AI and I have been trying to make sense of what I think about the emerging political and legal landscape online. I'd thought of this as a lecture series building on somewhat vague ideas I had about what AI is, where it comes from, and how to use it for the purposes of merging Catholic thought with Georgism to escape liberalism. All quite soupy stuff. Here is one of our efforts.
The
Devil’s Boolean: How Modernity Turned Us Into Conspiracy Machines
Modern democracies rest on a paradox. They
promise freedom, rational control, and technological progress—yet deliver
burnout, conspiracy, and deepening distrust. Tools meant to liberate us—social
media, artificial intelligence, the market—now trap us in a relentless binary
logic: success or failure, visibility or obscurity, control or collapse.
That binary—what might be called a Boolean
logic of the self—runs deeper than technology. It comes out of a
Protestant-inflected culture that prizes achievement as a moral duty. As
philosopher Byung-Chul Han notes, the neoliberal subject is compelled to
perform endlessly, while failure must always be blamed on something else. The
result is a culture that explains collapse not through chance or complexity but
through conspiracy—or, increasingly, through a kind of spiritual teleology in
which history itself is imagined to be rigged.
None of this is new. Centuries earlier, Thomas
Hobbes observed that human beings are driven by the restless desire for
recognition and credit—and that this recognition is always challenged by
others. In his Leviathan, Hobbes saw rivalry for esteem as the basic
engine of conflict. Today, in the world of social media, Hobbes’s insight feels
like prophecy. Platforms transform status into a game of endless comparison,
where every like or follower is another disputed token of recognition.
The political scientist Barbara Walter has
shown how this dynamic can destabilize democracies. When combined with widening
inequality and algorithmic platforms that reward outrage, the Hobbesian battle
for esteem scales into collective resentment. Institutions fray. Polarization
hardens. Leaders bypass deliberation in favor of binary affirmation.
But there’s another layer here, one that
theologians have not been shy to name. Archbishop Fulton Sheen once argued—and
philosopher Edward Feser has recently expanded—that the modern world itself
embodies a diabolical logic. Science, markets, and democracy, he suggested,
mirror the temptations Christ faced in the desert: appetite, marvel, and
sovereignty. Each promises liberation, yet each diverts us from transcendence.
Modernity, on this view, is not godless at all—it is a false religion, offering
salvation without sacrifice.
The Machine
as Messiah
Technology has always carried an aura of
enchantment. The first computers in Vienna drew crowds not because of what they
calculated but because they seemed uncanny. Today, Silicon Valley markets
devices not only as tools but as pathways to immortality, transcendence, even
communion.
As scholars like Diana Pasulka have noted,
digital culture recycles religious forms. Tech moguls speak in tones of
prophecy, promising singularities and digital heavens. Feser reads this as a
secular replay of an old temptation: science becomes a provider of marvels,
dazzling us with wonders while distracting us from deeper truths.
Binary
Souls
The Protestant ethic, Max Weber argued, made
achievement a sign of election. One was either saved or damned, successful or
failed. In neoliberal society, Han observes, this binary structure remains. We
measure ourselves endlessly, and when we fall short, we blame shadowy
conspirators, corrupt elites, or cosmic forces.
Feser extends this argument. Modernity, he
writes, turns markets, science, and democracy into idols. Each maps onto a
diabolical temptation: appetite satisfied by consumption, marvel provided by
technology, sovereignty promised by liberal democracy. All three reinforce a
Boolean worldview: the world is divided into winners and losers, insiders and
outsiders, chosen and damned.
Recognition
and Resentment
For Hobbes, the desire for esteem was
perpetual and destabilizing. On Twitter or TikTok, that desire is the product
itself. Every algorithm, every ranking system, monetizes envy and recognition.
But recognition is fragile. When esteem
evaporates, people look for explanations. Conspiracy theories fill the void.
They provide moral order, a narrative in which failure is never personal but
always the result of hidden forces. The Boolean structure is preserved: guilty
or innocent, pure or corrupted.
Democracy
as Idol
Barbara Walter warns that algorithmic
platforms accelerate the slide toward instability. Leaders exploit this logic,
bypassing institutions and governing by spectacle. Alvin Toffler called it
“future shock”; today, it looks more like technopopulism, where democratic
process collapses into binary choice.
For Feser, this is another form of idolatry.
Democracy was meant to mediate disputes, to channel Hobbesian rivalry into
peaceful procedure. But when democracy becomes an idol—promising liberation
from every form of constraint—it becomes another false Messiah, producing
division instead of unity.
Techno-Religion
and False Eschatologies
Modernity, far from extinguishing religion,
has transformed it. Ray Kurzweil’s singularity, Vernor Vinge’s technological
rapture, the breathless discourse of AI “god models”—these are not secular
dreams but spiritual narratives in digital dress. They echo Gnostic fantasies
of hidden knowledge and transcendent escape.
For Feser, this is the essence of modern
idolatry: salvation without suffering, transcendence without sacrifice. Our
politics and technologies no longer just serve us; they preach to us. They
offer coherence, purpose, and destiny, even as they erode the very individuals
they claim to empower.
The
Collapse of the Individual
The liberal ideal of the rational, autonomous
self now looks increasingly fragile. Han describes a burnout society; Hobbes
described endless rivalry; Feser describes idolaters chasing false messiahs.
Each diagnoses the same collapse of the coherent individual.
As demographic decline and inequality deepen,
people turn from individuality to collective identities—whether nationalist,
conspiratorial, or technoreligious. The Boolean structure persists: belonging
or exclusion, visibility or erasure.
Toward a
New Leviathan
What comes next? Hobbes prescribed a
Leviathan, a sovereign strong enough to contain rivalry. But our crisis is not
only political; it is spiritual. We need a new Leviathan—not of total control,
but of collective meaning. Leviathan emerges from what we expect of each other this time, not what the state tells us to do.
Such a Leviathan--based primarily around culture not law--would resist Boolean
temptations. It would desacralize our institutions, stripping away the false
transcendence of markets, machines, and populist politics. It would cultivate
ambiguity, accept failure, and reintegrate our tools into a broader human
story.
Sheen and Feser would put it in theological
terms: faith against the idol of science, hope against the idol of politics,
charity against the idol of markets. For the secular, the lesson is similar:
modernity’s idols must be exorcised, not destroyed.
Only then can we restore balance—resisting
conspiracy without denying mystery, embracing technology without worshipping
it, accepting failure without collapsing into despair.
Modernity’s devil is not in the details. It’s
in the binary. And until we learn to live beyond Boolean logic, our democracies
will remain haunted.
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