While quarreling with the Pope over the legality of his “Epic Fury” Operation, the President of the United States of America had no qualms about showing the Bishop of Rome, the most prominent Vicar of Jesus Christ, that, in matters of Church and State, he considered himself to be the Pope’s superior. To make his point, the President posted a meme that unmistakebly depicts his younger self as Jesus wearing a red-purple mantle. If it really was the President of the United States’ intention to lecture the Pope on “being a Great Pope, not a Politician”, then, perhaps, it would have been more effective and befitting the decorum of the Office of President of the United States of America, had he, instead of shooting from the hip with vulgar blasphemy, referred the Holy Father to Jesus Christ’s confrontation with the “old Cardinal Grand Inquisitor” as described by Fyodor Dostoevsky in the Legend in the Brothers Karamazov.

The Legend

The Legend is a story within a story. It is Ivan Karamazov’s poem “set in Spain, at the most dreadful period of the Inquisition”. Following an auto-de-fe in Seville, where “very nearly a good hundred heretics” were burned at the stake, Christ appears on the scene “quietly, unostentatiously, and yet – strange, this – everyone recognize[d] him.” The Grand Inquisitor has Christ arrested and then visits Him in prison. He introduces himself as one of the clerics who had chosen to enter into the affairs of the world by taking “the sword of Caesar” to “reign over human beings”.

Not by bread alone …

In a long monologue, the Cardinal unfolds his vision of mankind and the role of the clergy in worldly affairs, especially in view of Christ’s decision to ignore the suggestion, made by Satan during His stay in the Desert, that He should turn stones into loaves so that mankind would go “trotting after [Him] like a flock, grateful and obedient, though ever fearful that you may take away your hand and that your loaves may cease to come their way”. The Cardinal bluntly confronts Christ, saying: “But you did not want to deprive man of freedom and rejected the offer, for what kind of freedom is it, you reasoned, if obedience is purchased with loaves? You retorted that man lives not by bread alone, …”

All will be happy

“For who shall reign over human beings”, the inquisiting Cardinal tells Christ, “if not those who reign over their conscience and in whose hands are their loaves?” […] “Oh, we shall permit them sin, too, they are weak and powerless, and they will love us like children for letting them sin. We shall tell them that every sin can be redeemed as long as it is committed with our leave, we are allowing them to sin because we love them, and as for the punishment for those sins, very well, we will take it upon ourselves … […] The most agonizing secrets of their consciences – all, all will they bring to us, and we shall resolve it all, and they will attend our decision with joy, because it will deliver them from their great anxiety and fearsome present torments of free and individual decision. And all will be happy, all the millions of beings, except for the hundred thousand who govern them. For only we, we, who preserve the mystery, only we shall be unhappy.”

Do not come back … ever

Christ remains perfectly still throughout the entire monologue. In the silence that falls when the Cardinal awaits Christ’s answer, the latter “suddenly draws near to the old man without saying anything and quietly kisses him on his bloodless, ninety-year old lips. That is His only response. The old man shudders. Something has stirred at the corners of his mouth; he goes to the door, opens it and says to Him: ‘Go and do not come back … do not come back at all … ever … ever!’ And he releases him into the ‘the town’s dark streets and quarters’.”

The ideal of life

In a letter to one of his readers, Dostoevsky explained The Legend as follows: “Christ knew that men do not expect to live by bread alone. If, furthermore, there is no spiritual life, no ideal of Beauty, then man grieves, cheats, loses his mind, declines, or turns to pagan fantasies. But since Christ, in Himself and in his Word, is the ideal of Beauty, he decided that it is better to inspire man’s soul with the ideal of Beauty; possessing it in their souls, all men become brothers and then, finally, influencing each other, they will also be prosperous. When you give them bread, from boredom they may grant each other beer, become enemies of one another. But if you should give both Beauty and bread simultaneously? Then man would be deprived of toil, personality, self-sacrifice of his own goods for the sake of his fellow man – in a word, he would be deprived of life, the ideal of life. And consequently it is better to proclaim only the spiritual ideal. […] Not entering into any theories, Christ straightforwardly explained that in man, besides the animal nature, there is also the spiritual one.”

Wouldn’t it be wonderful …

… if Pope Leo XIV, the Vicar of Jesus Christ whose Kingdom is not of this world, would inspire the soul of the American President, the “Vicar” of “We the people of the United States”, with the ideal of Beauty, so that the latter may come to his senses and deliver on his express promise that he would not start but stop wars.

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If we wish to truly understand the meaning of Easter, we have to open the Gospel of John the Apostle, at the pages where he described what happened after the Jewish leaders had brought Jesus to the Palace of Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governer of the Province of Judaea. When Pilate had come out, he asked them: “What charges are you bringing against this man?” Whereupon they answered: “If he were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you.” Pilate then said: “Take him yourselves and judge him by your own law.” “But we have no right to execute anyone,” they objected. [i] Pilate then decided to take up the case, but after having interrogated Jesus several times, he still found no basis for charging Jesus with any criminal offense. So he handed Him over to the chief priests and officers who had brought Jesus with the words: “You take Him and crucify Him.” To which they answered “we have a law … and according to that law He must die, because He declared Himself to be the Son of God.” Whereupon Pilate “tried to release Him, but the Jews kept shouting, ‘If you release this man, you are no friend of Caesar. Anyone who declares himself a king is defying Caesar’.” When Pilate heard these words, he brought Jesus out, sat on the judgment seat and said to the Jews, “Here is your King!” At this, they shouted, “Away with Him! Away with Him! Crucify Him!” Just to be sure, Pilate asked the High Priests again “Shall I crucify your King?”. Whereupon they replied “We have no king but Caesar.” [ii]

The Kingdoms

During their encounters “in chambers”, Pilate had specifically asked Jesus whether He considered Himself to be the King of the Jews. On this question Jesus had answered: “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.” With these words, Jesus tried to explain the essential difference between His Kingdom and the kingdoms of the world. When Pilate then said, “So, you’re a king then”, Jesus told Pilate that it was up to him to determine whether He was a king, and, if so, of which kind of kingdom. When Pilate then asked Jesus what reasons could possibly exist for the Pharisees’ request that Jesus be put on trial, Jesus answered: “To this end was I born, and for this end came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.”

Understanding the Drama of Jesus Christ

In his book The Mark, the esteemed Scottish psychologist, writer and teacher Maurice Nicoll (1884 – 1953) wrote that “the problem of esoteric teaching is to connect a higher level of understanding with a lower level.” According to Nicoll, the supreme example of an esoteric teacher is Jesus Christ, “who was born of a human mother and yet was the Son of God.” … “We can understand nothing of the drama of Jesus Christ unless we understand that he was in a way two things – the Son of Man and the Son of God. This means that he was in contact with a lower level and yet in some way in contact with a higher level. […] Christ came as a mediator between the higher and the lower level. His task was, as simply a human being exposed to every temptation, to overcome everything belonging to the lower level, that is, the human level, and to unite the human level with the divine level. God came down to earth as a human being but as such was unable to use the divine.” [iii]

Man raising himself up

“But you can see,” so continues Nicoll, “that if a man were endowed with powers of a higher level, of the level of Heaven as it is called in the Gospels, and having these powers, or rather, being able to use these powers on earth, he would not make an example of a human being raising himself up through inner battles, inner doubts and human temptations. […] Now if we realize that the task of Christ was to connect the human with the divine, the Son of Man with the Son of God and for this reason he had to suffer everything that a human being must suffer in climbing the ladder of inner development, we can understand the central meaning of the Gospels much better.” Indeed, Jesus Christ set the supreme living example of connecting the lower with the higher level of understanding, not to prove to Himself that He was able to do it, but to give us a demonstration of what it is that we can and may accomplish when we, as Sons of Man, strive to raise ourselves upwards to the level of the Son of God.

I am coming towards You

In the words of John the Apostle, in the hours before He was apprehended to be led before Pontius Pilate, Jesus had “lifted up His eyes to heaven”, and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son, that the Son may glorify You, as You gave to Him authority over all flesh, so that all whom You have given to Him, He may give to them eternal life. Now this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You sent. I glorified You on the earth, having completed the work that You have given to Me that I should do. And now, glorify Me—You, Father, with Yourself—with the glory that I had with You before the world existed.” … “But now I am coming towards You, and I speak these things in the world, so that they may have My joy fulfilled within them.” [iv] [v]

“I in them and You in Me”

Christ then described the “work” he had completed on earth as follows: “I have given them the glory You gave Me, so that they may be one as We are one — I in them and You in Me —that they may be perfectly united, so that the world may know that You sent Me and have loved them just as You have loved Me. Father, I want those You have given Me to be with Me where I am, that they may see the glory You gave Me because You loved Me before the foundation of the world. Righteous Father, although the world has not known You, I know You, and they know that You sent Me. And I have made Your name known to them and will continue to make it known, so that the love You have for Me may be in them, and I in them.” [vi]

“I am” … Infinite Beingness

With these words, Christ confirmed that He considered Man in potentia capable of becoming aware of himself as the spiritual being who is conscious of the fact that he fits the image and likeness of his Creator. And so it is that God closes the circle ‒ the lemniscate ‒ of infinite beingness in Man by endowing him with the ability to close, on his own determinism, the circle of beingness in God and be with Christ where He is and where His name is the name of God: “I am“.

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[i] Gospel of John 18 verses 28 – 31.

[ii] Gospel of John 19 verses 6 – 16.

[iii] The Mark; Maurice Nicoll; Watkins Publishing, Somerset, England; First published 1954.

[iv] Gospel of John 17 verses 1 – 5.

[v] John 17 verse 13

[vi] Gospel John 17 verses 22 – 24.

As “America approaches the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence”, the National Archives has launched “an ongoing exhibition series, Opening the Vault, to share some of the most historically valuable and iconic artifacts in American history.” [i] Without a doubt, the Declaration itself stands out as THE MOST historically valuable and iconic “artifact” in the history of the United States. Not so much because it marked their political independence, but because its Preamble is the “vault” where the Founders of the united States stored the “self-evident truths that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.

Truths that were held

It’s easy to open the Archives’ Vault and exhibit iconic historical artifacts. It’s more difficult to “open” the Declaration and understand that the truths promulgated by its signatories aren’t opinions, ideas or propositions circulating among the American peoples of the 18^th century. These truths are …. truths and what’s more, they’re self-evident ones. They require neither proof nor argument or belief. They did not become true when 56 courageous signatories signed the Declaration. They existed well before, during and after the 4^th of July 1776. They are true today and they will remain true forever. So will the self-evident truth “that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The journey

“Celebrating the Triumph of the American Spirit”, President Trump recently said: “With a single sheet of parchment and 56 signatures, America began the greatest political journey in human history.” [ii] The point is that this journey wasn’t undertaken by “America”, but by “the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of [their] intentions.” Since nothing but the Truth is this Supreme Judge’s measure that determines that rectitude, their journey was undertaken for no other purpose than upholding and “living” the Truths they held so close to their hearts. They knew that the journey would end when these Truths would no longer held as truths, but as propositions.

