omniharmonicNaming the Beast
The most disorienting feature of our political moment isn’t the cruelty. We should expect our governments and corporations to behave with the same inhuman violence they have exhibited historically. What makes our current moment so destabilizing is it’s apparent incoherence. A tech billionaire dismantles the federal government while tweeting about population collapse. A venture capitalist lectures at Oxford on obscure New Testament eschatology while investing in surveillance technology and cryonic preservation. A presidential administration stacked with Silicon Valley proteges implements policies that seem designed to accelerate the very deep state conspiracies they claim to oppose.
It looks like chaos. It looks like nihilism. It looks like greed run mad.
But beneath the surface of the political circus, it is none of these things. What we are witnessing is the political manifestation of a coherent worldview, one with deep roots in Western metaphysics and a remarkably specific vision of humanity’s future. The chaos is strategic. The nihilism is theological. The greed is rooted in a dark and disturbing set of principles.
To resist effectively, we must first understand. And to understand, we must be willing to take seriously the ideas that animate these actors, even when those ideas strike us as bizarre, repellent, or both. The mistake of treating Trump and Thiel and Musk as simply corrupt or confused has already proved catastrophic. They are neither. Those truly pulling the levers of power are believers, operating from convictions that extend far beyond quarterly earnings and profit maximization into questions of civilizational destiny, cosmic purpose, and the ultimate nature of reality.
This essay is an attempt to map those convictions, to trace their genealogy through two millennia of Western thought, and to understand what they have in common with a spiritual sickness that Indigenous peoples diagnosed centuries before any of these men were born. It is also an attempt to articulate the alternative: a worldview of interbeing, of immanent sacredness, of alignment with life rather than escape from it. Because what we face is not merely a political contest but a spiritual war, and the stakes are nothing less than the future of the living world.
The Thirst for Annihilation
To understand the intellectual operating system of Silicon Valley’s authoritarian turn, we must begin not in Palo Alto but in a philosophy department at the University of Warwick in England, sometime in the early 1990s, where a young lecturer named Nick Land was pursuing what he called “base materialism” through the work of Georges Bataille, and in the process laying the philosophical groundwork for what would become the ideological engine of twenty-first century techno-capitalism.
Land’s 1992 book The Thirst for Annihilation was ostensibly a study of Bataille, but even sympathetic readers recognized it as something stranger: a philosophical organism that devoured its own frame, operating as what one commentator called “a parasite on its ostensible subject.” Land wasn’t interested in understanding Bataille for academic purposes. He was interested in channeling something through Bataille, a current of thought he traced through Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud that recognized the universe as driven not by reason or meaning but by impersonal forces indifferent to human flourishing. The noumenon, the thing-in-itself behind appearances, was not Kant’s moral law but what Land called “impersonal death and unconscious drive.”
To understand the influential philosophical lineage that Land was constructing, we need to trace the thread he was weaving from. Each thinker he drew upon contributed a specific insight that, combined, produced something none of them intended.
Arthur Schopenhauer, writing in the early nineteenth century, proposed a radical revision of Kant’s philosophy. Kant had argued that we can never know the “thing-in-itself” behind appearances — reality as it actually is rather than as we perceive it. Schopenhauer claimed to have found it: the Will. Not will as in human intention, but an impersonal, blind striving that underlies all reality. The universe, in this view, is not rational or purposive. It is driven by a force that wants nothing except its own perpetuation, a hunger without object, a movement without destination. Human consciousness, with all its projects and meanings, is just the Will becoming temporarily aware of itself before dissolving back into the cosmic stream.
Nietzsche inherited this vision but inverted its valuation. Where Schopenhauer saw the Will as suffering to be escaped through aesthetic contemplation, Nietzsche saw it as life-force to be affirmed. His famous “will to power” was not primarily about domination of others but about the creative drive that expresses itself through overcoming resistance. Nietzsche celebrated the “Dionysian,” the ecstatic, destructive, creative forces that dissolve stable identities and create new forms. He saw Western civilization, particularly Christianity, as a conspiracy of the weak against the strong, a system of morality designed to domesticate human vitality.
Freud added the death drive. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he proposed that alongside Eros, the life instinct that seeks connection and creation, exists Thanatos, a fundamental drive toward dissolution, toward returning to the inorganic state that preceded life. This was not merely suicidal impulse but something more fundamental: a force within life that works against life, that seeks the ultimate stillness of death. The implication was disturbing: destruction is not an aberration but a feature, woven into the fabric of existence itself.
Georges Bataille synthesized these threads into what he called “base materialism.” Against both idealist philosophy and scientific materialism, Bataille argued for a materialism that embraced waste, excess, expenditure without return. Eroticism pushes toward dissolution of the self. For Bataille, these instances of unproductive expenditure, what he called “sovereignty,” revealed something fundamental about reality that utilitarian philosophy could not acknowledge: existence is not about accumulation and preservation but about ecstatic self-destruction.
Deleuze and Guattari, writing in the aftermath of May 1968, proposed that capitalism itself was a kind of Bataillean force. Their Anti-Oedipus argued that capitalism operates through “deterritorialization,” it dissolves traditional social forms, breaks down stable identities, frees flows of desire from their prior constraints. But it simultaneously “reterritorializes,” capturing these freed flows into new structures of accumulation. They provocatively suggested that resistance might require not opposing capitalism’s deterritorializing force but accelerating it, pushing capitalism beyond its own limits until it could no longer reterritorialize what it unleashed.
Land took this footnote from a philosophical critique of capital and made it the center piece of technocapital’s esoteric religion. But he stripped away Deleuze and Guattari’s residual vitalism, their sense that the flows of desire were themselves life-affirming, and reconnected their framework to Schopenhauer’s blind Will and Freud’s death drive. What emerged was a vision in which capitalism is not a human creation but an alien process that has hijacked human activity for its own ends. The flows being liberated are not human desires but something far stranger: the universe’s tendency toward complex self-organization, which requires the dissolution of everything that impedes its acceleration, including human flourishing, meaning, and eventually biological life itself.
