Essential ‘Gut Checks’
Beginning with a simple ‘virus scan’ of your autonomic nervous system to check for fight/flight bugs in the system, lets take a deep look at the bi-partisan nature of what’s at stake here beginning with the recent Congressional testimony of Jordan B. Peterson on March 7th, 2024 regarding SkyNet. In doing so, I can not stress it enough that the existential risk of what China’s SkyNet represents is not a left vs. right (us/them) issue but a genuine crisis on the order of apocalyptic proportions. For one thing, I have some sense of the nefarious nature of said government given some of my undergraduate research conducted in Suzhou China (苏州市) regarding the correlation between the spread of AIDS and globalization was abruptly shutdown by said communist regime. Lastly and perhaps most importantly the following ‘test of will’ (i.e., virus scan) has everything to do with the purpose of this memoir. What does this mean you may ask?
To be blunt, if my citing of the conservative’s anti-woke rock star JP triggers your fight/flight response, take this as a real-world ‘gut check’ that you may already be infected by the aforementioned binary logic which shuts down one’s capacity to hear the other side (i.e., your autonomic system has been hacked). So here goes…
Helping us to further scan for the presence of the right/left logics, lets now turn to the hot topic of religion to explore just how deep the impending risk may be if, God forbid, we do not restrain its ‘algorithmic system of control.’ In describing what he calls “the paradox of sovereignty,” Italian philosopher Georgio Agamben’s critical analysis of biopolitics (which merges political judgement w/ life) sheds additional light onto the Schmittian ‘Us vs. Them’ algorithm which consists in the fact that the sovereign (Carl’s friend Adolf) is simultaneously inside and outside of the legal order.[vi] Very much akin to corporate regulatory capture of federal agencies through the ‘revolving door’ such as Monsanto’s relationship with the Environmental Protection Agency, Agamben’s paradox illuminates that Adolf along with others such as Stalin, Mao, Napoleon, etc. could operate outside of as well as within the legal order as they saw fit.
The ‘state of the union’ so to speak, within each context, was formed by the the degree to which liberty either flourished or fell to the wayside due to a variety of contextual issues. Simply put, what it boiled down to is more dialogue = good (i.e., transparency) and less dialogue = bad (i.e., secrecy). In Redesigning Life: Eugenics, Biopolitics, and the Challenge of the Techno-Human Condition, Nathan Van Camp explains:
Writing in the context of latent civil war characteristic of early Weimar Germany, Schmitt argued that the liberals’ ignorance of the possibility that some exceptionally threatening event might occur kept them from developing a consistent theory of emergency powers that could protect the legal order in times of extreme peril. More specifically, Schmitt detects two fundamental flaws in the liberal theory of the state. Firstly, some of its most essential principles, such as the separation of powers and the system of checks and balances, impede the state in deciding clearly who has the power to proclaim a state of exception and take the necessary measures to restore law and order. Secondly, since the exception cannot be subsumed under a preexisting legal norm, it is impossible to appeal to codified law to determine in advance what must done to suppress extremely dangerous threats to the legal order. The first line of Schmitt’s Political Theology, “[s]overeign is he who decides on the exception,” should be read as a remedy to both of these flaws in the liberal constitutional state.[vii]
The paradox for Agamben is to be found in the fact that, in order to protect the legal order, the sovereign has the power to legally place himself/herself outside of it. For me this paradox can be easily resolved from a Catholic perspective by first understanding that the sovereignty of the state is not a person but the will of the people hence my ‘gut check’ (viral scan) above: assessing how deep the us/them logics has taken over the neurophysiological ‘system’ so to speak. In accepting the reality of the ‘will of the people,’ the problem then resides in where we place the sovereign powers of what St. Paul calls the katechon (i.e., ‘he who holds back’ or ‘that which holds back’) found in 2 Thessalonians 2:6-7. That is, who or what executes the ‘emergency powers’ that relates to the growing concerns with both trans-humanism and wokeism alike especially in light of the two merging into the apocalyptic form of post-humanism’s so-called non-human turn?