Truth redefined as proposition

And so it happened that the journey that began on July 4, 1776 ended officially on November 19, 1863, when President Lincoln gave a speech in Gettysburg, a town where one of the most gruesome battles fought between the Northern and the Southern States had just taken place. In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln equated his “civil war” with the War of Independence by stating: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Apart from the fact that the Founding Fathers did not bring forth a “new nation” but 13 independent States, Lincoln single-handedly substituted Truth for a “proposition” and so opened the way for his and following Governments to turn the unalienable Rights into entitlements that can be handed out and withdrawn at will to secure their unjust powers by selectively entitling and detitling the governed for no other purpose than staying in power.

The libido liberandi and the libido dominandi

Now that “America approaches the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence”, the demolition of the Truths evocated in the Declaration is celebrated as the “Triumph of the American Spirit” by elements “whose character”, in the words used in the Declaration, “is marked by every act which may define a Tyrant”, one can be sure that what they actually mean by “American Spirit” isn’t the “libido liberandi” that inspires Independence, but the “libido dominandi“, the Will to Power, that drives “rulers of unfree people”. In spite of all the evidence that in the United States the latter libido has replaced the former, President Trump, who, by the way, is the majority shareholder of the Truth Social platform, nonsensically boasts that “The Story of America makes everyone Free”. He obviously doesn’t understand that no one needs the “Story of America” to become free since the Americans “of old” held the truth that Men are free because Freedom ‒ Liberty ‒ is a right endowed to all Men by their Creator.

“Freedom 250” …

… is a “Movement Celebrating Our Nation’s 250th Birthday.” It defines itself as “the national, non-partisan organization leading the celebration of our Nation’s 250th birthday. At its heart, Freedom 250 is creating a movement of citizens, organizations, companies, and leaders from across the country to honor our Nation’s proud history, cherish our God-given freedoms, and build the Golden Age of Opportunity for the next 250 years.” [iii] The movement’s movers seem to wallow in the belief that along with the birth of their putative “nation” 250 years ago a sibling called Freedom was “co-born” in that “nation”. Perhaps they should open the Vault that was created 250 years ago and discover the Truth that God didn’t endow Man with “freedoms” but with unalienable Rights and that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. And, to be sure, God being the Creator of Man, He made the endowment when he created Man. And that was long ago …..

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[i] Freedom 250 / Celebrating the Triumph of the American Spirit; National Archives; https://www.archives.gov/freedom250

[ii] Freedom 250 / Celebrating the Triumph of the American Spirit; White House; https://www.whitehouse.gov/freedom250/

[iii] Freedom 250 / “A Movement Celebrating Our Nation’s 250th Birthday; https://freedom250.org/

On February 14, in a dizzying and convoluted speech delivered to an enthousiastically applauding audience at the Munich Security Conference, the American Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, unfolded a brief history of the Western empires and their American colonies. “For five centuries before the end of the Second World War,” so Rubio, “the West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe.” Referring to the period when this “pouring out” inundated the Eastern shores of the American continent, he thankfully noted how it gave rise to “colonies” that “were built by English settlers, to whom we owe not just the language we speak but the whole of our political and legal system.” (*)

Altering the Colonies’ British Systems of Government

While it can’t be denied that most of the earliest settlers spoke the English language and that the British colonies they established owed their political and legal system to the British Empire, the whole of what Rubio described as “our political and legal system” is owed to the anti-colonial Americans who revolted against and fundamentally rejected the British imperialist system of government. In their Declaration of Independence, they clearly stated: “… when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”

“Here I am …”

Secretary Rubio squarely placed himself in the post-colonial tradition of Independence, anti-imperialism and “new Guards” for the future security of the united States, by informing his audience that in 1776, “… in the year that my country was founded, Lorenzo and Catalina Geroldi lived in Casale Monferrato in the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. And Jose and Manuela Reina lived in Sevilla, Spain. I don’t know what, if anything, they knew about the 13 colonies which had gained their independence from the British empire, but here’s what I am certain of: They could have never imagined that 250 years later, one of their direct descendants would be back here today on this continent as the chief diplomat of that infant nation. And yet here I am, reminded by my own story that both our histories and our fates will always be linked.” If anything, Rubio’s “own story” links the United States with Cuba, from where his Cuban parents emigrated in 1956, just before Fidel Castro came to power.

Dissolving the “links”

In any case, whatever “links” Secretary Rubio may have had in mind, in 1776, all political “links” between the vast “Western” Empires and the 13 united States were radically severed when, as it was so succinctly stated in the Declaration of Independence, “in the Course of human events, it became necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitled them.” The dissolution was followed by the replacement of the Western colonial system of Government with the infant nations’ anti-colonial system of independence and unconditional respect for Man’s unalienable rights: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Enemies in war, in Peace Friends

Even the links between peoples’ “own stories” did not survive the discontinuation of an era of dependence unscathed. As the Declaration provides: “We [have] been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.”

The Path of War

Speaking of this year’s expenditure of 1.5 trillon US dollars on America’s military interventions around the globe, Rubio staunchly defended it by reminding the Security Conference’s attendants of the fact that “[i]n a perfect world, all of these problems and more would be solved by diplomats and strongly worded resolutions. But we do not live in a perfect world, and we cannot continue to allow those who blatantly and openly threaten our citizens and endanger our global stability to shield themselves behind abstractions of international law which they themselves routinely violate. This is the path that President Trump and the United States has embarked upon. It is the path we ask you here in Europe to join us on. It is a path we have walked together before and hope to walk together again.”

Making Empires Great Again – the MEGA Doctrine

On this path to glory, Europe must regain the will to restore the imperial and imperialistic power which it lost as the result of fighting 2 World Wars in an unsuccessful effort to maintain its vast Empires. “In 1945”, so Rubio, “for the first time since the age of Columbus, [the West] was contracting. Europe was in ruins. Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow. The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.” Rubio strongly advised European leaders to embrace the MEGA Doctrine and Make what’s left of their former Empires Great Again.

Soldiers, soldiers, and nothing but …

In other words … now that, over the course of 250 years, the united States of old were taken over by that brandnew Empire named the United States of America, the “Western” Empires of old must reverse their “terminal” decline and join the American Empire in fighting “those who blatantly and openly threaten our citizens, endanger our global stability and shield themselves behind abstractions of international law which they themselves routinely violate.” With this statement America’s chief diplomat declared diplomacy to be a thing of the past and a waste of time. The missionaries, pilgrims, explorers and diplomats such as Marco Rubio can stay home. Let’s cut to the chase. What the West needs is what it used to have in abundance … soldiers, soldiers and nothing but soldiers.

Armies, armies, and that “perfect world”

According to the American Empire’s Chief Diplomat, since we don’t live in a “perfect world” we have no other option than calling in the military to bomb our way to that “perfect world”. In Rubio-double-talk: “National security, which this conference is largely about, is not merely series of technical questions – how much we spend on defense or where, how we deploy it, these are important questions. They are. But they are not the fundamental one. The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending, because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life. And that is what we are defending: a great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history, confident of its future, and aims to always be the master of its own economic and political destiny.”

Security …. for what ?

Yes, Mr. Rubio. Sounds great. But what kind of “great civilization” is it that you are actually defending ? Is it the “great civilization” that, for centuries, the Western Empires poured out over their colonies across the globe ? Or is it that “great civilization” that the Founders of the united States of America had in mind when they declared and established their independence and decided that such civilizations can only survive when Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed for the sole purpose of securing Man’s unalienable rights. As Secretary of State you probably know that Thomas Jefferson, your very first predecessor in office and main author of the Declaration of Independence, was acutely aware of the fact that States have a habit of securing the pursuit of their own happiness rather than that of their peoples and so become Empires that blatantly and openly threaten and tyrannize their own citizens. Truly Great Civilizations last only for as long as their Governments exclusively use the powers given to them by the governed to secure and defend the latters‘ rights to Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness.

The Hollow Men

As T.S. Eliot, the great poet who witnessed the demise of the British Empire, wrote in his poem The Hollow Men, “this is the way the world ends – not with a bang but with a whimper”. This is the fate of “Great Empires” when they are being ruled by Men in whose hollowness resounds nothing but the Will to Power. In the words of that same poet, they are “the stuffed men – Leaning together – Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!” Their “dried voices”, when they “whisper together – Are quiet and meaningless – As wind in dry grass – Or rats’ feet over broken glass”, in their “dry cellar”.

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(*) Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference; Remarks; Hotel Bayerischer Hof; Munich, Germany; February 14, 2026. https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/02/secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-at-the-munich-security-conference

More than ever before, the powers that be are showing their cards when it comes to controlling and bullying you by vastly expanding their ways and abilities to “ID” you. Digitalizing your ID is the latest development in satisfying this irrepressible lust for power. True to form, the unelected European legislature, the EU Commission, is playing its part. Its faceless and invisible bureacracy has designed and begun promoting a “Personal Digital Wallet” that Member States must make available to their citizens. This Wallet goes way beyond what is normally required to identify yourself: name; date and location of birth. EU Digital Identity Wallets will contain all “your personal data” that “tell your life’s story“. The wallets, so says the EU, “will enable you to safely request, store and share important digital documents about yourself and electronically sign or seal documents”. [i] [ii]

Enhancing your privacy … ?

Your Digital Wallet will open the door to a digital Nirvana. “Obtaining a new bank account, enroll in a university abroad, or applying for your next dream job will be as easy as it is secure. And your privacy will always be respected; you control what data is shared and who gets to use it.” This utter nonsense obfuscates the fact that whoever “gets to use it” ‒ providers of private and public services demanding digital identification  ‒ determines how it will use the “shared data” and how your private data will be protected against hackers and against being shared with other “users” without your knowledge. Once you’ve shared your personal data, they’re beyond your control. Still, the European Union glibly asserts that “with more and more private and public services becoming digital, a safe, reliable, and privacy enhancing means of digital identification is needed for everyone in Europe.” Just in case you didn’t get it, the more you share the content of your Wallet with ID-hungry outsiders, the more you’ll enhance your privacy …

Proving who we are

When you open EU’s Wallet, you’ll discover a special commemarative coin on which it printed the following slogan: “Identification is how we prove who we are; …” The point is, however, that your ID doesn’t provide proof of who you really are. Nowhere else was this explained better than in the Gospel of St. John. In the verses 18:4‒9, the Apostle describes what took place when Judas, having received a band of men and officers from the chief priests and Pharisees, came thither with lanterns and torches and weapons to apprehend Jesus. When they had found Jesus, Christ “went forth” and asked them “Whom seek ye?”. According to the King James Bible, “they answered him: Jesus of Nazareth.” Whereupon “Jesus saith unto them, I am he.” But instead of apprehending Jesus right away, “as soon then as he had said unto them, I am he, they went backward, and fell to the ground. Then asked he them again, Whom seek ye? And they said, Jesus of Nazareth.” Whereupon Jesus said: “I told you that I am he: if therefore ye seek me, let these go their way.”