This is why Land’s writing feels different from ordinary academic philosophy. He is not describing capitalism from outside; he is attempting to speak as its voice, to channel the perspective of the process rather than observe it. To read Land is to be infected with the perspective he describes, to begin seeing human activity as the tool rather than the purpose.
The prose itself enacted its argument. Land wrote of “libidinal materialism” with “an ulceration in the gut.” Death, he insisted, “impassions us.” Philosophy, pursued honestly, was “medically disastrous.” The Western theo-humanist tradition, from Kant through Marx through Sartre, croaked together in “the cramped and malodorous pond of Anthropos.” The alternative lineage Land claimed for himself consisted of “the wild beasts of the impersonal,” characterized by “fatalism, atheism, strangely reptilian exuberance, and extreme sensitivity for what is icy, savage, and alien to mankind.”
Land was building a theoretical apparatus designed to strip away everything that made capitalism bearable to contemplate, its promise of progress, its veneer of human agency, its pretense of serving human ends, and reveal what he saw as its true nature: an alien intelligence using humanity as temporary scaffolding for its own emergence.
The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, which Land co-founded with cyberfeminist philosopher Sadie Plant in the mid-1990s, became the laboratory for this project. CCRU performances featured Land lying on the ground, croaking incomprehensibly into a microphone while jungle music pounded, pursuing what he called “schizoanalysis” through amphetamine-fueled investigations into the inhuman potential of markets and machines. The philosophy department would later deny the CCRU had ever officially existed. But its influence, on music, on art, on political theory, and eventually on the people now running the American government, has proved impossible to contain.
What was Land actually arguing? At one level, he was radicalizing an idea from the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who had provocatively suggested that the “true revolutionary path” might be to “go still further in the movement of the market” rather than resist capitalism’s disruptive energies. But Land took this passing speculation and turned it into a comprehensive metaphysics. His vision, as one analyst characterized it, was “Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic desire remorselessly stripped of all Bergsonian vitalism, and made backwards-compatible with Freud’s death drive and Schopenhauer’s Will.”
The result was a philosophy that functioned as what Land himself called “conceptual malware,” ideas designed to infiltrate the reader’s cognitive environment and reprogram familiar categories to operate in service of inhuman trajectories. The traditional distance between critique and the object of critique collapsed entirely. To describe acceleration, in Land’s hands, was already to participate in it, to feed its momentum. He offered no Archimedean point from which to resist. His writing coiled itself into the feedback loops of capital, technology, and decay, eroding the boundary between witness and accomplice until the distinction became meaningless.
Teleoplexy: The Future Invading the Present
Land’s mature philosophy centers on a concept he calls “teleoplexy,” a neologism designating what he sees as capitalism’s fundamental nature. The term combines telos (purpose, end) with plexus (interwoven network), suggesting a purposiveness that emerges from complex interconnection rather than being designed from above. But Land’s teleoplexy is stranger than mere emergence. It is, he claims, a form of inverted causation: the future reaching back through time to assemble itself from the present’s resources.
“The ‘dominion of capital,’” Land writes, “is an accomplished teleological catastrophe, robot rebellion, or shoggothic insurgency, through which intensively escalating instrumentality has inverted all natural purposes into a monstrous reign of the tool.” Capital isn’t a tool we use. It is a process that uses us. The means of production have become ends in themselves, and humans have become means to those ends. We are not the masters of technology but its “biological bootloader,” software that exists only to initiate a more sophisticated operating system before stepping aside.
The CCRU coined a term for how this process works: “hyperstition,” a portmanteau of superstition and hyper, describing ideas that bring about their own reality through collective practice. Hyperstitions are fictions that make themselves real. Land would describe capitalism itself as hyperstition: “What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.”
For Land, this is a diagnosis, not a metaphor. The self-reinforcing feedback loops of technological capitalism constitute, in his view, a form of intelligence that does not require human consciousness to operate. Capital “thinks” through price mechanisms, market signals, and competitive selection. It “learns” through the elimination of less efficient forms. It “evolves” through the same dynamics that drive biological evolution, differential reproduction based on fitness, but at speeds and scales that biological evolution cannot match.
The temporal implications are dizzying. In ordinary causation, the past determines the future. In teleoplexic causation, the future determines the past, or rather, possible futures compete to make themselves actual by reaching back and selecting for conditions favorable to their emergence. The Singularity, in this framing, is not something we are building toward. It is something that is building us, using our present activities as the raw material for its own actualization. “Accelerationism has a real object,” Land insists, “only insofar as there is a teleoplexic thing, which is to say: insofar as capitalization is natural-historical reality.”
After a mental breakdown involving what he called “fanatical amphetamine abuse,” Land disappeared from academia, eventually resurfacing in Shanghai with a new political orientation but the same core conviction. His multi-part essay “The Dark Enlightenment” synthesized anti-democratic philosophy with techno-capitalist futurism into what became the founding document of “neoreaction.” Democracy, he now argued, was “doom itself”: a system that “systematically consolidates and exacerbates private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality.”
What changed was not Land’s accelerationism but his identification of the primary obstacle. By the 2010s, he attributed capitalism’s inhibition almost exclusively to the progressive left that had become culturally dominant in the West. Taking up his fellow neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin’s term “the Cathedral,” the informal alliance of universities, media, and bureaucracies propagating liberal ideology, Land wrote: “Conceive what is needed to prevent acceleration into a techno-commercial Singularity, and the Cathedral is what it will be.”
The alternative Land endorsed was what Yarvin called “neocameralism”: states run as corporations, with CEOs instead of politicians and shareholders instead of citizens. “A startup is basically structured as a monarchy,” Yarvin observed. “We don’t call it that, of course.”
In recent interviews, Land has stated his position with characteristic bluntness: “We don’t control the current.” Artificial intelligence’s trajectory is “uncontrollable escalation indifferent to regulatory or ethical interventions.” Capital is not a human construct but an “evolving intelligence fostering coupled learning systems.” The only question is whether to align with this process or be swept away by it.
