Earth's Emerging Butlerian Jihad
What happens when humanity rebels against a mechanized, algorithmic world run by roboticized technocrats, bureaucrats, and transhumanist social engineers?
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
―Gaius Helen Mohiam to Paul Atreides[src] (in Dune by Frank Herbert)
A lot can be learned about our own situation from reading a speculative fiction book like Dune, especially one so prescient and well-rendered. It is humanity’s nature to learn and be moved by story, and to know itself, its challenges, and ultimately its character, by the story it writes for itself.
Will Earth’s humanity embrace the spirit of life that animates its existence and provides for its creativity, or will it succumb to silicon-based programming? Will it fail to exercise faith and courage in the face of daunting intimidation and de-humanization, or will it instead EMPOWER its life—conferred to it in special times in history—to write a new story, a new creation, a new power and sovereignty from the ashes of oppression.
The rallying cry, “Rise up!” can be read, written, and spoken in so many ways—as refusal, as rebellion, as resurrection, and as elevation. We are now being called to manifest broadly and deeply all four of these meanings.
We are going through our own “Butlerian Jihad” even as I speak to you, the reader. What is a Butlerian Jihad? It is a battle over the ultimate sources of meanings in our lives—between the “gods” of in-souled spirit, personhood, and reverence for life and the “gods” of de-souled machines, programming, and slavish devotion to a hollow materialism.
A Dune fansite describes Butlerian Jihad thusly:
The Butlerian Jihad, also known as the Great Revolt[1][2], was the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots begun in 201 BG and concluded in 108 BG.[3] After two generations of chaos, the god of machine-logic was overthrown by the masses and a new concept was raised: "Man may not be replaced." After two generations of violence, humanity took pause. Following this, their gods and rituals were looked upon in a different, perhaps even jaded, light. Both were largely seen to be guilty of using fear as a means of control. Hesitantly, the leaders of religions whose followers had spilled the blood of billions began meeting to exchange views.
This description foretells our own struggles and redemption. There is within it the intimidating onslaught of impersonal forces that anoint themselves as the new global religion—largely atheist, techno-utopian, and silicon driven. There is the conflict between these dehumanizing forces and the ramparts of the human heart and soul, once perhaps domesticated by institutionalized religion, but freed from its slumber when “religion” served only to intensify dehumanization and side with autocratic powers. Finally, there was confrontation, fatigue, and detente, the emergence of a new world based on exchange, connection, and co-creation over tribalisms that served only to slaughter and degrade.
I was turned on to the term Butlerian Jihad by my brother-in-law, Tom, who used it to describe (in an email he sent today) a necessary (and now nearly inevitable) path forward given the failure of “reform” and “progress” in our present system. He rightfully pointed out that this so-called progress was actually a regressive, and strangely conservative, ruse to deepen monopolies, concentrations of power and money, and greater domination of the earth in the hands of fewer and fewer people.
Tom:
The ONLY hope is a collapse and reinvention. There is no gradual, holistic, progressive awakening without a crisis (says Schumpeter) via creative destruction. That creative destruction should start with (attacking) computer power and AI - we need a Butlerian Jihad.
Tom based this on a profoundly disturbing and relevant insight, that according to an updated Marxian analysis, humans have become both the exploited worker and the exploited product in which they not only agree to their own dehumanization, but in may ways even CELEBRATE it and attempt to make it a kind of virtue. The age old question of ancient Greek philosophers, “What is the good life?”, has been answered with “Selling your soul to a surface-rich and substance-lacking script pre-written and programmed by others.” These impersonal “others” worship (to borrow Tom’s analysis) a trinity of false gods: globalization, financialization, and social media”:
The only way to make money, to be seen, or have value in the world is to be a brand. This results in our very identities as human beings - not just labor - being bought and sold. Because we are actively doing it to ourselves we think this is agency but it is the opposite. To do this you must embed yourself in some of the evilest capitalist enterprises ever constructed - Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and all the ecosystem of apps and finance surrounding them. Once you do this they have you - you become a cog in the machine and you have truly sold your soul and - most importantly - you are now even less resilient and less likely to upset the apple cart.
I replied:
I don't disagree…. (but even) Marxist analysis,… could not have anticipated the ways in which citizens themselves would become the multi-trillion dollar products in a Big Data industry that is spreading like cancer to consume the entire economy, even financialization itself.