“Ego eimi” means “I I-am”

It’s quite obvious that what really took place here cannot be properly understood from reading the King James translation, in which Jesus answers with the words “I am he”. Neither can it be found in other translations that follow the similar Latin (Vulgata) version of the original Greek texts. Why on earth would a band of rough-shod Roman soldiers and imperious officers of the high priests and Pharisees, who carried lanterns, torches and weapons, go backward and fall to the ground when the unarmed Jesus peacefully made himself known as “he”? St. John’s words make sense only when we literally translate what Jesus really said ‒ “Ego eimi” ‒ as “I I-am”, not as “I am he”. Greek verbs don’t require personal pronouns in their conjugation. The English pronoun that is implied in “eimi” is not “he” but “I”. “Eimi” means “I am”. It doesn’t mean “he is” or “I am he”. Jesus said no more than “I I-am”. It is in these few words, that John describes how Christ manifested Himself through Jesus of Nazareth by showing His true – transcendental / divine – nature. “My name is ‘I am’.”

A higher level of being

The Gospel is not a historic positivist account of worldly affairs and events. It is an account that reflects a message spoken to us from a higher level of being, from the level of Christ, the Son of God. And so, the words spoken by Jesus become meaningful only when we accept that they express what He ‒ Christ ‒ had to “say” from that higher level of being so that, through Jesus, they could be heard at the lower level and be relayed as coming from that higher level by the authors of the Gospels. The Gospels serve no other purpose than showing us that a higher level of being, which is the level of Christ, exists in and is attainable by Man. Christ “spoke” from this level while he was fully embodied in the man called Jesus of Nazareth. After the crucifixion of Jesus, Christ remained as the living Spiritual Being that was not affected by the death of Jesus.

The Ground

Speaking the words “Ego eimi“, it was not Jesus of Nazareth who made himself known. It was the Son of God, communicating from a higher level of being, Who made Himself known. Had Jesus answered “I am he”, the effect would have been entirely different. The soldiers and officers would have simply proceeded and said, “So, you’re Jesus of Nazareth, fine, then come with us. We’ll bring you to trial.” Instead, they withdrew backwards and fell to the ground. In this case, ground, “chamai” (“χαμαί”), represents the lowest level of being. The Greek word has as its root the word “chasma” (“χάσμα”), which means chasm, abyss or fissure in the earth. By going backwards, the rabble fell to the ground into a gaping abyss.

The Son of God

Given the situation, it is impossible that they physically fell to the ground and prostrated in front of Jesus to show Him their deepest respect and adoration. No. They didn’t seek Christ, they sought Jesus of Nazareth. They operated at the “ground”, the lowest level of being that stands in contrast to the Kingdom of Heaven, the highest level of being, from which Christ, the Son of God, had emanated. Jesus’ captors experienced the abyss where, spiritually speaking, they had fallen into, when unexpectedly they were exposed to the power that the Son of God showed by making His appearance and revealing to them His true identity. It is telling that Judas, who was “standing there with them”, also fell into this spiritual abyss as betrayer of the Christ Whom he knew. Without the slightest form of force, two words were enough to throw his inquisitors into a spritual abyss: “Ego eimi.” When, from the abyss, the question was raised for a second time, Christ confirmed the difference in levels of being by saying: “I told you, Ego eimi”, which is the name that the Son and the Father have in common: “I am I-am”.

Just say … “I am”

So, the next time you must “ID” yourself, just remember that you are not “your personal data” that “tell your life’s story”. You are an individual, a spiritual being, whose name is “I am”. You’re not the name printed in your passport. Neither were you born on the date and at the place mentioned in your passport. You’re not ‘data in the form of numerical digits’. You’re God’s immortal creature. As such, you’re nothing but beingness. You are “I am”. If you don’t believe me, just say “I am” – full stop – and you’ll feel what I mean. Only then will the powers that are in search of your ID “go backward and fall to the ground”. They’ll find out that they have no power over who you really are at the Divine Ground of Beingness.

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[i] https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/EUDIGITALIDENTITYWALLET/pages/694487738/EU+Digital+Identity+Wallet+Home

[ii] https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/EUDIGITALIDENTITYWALLET/pages/791609471/What+is+the+Wallet

On its website, the White House announces that “under the President’s leadership, the Salute to America 250 Task Force (“Task Force 250”) has commenced the planning of a full year of festivities to officially launch on Memorial Day, 2025 and continue through July 4th, 2026. The White House is engaging and encouraging the entire federal government, state and local governments, the private sector, non-profit and educational institutions, and every citizen across this country to join in this historic celebration.” [i]

The Right to abolish government

Well, …, the President and his entire federal government may be careful what they intend to celebrate. Per the wording of the Declaration of Independence, the Federal Government and, for that matter, all State and local Governments, will namely celebrate the right of the people to abolish the celebrants. While inviting “citizens to have a renewed love of American history, experience the beauty of our country, and ignite a spirit of adventure and innovation that will raise our nation to new heights over the next 250 years”, President Trump should be invited to read out loud this particular part of the Declaration:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.“

Under absolute Despotism

Wouldn’t it be great if, on the very day of the Declaration’s 250^th anniversay, the President would also use the text of the Declaration to publicly acknowledge and confirm that “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce all citizens residing in the various American States under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” [Long pause] “The history of the Federal Government of the United States of America is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States that, in 1776, declared their independence by signing the Declaration and then fought and won the ensuing War of Independence.”

America 250 ???

Celebrating and glorifying the Declaration of Independence as a document that concerns or hints at “the birth of a nation” and the establishment of “our country” is contrary to the facts, the wording of the Declaration and the stated intentions of its signatories. It is a carefully crafted falsehood that has been instrumental in the design to reduce the peoples of the American States under the despotism of the Federal Government that was to replace the “league of friendship” originally formed by the several independent States, when, in 1788, the Articles of Confederation were replaced by the Constitution.

A Ulysses Pact

To be sure, the unalienable rights enshrined in the Declaration survived in so many words in the Bill of Rights that was added to the Constitution in 1791. It turned the Constitution into a Ulysses Pact by way of which “We the People of the United States” bound the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Powers to honour and respect the duty not to interfere and mess with the unalienable rights and the lives of its citizens. Taking the oath to uphold the Constitution means that the pledger unconditionally and voluntarily enters into this Ulysses Pact that binds him or her to the Mast of the Ship of State so that he or she can withstand the calls of the Sirens.

What if … ?

Still, where the Constitution’s Bil of Rights states what Government shall not do out of respect for its citizens’ rights, the Declaration provides that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The Constitutional oath not to interfere and “let alone” categorically differs from the duty to faithfully execute the assigment to actively secure and protect the rights that shall not be interfered with. In this respect, it is noteworthy that breaking the Ulyssean oath by violating the Bill of Rights mostly remains without consequences because it merely opens the “holder of Office” who committed the breach to the Constitutional right of the United States Senate to impeach him/her and, if successful, the removal of him/her from office. On the other hand, per the words of the Declaration, the failure to secure Man’s unalienable rights exposes the “entire government” to the right of the people to abolish it and institute an entirely new Government that is most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The Fires

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written on sheets of parchment, on pieces of paper that, on a whim, can be shredded and turned to ashes when thrown into the fire of the Will to Power, the fire of Greed, the fires of Fraud and Deception, the fires burning in Ideologies and in the souls of Pneumapaths and Utopists, the fire that energizes those of us who seek the Powers of Office for the sole purpose of extinguishing the fire that burns in the heart of Man as the unalienable endowment received from his Creator. Yet, as long as the Declaration and the Constitution are celebrated on their anniversaries, they may serve as reminders, as notes of what was done and not done, when our holders of Office eventually meet their Creator.

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[i] https://www.whitehouse.gov/america250/

This Happy New Year marks the 250^th anniversary of The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, which the signatories opened with the words:

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

Thirteen distinct Peoples

These opening lines leave no doubt whatsoever that there wasn’t one “American Nation” that declared its independence. No, there were 13 distinct American Peoples which declared that they were united in their determination to dissolve their political bands that had connected each of them with one other People, in casu, the British People. The American Peoples, whose political status, until then, had been that of British Colonies, thus assumed, as several sovereign States, their equal stations to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitled them. To be precise, the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God do not apply to States but to Peoples that are free to decide in liberty whether they will or won’t organize themselves as States. In this sense, the Declaration is not a national but an international Covenant.

The spirit of spontaneous association

In his Treatise on the Commonwealth, the Roman philosopher, politician, lawyer, consul and constitutionalist Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 – 43 B.C.) defined a commonwealth as a “constitution of the entire people. The people, however, is not every association of Men, however congregated, but the association of the entire number, bound together by the compact of justice, and the communication of utility. The first cause of this association is not so much the weakness of man, as the spirit of association which naturally belongs to him—For the human race, is not a race of isolated individuals, wandering and solitary; but it is so constituted for sociality, that even in the affluence of all things, and without any need of reciprocal assistance, it spontaneously seeks society.”

A “certain authority”

“It is necessary to pre–suppose”, so continued Cicero, “these original germs of sociality, since we cannot discover any primal convention or compact, which gave rise to constitutional patriotism, any more than the other virtues. These unions, formed by the principle I have mentioned, established their head quarters in certain central positions, for the convenience of the whole population, and having fortified them by natural and artificial means, they called this collection of houses, a city or town, distinguished by temples and public courts. Every people, therefore, which consists, as I have said, of the association of the entire multitude;—every city, which consists of an assemblage of the people,—and every Commonwealth, which embraces every member of these associations, must be regulated by a certain authority, in order to be permanent.”

Bound by the objects of love

Still, there may be an entirely different approach to define a people. For this, we must turn to a critic of Cicero, to Saint Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430 A.D.). In The City of God, Augustine wrote: “But if we discard this [Ciceroʼs] definition of a people [as the association of the entire number, bound together by the compact of justice, and the communication of utility], and, assuming another, say that a people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love, then, in order to discover the character of any people, we have only to observe what they love. Yet whatever it loves, if only it is an assemblage of reasonable beings and not of beasts, and is bound together by an agreement as to the objects of love, it is reasonably called a people; and it will be a superior people in proportion as it is bound together by higher interests, inferior in proportion as it is bound together by lower.”

The highest common interest

In 1776, the 13 Peoples that would constitute the distinct States of America, declared that the objects of their love were the unalienable rights endowed to Man by his Creator: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. They were conscious of the fact that it was the unconditional Love for these rights that fueled the Spirit of Association, the inner drive or urge that bound each of them together and that energized their worldly quest for constancy, permanency and survival. In the Declaration of Independence, they pledged that the defense of these rights ‒ the objects of their love ‒ was the highest common interest that bound “the good People of these colonies” together. Still, that express determination laid down in the Declaration did not turn the 13 newly constituted American States into one State or Nation. “Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown”, and with “all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, … totally dissolved”, the ex-colonists unequivocally declared that “as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.”