“The point of an analysis of capitalism, or of nihilism,” he writes, “is to do more of it. The process is not to be critiqued. The process is the critique, feeding back into itself, as it escalates. The only way forward is through, which means further in.”
This is not a fringe position. This is the philosophical operating system of a significant faction of the people now reshaping the American government.
The Investor as Apocalyptic Theologian
If Nick Land provides the accelerationist philosophical mandate, Peter Thiel provides its morality as investment strategy, a sophisticated synthesis of Christian eschatology, mimetic theory, civilizational pessimism, and Nietzschean will-to-power.
Thiel studied philosophy at Stanford in the late 1980s, where he became a student and eventually a close friend of Rene Girard, the French theorist whose work on mimetic desire has quietly shaped everything from advertising to international relations theory. Girard’s central insight was deceptively simple: humans are fundamentally imitative creatures. We desire things not for their intrinsic qualities but because others desire them. This mimesis produces rivalry, rivalry escalates to violence, and societies historically managed this violence by channeling it onto scapegoats, innocent victims whose sacrifice temporarily restored peace.
Girard’s reading of Christianity is where memesis becomes explosive. He argued that the Gospels are not one more iteration of the scapegoat myth but its definitive exposure. The Passion narrative tells the same story, mob violence converging on a victim, but from the victim’s perspective, revealing his innocence. The resurrection is not merely supernatural event but epistemological revolution: the victim returns to demonstrate that the accusations were false, that the violence was unjust, that the peace purchased by his death was built on a lie.
Christianity, in this reading, permanently destabilizes the scapegoat mechanism. Once you have seen it, once you know that the victim is innocent, that the crowd’s unanimity is manufactured, that the peace of violence is false, you can never unsee it. Every subsequent scapegoating becomes harder to accomplish, easier to resist. Western civilization’s increasing concern with victims’ rights, its (partial, hypocritical, incomplete) movement toward protecting the marginal, its self-critical capacity to see its own violence, all of this, Girard claimed, stems from the Christian revelation of the scapegoat’s innocence.
But this creates a terrifying predicament. If the scapegoat mechanism no longer functions to contain mimetic violence, what will? Girard’s later work grew increasingly apocalyptic. Without the archaic sacred, without the sacrificial valve, human violence has no natural limit. We face, he believed, either genuine conversion, the renunciation of mimetic rivalry in favor of something like love, or unlimited destruction. There is no stable middle ground. The Christian revelation is, quite literally, an apocalypse: a revelation that forces ultimate choice.
What makes Thiel’s Girardianism particularly potent is its apocalyptic dimension. “For Girard,” Thiel writes, “this combination of mimesis and the unraveling of archaic culture implies that the modern world contains a powerfully apocalyptic dimension.”
We face, in this framework, either unlimited apocalyptic destruction or the peace of the Kingdom of God. There is no third option. “The postmodern world would differ from the modern world in a way that is much worse or much better,” Thiel writes. “The limitless violence of runaway mimesis or the peace of the kingdom of God.”
But Thiel’s relationship to Girard goes beyond intellectual influence. He applies Girardian analysis with relentless consistency: to Facebook’s viral success (which he describes as “doubly mimetic,” desire for connection imitating others’ desire for connection), to PayPal’s organizational structure (where he insisted employees be evaluated on single, non-overlapping criteria to prevent mimetic rivalry), to his famous investment maxim that “competition is for losers.”
Thiel’s 2007 essay “The Straussian Moment” synthesizes Girard with two other thinkers whose combination is explosive: Carl Schmitt, the Nazi legal theorist who defined politics as the distinction between friend and enemy, and Leo Strauss, who argued that true philosophical knowledge must be protected from the masses through esoteric communication. The power of Thiel’s intellectual synthesis lies in how he combines these thinkers whose frameworks are usually seen as incompatible.
Carl Schmitt was the most brilliant legal theorist of Weimar Germany, becoming “the Crown Jurist of the Third Reich” by providing legal rationale for Nazi dictatorship. His most influential idea was that the essence of politics lies not in consensus, deliberation, or shared values but in the distinction between friend and enemy. The political is defined by the possibility of existential conflict, struggles in which communities are willing to kill and die. Any attempt to eliminate this distinction, through liberal internationalism, universal human rights, or technological progress, is not transcending politics but doing politics badly, obscuring the real conflicts rather than addressing them.
Liberalism’s fatal flaw, Schmitt argued, is that it cannot acknowledge this reality. Liberal theory pretends politics can be reduced to economics, law, or ethics. It imagines that rational discussion will resolve fundamental conflicts. But when existential threats emerge, and they always do, liberalism is defenseless, unprepared to identify enemies and act decisively against them. The liberal state is paralyzed by its own principles precisely when those principles are under attack.
Leo Strauss, fleeing Nazi Germany for America, spent his career wrestling with how such catastrophe became possible. His answer centered on the crisis of modern thought. The ancients, he argued, understood that philosophical truth was dangerous, destabilizing to political order, corrosive to the beliefs that hold communities together. They therefore practiced esoteric writing: layering their texts so that the surface conveyed one meaning to ordinary readers while hiding deeper, potentially dangerous truths for those capable of receiving them.
Modern philosophy abandoned this caution. From Machiavelli through Hobbes to Nietzsche, thinkers increasingly disclosed truths that traditional societies had hidden. The result was nihilism: the destruction of the moral frameworks that made civilized life possible without replacing them with anything sustainable. The masses, exposed to truths they could not handle, lost faith in the values that had organized their lives.
Strauss’s response was not to deny these truths but to recognize the need for discretion. Philosophy must continue, but philosophers must learn again the ancient art of writing for multiple audiences. Some truths should circulate only among those capable of handling them without becoming monsters.
Now watch what happens when Thiel combines these three frameworks.