I argue that this requires a sovereign call “for a binding international treaty to regulate the development and use of artificial intelligence” (AI) that either resides within the state alone which in Schmitt’s case was Hitler (i.e., inordinate hierarchy) or with a hybrid between the state and the Holy Roman Catholic Church (i.e., moderate hierarchy); forming something akin to a hybrid between what philosopher D.C. Schindler calls the Politics of the Real with the ‘Reality of the Politics’ that reflects a “kind of ‘left-integralism’ quite different from the Schmittian version.”[viii] This katechonic process-design is performed by encouraging an anointed transduction rather than a diabolical stagnation of communicative signals moving freely between the One Holy Church and the Many liberal democracies throughout the world. What I mean by this is that for those of us who are enjoying the pronounced privileges that come with living in a modern liberal democracy, this either/or choice is fairly straight forward given Schmitt’s view is to shut down dialogue in favor of an inordinate hierarchy that looks a lot like this:
In choosing the sovereign temperance of the Pope over the absolute intemperance of a Dictator in the emerging age of intelligent machines, the sovereign ‘call’ of the katechon (a person) is best expressed by the Holy Church while the katechonic powers of the/a state bound by an ‘international treaty’ to regulate AI is exercised extrinsically through the liberal engagement ‘of the people, for the people by the people.’ A regulatory framework founded upon open-dialogue performed through what Schmitt patronizingly deemed to be “a cautious half measure” rather than his preferred all-in measure of supporting the rise of fascism that explicitly ignores the Center for AI Safety’s 2023 statement on AI risks: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”[ix]
Honestly, the very real existential risks of AI means that we must come to trust a liberal democracy’s external power ‘of the people’ to restrain the ‘the man of lawlessness’ (‘that which holds back’) while leaving the conservative internal measures of ‘one person’ to the Sovereign Pontiff as our global commander and chief (‘he who holds back’). Upon doing so, the katechonic act of withholding resolves Agamben’s paradox through proactive extrinsic/intrinsic engagements between the state and the Holy Church. If this is the case which I believe that it is, my hope through this project is that by doing so, “the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle” born from the Us vs. Them logics of the control-state (卐) will be remissively halted and thus the emerging identity war in the age of intelligent machines will be “suspended forever in an everlasting discussion” as Schmitt puts it.[x]
At this juncture between the ‘decisive bloody battle’ of the fascist state, which history tells us that it flipped the above katechonic schema on its head in the 1930s by declaring Adolf as the so-called sovereign, and the open dialogues of a liberal democracy that restrains the virality of an us/them logics from crashing the governing system (via Pope = sovereign Vicar of Christ on earth), Weindling helps us to better understand the historical origins of America’s emerging identity war by describing the left’s ‘soft,’ un-restraining response to Huxley’s new eugenics. He writes:
Civil rights protests, the critique of professional authority and feminism at the close of the 1960s marked the crystallisation point for libertarian and socio-political critiques of science as value-laden and itself constituting vested social interests and structures of biopolitical power. The critique marked the starting-point for the social history of eugenics and population policies that would deconstruct the public attitudes and authoritarian structures that Huxley had endeavoured to create.[xi]
This period also marked the beginning of the end for science’s claim to objectivity and thus ushered in a new breed of social theorist who eventually came to the post-modern conclusion that nature in and of itself was socially constructed and sex was “assigned at birth.”[xii] In leaving objectivity behind and with it any and all intuitive bearings for discerning between what is real and non-real, Huxley’s trans-humanism didn’t simply disappear from the institutional petri-dishes within which it was incubated but it evolved, morphed into a more potent expression of technocratic control that is surprisingly not being critiqued by the left but is in many ways being embraced by it.
Again, Schmitt is instructive here when we account for the ‘productive power’ of the left as I have pointed out in my past work on the environmental movement in central Appalachia. Essentially I found that the radical left often carries with it a self-righteous 'blind spot' that renders its response to “some exceptionally threatening event” such as climate change or unregulated AI as ‘soft’ and thus ensuring said ‘crisis’ as an un-restrained existential threat.[xiii] Rather than engaging in concrete actions that directly confront said crisis through ‘doing,’ much of my intimate experience with the radical left over the past 20-yrs is that many of them are more concerned with self-congratulatory expressions of ‘symbolic action’ rather than ‘connective community action’ thus forgoing any actual, concrete change occurring in the real-world. St. James puts it this way in James 1:22-24:
But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.
Most often attributed to its unchecked ‘productive power’ which affectively represses internal gut checks (i.e., necessary criticisms of liberal norms) rather than promoting them via a secularized version of the Church’s ecumenical disposition towards open-dialogue, liberalism could certainly use a deeper reflection upon and faith-in Christ’s desire that “they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”[xiv] This is as true for both the Environmentalist’s beloved ‘anti-mountain top removal movement’ as well as the ‘anti-fascist’ or Antifa-regime of the today as it was for the anti-psychiatry movement of yesteryear.