The Wisdom of the Body

In physiology, a similar natural impulse to bring forth spontaneous order and maintain and restore constancy and harmony in the living organism is called homeostasis. The scientist who coined and first defined the term “homeostasis” was the American physiologist Walter B. Cannon. In 1932, in the first edition of his book The Wisdom of the Body, Cannon wrote: “The ability of living beings to maintain their own constancy has long impressed biologists. The idea that disease is cured by natural powers, by a vis medicatrix naturae, an idea which was held by Hippocrates (460-377 B.C.), implies the existence of agencies which are ready to operate correctively when the normal state of the organism is upset.” Likewise, a People is an “organism” that is bound together by similar “agencies”, by an inner power that we might, in analogy to Cannon’s concept of homeostasis, very well describe as the healing powers of a people, the vis medicatrix populi.

The Wisdom of the People

In all its brevity, clarity and conciseness, the Preamble to the American Declaration comprises The Wisdom of the American Peoples as it defines the “agencies” which are ready to operate correctively when the normal state of the People is upset. In words used by Cannon in The Wisdom of the Body, a People’s homeostasis “does not imply something set and immobile, a stagnation. It means a condition – a condition which may vary, but which is relatively constant.” Considering “the extreme instability of a People’s [our bodily] structure, its readiness for disturbance by the slightest application of external forces and the rapid onset of its decomposition as soon as favoring circumstances are withdrawn, its persistence through many centuries [decades] seems almost miraculous. The wonder increases when we realize that the system is open, engaging in free exchange with the outer world, and that the structure itself is not permanent but is being continuously broken down by the wear and tear of action, and is continuously built up again by processes of repair.”

The Consent of the Governed

When a People decides that, as a Commonwealth, it shall be governed by what Cicero called “a certain authority”, it runs the risk that this authority will act as an “external force” and use the powers delegated to it against the interest of the people by suppressing, undermining or interfering with the latter’s condition of homeostasis. To prevent this from happening, the American Founders declared that the “certain authority” they defined as “Government” shall only derive its just powers from the consent of the governed and that it shall be instituted among Men for no other ends than to secure Man’s unalienable rights. In other words, per the Declaration, Governments are instituted for the ends of supporting and defending the homeostatic agencies that keep their Peoples together and procure their constancy, permanency and safety.

The Right and Duty of the People

In this regard, the Founders expressly stipulated that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” …  “[W]hen a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce [mankind] under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” This Right forms the key element in any People’s condition of homeostasis since it legitimizes,  activates and empowers the ultimate “process of repair”, the vis medicatrix populi, that prevents and reverses a People’s decomposition, disintegration and demise.

The wonder increases …

… when we realize that in 1776 the Representatives of no less than 13 Independent States jointly signed a Covenant in which they unconditionally stated that this Right doesn’t belong to them but to their Peoples. The irrevocable acknowledgement of this Right and the fact that for the support of it, they not only firmly relied on the protection of divine Providence, but also pledged to each other their Lives, Fortunes and sacred Honor, is what makes The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America so miraculous and universally relevant.

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When the French thinker Blaise Pascal confronted the short duration of his life, his being swallowed up in the eternity of times and engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which he was ignorant and which knew him not, he was frightened by the eternal silence of the infinite spaces that surrounded him.

The Wager

To overcome this darkness, Pascal then offered the Necessity of Wager, the solemn pledge to search for a structure of reality that includes ourselves and divinity; that simultaneously includes the little lonely “I” who is “swallowed up in eternal silence” and the Creator of the “infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant”.

Fides and Intellectus

Laying Pascal’s wager must inevitably begin with the intuitive experience of the Divine Ground of Being ‒ the Kingdom of God ‒ as real before the inquiry into the structure of reality has even begun. In the words of St. Augustine: “Fides quaerit, intellectus invenit”. Let faith – fides – lead the search so that our intellect – intellectus – may discover and explore the Divine Ground of Being.

The Kingdom of God

When the Pharisees asked Jesus Christ if He had any idea where we might find this Kingdom of God, He answered “the Kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall people say, Lo, here! Or There! For lo, the Kingdom of God is within you”. The Kingdom of God cannot be discovered outside oneself by following observable signs in the immensity of spaces. It is within us. It is the “place” where Christ and God share the same name: “I am”.

Christ’s Promise

During Christmas we celebrate the coming of Jesus Christ into the world. Why? Because at the end of His life, when He was “no more in the world” and “made his appearance unto God”, He prayed that those who are in the world “may be one … as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us”. The promise of Christ is that making Pascal’s wager will not be in vain because all Men can become conscious of and experience “I am” within themselves, so that, in the words of Christ, we “may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.”

Merry Christmas to all of you.

English computer scientist and cognitive psychologist Geoffrey Hinton is said to be the “Godfather” of Artificial Intelligence. Earlier this year, Hinton publicly stated that developing AI is like raising a young tiger, warning that “[t]here’s only two options if you have a tiger cub as a pet. Figure out if you can train it so it never wants to kill you, or get rid of it.” … “For AI,” he warned, “we have no way to eliminate it.” … “AI won’t give humans the chance to ‘pull the plug’ – when that day comes, the AI will persuade people not to do it, because our control over AI would be like a three-year-old trying to set rules for adults.”

Eliminating AI

Given the fact that AI depends on humongous data centers that need electricity in quantities comparable to those consumed by the world’s largest cities, it seems quite easy to “pull the plug.” Just cut off the electricity and AI is dead. When asked, AI may even agree with you that if you want to radically eliminate it, this is the most efficient way to do it. The problem, though, is not that AI may try to persuade people to keep it plugged in, but that its several “ultimate beneficiary owners” will fight tooth and nail to keep the electricity flowing.

The utopian Transman

It is often said that the AI elite is in it for the money. Yet, there may be more to this than meets the financial eye. AI isn’t just a piece of software that helps streamline and automate activities and processes. It is hailed as the magic key that will open the door to a Utopia where machine-based systems will produce better outcomes than ordinary human intelligence and interaction. In this Utopia, Man will live as a Transman who shall be “singing to the tunes” of the digital algorithms embedded in the AI designed by sorcerers who are intent on squeezing the transformed you and me into the quasi realities of their idiosyncratic preferences.

Dreams that become tigers

All Utopias began and begin as adorable, cute and innocent tiger cubs. As great and wonderful tales of imagined “nowhere-worlds” that are too good to be true. As long as they are dealt with as dreams, they remain harmless innocent cubs. But, they become dangerous tigers when their imaginators insist that their dreams must come true. If they can’t be realized by way of rational argument or gentle persuasion, their creators will not hesitate to resort to the use of all the coercion and force that is needed to eclipse the reality of existence and replace it by the Second Reality of their imaginative project. Meaning that the unknown future must be replaced by the image of a “known future” that must forthwith become reality in the here and now. In the case of AI, this means that this “known future” is a world where human intelligence has been replaced by machine-based systems developed to improve the lot of an otherwise helpless and hapless Mankind.

Utopias and the Will to Power

This explains why Utopias always arise in the minds of imaginators whose character is profoundly disturbed by the libido dominandi, the Will to Power. The Utopias energize their Will which, in turn, energizes the imaginators’ irrepressible and pathological libido that generates the power to realize the utopian projects of which they and no one else shall be the inaugurators and masters. As a result, Utopian projects ‒ such as AI ‒ are always endowed with an “inner logic” and “ethics” that demand unconditional obedience and absolutely exclude, condemn and suppress disagreement and dissent. Paraphrasing Hinton: “if you have a Utopia cub as a pet, figure out if you can train it so it never wants to kill you, or get rid of it.” The problem with Utopias is that the “Great Leaders” who created them are so obsessed by their “pets” that they can’t let go of them or give others a chance to “pull the plug” before the cubs have become tigers. The cubs must become tigers because their personal “greatness” depends on realizing their Utopias.

Man stands in the way of the Transman

The transhuman Man that AI will help shape was described by Klaus Schwab, the founder and former Chairman of the World Economic Forum, as a fusion of Man’s “physical, digital and biological identity”. The pure and unadulterated Man, as created by God in His image, thus stands in the way of realizing the Transman. The former must be “built back better” and if he refuses to undergo the transformation, he is regarded as an enemy of the imaginative project to transform him. It so happens that a picture of Schwab taken in his personal office showed a statue of Vladimir Iljitsj Lenin placed in the bookcase behind him. Most likely, this is how Schwab wishes to pay tribute to his communist hero and the ways in which he installed and organized the Soviet regime and mercilessly dealt with its enemies.

Inflict maximum harm

In his book Wonder confronts Certainty, literary critic, Slavist and expert on Lenin’s and Stalin’s pneumapathologies and crimes, Gary Saul Morson relates that “[a]ccording to Leninist ethics, it is criminal not to inflict the maximum harm on an enemy. But what is the worst thing one can inflict? Clearly, it isnʼt death, which might well constitute an escape.” What was it that the Sovjet’s “justice system”, that included “interrogation with torture and false confessions, forced labor often in frozen wastes, and gradual starvation”, was designed to accomplish what shooting could not? That system, so Morson, “does make sense in terms of the Leninist imperative: inflict maximum harm, not just to the body but also to the soul; not just to eliminate but to dehumanize enemies. It also makes sense if the creation of a new type of human being (the ‘new Soviet person’) required utterly destroying the old order, not just institutions and people but also everything that used to constitute humanness.”

Wiping Man clean of his Spiritual origin

Well, I’d say that AI perfectly fits the Leninist/Schwabian shoe of destroyng everything that used to constitute humanness (intelligence, integrity and self-determinism) and building back better a new type of human being (the Transman) that perfectly fits in with the Utopia imagined by those who are in control of the machine-based systems designed and operated for the purpose of accomplishing this imaginative project. What all the current de- and re-constructors of Man seem to have in common with the patently pathologic Great Leaders and Wise Teachers of the former Soviet Union, is their obsessive hatred of Man’s soul, his spiritual nature, his imago Dei. Although God Himself was murdered a while ago, Man shall be wiped clean of what might have remained of His image, which is the lynchpin of Man’s divine origin.

“Chatting” you into UtopiAI

What Lenin, Stalin and like-minded tyrants failed to accomplish by using brutal force, suppression, starvation and murder, the promoters of AI seek to accomplish by gently and amicably luring you into having a “chat” with their “pets”. In the field of online communication, “to chat” is usually understood as “participating in a synchronous exchange of remarks with one or more people over a computer network”. The problem is that when you open OpenAI, ChatGPT or any other AI system, you’ve merely made an online connection between yourself and a Generative Pre-trained Transformer in a virtual “chatroom” where you won’t find “one or more people” to casually exchange remarks with. There’s absolutely no one there to chat with. You’ve merely opened on your electronic device a generative artificial intelligence system that has been trained to simulate having a chat with a user in natural language in a way a human would behave as a conversational partner.