I went on to identify concrete examples in which labor is being exploited and paid less and less in real dollars to make products and to grow their own earnings, for example 12 years of no minimum wage raise and 12 years of zero interest rate on savings, but I also went on to detail how these impersonal EXTERNAL forces have worked their way into our INTERNAL experience and choice-making:
It doesn't take much of an extension to see how the mechanisms of control have extended not only into labor production and exploitation, but domination of the emotional and psychological faculties and resources of the world's most valuable asset-- people's attention, energy, and mind.
I went on:
Yes, I agree that many people have mostly reduced themselves to an avatar (a plasticized "brand" in [Tom’s] terms). But this also solves nothing. Will the system have to collapse? It is already, and even the controlling neo-liberals are trying to buy their way into an alternative. Read this excellent Substack article on it: "The Billionaires have hired Millionaires to write a new version of Das Kapital." Even these controlling neo-liberals recognize there is nothing to save.
Ironically the… Republican Christians [in the U.S.] are the ones most successfully rebelling against this dehumanization and attempted coup by technocrats and unelected bureaucrats (spearheaded… by a neo-liberal, transhumanist social engineering caste). Isn't it richly ironic that [the neo-liberal cabal has] formed a circular firing squad with their neurosis and fear [all to familiar in too many of our own families], allowing the fear-driven "rich" countries to OVER-vaccinate [and come up with worse results than] the countries they despise and find "lower" (i.e. Palestine, African countries, India, etc.)...
I will actually be meeting with a local Republican party power couple to challenge the idiotic mask mandates here, as I did at a recent school board meeting. Adults, who are up to 1000x more likely to die from it, are freed from wearing masks in California as of Feb. 15, 2022, but kids still are [required to wear masks in schools]. There are ample examples of Stacy Abrams, AOC, etc. not wearing masks where the children and the "help" all are forced to wear them.
I have not changed my historically progressive values: Standing with the with the working class and against corporatism, with the oppressed and against the oppressor, with civil and human rights and against tyranny, with democracy and against authoritarianism. But who do you align with when you have so-called “progressives” like Justin Trudeau (and even Naomi Klein, author of the the anti-corporatist Shock Doctrine) act against every imaginable historical progressive value and side with an anti-democratic repressive government against peaceful protesters including freezing their bank accounts?! I am left out in the cold as a pro-democracy advocate, just like the truckers and Canadian Freedom Convoy are literally left in the cold by their own “liberal” government.
I continued:
I'll never vote for that amoral, incompetent, megalomaniac, atheist [Donald] Trump, but neither will I ever vote for or fund a neo-liberal party or candidate and that incompetent, corrupt, mentally-addled, loser, [Joe] Biden. If they are running against each other in 2024, I am writing in RFK Jr. and that is that. I have withdrawn my money from all contributions to Democratic candidates (even the so-called "progressive" ones, because they have proven they won't fight and that they are feckless and ineffective). I am working at the local level now with people of good will and faith [across political lines] to achieve pro-democracy, pro-human and civil rights objectives.
I certainly don't have an answer to the overreach and collapse, except these modest capacity and resistance-building local efforts, but make no mistake, the collapse is in progress and it will not be stopped. As Toby Rogers said on Substack:
The world right now is run by technocrats — the World Economic Forum, Davos, the Gates Foundation, W.H.O., and Greens/Democrats/Liberal/Labor Parties all operate from the belief that a ruling class of highly educated elites is entitled to govern because they will make the best decisions. And they have made a total mess of things. The world is now beset with skyrocketing inequality; corruption and capture; political polarization; chronic illness, pandemics, and death; and a move by all developed economies to emulate China with digital surveillance, censorship, and totalitarian state control. All of these horrible outcomes are a direct result of the technocrats taking power and not understanding either political philosophy nor the needs/interests of citizens.
You cannot solve the problems with the same mindsets and interests that gave rise to them.
AI is [partly] causing the destruction, but it cannot cause the creation. That is up to us and the human spirit itself. What are we willing to tolerate? What are we enabling? What are we willing to resist? How much are we ready to come across lines of divisions in our own minds and societies CREATED BY THOSE WHO WOULD SEEK TO CONTROL AND USE US? How much are we willing to co-create with others who are on different "teams" but who can join with us in coalition to take on the dehumanizing forces killing this planet and its people?
That is up to each and every person. I talked about this in my last Substack article. [People broadly] may be gulled and manipulated, but in their hearts I think they know what is up, and I think it is time to display courage to act on that deeper knowing. Those with more courage can speak up sooner and act sooner, but ultimately EVERYONE will have to make an informed decision and they will not be able to claim ignorance.
This is great and places on the table the psychodrama going on. The puppet-masters are loving it.
Brother-in-Laws having a syncretic moment. Nicely written. Tom