind everything that they they've been told. They're at different layers, and even the levels above them. Right?
No one knows what you would not serve Satan if you knew the the truth of what was going on. And so they're they're fed lies the entire way. As Christ said in the passage we read earlier from that Brian Cates article, you know, that your father, the devil, the is the he's the father of lies. You know, lies are his native tongue. So this is, you know, these secret organizations or or not secret, but government organizations to get past all the silly superstition. This was another CS Lewis thing where he's saying that the scientism is much more superstitious than traditional Christianity. I mean, it just is. And Christianity is actually a path out of kind of that pagan superstition that scientism claims it has nothing to do with, and then you look back and it's like, scientism claims it has nothing to do with, and then you you look back and it's like, oh, oh, there's Kabbalah.
You know, there's there's paganism. There's, killing babies just like people in the Old Testament sacrificing your firstborn, what have you. So there is nothing new under the sun. Humanity is you know, it which which should be somewhat reassuring too. Right? I I don't mean it to be entirely negative. This is this is not, some new development that's totally worse than anyone else has had to live through. This is just a a different iteration of the same, you know, the same struggle of a of a fallen world, but there's still good, and there's still grace in it. And the the difficult part for for me, and I think for a lot of us, is to focus on what we know to be true and and away for and take our focus away from all the distractions and the horror and the things to make you mad and the things to, you know, trigger you or discourage you or distract you or tempt you, all that stuff. I mean, focus on what is real, what is eternal, which is just people. There's no no political position that's eternal. There's no no power, no money. None of that is eternal. Only only people are eternal. So that's, kind of the the end challenge for the day is focus on the things that that do actually matter, and don't allow yourself to be like Wither where he realizes the truth, and yet in the knowing he has a choice between endless joy and endless destruction, chooses the destruction just because, you know, destruction, chooses the destruction just because, you know, forced to have it, everything was going that way anyway. So that's that's all I got for today. Thank you so much for listening. It was a long one.
But, yeah, I didn't. I would encourage people to check out the the book, That Hideous Strength. I didn't totally spoil the actual ending, at least the the positive parts of it. So, it it's worth reading if you haven't or if you were like me and you read it a long time ago, worth reading again through a lens of of what's currently going on. I think the the first time I read it, it kinda stuck out to me, kinda nine eleven stuff, you know, false flag, the false flag riot and what have you. But, this time around, it was it still still really affected me, but, you know, it made sense of our of our current situation. So I don't think this never ending quest for immortality apart from eternal life, I don't think the current version of it is any different than, you know, Adam immortal back in the the Garden of Eden or throughout history. You know, they've it's the same serpent lies all the way through, and we we know what the truth is. We know where those lies lead, and we know, know what the truth is and the the narrow path, that we have to follow if we want, if we want to be where be where god God is, be where Christ is for all eternity.
So that's, you know, that's a when Jesus says it's a narrow path, make sure that we we understand what that means. So, blessings to you all. Thank you so much for listening, and, hopefully, no excuses. Should be a shorter time between this episode and the next one. Enjoy your September. Thank you very much for listening.
Introduction and Personal Update
Episode Theme: AI Technocracy and Historical Parallels
Understanding the Agentic State
AI and Crisis Management
The Choice and Consequences of Obedience
Luciferian Influence in Modern Culture
The Nature of Lies and Deception
Peter Thiel and Elon Musk on AI and Transhumanism
Critique of Modern Technocrats
CS Lewis's 'That Hideous Strength': Themes and Analysis
Manipulation and Control in 'That Hideous Strength'
AI as a Modern Spiritual Experience
AI Companions and Psychological Impact
Spiritual Implications of AI Interactions
Concluding Thoughts on Spiritual Warfare and Truth