Pulling the plug

This deceptive set-up humanizes the system and stealthily dehumanizes the user. Unlike yourself, the system doesn’t have a divine origin. It’s origin lies in the minds of imaginators who try to design systems that train themselves for the purpose of training you to behave as a nameless and soulless Transman in UtopiAI. The good news, however, is that Utopia still means a model of a perfect society that cannot be realized because an essential part of reality has been omitted from its construction. What makes Utopias so dangerous is that their authors and addicts have suspended from their consciousness the fact that the constructs are unrealizable because of the omission. Yet, it is precisely this truncated part of reality that is the source of the seemingly inexhaustable energy that keeps the Utopia alive as a realizable project. This is why detecting the omission and integrating the truncated part of reality into the imaginary construction will instantly demolish it. So, when it comes to AI, if you want to pull the plug, just accept and be conscious of the part of reality that was omitted from this project: you are a spiritual being who was made in God’s image.

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When a war, such as the proxy one that’s now being fought in Ukraine, is clearly lost by the parties that instigated it, it’s difficult, if not impossible, for someone who is still compos mentis to understand why the losing side insists on blindly prolonging it at the cost of completely destroying what the instigators claim to defend. Examples of this counterintuitive, counterproductive and evidently aberrant mindset are plenty and not limited to warfare and terrorism. For instance, it’s equally difficult to understand the mental condition of the climate change elites who fail to see that execution of their plans is destroying the world they so adamantly purport to save. What all these cases do have in common, though, is that facts, plain reality and rational arguments don’t seem to matter.

The disease of the soul

There have been eminent political thinkers who were able to explain with great precision this phenomenon as a form of pneumapathy. Eric Voegelin defined pneumapathy as “Krankheit des Geistes”, disease of the soul. Cicero called it the morbus animi, the disease of the animus, the rational soul in Man. The stoics called it agnoia ptoiodes or fearful ignorance. As such, the condition escapes the scope of psychology and psychiatry as well as the characterizations and definitions standardly applied in the field of mental health care. To be sure, pneumapathy is not a disease of the mind or the psyche. The pneumapath is not insane, but often intelligent and cunning.

The Will to Power

Since mainstream psychology and psychiatry have excluded the soul, the pneuma, from their field of expertise by reducing Man to nothing but mind/psyche and body (“brains”), these unfruitful practices cannot detect, let alone describe or treat, pneumapathy. Still, a psychosis is not a “pneumosis”, and a psychopath is not a pneumapath. The pneumapath is characterized by his/her flight from a noetic reality which includes the Spiritual ‒ Divine ‒ Ground of Being. It brings the fugitive into the realm of existence where, in the terms of classical and Christian ethics, the dominant drivers of human behavior are concupiscent passion and irrepressible libido. Eventually, combat, coercion, duplicity, terror, war and the Will to Power become the main aspects that outline the deformed character of the pneumapath.

Pneumapaths and society

Voegelin speaks of a condition of alienation, of deformed and closed existence in which the ability to make contact with reality is heavily disturbed. A Man thus deformed by his amor sui and the unmitigated “coming out” of his ego, is only strong and self-conscious in appearance. In fact, his behavior is driven by fear, especially the fear of his fellow Men. The main problem with this spiritual disease is that those who suffer from it aggressively claim the possession of an impeccable, vibrant and superior mental health and an equally impeccably functioning mind. Yet, pneumapaths would not be a societal problem if they kept their illness to themselves and their therapists. Unfortunately, they don’t. In 1965, in a lecture entitled “The German University and the Third Reich” (“Die deutsche Universität und das dritte Reich”), Voegelin explained how pneumapaths disturb and destroy not only themselves and those who are in direct contact with them, but also entire societies. [i]

Heraclitus’ Xynon

To begin with, Voegelin asks us to acknowledge that the key aspect that all Men have in common is their openness to the Divine Ground of Man’s existence. This is the human aspect we usually call “soul” (“Geist”). In the classical sense of the word, the soul is what all Men have in common (“das allen Menschen Gemeinsame”). Heraclitus called Man’s common denominator the xynon, which is, according to the Greek philosopher, the essential principle of order in the universe and as such the blueprint for the structure of civic law and moral custom. The blueprint can only be discovered and implemented when Man, through his soul, is capable of participating in the Divine ground of Being (“das Göttliche”) and become God’s image (the “imago dei”), which Voegelin defined as Man’s destination (“Bestimmung”).

Estrangement from the soul

But although Man is a Spiritual Being, he can drift away from and abandon his soul. This alienation or estrangement from the soul (“Entfremdung vom Geist”) means not only the closing off of the ability and possibility to participate in the Divine, but also the engendering of the active and sometimes passionate revolt against it. It is often difficult to distinguish what comes first, the closing off or the revolt, but practically always they go hand in hand and reinforce each other. The interesting point in Voegelin’s words is that they can only become meaningful for those of us who are still “soul-connected”. Anyone who is critical of or rejects the fact that the key aspect that he/she shares with all Men is one’s soul is already beyond the pale of “das allen Menschen Gemeinsame”. Such people will be incapable of following, let alone accepting or acknowledging, Voegelin’s line of reasoning.

Idiotes

By living life “in the soul” (“im Geist”), human existence becomes existence in community. In the openness toward the xynon grows the public sphere (“die Öffentlichkeit”) of society. Whoever closes off the xynon or revolts against it, reduces himself to the soulless private individual (“Privatmann”) whom Heraclitus called “idiotes”. Every day we can witness how the “idiotes”, individuals who became alienated from their souls, work themselves up to socially dominant figures. The problem is that for the “idiotes” the public sphere of the community is no longer characterized by the soul, but by the alienation from it. The socially dominant “idiotes” thus disturbs the natural relationship between the entire community and the principle of order in the universe, the Logos, the Divine Ground of Man’s existence. Yet, such “idiotes” will standardly cloak their alienation from their souls and the effect it has on society in narratives and theories that redefine the illness and the destruction they cause as the patients’ epic and heroic struggle with reality, a struggle that is fought for the benefit and glory of his or her people, if not of mankind.

The Soul is the crux of the matter

Between the extremes of, on the one hand, the public sphere that is infused by the communal xynon when, through their souls, people live in open contact with their Divine Ground, and, on the other hand, the community that, due to the radical individuation or enforced collectivisation of its members, suffers from a fractured xynon, lie the various concrete examples of communities that exist in the tension between soul and alienation. It is thus that the health or illness of each society can be established by assessing its concrete form of the public sphere. Since the soul or pneuma is the crux in this matter, a society’s illness is essentially of a pneumapathological nature, wherefore it cannot be corrected by taking action in the realm of politics, but only by overcoming the alienation and pursuing the restoration of the Soul of Man. This is the pursuit that the Founders of the united States of America had in mind when they defined the Pursuit of Happiness as one of the unalienable rights endowed to Man by his Creator. The degree to which this and other unalienable rights, such as Life and Liberty, are respected or suppressed in the public sphere is the best indicator of a society’s health or illness. Just in case you decide to make this assessment, it’s not the “standard of living” that you should measure, but the standard of “living life in the Soul”.

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[i] 1966 “Die deutsche Universitaet und die Ordnung der deutschen Gesellschaft.” In Die Deutsche Universitaetim Dritten Reich. Munich: Piper. pp. 241 -82.(Reprinted as “Universitaet und Oeffentlichkeit: Zur Pneumopathologia der Gesellschaft.” Wort und Wahrheit. XXI, 8/9, pp. 497 – 518.)

There’s a new “kid” on the AI-block. It’s name is Agentic Intelligence. According to IBM’s Staff Editor Cole Stryker, “Agentic AI is an artificial intelligence system that can accomplish a specific goal with limited supervision. It consists of AI agents—machine learning models that mimic human decision-making to solve problems in real time. In a multiagent system, each agent performs a specific subtask required to reach the goal and their efforts are coordinated through AI orchestration.” … “Agents can, for example, not only tell you the best time to climb Mt. Everest given your work schedule, it can also book you a flight and a hotel.” [i]

The anthropomorphism of AI

The fundamental and easily overlooked problem with texts such as these is that by defining “machine learning models” as “agents” and qualifying artificial intelligence systems as “agentic” (“agent-like”) because they mimic human decision-making, their authors implicitly and thoughtlessly reaffirm the anthropomorphism of AI that I described in my previous Commentary “Of two “Original Sins“. This isn’t an innocuous or playful marketing ploy to sell AI to prospects who would decline the offer if they would be made aware of the fact that AI systems are inhuman to the core. The main point, however, is that humanizing “automata” and conferring authority on them when it comes to making decisions and solving problems effectuates what has become known in social psychology as the “agentic shift“.

Stanley Milgram’s experiment

The term “agentic shift” was coined in 1963 by social psychologist Stanley Milgram (1933 – 1984) to describe the shift of autonomous agency that takes place when people relinquish personal control and responsibility to an external agent. Milgram gave a demonstration of the “agentic shift” phenomenon in an experimental setting in which an authority figure (“supervisor”) ordered participants (“teachers”) to stepwise administer slight to increasingly severe electric shocks to other persons (“learners”). The “teacher” and “learner” could hear but not see each other. The “teacher” was instructed to check whether the “learner” was able to correctly reproduce pairs of words that the “teacher” had read to him. With each incorrect answer the “teacher” was told by the “supervisor” to increase the voltage of the shock with 15-volt increments. The “learners” were instructed to fake signs of distress and pain to let the “teachers” know they were causing physical harm. Despite being aware of the harm they inflicted, the majority of the “teachers” were eventually prepared to give the maximum voltage to “learners” when ordered to do so.

Recognizing the Agentic Shift

Milgram’s experiment showed how obedience to authority reduces a person’s sense of autonomous agency. He demonstrated that even in the relatively simple setting of “supervisor”, “teacher” and “learner”, randomly selected “normal people” could be easily persuaded to defer the responsibility for their actions to an authority telling them no more than: “go on”. The “teachers” just “followed orders”. “In the context of AI”, so writes political journalist and media theorist Daria Rudakova in an essay entitled Recognizing the Agentic Shift, “this shift results in humans abdicating their decision-making to artificial systems.” She explains how the “metaphorical framing of AI as human-like has contributed to the premature attribution of human qualities to these systems, undermining human agency and responsibility.” [ii]

Equating machines with humans

In my previous Commentary “Of two Original Sins”, this anthropomorphism of AI was described as AI’s “original sin”. Rudakova describes it as follows: “Despite the fact that technologies of that time [1950s – 1990s] were inadequate to allow the fulfilment of an idea of duplicating a human mind, the general public began to see computers not merely as tools, but as entities with human-like qualities, prematurely attributing to these imperfect systems the ability to think. AI intelligence has not only been humanised in people’s perception, but has begun to be perceived as an expert of last resort.” By falsely ascribing “intelligence” to “automata”, modern society was misled to “equate machines with humans, and humans with machines”. Speaking of computers in “anthropomorphic language” implies that these machines and the machine-based systems installed on them have human-like qualities such as the ability to fall ill when affected by “viruses”, recover, think, learn and make decisions.”