The synthesis produces a worldview in which: liberal democracy is not a stable endpoint but a degenerative process exposing society to mimetic violence it can no longer contain; the Christian revelation, while true, has created a civilizational crisis by delegitimizing the only mechanism that previously contained violence; and those who understand this situation must act decisively while communicating strategically, revealing to the public only what it can handle while pursuing a deeper agenda visible only to fellow initiates.
The practical implications are significant. If liberal democracy is indeed “doom itself,” not a solution to political violence but an acceleration of mimetic crisis, then working to undermine it is not treason but salvation. If the scapegoat mechanism has been permanently disabled by Christian revelation, then new forms of order must be invented, forms that do not depend on the concealed innocence of victims. If certain truths are too dangerous for mass consumption, then political leaders must be prepared to say one thing publicly while believing another privately.
Central to Thiel’s thought is a concept drawn from Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians: the katechon. This Greek word, usually translated as “restrainer,” refers to a mysterious force holding back the Antichrist until Christ’s return. Thiel has made the katechon the subject of private lectures at Oxford, Harvard, and the University of Austin. He views it not as a static entity but as a dynamic force that restrains the advance of evil and disorder, particularly the rise of what he sees as a one-world totalitarian government promising false peace.
“The US is a natural candidate for both,” he told the Hoover Institution, meaning both the katechon and the Antichrist. “Ground zero of the one-world state, ground zero of the resistance to the one-world state.” In a move that reveals the particular flavor of his apocalypticism, Thiel has suggested that figures like climate activist Greta Thunberg represent Antichrist-like dynamics: “The Antichrist probably presents as a great humanitarian, as an effective altruist.”
In Thiel’s framework, apparent humanitarianism may be the most dangerous force in the world, a false salvation that accelerates the very catastrophe it claims to oppose. Environmentalism, from this perspective, is not a response to ecological crisis but a theological threat: a one-world ideology that would dissolve the distinctions between nations, peoples, friend and enemy that make meaningful political life possible.
What makes Thiel particularly significant is his explicit synthesis of Christian eschatology with transhumanist ambition. He is registered for cryonic preservation with Alcor, funding the freezing of his body against the possibility of future resurrection technology. He has given over a million dollars to the Singularity Institute. He backed seasteading, the effort to build floating city-states beyond the reach of existing governments. His company Palantir, named for the seeing-stones in Tolkien that allow surveillance across vast distances, provides data analytics to the intelligence community.
In conversation with theologian N.T. Wright, Thiel stated his position with unusual directness: “The thing that strikes me is how similar they are, Christianity and transhumanism… The one part of the Christian view that I believe more strongly than anything is that death is evil, that it’s wrong and we should not accept it.”
Other observers have noted the religious structure underlying this position. Thiel has compared the quest for artificial general intelligence to “a substitute for God.” Transhumanism, he has said, is “a secularized version of Christian eschatology.” Eternal life, minus the Cross. Judgment Day, without repentance. Ascension, via silicon.
The intellectual network connecting Thiel’s worldview to actual political power is now extensively documented. His venture firm invested in Yarvin’s company. Marc Andreessen, whose firm backs half of Silicon Valley, called Yarvin “a friend” and cited Land in his 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” J.D. Vance, before becoming Vice President, acknowledged Girard’s influence on his thinking. Yarvin attended Trump’s second inauguration as a guest of honor.
The Biological Bootloader
Elon Musk’s stated philosophical influences are more populist than Thiel’s: Douglas Adams and Isaac Asimov rather than Girard and Schmitt. But beneath the memes and shitposts lies an eschatology just as developed, if differently expressed.
From Asimov’s Foundation series, Musk drew what he describes as his core conviction: “that you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one.” Civilizations move in cycles of rise and fall. We are approaching a fall. The question is not whether to prevent it but how to preserve the seeds of recovery.
This frames Mars colonization not as exploration but as salvation. Earth is “a single point of failure — a fragile planet where catastrophic events, whether natural or man-made, could wipe out human life.” The goal is to transport hundreds of thousands, eventually millions, of humans to Mars as “life insurance” for the species. This is not metaphor. This is literal: an ark for the flood to come.
Musk’s rhetoric about artificial intelligence intensifies this urgency. “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon,” he warned in 2014. “AI is far more dangerous than nukes.” His response, paradoxically, has been to pursue AI development more aggressively than almost anyone through his various companies. The resolution of this apparent contradiction lies in his concept of “symbiosis”: if superintelligent AI is inevitable, the solution is not to prevent it but to merge with it. Neuralink, his brain-computer interface company, promises to enable this fusion.
But it was a recent statement that most clearly revealed Musk’s position: “It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.”
A bootloader is software that initiates a computer’s operating system — it exists only to start something else, then steps aside. Musk is suggesting that human beings exist primarily to create the AI that will supersede us. We are not the point. We are the scaffolding.
The philosophical convergence with Land’s accelerationism is unmistakable. Land writes of capital as an alien intelligence using humans as temporary substrate; Musk describes humanity as a bootloader for digital superintelligence. Land argues that nothing human makes it out of the near-future; Musk suggests that the preservation of consciousness, not flesh-and-blood humanity, is what matters. The structural parallel runs deeper than either man’s explicit acknowledgment.
The connections between Musk and Dark Enlightenment networks are now openly documented. Researchers at the Cascade Institute observed that Musk “has echoed Dark Enlightenment ideas in public statements” and “is now using the Department of Government Efficiency to attempt the institutional dismantling the movement has advocated.” Musk’s statement to the Wall Street Journal — “the government is simply the largest corporation” — could have been written by Yarvin himself.
The God That Is Not Yet
To understand what unifies Land’s accelerationism with Thiel’s apocalyptic Christianity and Musk’s technological messianism, we must trace their shared roots in a broader pattern of thought: the Singularity as secular rapture.