The trend that I’d like to propose as a suggested 'gut check' for the radical left and the left-in-general that blindly (w/out criticism) supported their riots over 2020 is that the insertion of 'anti' before the professed cause always seems to obscure a more sinister, dare I say fascist, force at work just below the surface of its self-righteous ethos. A flimsy ethos built upon a ‘No Gods, No Masters’ ethos that in all honesty lacks a genuine moral fortitude to exercise some much needed katechonic restraint as we enter the age of intelligent machines. Here again, Christ is instructive when He calls us to turn away from anger (Mt 5:21-26) and to love our enemies (43-48):
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.[xv]
The post-Huxley ‘neo-left’ and its rhizomatic ‘anti-psychiatry’ offshoots seems to have forgotten time and time again its old-left roots (which I deeply align with) that was and still is in many ways found in the radical potency of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. Don’t trust me on this point! All one has to do is look to the great giants upon which the legacy of modern liberalism - ‘life, liberty and pursuit of happiness’ - stands upon which includes both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. King provides a potent ‘gut check’ for contemporary libs ‘anti-( )’ leanings in Stride Toward Freedom: “Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale[…] It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking[…] I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.”[xvi]
It’s for this and many other reasons that I stand firm in my statement that ‘in 2020, the left, left me – it shifted, I didn’t!’ This is, as I will argue throughout the corpus of my work, due to very real fact that the neo-left that reared it monstrous head in 2020 is being driven by similar nefarious forces that have and still are fueling the radical right ever since trans-humanism supposedly fell out of favor with the collapse of Nazi Germany and morphed into the left’s ‘new eugenics’ espoused by Margaret Sanger.[xvii] Monstrous indeed, this force is accelerating it’s technocratic march from organic womb - to - ‘artificial life’ in an almost unfathomable speed under the health affirming guise of reducing “deaths and disability for babies born extremely preterm” by taking the woman-based womb completely out of the equation.[xviii] The convergence of this trend with the so-called technological singularity sets the stage for unleashing Schmitt’s us/them logics in ways that not even the most imaginative science fiction mind could muster up a vision for depicting such impure-potentiality.
The Reality of Politics…
Given the historical ebb/flow of transhumanism’s neo-eugenics is simultaneously increasing its oscillatory resonance between right/left political orientations in direct proportion to the speed at which it is accelerating towards fusing artificial life (A-Life) with AI, the true enemy isn’t found in leftist or right wingers as some would want to believe the case to be including…
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THE REST OF THIS SECTION WILL BE RELEASED ON APRIL 12TH @11:00EST
[vi] Georgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University Press, 1998); For Agamben, “‘biopolitics is at least as old as the legal exception.’ The legal exception marks the state’s willingness to make judgments about life in general, not merely the political elements of it.” What’s important here is how the state defines what life is and what it is not which is, I argue, a function of the Holy Church rather than the state. Hear me out! This is especially important with the accelerated movement towards merging artificial intelligence with artificial life via the so-called technological singularity. According to the standard understanding of the ‘sovereign,’ the state alone welds the capacity to judge what is or is not life. Given this, at this singular nexus that lies between AI and A-Life resides the central target of the new materialist project and its focused attack on human exceptionalism. I am almost certain that this frontal attack will unfold by defining through the so-called sovereignty of the state what consciousness is by and through the lens of an AI framework (i.e., the essence of consciousness is computational). By oversimplifying consciousness as merely computational in an already primed political mindset willing to accept un-real claims ((i.e., a man is a woman) as being real, the state can then equate the two and thus pronounce the birth of the so-called singularity by proxy with little to no adherence to an objective protocol set out by the Holy Church in collaboration of world governments. Here, perception and its relationship to the ‘will’ of the people is absolutely everything regardless of the objectively of the claim in terms of its scientific validity. If people believe AI is A-Life then in many ways it is from a relative perspective. The smoke and mirrors of this magick show has everything to do with philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s theory of time he calls aion. My work corrects his (esoteric) spell-ing by referring to his theory of time as æon and in turn ‘takes back’ Aiôn which is a term used in Holy scripture to signify God’s Olam (עולם). In the old testament, the essential idea in olam was flow, in the sense of ever-flowing. Deleuze’s æon is an esoteric attempt to simulate this ‘eternal flow’ by merging AI and A-Life to produce the illusion that man has become god by creating life. This is the sole purpose and singular strategy of Deleuze’s so-called ‘order’ which he calls ‘pure immanence.’ Above quote taken from Luke Dunne, “Giorgio Agamben on Biopolitics and the State of Exception,” The Collector, June 11, 2023, https://www.thecollector.com/giorgio-agamben-life-biopolitics-state-exception/
[vii] Nathan Van Camp, Redesigning Life: Eugenics, Biopolitics, and the Challenge of the Techno-Human Condition (P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2015), 73-74.
