Post-Christian America

What did you think Post-Christianity meant? Vibes? Essays? No, it means a totalitarian surveillance state.

Christianity has declined precipitously — first went the practicing faith, then soon after went the cultural Christian grace of a single generation of nonbelievers. Now, America faces ever crazier cranks, maniacs, and cultists. A new outlook on the world is born from a H.P. Lovecraft novel — paranoid, conspiratorial, and authoritarian.

While the crazies are responsible for their own decisions, I believe the past generation of political and technological leaders share the blame. In chasing Christianity from the public sphere, they unleashed another level of derangement.

Comfort with a growing civilization, far from being a universal value, is one tied to the cultural Christianity of the enlightenment. It isn’t the human norm. The human norm evolved from stagnant hunter-gatherer societies with little potential for growth. Man was at the mercy of nature. Man could do nothing to fight back against the tribe’s apocalypse, whether by flood or quake or eruption. That is why the tribal norm is an authoritarian paranoia, wrought with taboo and ritual sacrifice.

The past is now the future. The past generation led a descent into cultural atheism. Now, they find themselves directly threatened by this authoritarian paranoia. On the 20th of December, 2019, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrum published an essay titled “the Vulnerable World Hypothesis”. In it he envisions a “high-tech panopticon”:

High-tech Panopticon

Everybody is fitted with a ‘freedom tag’ – a sequent to the more limited wearable surveillance devices familiar today, such as the ankle tag used in several countries as a prison alternative, the bodycams worn by many police forces, the pocket trackers and wristbands that some parents use to keep track of their children, and, of course, the ubiquitous cell phone (which has been characterized as ‘a personal tracking device that can also be used to make calls’).42 The freedom tag is a slightly more advanced appliance, worn around the neck and bedecked with multidirectional cameras and microphones. Encrypted video and audio is continuously uploaded from the device to the cloud and machine-interpreted in real time. AI algorithms classify the activities of the wearer, his hand movements, nearby objects, and other situational cues. If suspicious activity is detected, the feed is relayed to one of several patriot monitoring stations. These are vast office complexes, staffed 24/7. There, a freedom officer reviews the video feed on several screens and listens to the audio in headphones. The freedom officer then determines an appropriate action, such as contacting the tagwearer via an audiolink to ask for explanations or to request a better view. The freedom officer can also dispatch an inspector, a police rapid response unit, or a drone to investigate further. In the small fraction of cases where the wearer refuses to desist from the proscribed activity after repeated warnings, an arrest may be made or other suitable penalties imposed. Citizens are not permitted to remove the freedom tag, except while they are in environments that have been outfitted with adequate external sensors (which however includes most indoor environments and motor vehicles).

Bostrum begins by presenting this as a hypothetical, but later constantly insists it is necessary for governments to implement. His reason is the eponymous “Vulnerable World,” a world Bostrum envisions where “there is some level of technological development at which civilization almost certainly gets devastated by default.”

Bostrum inspired Effective Altruism, a real world political movement, to take up these causes and pursue his vision in the real world. I have personally reported on their financial and political corruption in the attempt to implement their political vision, as well as the various falsehoods and false arguments they use to come to these totalitarian conclusions.

Bostrum is a stock character out of the novels of H.P. Lovecraft — the arrogant intellectual who stumbles upon forbidden knowledge of a cosmic entity beyond human understanding. The way Bostrum develops his theory smacks of how Lovecraft paces his characters reckoning with the unknowable. He delves deeper believing he can master it and in the end is driven mad, all while attempting desperately to hold on to his scientific proceduralism.

In classic Lovecraft, that’s where the story ends. They die, go into the wilderness, or return transformed beyond understanding; all we are left to describe their horrors are their written notes. But what happens when the madmen live to tell the tale?

What makes Bostrum the modern — or postmodern — Lovecraft character is that he has encountered this forbidden knowledge entirely in his own imagination. That’s what makes the PCA (Paranoid, Conspiratorial, and Authoritarian) style of politics unique. They combine the paranoia of primitive tribes fearing the river god with the scientism of the modern messiah, who could save the world if only they created a totalitarian surveillance state.

More than a century ago, Lovecraft saw into Bostrum’s heart. Like Lovecraft’s characters, Bostrum has tuned all his instruments to detect visions of certain doom. There is nothing that science can do to stop the fear of the unknown. Science had not banished fear, but was in the process of transmuting it into a new, total form. The language of science did not stop Effective Altruists from jumping to extreme conclusions without evidence. If anything, it made their claims more extreme, more totalitarian.

We are already beginning to witness the sacrifices modern societies are willing to make when they believe doom is near. Lok at Europe’s self-impoverishment, demographic collapse, and pre-war subservience to Russian oil. The American version, though it will ultimately be a losing ideology, is even more extreme. Bostrum himself has become aware of this. In his 2024 book Deep Utopia, he presents an alternative vision of the future, one which echoes his past authoritarian instincts but which tries to wrestle back the vision of certain doom. But like Dagon, he is too late; he and his kin have become creatures of corrupted knowledge.

Peter Thiel’s philosophical project has turned to the Antichrist versus the Katechon. A decision which in his view is an alternative to “one world or none”. In the modern variation, this question is posed by the Effective Altruists. Totalitarian global surveillance state to ban AI or AI Doom. That’s the Antichristian choice; the Book of Revelation is ultimately an act of grace, not of either loyalty or destruction.

The predominant theological hypothesis for the Katechon is the Church, or the Body of Christ. The Holy Spirit who presides over Christian believers is the restraining force of the Katechon, who holds back the Antichrist.

The Body of Christ was undermined and discarded through the denigration of “thoughts and prayers”. In each case “thoughts and prayers” was attacked as a foil to a preferred authoritarian policy proposal. “Thoughts and prayers” versus the welfare state. “Thoughts and prayers” versus the surveillance state. “Thoughts and prayers” versus lockdowns. Antichrist versus Katechon.

In hindsight, thoughts and prayers were the superior policy choice, even from the perspective of someone who believes thoughts and prayers accomplish nothing. Yet in each case, the authoritarian impulses expanded and public Christianity receded. The Katechon, the Body of Christ, weakened.

Presiding over that denigration was the coastal amoralism of a particular political and economic elite which put their faith in their amorphous ‘intelligence’, while at the same time denigrating Christianity as mere superstition. This was not only a philosophical debate, but an overt contempt for social Christianity and its role in political life. At no point in this denigration did they ask the question “at what cost”.

True critics of superstition rapidly identified the disastrous superstition of PCA emerging from inside the house. From Climate to Russia to Covid to AI, the most conspiratorial beliefs were those of the absolute pessimists. First in Eurasia — degrowth — and then East Asia — zero Covid — these conspiratorial beliefs became catastrophes of choice for populations while furthering the power of the tyrants that made those choices.

That made them uneasy allies of Christian America. In a sense, their universal dismissal is a ‘correct’ position. At least Christ’s resurrection had testimony; AI Doom, a belief truly devoid of evidence, can truly be dismissed without evidence. Yet at each step, their unwillingness to confront the universal human denominator, not Christianity but PCA, slouched towards the totalitarian state of the Antichrist.

In the same way, it is ‘correct’ to simply note that AI Safety is based entirely on false assertions. But that is simply not a political solution to the never-ending conga line of apocalyptic fantasies motivated by the primordial fear of growth. So, the hand of the leisurely logician is forced: Antichrist or Katechon.

In horror, only Hobbes exceeds Lovecraft, because Hobbes’ horror is found in truth.