UAP, AI, And The Naiveté Of Moderns

And: America As 'Truman Show'; Benz Warns,'You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet'

Our coming spiritual fathers? (Made with Grok, which is AI)

Do you remember my mentioning here the thing Marc Andreessen said on Rogan late last year, about how an unnamed Catholic professor of his acquaintance said that a medieval peasant would be more psychologically prepared for what’s coming than a modern person? I thought I had a good idea of what that professor meant, but I wasn’t quite sure. Lo, it turns out that the professor is a friend of mine, and indeed a reader of this newsletter! When he identified himself to me, I asked him to explain. He said:

The Enlightenment worldview is characterized by a view of the self as fenced off from other selfs and impermeable. It also places Reason (and man as the rational animal) at the top of the food chain of Being, with perhaps some concession for a distant Deist god. AI is a calamity for this worldview, both because it calls into question man’s position in this chain of being, and because it will fill the world with intelligent agents, including some that seem quite alien to us. A medieval peasant believed that a) the world was filled with spiritual beings more intelligent than him and b) that he could navigate this world with certain humble practices, and that he tempted disaster if he didn’t.

This is a profound insight. It brings to mind a guy I know, a Christian who lost his faith a couple of years ago. He has become a thoroughgoing enthusiast of UAPs (the new name for UFOs), and says it’s all more real to him that Christianity ever was. The hiddenness of God infuriates him. The UAPs give him something to see and feel. Of course he is being very selective here, ignoring the many miracles of Christ, and the signs and wonders that continue within Christianity today. But I think I get it: this UAP thing is visceral, and he is an enthusiast.

It does not seem to have occurred to him that these things might be real (as I believe they are) but not of God, and indeed evil. He’s all in. Jacques Vallée, who is not a Christian, theorizes that they are real, and are manifestations of a malign superintelligence. Vallée has also written that this “aliens” thing is exactly how you would expect them to manifest in a scientific and technological age, one that has no use for paranormal beings of past ages, but is eager to believe in aliens from space who possess advanced technology that seems to us like magic.

My friend’s belief that whatever these things are, they mean us no harm, is vital to understanding what is coming. I hope I’m wrong, but I believe that a shocking number of people would surrender their judgment entirely if these things ever show themselves to us in an undeniably real way — the “landing on the White House lawn” scenario. Though he was a very conservative Christian, his belief seems to me to have been entirely theoretical — meaning, a phenomenon of his left brain. I don’t know him well enough to judge, but an experience of the living Christ never seems to have taken root in his heart. It is easy for me to understand why this UAP thing has lit his mind on fire. As conservative as he was in his Christianity, he is a thoroughly modern person, in the sense that the Catholic professor means. As rationalistic as he is, he has no inner defenses against these things. Though the professor was talking about AI, he could also have been talking about NHI (the acronym for “non-human intelligences”).

See, this is why I judged it vital to include in Living In Wonder a chapter on the dark/false enchantment of UAPs and AI. These entangled phenomena, which offer a form of enchantment — a sense of being in touch with intelligent powers greater than ourselves that give us a sense of wonder, of meaning, and of purpose. But it is not of God. As I wrote yesterday, in Clarke’s Childhood’s End, the Overlords — the hyperintelligent aliens who take control of earth, and manage it beneficially, though for catastrophically evil ends — are well aware that they would have to lead humanity through a long period of desensitization, to make man able to receive them without freaking out. They look like demons, and though they aren’t supernatural beings — that is, they aren’t demons in the sense Christianity understands them — they behave like demons, in that their ultimate purpose is the destruction of humanity.

Per Vallée, we have long been living through this desensitization. It began with the advent of the scientific and technological age, and the dethroning of Christianity, and of religion in general, as the authoritative mode of experiencing Truth. And now it’s accelerating. As I wrote yesterday, in the 2015 TV series version of Clarke’s novel, a TV commentator present when Karellen, the chief Overlord, finally shows himself to the world, calls him one of “our guardian angels.” He looks like a classic demon, but by then, the world’s religions have declined to almost nothing, and humanity has lost its fear of being who look like monsters with horns and barbed tails.