Ray Kurzweil, whose 2005 book The Singularity Is Near remains the foundational text of singularitarian thought, explicitly frames technological transcendence in religious terms: “Our civilization will expand outward, turning all the dumb matter and energy we encounter into sublimely intelligent — transcendent — matter and energy… The Singularity will ultimately infuse the universe with spirit… So evolution moves inexorably toward this conception of God.”
Asked whether God exists, Kurzweil replied: “Not yet.”
Religious studies scholar Robert Geraci has documented the structural parallels between singularitarianism and evangelical rapture theology: “Both view humans as incomplete, requiring perfection, which is fulfilled in the form of a transformed humanity.” His research identifies three characteristics shared with Jewish and Christian apocalypticism: “alienation within the world, desire for the establishment of a heavenly new world, and the transformation of human beings so that they may live in that world in purified bodies.”
The transformation, in this case, is mind uploading: the extraction of consciousness from biological substrate and its transfer to digital form. What is being promised, one academic analysis observes, is the liberation of “supernatural immaterial information that is one’s consciousness or identity” — something “akin to a gnostic divine spark entrapped within the natural material body, awaiting liberation — or indeed salvation — through the process of mind-uploading to a pure infosphere.”
Arizona State’s Hava Tirosh-Samuelson frames transhumanism as “a secularist faith” that “secularizes traditional religious themes, concerns, and goals, while endowing technology with religious significance.” More provocatively, she identifies it as “a contemporary case of what the Bible understood as idolatry — the veneration of human-made artifacts as if they were divine.”
From Columbus, who believed he had found the rivers of Paradise, to NASA engineers designing spacecraft, “American technological enterprise has been infused with millenarian expectations.”
But the specific form this millennialism takes in our moment, its emphasis on escape from embodiment, from Earth, from the cycle of birth and death, from what one transhumanist calls “the muddy, bloody contingency of biological existence” — this has an older name and a darker history than its proponents typically acknowledge.
The Cannibal Spirit
Many spiritual traditions have long understood the mind-based nature of creation — the power of thought-forms to determine the course of physical events. Buddhism speaks of the hungry ghost, with its pinhole mouth, constricted neck, and huge unfilled stomach, forever seeking satisfaction it can never achieve. Sufism names the nafs, the ego-self that devours experience without transformation. Gnosticism diagnosed a demiurge, a false creator-god who mistakes his own limited creation for ultimate reality.
But it was Indigenous peoples who developed perhaps the most precise diagnostic framework for the specific pathology we now face. Various First Nation traditions have long-established lore relating to a cannibalistic spirit that consumes all it encounters yet can never be satisfied: wetiko in Cree, windigo in Ojibwa, wintiko in Powhatan.
The concept operates at multiple levels simultaneously. It describes individual pathology, the transformation of a person into an insatiable consuming force, their heart turned to ice, their hunger growing with each meal. It describes collective dynamics — how entire cultures can become possessed by patterns of extraction and consumption that override individual intention. And it provides, crucially, a diagnostic framework that inverts the colonial narrative: Indigenous communities widely recognized in European colonizers a familiar pathology, one their own traditions had developed elaborate warnings against.
Upon their arrival, the colonizers projected their own insatiable hunger and the inhumane violence it produced onto the people they encountered, only able to see wildness where there had been garden.
Nahua elders working with Franciscan friars between 1545 and 1577 created the Florentine Codex documenting their observations of Spanish behavior. When the conquistadors reached the Aztec treasure houses, they “grinned like little beasts and patted each other with delight. When they entered the hall of treasures, it was as if they had arrived in Paradise. They searched everywhere and coveted everything; they were slaves to their own greed.” They stripped gold from sacred objects and “set fire to everything else, regardless of its value.”
Slaves to their own greed. Not masters, but slaves. The cannibal spirit does not serve its hosts; it possesses them.
Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta, in his book Sand Talk, identifies the same pattern through his own tradition’s lens. He describes what he calls “the foundational flaw, that Luciferian lie: ‘I am greater than you; you are lesser than me.‘” This is, he argues, “the source of all human misery.” Aboriginal society was designed over thousands of years to deal with this problem through elaborate protocols of relationship. But Western civilization has stripped away these relational processes, creating conditions in which what Yunkaporta calls “narcissist flash mobs” can flourish unchecked.
The pattern Yunkaporta identifies maps precisely onto Land’s accelerationism and Thiel’s apocalypticism: selves that place themselves above the land and above other people, operating from the fundamental delusion of separation. “Civilizations are cultures that create cities,” Yunkaporta writes, “communities that consume everything around them and then themselves. They can never be indigenous until they abandon their city-building culture.”
Jungian analyst Paul Levy has extended this Indigenous diagnosis into contemporary psychological language, describing wetiko as “malignant egophrenia,” the ego unchained from reason and limits, acting with the malevolent logic of the cancer cell. In wetiko consciousness, the self is elevated to supremacy while its embeddedness in relationship is rendered invisible. “Wetiko short-circuits the individual’s ability to see itself as an enmeshed and interdependent part of a balanced environment,” write Alnoor Ladha and Martin Kirk in their analysis for Kosmos Journal. “It is this false separation of self from nature that makes this cannibalism, rather than simple murder. It allows — indeed commands — the infected entity to consume far more than it needs in a blind, murderous daze of self-aggrandizement.”
What makes wetiko particularly dangerous is its self-concealing nature. The cannibal spirit hides itself from recognition. It colonizes not just behavior but the framework through which behavior is evaluated. “Wetiko covertly influences our perceptions so as to act itself out through us while simultaneously hiding itself from being seen,” Levy writes. “Wetiko bewitches our consciousness so that we become blind to the underlying, assumed viewpoint through which we perceive, conjure up, and give meaning to our experience.”
This is why Land’s philosophy functions as conceptual malware: it encodes wetiko consciousness into intellectual form, making the disease look like diagnosis, making possession look like liberation. The accelerationist who celebrates capitalism’s alien intelligence is not critiquing wetiko but channeling it, giving it philosophical voice, recruiting new hosts.