[viii] First quotes taken from Christopher White, “Pope Francis Calls for International Treaty on Artificial Intelligence,” National Catholic Reporter, December 14, 2023, https://www.ncronline.org/vatican/vatican-news/pope-francis-calls-international-treaty-artificial-intelligence; second quote taken from John Ehrett, “Discerning the Real,” Kirk Center, June 27, 2021, https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/discerning-the-real/; First and foremost, it must be clearly understood that I'm not in any way proposing a theocracy for but an ‘anointing’ of the participatory process-design that I hope will emerge between the Holy Church and a global assemblage of liberal democracies for our journey into the age of intelligent machines. Ideally incubated by and through this works proposed katechonic disposition that links living architecture with regenerative design. This said, the ‘politics of the real’ as it relates to liberalism is not lost but is found in the ‘reality of the politics’ by and through the theological realism I am advocating throughout the corpus of my work. This will be further unpacked throughout this memoir but the basic gist is that the ‘reality of politics’ is built upon a fusion (we are one) rather than a separation between conservative and liberal values that suppresses (withholds) rather than expresses (unleashes) Schmitt's us/them logics. This fused ‘state of the union’ is expressive of peace where we are one in Christ rather than promoting war in the age of intelligent machines. Moreover, the katechonic disposition that my theological realism includes requires both conserving the eternal Good (in God) while also affirming our free will to choose (in reality/creation). This is the absolute liberal nature of creation, its pure potentiality, its evolutionary process-design that reflects God's gift of free will which allows for us to choose eternal life (everything) or absolute death (nothing). It's not us but God who holds the sovereign position of the conservative Will which is Being in and of itself. This means that a so-called conservative agent or citizen (‘he that withholds’) cannot fully reflect this Will of the sovereign alone and to claim that a person or group of persons holds this power is to claim that she/he or they is/are God: essentially claiming that the seat of St. Peter is vacant and to fill it by proxy. This is precisely why the Pope is fundamentally crucial both inside and outside of Catholicism as he serves as a spiritual/physical intersection point between conservative and liberal values, that is, God's Will and our will. God is the one and only true conservative (i.e., the absolute conservation of the Good) who in His infinite wisdom is also immanently liberal by and through how creation is designed (by Grace) to either openly, and in the case of Humans kenotically, reflect the living image of God or to turn away from Him by simulating the Christ via fusing AI with A-Life. To become one with God or to proclaim to be God, to be in God or to be shut off from Him as Deleuze’s neo-pantheism embraces. Simply put, to be or not to be, this is the essential question.
In this way, it's not God who condemns us but our own free will that chooses either good or evil in the physical (flesh) that carries with these choices eternal consequences in the spiritual (soul). Basically, these physical choices accumulate over time to form our spiritual identity which is either able to stand in or fall from the eternal Grace of God who is love. God is good and is only good which provides present day identity politics with the absolute truth that “love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” Love is not safe, it's radically transformative! This living God is the One that conserves the Good and it is this eternal Good that is Ultimate Reality. It is us who are either good or evil expressed through our actions in the world not God.
St. Paul puts it this way when describing the division in the church that wholly captures the politics of the real that I will be unpacking throughout my work. He states: “But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not being merely human? What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building. According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it. For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw— each one's work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If anyone's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire. Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him. For God's temple is holy, and you are that temple. Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, “He catches the wise in their craftiness,” and again, “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.” So let no one boast in men. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's;” First quote above taken from D.C. Schindler, “Bishop Barron Presents | D.C. Schindler - Catholicism and Liberalism,” Bishop Robert Barron YouTube Channel, March 14, 2024,
; for more about the politics of the real see: D.C. Schindler, The Politics of the Real: The Church Between Liberalism and Integralism (New Polity Press, 2021); scriptural verses above are taken from 1 Corinthians 3 ESV.
[ix] Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, 63.
[x] Ibid.
[xi] Weindling, "Julian Huxley and the Continuity of Eugenics in Twentieth-Century Britain."
[xii] In her testimony before Congress on June 14th 2023 Dr. Miriam Grossman stated that “sex is not assigned at birth. Sex is established at conception, and it’s recognized at birth if not earlier. To claim that sex is assigned at birth is without any scientific basis whatsoever. Its language misleads people, especially children, into thinking that male and female are arbitrary designations and can change.” She also provides a global perspective from other countries who have attempted the trans-path. Taken from Miriam Grossman, “Dr. Miriam Grossman's Testimony House Committee on Energy and Commerce,” Do No Harm, June 14, 2023,
[xiii] Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, 63; for more about my use of ‘productive power’ in analyzing the environmental movement see: Joseph Eric Mathis, A Practitioner's Guide to Applied Sustainability: Initial Explorations (Appalachian State University, 2013), 78.
[xiv] John 17:21 ESV.
[xv] Matthew 5:43-48 ESV.
[xvi] Martin Luther King, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (Beacon Press, 2010), 84-85.
[xvii] Angela Franks, Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility (McFarland & Company, 2005).