I don’t believe these NHI, when they eventually manifest in whatever form they take, will look like demons from medieval illustrations. But I also believe that however they look, much of humanity will fail to recognize what medieval peasants would have done. It’s happening now. The process is underway. If it happens — that is, if government disclosure is eventually followed by direct and sustained contact, whether it happens five years from now or fifty — a large part of humanity will have been prepared to greet them as the equivalent of gods.

It’s true with AI as well. From Living In Wonder:

A technology that makes a dream seem real, or at least more satisfying than reality, sounds magical, doesn’t it? “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously said. The metaverse churchgoers and the lonely men who prefer their AI girlfriends to real women embody what sets advanced digital culture apart from other technologies. What makes it the most magical of all is its power to define our sense of reality.

After all, nobody bows down before their laptops. Yet it is science and technology that provide the framework—a faith framework of sorts—for our engagement with the world, that set the parameters around the way we think and the things we do. Only cranks and other marginal people dare raise voices against the cultural hegemony of science and technology. What the church was for medieval Christians, the Machine is for most of us today. Science—especially digital technology—does in fact what magic tried to do in theory: extend man’s power over the material world.

The magic of the Machine has nearly destroyed the buffered self. Digital culture and its tools—the internet, personal computer, smartphone, and now artificial intelligence—are accomplishing what no other worldly enchanter could: re-creating the porous self, one open to forces more or less beyond one’s ability to control.

It seems paradoxical to condemn the Machine as a powerful agent of disenchantment, yet also condemn it for opening the self to re-enchantment. How to explain this seeming contradiction? Centuries of Machine thinking eroded and eventually all but obliterated Christian enchantment. But it did not eliminate the craving for the mysterious and the transcendent. Having destroyed the old Christian cosmic way of seeing, the Machine now prepares its servants to accept new forms of enchantment. Some of them are forthrightly occult—dark enchantment. Others—like idolizing technology as a materialistic means of achieving transcendence—are false forms of enchantment. Sometimes, as with AI enthusiasts and other technological devotees who channel entities, the two forms of enchantment cross over.

The point is this: readying the world for these new religions required scraping the Western mind clean of traditional Christian metaphysics. That clearing operation began hundreds of years ago with the abandonment of the medieval model. Our post-Christian world is being re-enchanted; the question now is, By what, and by whom?

Digital culture has created a global system of communication that permits the most intimate details of one’s life to be known instantly around the world, if one chooses. And many do choose—especially young people who have grown up in the digital era and who scarcely recognize boundaries between the personal and the public. The person of digital culture is one who has externalized his mind to a degree unprecedented in human history.

In the book, I quote scholars who talk about how AI will seem to have godlike powers, and human nature being what it is, we will be hard-pressed to resist relating to it as such, even if we tell ourselves that it is “just” a machine. More:

As McArthur puts it, “We should try to imagine what an unsettling and powerful experience it will be to have a conversation with something that appears to possess a superhuman intelligence and is actively and aggressively asking for your allegiance.”

According to Pasulka, some of the most intellectually sophisticated and accomplished people on the planet believe that AI reveals, in her words, “nonhuman intelligence from outside our dimension of space-time.” These people postulate that AI is the form of communication that these higher intelligences are using to establish deeper and broader contact with humanity. AI, in their view, is an oracular icon these discarnate beings are using to communicate to humanity, to help the human race.

Seraphim Rose, as I’ve said, thought otherwise, holding that UFOs are the form demons take to prepare the world for a false religion. I reread Rose’s book after Jonah, the ex-occultist turned Orthodox Christian who appeared in an earlier chapter, told me how shocked he was, after his conversion, to discover that the things Seraphim Rose foresaw were very close to what the demonic “gods” with whom he communed as an occultist told him was their plan to enslave and destroy humanity.

Along those lines, it stunned me to read the persuasive case that bestselling Christian writer and pastor Jonathan Cahn makes that ancient Sumerian gods—Baal, Ishtar, and Moloch—have returned and are asserting their dark power over the post-Christian world.[iii] As a Messianic Jewish cleric and a megachurch pastor, Cahn’s world is very different from the Christian headspace inhabited by Orthodox Christians such as Jonah and me. But when I put Cahn’s argument to him, Jonah didn’t hesitate to affirm it as “absolutely correct.”