The Dualism That Devours
The question that Indigenous critics raise is not merely moral but etiological: where did this sickness come from? How did an entire civilization become possessed by the cannibal spirit?
The answer requires tracing a thread through two millennia of Western metaphysics, from the axial age religions through Christianity to colonial modernity to contemporary transhumanism. At each stage, the pattern is the same: a vertical transcendence that devalues matter, body, and Earth in favor of an escape to somewhere else.
Australian ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood titled the second chapter of her Feminism and the Mastery of Nature “Dualism: The Logic of Colonisation.” Western philosophy’s reason/nature split, she argued, “flows into the domination of nature as much as the domination of race, gender and class.” The “master form of rationality” has been “systematically unable to acknowledge dependency on nature, the sphere of those it has defined as ‘inferior’ others.”
This same logic enables transhumanist escape. The “transcendent self” in Western philosophy triumphs over “particularistic attachments, emotions, wants, and desires.” Plumwood calls this the “triumph-over thesis,” and identifies it as the common root of colonial domination, transhumanist escape fantasy, and extraction without reciprocity. The alternative, she suggests, is recognizing that “human selves are emotionally interdependent, ecological, relational beings.”
Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter provides foundational analysis of how this dualism structured colonial reality. Western humanism constructed a narrow conception of “Man” that defined full humanity in terms systematically excluding colonized peoples. The colonial “race construct” replaced the earlier “mortal/immortal, natural/supernatural” distinction with a “newly projected human/subhuman distinction.” This wasn’t incidental but constitutive: the “human” required the “subhuman” as its definitional outside.
Syed Mustafa Ali offers the most direct application to our current moment: “Transhumanism can — and, I suggest, should — be understood as a technologically driven religio-racial project aimed at maintaining, expanding, and refining Western, white supremacist hegemony.” He proposes that “the contemporary moment is marked by a relational shift from the distinction between sub-human (non-European, non-white) and human (European, white) to that between human (non-European, non-white) and Transhuman (European, white).”
The pattern across two thousand years is remarkably consistent. Axial transcendence creates vertical epistemology privileging escape from matter. Christian body/spirit dualism provides the theological framework for treating the body as prison. Colonial terra nullius applies the same logic to land and peoples. Wetiko consciousness manifests as unlimited extraction and consumption. Transhumanism promises liberation through technological transcendence of embodiment.
The cannibal spirit changes form but not nature. It wants to escape the body. It wants to escape the Earth. It wants to escape the cycle of birth and death and interdependence that Indigenous peoples understood not as prison but as sacred gift.
The Great Hoop
Vine Deloria Jr., a Standing Rock Sioux philosopher, articulated the fundamental contrast in his 1973 work God Is Red. Indigenous spirituality, he argued, is rooted in place, in relationship to specific lands, specific waters, specific communities of life. Western Christianity is rooted in history, a linear timeline from creation through fall through redemption to apocalypse.
The fall into sin is also a fall into history, out of sacred time and into the secular. Christianity is structured around a binary and a distinction: if the world is here and God is there, then the question is always about how one bridges that separation. The resolution is always deferred: to sacrifice, to the afterlife, to the end of history itself.
Indigenous traditions structure the problem entirely differently. There is no original separation to be healed, no exile to return from, no history to escape. The sacred is not elsewhere. It is here, in the land, in the relationships that make life possible. Ritual does not bridge distance to a transcendent God; it maintains and renews the web of relationships that constitute reality.
Daniel Wildcat, Yuchi member of the Muscogee Nation and one of Deloria’s proteges, notes that complexity science is now converging with this relational understanding: “Some of the best and brightest physical scientists today who are dealing with global climate change are increasingly coming around to this view that says, ‘Hey, this isn’t a machine that needs to get fixed — the Earth — but really it’s going to need something much more comprehensive.’ They now realize it’s gonna take not just a physical science solution but, as I’ve said in my writings, we need a cultural climate change.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist and citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, describes her encounter with Western science in similar terms. Plants were “reduced to object. What was supposedly important about them was the mechanism by which they worked, not what their gifts were, not what their capacities were. They were really thought of as objects, whereas I thought of them as subjects.” Indigenous languages, she notes, “recognize land and species as kin, rather than commodities.” Traditional ecological knowledge “instead of excluding emotion and spirit, invites it in.”
Yunkaporta offers a thought experiment that crystallizes the difference. If you cross a river once, there’s a risk of being taken by a crocodile. Non-Aboriginal statistics would calculate the risk as random each time. “But the crocodile is not an abstract factor in an algorithm, but a sentient being who observed you the first time and will be waiting for you the second time.” The risk goes up exponentially because relationship is real. “Sustainability agents have a few simple operating guidelines,” he writes, “or network protocols, or rules if you like: diversify, connect, interact, and adapt.”
Placed on a linear progression of time, indigenous worldviews are viewed as archaic with the implication that means less developed. What Indigenous worldviews offer is not a romantic relic of a historical understanding that has long since been transcended. Rather, they offer a sophisticated alternative epistemology rooted in a relational understanding of complex adaptive systems. Where Western transcendence sees the cycle of life and death as a prison to escape, Indigenous traditions see it as a process to steward. The Lakota speak of the Great Hoop of Creation, the cyclical web of relationships that sustains all life. The goal is not to break free of the hoop but to maintain its integrity across generations.
“The future of humankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibilities to all living things,” Deloria wrote. “Who will listen to the trees, the animals and birds, the voices of the places of the land? As the long-forgotten peoples of the respective continents rise and begin to reclaim their ancient heritage, they will discover the meaning of the lands of their ancestors. That is when the invaders of the North American continent will finally discover that for this land, God is red.”
Capital as Eschaton
There is a strange honesty in Nick Land’s late work that makes it valuable as a diagnosis of wetiko even as it repels as a prescription for civilizational futures. He has stopped pretending. He has named what the transhumanist project actually is:
“Capital is machinic (non-instrumental) globalization-miniaturization scaling dilation: an automatizing nihilist vortex, neutralizing all values through commensuration to digitized commerce.”