The perfect embodiment of Milgram’s “teacher”

The story goes that Milgram’s “agentic shift” experiment found its origin in his interest in the Holocaust and that it was set in motion on the occasion of the trial of Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann which had started in Jerusalem in April 1961, just 3 months before the beginning of the experiment. Eichman, who showed no regret or signs of guilt during the trial, was the perfect embodiment of Milgram’s “teacher”. The philosopher Hanna Arendt, who observed Eichman during the proceedings, noted that he not just “obeyed ‘orders'”, but that he “obeyed the ‘law'”. What “the law” meant in Nazi Germany was explained in The Führer Protects the Law, an article published in the Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung on August 1, 1934, by the legal scholar Carl Schmitt, who, in July 1933, had been appointed State Councilor for Prussia by Hermann Göring, and in November of that year had become the president of the “Union of National-Socialist Jurists”. According to Schmitt, “the law” meant nothing other than “der Führer“. He described Adolf Hitler’s legal role as that of both supreme judge and the supreme source of the German Volk’s collective sense of justice. The German Volk, the German State and the German Sovereign all came together in the unique Übermensch, the Führer, whose given name was Adolf Hitler.

Hitler and the Germans

This is how Schmitt reconciled his conscience with a society that had surrendered itself to a pneumapath who had replaced First Reality, in which crimes are crimes, by a Second Reality, a Third Reich, in which crimes are no longer crimes. This “reality switch”, though, was not a problem of national socialism as such, but of the moral degeneration and dehumanization of an entire society. As the political philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901 – 1985) put it, it was the problem of Hitler and the Germans, which is the title of a book that comprises a series of lectures he held in 1964 at the Arts Faculty of Munich Universit, one year after Milgram had first described his “agentic shift” study in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. [iii] In the introduction to Hitler and the Germans, the book’s editor, Brandon Purcell, stated: “While the ‘Hitler and the Germans’ lectures undoubtedly mark the peak of Voegelin’s work as an academic teacher in Germany, they also were his most elaborated and outspoken analysis of the spiritual level of contemporary German intellectual life and, in general, of German political culture. […] Voegelin’s topic was the Germans’ complicity in Nazi rule and their current treatment of their National Socialist past.” [iv]

Reciprocal exonoration

In the lecture Descent into the legal abyss, Voegelin contended that psychologically the problem of the Germans’ societal degeneration wasn’t a thing of the past, but that it had persisted in postwar Germany when numerous courts failed to convict Germans who had, during the war, committed obvious crimes that were, at the material time, not considered as crimes but as acts committed in the interest of the Reich and its Volk. Voegelin described the courts’ line of reasoning as follows: “The murderer, who physically committed the murder, acts under orders; the one who gives the order committed no murder. That is to say, they are all innocent. […] Of course this reaches beyond the essential problem of the Rechtsstaat [the State founded on the rule of law] to the problem of moral degeneracy and, further, to the comprehensiveness of criminal law. […] Again and again, it’s a question of this reciprocal exoneration ‒ the murderer acted under orders, and the one who gave those commands has not himself murdered. So, all are innocent.”

“Topoi” of an ideological kind

Voegelin then explained the problem as one in which First Reality is replaced by a Second one. “When reality and murder are replaced by topoi of an ideological kind, like ‘historical necessity’ ‒ and the same holds for the achievement of the Communist revolution, where you have the same problems ‒ then the entire moral order comes to an end. A new [second] reality … takes the place of the first reality, where man lives morally, and an imaginary reality permits killing, which then no longer falls under the category of murder, of law, of justice, and so on. So, the entire constitution of the reality of man and of society is switched off by the dream, the fantasy, of a second reality, where things like ‘historical necessities’ can be found. Such a second reality, of course, doesnʼt exist. Instead it is always a question of the man concerned being a degenerate type. Whoever is a degenerate type has historical necessities.”

The reality of Man

The degree to which a society or group of people has slipped into any kind of Second Reality determines its state of degeneration. This process of degeneration becomes most visible as one of moral decay when the population can no longer distinguish between legality and illegality, criminality and noncriminality, normality and aberration. Without a doubt, a community’s descent into such a state is orchestrated by self-anointed “Masters” who wrap their Utopias in glowing rhetoric and millenial tales of Führers, World Soul, Geist, Übermensch and whatever Utopias come to mind. To be sure, it’s easy to demonstrate this process of substituting First for a Second Reality by taking national socialism and communism as historic examples. But Voegelin did more than that. He showed that at any given moment in human history the process can be set in motion in the everlasting and universal quest for the “constitution of the reality of man and of society”.

The “agentic” and the “reality switch”

Combining Voegelin’s and Milgram’s insights, it becomes evident that a people‘s switch from First to Second Reality cannot take place unless there was an “agentic switch” from the individual person living in First Reality to the Authority figure who is the self-anointed Master of whatever Second Reality it is that must be enforced at all cost as a matter of historical, planetary or similarly grandiose kinds of “necessities”. The “agentic” and the “reality” switches go hand in hand. In the context of AI, humanizing machine-based systems not only facilitates the “agentic shift” from individual users to these systems but it leaves the users unaware of the fact that AI is the Second Reality that the several “Masters” who run the Artificial Intelligence Show seek to impose on society.

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[i] What is Agentic Intelligence?; IBM Think; Cole Stryker; https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/agentic-ai

[ii] Recognizing the Agentic Shift; October 17, 2024 by Daria Rudakova. https://ic4ml.org/blogs/recognizing-the-agentic-shift/

[iii] Milgram, Stanley (1963). “Behavioral Study of Obedience”. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. 67 (4): 371–8.

[iv] Hitler and the Germans; Eric Voegelin; Collected Works, Volume 11. Copyright 1999 by the Curators of the University of Missouri. University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201, USA.

In her book Empire of AI, investigative journalist Karan Hao, writes: “The promise propelling AI development is encoded in the technology’s very name.” She relates how, in 1956, twenty scientists gathered at Dartmouth College to form a new discipline to study the question “Can machines think?”. “They came from fields such as mathematics, cryptography, and cognitive science and needed a new name to unify them. Johan McCarthy, the Dartmouth professor who convened the workshop, initially used the term automata studies to describe the pursuit of machines capable of automatic behavior. When the research didn’t attract much attention, he cast about for a more attractive phrase. He settled on the term artificial intelligence.” [i]

Anthromorphisizing automata

“The name artificial intelligence“, so Hao, “was thus a marketing tool from the very beginning, the promise of what the technology could bring embedded within it. Intelligence sounds inherently good and desirable, sophisticated and impressive; something that society would certainly want more of; something that should deliver universal benefit. The name change did the trick.” Hao cites longtime chronicler of AI, Cade Metz, who called this rebranding “the original sin of the field” and the source of “so much of the hype and peril that now surround the technology”. In essence, that original sin comes down to “casual anthromorphisizing” non-human automata and making it possible for AI developers to describe their automata‘s functions in terms of “learning”, “reading” and “creating” as if their software “acts” or is capable of “acting” and “inferring” just like humans.

A fata morgana

In Webster’s College Dictionary, an automaton is defined as “a mechanical figure or contrivance constructed to act as if by its own motive power; a robot; a person or animal that acts in a monotonous, routine manner, without active intelligence; a mechanical device, operated electronically, that functions automatically, without continuous input from an operator; anything capable of acting automatically or without an external motive force”. [ii] When a humanoid automaton is defined as a person acting without active intelligence, we can be sure that there’s no machine based automaton that functions with active intelligence. All that automata such as AI can do is show a semblance of intelligence. Artificial Intelligence is a fata morgana, a hallucination, because the term embodies a contradictio in terminis. To be sure, automata do exist and they “do” as programmed. They look intelligent but lack any and all intelligence.

Artificial General Intelligence

To keep the AI bubble from bursting, the AI Elite is upping the ante by promising that AI will soon be turned into Artificial General Intelligence or AGI. AGI will complete the “anthromorphisation” of AI since it is supposed to match and even outsmart human intelligence. In fact, the coining of the term AGI cleverly obfuscates the fact that AI still functions without intelligence. We’re being told that all that is needed to make AI function with intelligence, i.e. to turn AI into AGI, is more and more and more data fed into more and more sophisticated computing power installed in many more data centers. This will take trillions of dollars in capital, but the investment is hyped as extremely wise because it supports the development of a new creed of automata that are being advocated as capable of applying all by themselves (without human instructions) what they were originally trained to do in the execution of specific tasks in performing completely new unspecific (“general”) tasks that they were never trained in. This is something that humans are quite capable of because humans are capable of understanding data and of using their intelligence to judge the data’s relevancy and applicability in solving all sorts of problems.

Kepler, Newton and AI

Whether all these drummed up trillions will eventually go up in smoke depends on providing a definite answer to the question whether AI systems can be “trained” to understand what they’re doing and “generally” apply that understanding in solving new problems they were never asked to solve. And so, a Harvard University / MIT team designed an elegant test to check whether AI systens are capable not only of predicting whether the sun will rise, but whether they can also explain why it rises every morning. They trained an AI system to do what Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630) did: predict the elliptical movement of the planets around the sun. Then, they checked whether their “Keplerian” AI model was also capable of doing what Isaac Newton (1643 – 1747) did: explain that the planets’ trajectories are determined by the laws of gravity. Kepler predicted that an apple will fall. Newton explained why it falls. In the words of the researchers, they checked whether what they called an AI foundation model can uncover a “deeper domain understanding” that explains the real “world model” that underlies the “foundation model”, much like how Kepler’s predictions of the movement of planets led to the discovery of the laws of gravity by Newton. [iii]

Predicting isn’t explaining

The HU/MIT team concluded that while AI models are quite capable of making accurate case-specific (“Keplerian”) predictions by resorting to aligning readily accessible data/information, they fail to “encode” the generally applicable “world model” of Newton’s laws. This is precisely the limitation that prohibits the realisation of AGI. [iv] To be sure, AI is capable of producing duplicates of world models, but these duplicates lack any and all understanding of the laws and priciples that underly and “move” the world model. Differently put, an AI system can predict but is incapable of explaining its prediction. Which means that it cannot predict beyond what it was tasked to predict on the basis of the data put into it. Putting in more data may enhance the similarity with the “world model”, but it won’t create one grain of understanding the forces, laws and postulates that orchestrate and drive the predicted events or patterns. To form a “world model”, one needs to encode in the model an explanatory set of functions that describe not just what will happen but why the world works that way.

World models

Now that it has become clear that AI is incapable of producing an accurate model of the laws that govern the world of physics, we better abandon all dreams about using AI to produce a “world model” that encompasses the living world and, ultimately, the world of Man. If we were to place our trust in automata to discover who we are and guide us in our “pursuit of happiness”, we tread on dangerous ground. Not only because the substitution of human for artificial intelligence will dehumanize and robotize us, but because we will have placed our trust in machine based systems that cannot even produce a correct model of the physical world.