We are sailing in deep waters here. It’s not hard to imagine that readers who have followed me up to now will conclude that this is where the story I tell of modern mysticism shipwrecks itself on the shoals of crackpottery. I get it. I would have thought the same thing not long ago—and once I overcame the epistemological shock of what is already known about UFOs and the connections that elites who study them make between the UFO-associated entities and artificial intelligence, many things began to seem less like cheap sci-fi fantasia and more like informed speculation—which points us to rightful cautions about the way that humanity relates to tech.

Martin Heidegger, arguably the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, reached the end of his life in despair about humanity’s capacity to govern its technology. In a 1966 article published after his death, Heidegger bleakly stated that “only a god can save us” from our out-of-control technology. He meant that only an external force that has the authority to command us could stay our self-destructive hand. If he’s right, then a question arises: In the postmodern, post-Christian age, what sort of visible god or gods could the masses believe in? What sort of theophanic event would be possible that would convince most people that they had witnessed the arrival of a higher being or beings capable of saving us from ourselves?

One (hypothetical) answer seems obvious: the landing of what appears to be an alien spacecraft and the manifestation of aliens who come bearing charisma, authority, and a new revelation. A planet that has been prepared by the de facto worship of technology, and the way it has bulldozed authoritative traditions and drawn people the world over into an electronic global community, is one that has been prepared for the gods to arrive in their sky chariots.

In his poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,” the Alexandrian Greek poet C. P. Cavafy described citizens of a rich, decadent, spiritually exhausted city who are encouraged by news that a barbarian horde is coming to conquer them. They welcome the opportunity to bend their knees to new masters, who stand to deliver them from their world-weariness. But the barbarians do not come. The citizens go home dejected. In Edmund Keeley’s translation, Cavafy ends his poem like so:

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.

In the same spirit, the aliens, whatever they are, are a kind of solution to save us from the burden of disenchantment. They would be the ultimate gods of a technocratic civilization that abandoned worship of the true God and instead had for some time been worshiping the work of its own hands.

Pray, then, that we don’t get the gods we deserve.

Please read the book, and read it with people from your church, or friends who are religious believers. This stuff is accelerating, and we are not prepared for it. If you had said to me three years ago that I would be writing like this, and even about this, I would have laughed. I’m not laughing now. I’ve had some readers end their subscriptions because they’re sick of reading about it. Seriously, I understand. But closing our eyes and ears to what’s happening, even as the mainstream media fails to report on the astonishing things that are really going on, and that you can hear about on podcasts and learn about on alternative media, is not going to make it go away. Obviously you can’t accept as true everything people claim. But something is going on.

I mentioned in this space recently that I had been told that a well-known scientist who had been a skeptic about UAPs recently flipped after receiving a lot of information from government whistleblowers — information he judged credible, so much so that he now believes that something big is happening. I didn’t know if this scientist had gone public, so I didn’t disclose his name.

But I see now that he has, in fact, gone public: he is Eric Weinstein, the mathematician and physicist who is now a high-level venture capitalist. I see that a few years ago, the Harvard PhD apologized to the UAP community for dismissing them all as cranks and fantasists. In this clip, Weinstein discusses what he learned late last year, and how it changed his mind. That interview happened almost a year ago. I had not known that until today.

Recently I learned that Weinstein has recently received far more credible information from multiple informed sources, and that this has taken him much further towards belief that whatever is happening, it’s real, and it’s massive. I look forward to whatever he says next publicly on the topic.

As I will discuss in the next item today, it is important that we all understand that so much of what we think is real, because we have been told certain narratives by authorities, is in fact a mixture of half-truths and lies. This is not only about UAPs, of course. The things that DOGE are uncovering about what the US Government was really up to all these years? That is the model for understanding what is broadly happening now. You who have read me for a while know that some years back, I realized that most professional journalism is more about creating and defending a Narrative, versus uncovering the truth. Again, I’m not talking here about the UAP story, but it certainly applies.

Point is, Mike Benz (whom you should be following on X) is right:

More on this point below the paywall.