The Electric Monk, featured in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987), is a humanoid robot designed to believe things for us. We’re very busy, you see, in fact too busy to wash dishes by hand or manually sweep our own floors, and similarly it seems too busy plowing Indefinite acres of short-form video content to believe our own beliefs?i Thankfully, it seems it’s no longer Adamsian absurdist science fiction to say that we can now seriously delegate such intellectual and metaphysical burdens to our eminently capable machines. Of course some people might want to use such machines as tools of leverage – “bicycles for the mind” if you will – but many, many more will use them simply as “scooty-puffs for the mind“.
This is Good and Correct, at least in the sense that Rich Times create Weak Herds, which in turn demand ingracious culling. So it is that we find ourselves in the accelerating depths of the McLuhanian “Electric Age” with its incipient Global Villageism barrelling towards tyrannical nannyismii as a consequent (and Venusian/Dionysian) conclusion to the chaotic, sclerotic, bureaucratised, financialised, feminine morass we currently find ourselves swimming in, and for which Thielians will lecture us about in “Antichristic”iii terms with one hand, while building out the networked panoptician infrastructure negating “up-and-to-the-right” Christic linearity and instead elevating an eternal circularity of stability or at least a kind of eccentric Meadian spirality arcing too slowly to even perceive over the lifetimes of mere mortals creating the foundations for a disciplined and upwardly-oriented renaissance with the other hand.iv
There can be no Martian / martial virtue within the context of chaos, after all. For Definite Optimismv to overcome its incumbent Indefinite shadow masquerading as “progress”, it must be able to snap iron filings into alignment towards concrete and elevated objectives.vi You see, never in its history has the State had more power over its citizens, nor insights into the behaviours and motivations of its feudal subjects than today. Unfortunately at present, such power is Antichristically directed towards navel-gazing safetyism, leveraging Marxian alienation to create a State-sanctioned caves for the inept to yell into, showering the unwashed in their own powerless echoes, and channeling their frustrations anywhere but up and out. The net result at present in America and Europe is a managed decline of apparent stabilityvii that’s only persistent… until it isn’t.
But you only have to piss off the wrong elite, or invite the wrong barbarian horde, or allow a sliver of Definite Optimism to shine light through the rusting hull of mediocrity, and it all comes crumbling down. Even the stillest thresholdviii is pregnant with possibility. China, Israel, and even Russia show the way.ix The crown of tyrannical freedomx lays in the gutter… will we pick it up with our swords?
It’s now for the West to cast aside its Electric Monk and follow the call of Conquest, of Crusades, of Christ.
Shana tovah.xi
- “Free Palestine” and “Climate Apocalypse” and all that. ↩
- Aka Demoooooocracy. ↩
- This has to be the most charitable interpretation of Palantir’s long-term vision, yes? That the company is katechon in electric form, restraining by exposing, making sovietesque complexity transparent and knowable? ↩
- What is Definite Optimism? GRAND PROJECTS aka Apollonianism. ↩
- To paraphrase Kipling, may our lesser breeds find the Law! Embedded in a sovereign leader à la Caesaropapist charters, naturally. ↩
- And less-than-coincidental affection and alignment with Shariatisation…
1: Trust the science bro
2: Umm who made the science?
1: Allah -
- Israel and China in particular are evidence that the McLuhanian “Electric Age” need not be inherently Antichristic: stultifying and decadent. Our machines must be means, not ends. ↩
- Tyranny is the next step in the Platonic Anacyclosis, of that there’s little question, but does that preclude freedom? I’d say not! Freedom from tyrannical democratic bureaucracy can only result… for the worthy. ↩
- Christ is of course a mass-market extension of linear “up-and-to-the-right” Judaism, but this is actually quite different from Mohammedanism, which is arguably a sort of regressive paganism wearing Judeo-Christianity like a skinsuit. The latter is the controlling point in understanding the otherwise apparent contradiction in the love affair between the Left and Islam: both embrace the Antichristic masquerade of “progress” to create stagnant, circular, theocratic parasitocracies that enforce a zero-sum worldview, never positive-sum potentiality. There is no third leg of the stool in Abrahamic religions! Adjaye monuments in Abu Dhabi notwithstanding…