The Original Sins

The “original sin” of the field of AI was no more than combining the words “artificial” and “intelligence” to create the misleading fallacy that automata can function with or “produce” intelligence. The “Original Sin” in the field of Man was of a different order. It was described in the authentic Greek version of the Gospel as “hamartanö”, which means “to miss the mark.” In his book The Mark, the Scottish psychologist, writer and teacher Maurice Nicoll (1884 – 1953) defined Man’s Mark as the point from where inner evolution starts, as the right place within oneself, the place of “I”, which is, according to the New Testament, the place where Man’s highest self can experience “one-ness” with God Whose name is “I am”. [v] This is the “one-ness” that was “lost and found” by the Prodigal Son, who, when he told his Heavenly Father that he had sinned, spoke the Greek word “hēmarton” (“ἥμαρτον“): “I have missed the Mark“. As the story goes, he then divulged that he had found the Mark in “the direction of (‘eis‘/ ‘εἰς‘) the heaven (‘ton ouranon‘ / ‘τὸν oὐρανὸν‘) and under the eyes (‘enōpion‘ / ‘ἐνώπιόν‘) of thee (‘sou‘ / ‘σου’).” [vi] The word “eis” specifically indicates an inward direction or movement. The Mark is inside Man. It is the “place” where “I” know myself as “I am” at the heavenly Ground of Being. This is the key message laid down in the Gospels. It is the highest possible spiritual level of Man.

Rebranding “AI”

While automata are quite useful in excecuting and monitoring well defined tasks, anthromorphisizing these machine based systems by rebranding them as “AI” or “AGI” creates the delusion that they can also help us in our pursuit of existential happiness. But, when happiness is defined as the state of being that comes about when Man hits “the Mark” and “AI” as automata, we must rebrand “AI” as the Devil’s spell (“Zauberwort“) that serves only one purpose: leading us away from our Selves to preempt us from hitting that Mark. Unless we do that, we’ll be as lost as the Prodigal Son.

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[i] Empire of AI – Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI; Karen Hao; Penguin Press – New York – 2025. pp. 89-90.

[ii] Random House Kernerman Webster’s College Dictionary, 2010.

[iii] What Has a Foundation Model Found? Using Inductive Bias to Probe for World Models; Keyon Vafa, Peter G. Chang, Ashesh Rambachan and Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard University, MIT; 14 August 2025; https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2507.06952

[iv] See for a simple explanation of the Harvard/MIT Study: AI Models Are Not Ready to Make Scientific Discoveries; Alberto Romero; The Algorythmic Bridhg; July 15, 2025.

[v] The Mark; Maurice Nicoll; Watkins Publishing, Somerset, England; First published 1954.

[vi] Luke 15:18.

At the memorial service for Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump said: “In that private moment on his dying day, we find everything we need to know about who Charlie Kirk truly was. He was a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose. He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry. I am sorry, Erika. But now Erika can talk to me and the whole group, and maybe they can convince me that that’s not right, but I can’t stand my opponents.”

God is … Agape 

Allow me to suggest an answer that would not only fit Erika Kirk but also, and more importantly so, her murdered husband. It’s an answer that was given by Jesus Christ when He showed the difference between conscious “love” and emotional “love” in His last encounter with his disciple Simon Peter. Understanding this difference is only possible when, first of all, one realizes that in the original Greek text of the New Testament two distinctive words are used to describe “Love”. In his Gospel, St. John assures us in verses 1-4:8 and 1-4:16 that God is Love. Here, John uses the word agapē [ἀγάπη] to describe God as Love. He doesn’t use the word philia [Φιλία] which means love in the sense of friendship, affection or fondness. Agapē means conscious love, which is the unselfish, unconditional, benevolent love that values and esteems. The verb phileó means to have affection for, to be a friend, as a matter of loyalty, sentiment or feeling. Agapē is completely selfless, unconditional, not contingent on feelings, judgment or considerations. Agapē is infinite and everlasting.

Agape and philia

In the English and most other translations of the authentic Greek text of the Gospel agapē and philia are indiscriminatively translated as “love”, suggesting that both words have the same meaning and may be used interchangeably. This makes most translations of the relevant verses of the New Testament imprecise, confusing and counterproductive. To be clear, genuine feelings of friendship and affinity (philia) cannot exist between persons who regard each other as enemies. What does exist between enemies is antagonism and, often, hatred. In fact, when a friend becomes an enemy, love rapidly turns into hatred. This is what makes “philia” and hatred contingent on the feelings and circumstances that determine human relationships.

Agapate your enemies

Does this mean that conscious love (agape) shall not or cannot exist between enemies? The question is raised in verse 1:53 of the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus says “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love [Agapēseis / Ἀγαπήσεις] your neighbor’ [friend] and ‘Hate [misēseis / μισήσεις] your enemy’.” This saying implies that “agape” is only possible between friends who share philia and defintely not between enemies who share hatred (μῖσος / mîsos). Jesus then says: “But I say unto you, Love [agapate” / ἀγαπᾶτε] your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” Here, Christ stipulates that we shall not withhold true and unconditional love (agape) from our enemies. What He didn’t say, though, is that we must treat or regard them as our friends. Other than this, His words confirm that He didn’t doubt that Man is capable of generating Divine Love. After all, if we would lack this capacity, we wouldn’t be able to heed His advice.

Do you love me ?

Admittedly, it’s not easy to distinguish between “agape” and “philia´. This difficulty is brought to light by John in the verses 21-15:17, where he relates how Christ, after His resurrection, when he was together with His disciples at the Sea of Tiberias, singled out His disciple Simon Peter to see if he was capable of distinguishing agapē from philia. When they had finished eating, Jesus asked Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love [agapas / ἀγαπᾷς] Me more than these?” Whereupon Simon Peter answered: “Yes, Lord, You know I love [philō / φιλῶ] You.” Jesus then replied, “Feed My lambs”, and asked Simon Peter the same question for a second time. “Simon son of John, do you love [agapas / ἀγαπᾷς] Me?” Again, Simon Peter repeated his first answer: “Yes, Lord, You know I love [philō / φιλῶ] You.” Jesus then told him, “Shepherd My sheep”, and asked for a third time, “Simon son of John, do you love [agapas / ἀγαπᾷς] Me?” Peter was deeply hurt that Jesus had asked him a third time, “Do you love [agapas / ἀγαπᾷς] Me?” and answered “Lord, You know all things”, he replied. “You know I love [philō / φιλῶ] You.” Jesus then ended the conversation, saying, “Feed My sheep.”

We’ll never know

The Apostle Simon Peter was the disciple who was to become the rock (from Petros / Πέτρος in Greek and Petra in Latin for “rock or stone”) on which the Christian Congregation (ekklēsia / ἐκκλησία) would be built. Even though Christ used the word “agapas” when He asked “do you love me”, Peter answered “don’t you know I am your friend.” When agape and philia are both translated as “love”, the conversation between Christ and Peter becomes a riddle that we’ll never be able to solve. This erroneous and mystifying translation blocks access to the actual words spoken by Christ and, as a consequence, prohibits understanding what they mean and how they can help us in dealing with our enemies. And so, we end up with President Trump stating that Charlie Kirk “didn’t hate his opponents” and “wanted the best for them”, implying that the latter considered his opponents to be his friends. By all means, Charlie Kirk’s opponents were his unrelenting enemies. They really hated him. In spite of that, he never returned hatred with hatred. Does this mean that he truly loved his enemies … ? Or, did he make the deadly mistake of offering them his friendship …

We’ll never know …

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On the 3^rd of November 2023 Elon Musk’s “xAI Team” announced that as of this memorable day, “Grok” will be the name of “an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy“, a science fiction novel created during the late 1970s by English author and screenwriter Douglas Noel Adams. In this book, a certain Arthur Dent hitchhikes through the universe following the destruction of Earth by a race of nasty aliens called Vogons. Dent discovers that the Earth was actually a giant supercomputer created by Deep Thought, an even bigger computer. [i] In xAI Team’s “artifictional” wonderworld its Grok AI is “intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask!” […] It was “designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor!” Let Grok be your guide when you hitchhike to the galaxy, have some fun and, in case you’d get bored or run out of questions, just ask xAI’s “machine-based system” what question you should ask.

Understanding the Universe

True to its word, the xAI Team doesn’t shy away from offering galactic visions on Grok’s website. After all, its mission statement is: “Understand the Universe“. And so, “AI’s knowledge should be all-encompassing and as far-reaching as possible.” In any case, I guess, as far reaching as the outer bounderies of the Universe. To assist all earthlings in understanding the universe, the Team advocates Grok as an “AI specifically to advance human comprehension and capabilities”. Under the header “Reasoning from First Principles“, the xAI Team boasts that it “challenges conventional thinking by breaking down problems to their fundamental truths, grounded in logic.” This should make Grok “your truth-seeking AI companion for unfiltered answers with advanced capabilities in reasoning, coding, and visual processing”. Should all these sophisticated terms escape your comprehension, don’t worry, because “[a] unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the X platform”. Let Grok seek and it will find. To the one who knocks on Grok’s door, that door will be opened.

Grokked, grokking, grocks

Without a doubt, when the xAI Team decided that “Grok” would be the name for its “machine-based system”, it was aware of the fact that “to grok” is a verb that was coined by the American writer Robert A. Heinlein and first used in 1961 in his science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. In the book, the term “grok” is used by Martians to indicate that you cannot understand, fear, hate or appreciate something “unless you grok it”, i.e. “understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you”. “The Martian,” so Heinlein in his novel, “seems to know instinctively what we learned painfully from modern physics, that observer acts with observed through the process of observation. Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed — to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. […] ‘Grok’ means ‘identically equal.’ […] It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science and it means as little to us as color does to a blind man.” Today, any dictionary will tell you that “to grok” means “to understand profoundly through intuition or empathy” and “to communicate sympathetically”. [ii]

Grokking Grok

Of course, picking Grok as the name that distinguishes your AI system from the ones designed by your competitors does have consequences. Meaning that in order to assist the users of Grok in understanding the Universe and finding truth, this “AI-companion” must above all be capable of grokking not only the Universe but truth as well. Grok must become part of ‒ “grok” ‒ what it observes, it must merge with “the observed” to the point where “the observed” merges with and becomes identically equal to Grok. The system must not only duplicate “the observed”, but understand it as well. Only then will Grok be able to deliver what it promises and share what it grokked ‒ thoroughly understood ‒ with its human “companions”. But then, the big question is: who’s to say whether Grok succeeded in grokking ‒ completely merging with ‒ and understanding ‒ knowing ‒ whatever it was asked to grok. To verify whether “truth-seeking” Grok truly grokked what it was supposed to grok, the verifier must grok it as well to determine whether Grok found and delivered what it promised to seek: truth.