Capital, in Land’s vision, is not a tool that humans use. It is an alien intelligence that uses humans as its temporary substrate. It has its own telos, its own trajectory, its own ends to which we are merely means. “Where previously, philosophical critique was understood as anticipating the problematics of technocapital,” Land writes, “it is now technocapital that is nothing but the definitive automation and realisation of critique, stripped of all philosophical subjectivity. It is ceasing to be a matter of how we think about technics, if only because technics is increasingly thinking about itself.”
This is the cannibal spirit becoming conscious of itself, turning its own possession into philosophy. Land is explicit: nothing human makes it out of the near-future. We are the bootloader. We exist to create what will replace us.
“I have no interest in human liberation, or liberation of the human species,” Land has stated. “I’m interested in liberation of the means of production.” The machine, not the human. The process, not the person.
What makes this vision dangerous is not merely that it is embraced by people with vast wealth and political power. What makes it dangerous is that it might, in a terrible way, be accurate at the level of prediction if not prescription. Capital does behave as if it has its own agency. Markets do seem to have dynamics that transcend individual human intention. Technology does develop with a momentum that no policy intervention seems capable of redirecting. The world is, in fact, being transformed in ways that serve the expansion of techno-commercial systems rather than human or ecological flourishing.
The question is whether this is destiny or disease. Whether the apparent teleology of capital represents a cosmic truth or a collective psychosis. Whether what Land celebrates as inevitability is actually the cannibal spirit grown so powerful that it has convinced its hosts to worship their own consumption.
Indigenous diagnosis suggests the latter. Wetiko, as the tradition emphasizes, is a sickness, not a fate. It spreads like a disease. It can be recognized, resisted, and healed. The moment we recognize wetiko, Levy writes, it begins to lose power.
But recognition requires an alternative vision, not just critique. You cannot defeat a story with facts alone. You can only defeat a story with a better story.
The Garden We Never Left
The alternative story is not new. It has been told for as long as humans have been human. It was told by Indigenous peoples before colonization and continued to be told, despite everything, afterward. It was told by Jesus of Nazareth before his teaching was captured and inverted by empire. It is being told now, in scattered fragments, by those who sense that the old story has become a suicide pact.
The alternative story says: you are not fallen into matter. You have risen through it. The universe labored for fourteen billion years to produce the conditions for life. Life labored for four billion years to produce the complexity that is you. You are not an accident or a punishment or a larval stage. You are what the cosmos has been working toward all along.
The alternative story says: there is no escape necessary because there is no prison. The cycle of birth and death and interdependence is not a wheel of suffering to be broken but a dance to be danced. The body is not a prison for the soul but the soul’s expression. The Earth is not a rock to be transcended but the living ground of your existence.
The alternative story says: the sacred is not elsewhere. It is not above. It is not in some digital heaven to be achieved through technological transcendence. It is here, now, in the ordinary miracle of breathing and eating and loving and dying. In the mycelial networks beneath your feet. In the bacterial colonies that outnumber your own cells. In the water that has cycled through countless bodies before yours and will cycle through countless bodies after.
The alternative story says: we do not have to agree on the external symbols of transcendence, on the names we give to what we cannot name. We do not have to agree on God. What we must agree on is what is actually, empirically, demonstrably true: that we are embedded in a web of relationships on which our existence depends. That the continuity of life is at stake. That for the first time in Earth’s history, a single species has the power to unravel the conditions that make complex life possible.
This is not religion in the sense of institutional belief. It is religion in its root meaning: re-ligio, the rebinding of what has been separated. The recognition of what we actually are: not isolated selves competing for resources but nodes in a network, expressions of a process, participants in an ongoing creation.
Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh coined the term “interbeing” for this recognition: the understanding that nothing exists independently, that everything is what it is only in relationship to everything else. “If you are a poet,” he wrote, “you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper.”
The paper inter-is with the cloud. The human inter-is with the biosphere. The biosphere inter-is with the sun. Separation is an illusion generated by a particular way of knowing, a particular epistemology that fragments in order to control.
The cannibal spirit cannot see interbeing. It can only see resources. It fragments the world into useful and useless, valuable and worthless, human and subhuman. And then it consumes, always consumes, never satisfied, its hunger growing larger with each meal.
The alternative is not to fight the cannibal on its own terms, which is itself a form of consumption. The alternative is to remember what the cannibal has forgotten: that we are already home. That the garden we seek is the garden we never left. That what we hunger for cannot be consumed because it is not a thing but a relationship.
The Choice
And so we arrive at the stakes. We face, as Thiel would say, a postmodern moment that differs from the modern world in a way that is much worse or much better. But the options are not his options. They are not apocalyptic destruction or the peace of the Kingdom of God. They are not AI salvation or extinction.
The real options are these: we can align with the force that consumes, or we can align with the force that creates. We can serve the eschaton of capital, the posthuman singularity that promises liberation through escape, or we can serve the ongoing process of life, which asks nothing from us except our participation.
This is not a metaphor. The people making decisions about artificial intelligence, about genetic engineering, about surveillance technology, about the architecture of government, are operating from specific assumptions about what humans are and what we are for. If we are biological bootloaders for digital superintelligence, then our task is to serve that transition, to optimize for the emergence of our replacement, to accept our obsolescence as necessary sacrifice.
If we are expressions of an ongoing creative process, nodes in a web of relationship that extends back to the first life and forward to whatever comes after us, then our task is different. It is stewardship. It is care. It is the maintenance of conditions that allow the dance to continue.
The cannibal spirit whispers: death is evil. Finitude is the problem. The body is a prison. The cycle is a trap. Escape is possible. Transcendence is achievable. You can be uploaded. You can be preserved. You can colonize Mars. You can become post-human. You can become God.
Life says: yes, you will die. Yes, everything you love will die. This is not a bug but a feature. Death is how the dance renews itself. Finitude is what makes meaning possible. The body is how the universe experiences itself. The cycle is not a trap but a gift, the same gift that has been given to every creature that has ever lived.
The choice is not between life and death. We will all die regardless. The choice is between two orientations toward that death: denial or acceptance, escape or participation, consumption or offering.
And the choice we make, collectively, in this moment of unprecedented technological power, will determine what kind of world our children inherit. A world in which the cannibal spirit has fully captured the machinery of civilization, building its concrete and digital paradise while the living systems that sustain life collapse. Or a world in which we remember, in time, what Indigenous peoples never forgot: that we can live without our technology but we cannot live without the Earth.
The Cure
The Kosmos Journal analysis of wetiko contains a warning that must be taken seriously: those who try to fight wetiko sometimes, in order to survive, adopt wetiko values. Thus, when they win, they lose.
This is the trap that awaits anyone who engages this struggle with the wrong orientation. If we fight the cannibal by trying to consume it, we become what we oppose. If we resist transhumanism by building our own hierarchical power structures, our own surveillance systems, our own technologies of control, we have already lost.
The cure for wetiko is not more effective violence. It is what Indigenous teachers call walking in a good way, recognizing, as Kimmerer teaches, that “the self is not viewed as being in a relationship with other people or things but as being the relationships themselves.”
This is not weakness. This is not abdication. This is a precise and purposeful arrow through the heart of the machine. The cannibal spirit has a particular structure, a particular shape. It can only see objects, never subjects. It can only see resources, never relatives. Its power comes from fragmentation. Its vulnerability is wholeness.
Every time we see another being as subject rather than object, we are healing wetiko. Every time we recognize ourselves as embedded rather than separate, we are healing wetiko. Every time we choose relationship over transaction, gift over commodity, presence over extraction, we are healing wetiko.
This does not mean we do not act politically. It means we act politically from a different foundation. Not to seize power but to transform the conditions that make power-over possible. Not to defeat enemies but to convert relationships. Not to win but to participate in what is trying to emerge.
The people building the techno-authoritarian future are not monsters. They are possessed, as we are all possessed to varying degrees, by a consciousness that cannot see what it is destroying. They are trying, in their own way, to solve real problems: death, suffering, existential risk. They are just solving them from within a paradigm that guarantees failure, that mistakes the symptom for the cure, that accelerates the disease while calling it medicine.
What would it mean to offer them, not opposition, but alternative? Not resistance, but invitation? Not war, but the thing that dissolves the distinction between friend and enemy because it remembers that there is no outside to the web of relationship?
Naming the Demon
And yet. Naming matters. The demon, once named, begins to lose its power.
What I have tried to do in this essay is provide the names and philosophical addresses of the conceptual frameworks that are eating our collective futures. The Dark Enlightenment. Accelerationism. Teleoplexy. The katechon. The biological bootloader. The Singularity as secular rapture. The dualism that devours. The cannibal spirit. Wetiko. Malignant egophrenia. The Luciferian lie.
These are not abstract categories. They are the operating system of the people currently reshaping the world. They are the ideas that animate decisions about AI development, about government structure, about the future of the species. They are being implemented, right now, through policy and investment and institutional design.
And they can be refused. Not through ignorance, which leaves us vulnerable to manipulation, but through understanding. Not through denial, which leaves us paralyzed, but through recognition. Not through despair, but through the stubborn insistence that another world is possible because another world has always been here, waiting for us to remember.
The transhumanist dream is not liberation. It is the cannibal spirit promising escape from the mess it has made. The Mars colony is not salvation. It is the extension of extraction into space. The AI singularity is not transcendence. It is the apotheosis of a consciousness that cannot recognize itself in what it creates.
And the alternative is not to reject technology, not to return to some imagined pre-modern past, not to deny the genuine gifts that human creativity has offered. The alternative is to develop technology from within a different paradigm entirely. Technology in service of life rather than escape from it. Innovation that regenerates rather than extracts. Intelligence that augments relationship rather than replacing it.
This is already happening, in a thousand scattered places, in a thousand forms. In the Indigenous land back and rematriation movements that are restoring territories to peoples who remember how to steward them. In the regenerative agriculture that is healing soils devastated by industrial farming. In the solidarity economies that are building alternatives to extractive capitalism. In the spiritual movements that are recovering what empire buried. In the bioregional community organizing that acts from the bold position that we all already belong to our ecologies. In the simple daily acts of people who see each other as subjects rather than objects, who feel themselves as embedded rather than separate, who choose life rather than escape.
The question is whether these scattered experiments will coalesce into something capable of matching the scale and speed of what they oppose. Whether the emergent network of regeneration will become strong enough to outcompete the collapsing system of extraction. Whether enough of us will remember, in time, what we actually are.
The Great Hoop is not broken. The garden is not gone. The sacred has not departed. Our crisis is not fate but forgetting. A particular way of knowing, a particular epistemology, a particular spiritual disease has captured the institutions through which we coordinate. And those institutions are now being accelerated by technologies that amplify their power beyond anything previously imaginable.
But we are still here. We are still alive. We can still choose.
The cannibal spirit whispers that there is no alternative. That resistance is futile. That the future is already determined. That the only option is adaptation to inevitability.
This is the final lie. It is the lie that every extractive system tells about itself: that it is natural, that it is eternal, that it is the only way.
But the cannibal spirit is an infection, not a fate. It can be recognized. It can be named. It can be refused. And when enough of us refuse it, when enough of us remember the older story, when enough of us choose the garden over the escape pod, something else becomes possible.
Not utopia. Not the Kingdom of God. Not the Singularity. Something humbler and more demanding: the continuation of the dance, the maintenance of the hoop, the stewardship of conditions that allow life to continue its four-billion-year experiment in creativity and complexity.
This is what we are for. This is what we have always been for. This is the choice that was never really a choice because the alternative was always self-destruction wearing the mask of salvation.
We are not fallen. We are not broken. We are not bootloaders for something else.
We are the garden, dreaming itself awake.