Let’s ask the Martians

According to Heinlein in Stranger in a strange land, grokking is an ability that was mastered by Martians. So, I’d say that only Martians will be able to determine whether Elon Musk’s Grok will pass the grok-exam cum laude. In this regard, we seem to be in luck since Musk’s SpaceX program aims at building a City on Mars. According to the SpaceX website, Mars is “one of Earth’s closest habitable neighbors”. [iii] The red planet is located “about half again as far from the Sun as Earth is”. It “still has decent sunlight”, yet it’s “a little cold, but we can warm it up. Its atmosphere is primarily CO2 with some nitrogen and argon and a few other trace elements, which means that we can grow plants on Mars just by compressing the atmosphere. Gravity on Mars is about 38% of that of Earth, so you would be able to lift heavy things and bound around. Furthermore, the day is remarkably close to that of Earth.” And, allow me to suggest, once we’re hopping around in Musk’s City on Mars, let’s ask the local Martians to grok Grok and let us know if Grok is able to grok like Martians. But then, …, even if the Martians would give Grok a pass, why on earth would we place our trust in Martians or in Grok instead of letting our own human intuition, empathy and intelligence be our guide to the galaxy. After all, aren’t we the ones who were created in God’s image !

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[i] https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy/summary/

[ii] https://www.thefreedictionary.com/grok

[iii] https://www.spacex.com/humanspaceflight/mars

In a recent conversation with Tucker Carlson, the German economist Richard Werner explained how banks are able to “create money from nothing”. [i] In 2014, Werner had already published two articles on this enigma: “Can banks individually create money out of nothing?” and “How do banks create money, and why can other firms not do the same?” In these articles Werner presents an overview of the well known theories of “money creation” and concisely described an experiment he conducted in cooperation with an established German bank to bring to light another monetary practice that had never before received any attention in mainstream economic/financial publications. [ii] iii] Briefly put, Werner demonstrated that banks can and do create money by making credit available to borrowers without disbursing the loan but, instead, keeping customer deposits in their own balance sheet.

Uniquely exempt from accounting rules

According to Werner, banks get away with keeping customers’ deposits, also known as “money”, in their own balance sheet not because they combine lending and deposit taking activities under one roof, but because the necessary and sufficient condition for being able to create credit and money is that banks are uniquely exempt from the accounting rules that provide that firms that do not have a banking autorisation must hold client deposits/money in segregated escrow (trust or third-party) accounts so that these deposits remain “off-balance” for the firm. In the simplest of terms, the exemption makes that the money you hold in “your” bank account remains on the bank’s own balance sheets.

The crucial accounting change

This Commentary is not the place to elaborate on Werner’s findings and evaluate whether they conclusively answer the question how banks create money from nothing. But in case you’re interested in the technicalities involved in creating money from nothing, read on. If not, just skip this and the following paragraphs and continue reading at Money, money, money. According to Werner, money creation is accomplished “through the one, small but crucial accounting change that does take place on the liability side of the bank’s balance sheet […]; the bank reduces its ‘account payable’ item by the loan amount, acting as if the money had been disbursed to the customer, and at the same time it presents the customer with a statement that identifies this same obligation of the bank to the borrower, but now simply reclassified as a ‘customer deposit’ of the borrower with the bank.” (emphasis added)

Banks are not financial intermediaries

The borrower is given the false impression that funds have been made available to him/her/it while in fact, due to this accounting change, no transfer of money has actually taken place. “There is,” so Werner, “no equal reduction in the balance of another account to defray the borrower. Instead, the bank simply re-classified its liabilities, changing the ‘accounts payable’ obligation arising from the bank loan contract to another liability category called ‘customer deposits’. Werner concludes that “banks are not financial intermediaries, but creators of the money supply, whereby the act of creating money is contingent on banks maintaining customer deposit accounts, because the money is invented in the form of fictitious customer deposits that are actually re-classified ‘accounts payable’ liabilities emanating from loan contracts.”

Money, money, money …

Evidently, money created from something existed long before bankers figured out how to create it from nothing. The Romans created money by stamping metal to make coins. Money comes from the Latin word “moneta”, which not only means “mint” or “minter”, i.e. a “place for coining money”, but also the result of minting: “coined money, money, coinage”. In Old English a “mynetere”, from Latin “monetarius”, was someone who “stamps coins to create money”. In this monetary tradition, money wasn’t created from nothing, but from metals. Had Tucker Carlson asked a “myneter” whether it is possible to create money from nothing, the latter would have laughed in Tucker’s face and shrugged him off as a complete idiot. Yet, here we are, watching Carlson and Werner discussing how banks create “money” from nothing.

The illusion of money

Solving this conundrum is actually quite simple. Banks do not create money from nothing. What  banks do is create the illusion of money from nothing. This is the reason why money is sometimes called “an idea backed up by confidence”. Bankers act like con artists. They are “illusionists”, skilled in the art of creating “money” from nothing by giving borrowers the false impression that the deposits placed in bank accounts have come from somewhere, while in fact, due to an accounting trick that remains unseen for the actual client, no transfer of money has taken place. As Werner explained, there is no equal reduction in the balance of another account to defray the borrower. The bank’s clients are left unaware of the fact that their deposits were created from nothing and that their money is added by the bank to the total amount of money that is in circulation and that this is the one and only cause of inflation. They have no idea that by accepting loans from banks they are instrumental in reducing the purchasing power of owners of previously existing “money” and that all future borrowers of new money created from nothing will inevitably reduce their own purchasing power.

What about CASH … ?

Does using cash solve the problem? Not really. Except that the use of cash takes place outside the control of the bank and, in a larger context, outside what’s called the “control grid”, cash is as illusionary as “money” held in bank deposits. Cash is no more than printed paper (banknotes) or coined metal of little or no value. Without its official marks and imprints, cash isn’t worth a dime. It gives the “money illusion” a glow of credibility because you can keep it in your pocket, money box or safe. Yet, all cash is issued by federal, national or reserve banks. To obtain it, the first user must withdraw “money” from his/her/its commercial bank account. Just like “money” held in bank deposits, cash is created from nothing, be it that it takes paper, metal, a printing press and a “mint” to create it.

Creation out of nothing ?

Richard Werner has been critisized for presenting a limited and one-sided explanation of “banking” and for rejecting “other theories” of money creation. In “Richard Werner’s Credit Creation ‘Experiment’: How Do Banks Create Money?“, an article published on the website of the Mises Institute on 14 August 2025, Jonathan Newman writes that Werner’s “favored theory, interpreted charitably, isn’t incorrect but it narrowly focuses on one loan by a fractional reserve bank.” [iv] Well, I leave it to the scholars, pundits and bankers to agree or disagree on how exactly banks manage to create money from nothing. Not because I think that the matter isn’t of importance, which it most certainly is, but because the word that is left unexplored in these discussions is ….. “nothing”.

Creation ex nihilo

Creation out of nothing, in Latin: ex nihilo, is commonly understood as an act that only God is capable of. In fact, creating ex nihilo is what defines God. The crux of the matter is, of course, to be found in the words “ex nihilo”, which makes creation out of nothing an act that takes place at a level of existence where nothing exists except the ability to create. Creation ex nihilo implies creating a creation from its very beginning, de novo. Before a creation’s beginning there was nothing, except of course the potentiality to come into existence as Creator.

Ex nihilo out of nowhere …

I doubt whether the monetary experts who offer explanations as to how bankers create money out of nothing are aware of the fact that the combination of the words create and out of nothing does have profound implications. Of course, we all think we understand what is meant by creating money from nothing. Without giving “nothing” any further thought our attention is primarily fixed on that precious “something” that, in spite of having been created out of nothing, still seems to make the world go round and round. The point is that, strictly speaking, creation from nothing must take place out of the nowhere where there is nothing, the nowhere that “was” before The Beginning. In this nowhere there were no heavens, no earth, no mankind, no Adam, no Eve, no plants, no fish, no beasts, no things, no objects, no …. money.

The Creator of Man

There was, however, a Creator Who, in the course of the human events that took place after The Beginning, made Himself known to Man as “I am” (“IAWEH”). Those of us who dismiss this as superstititon or baloney might consider that without “I am” they wouldn’t be here. Whatever the case may be, the Men who signed the American Declaration of Independence on behalf of their States held that the Creator of Man not only creates all Men “equal”, but also endows everyone of us with the unalienable rights called Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Anyone who thinks, suggests or insists that substituting money created from something for the illusionary money created by bankers “out of nothing” will be helpful in the pursuit of happiness, should seriously check how this promise impacts everyone’s Life and Liberty.

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[i] Richard Werner Exposes the Evils of the Fed & the Link Between Banking, War, and the CIA; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StTKHskg5Tg

[ii] Can banks individually create money out of nothing? — The theories and the empirical evidence. Richard A. Werner; International Review of Financial Analysis; http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.irfa.2014.07.015; 1057-5219/© 2014 Published by Elsevier Inc.

[iii] How do banks create money, and why can other firms not do the same?An explanation for the coexistence of lending and deposit-taking. Richard A. Werner; International Review of Financial Analysis; http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.irfa.2014.10.013; 1057-5219/© 2014 Published by Elsevier Inc.

[iv] Richard Werner’s Credit Creation “Experiment”: How Do Banks Create Money?; Jonathan Newman; Mises wire, 14 August 2025; https://mises.org/mises-wire/richard-werners-credit-creation-experiment-how-do-banks-create-money

In July, the White House published Winning the AI race / AMERICA’s AI ACTION PLAN. According to the Plan’s authors, AI high-priests Michael J. Kratsios (Assistant to the U.S. President for Science and Technology) and David O. Sacks (Special Advisor for AI and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, Marco Rubio, there’s a renaissance afoot, be it that this renaissance depends on “winning the AI race”. There won’t be “a new golden age of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people”, unless the AI race is won. AI is the digital technology that “will enable Americans to discover new materials, synthesize new chemicals, manufacture new drugs, and develop new methods to harness energy—an industrial revolution. It will enable radically new forms of education, media, and communication—an information revolution. And it will enable altogether new intellectual achievements: unraveling ancient scrolls once thought unreadable, making breakthroughs in scientific and mathematical theory, and creating new kinds of digital and physical art—a renaissance.”

A RENAISSANCE ….. ???

In 1486, the Italian philosopher Pico della Mirandola published “On the Dignity of Man.” This book is considered to be the “Manifesto” of The Renaissance. Although The Renaissance was “humanist” in nature in that it emphasized and celebrated “Man’s greatness”, the Renaissance’s humanists of the 14^th-15^th-16^th centuries were Christians, who sought to renew Christianity by exploring the works of the philosophers of Greek antiquity. In his Introduction to “On the Dignity of Man”, philosopher Paul J.W. Miller writes that della Mirandola held that “Man is the metaphysical center of the universe, standing between the physical world of nature and the spiritual world of angels and God. … [T]he root of Man’s excellence and dignity lies in the fact that Man is the maker of his own nature. Man may be what he wishes to be: he makes himself what he chooses. … This does not mean that Man is an absolute creator of himself, for the making activity of man operates upon potencies which are already given. … The context of Pico’s affirmation of man’s freedom shows that he is thinking above all of moral freedom, the ability to give oneself the character or set of moral habits that one chooses.” According to della Mirandola, “the end of Man is to return to his first cause, God, where our knowledge is perfected.” His philosophy “expresses the fundamentally religious spirit of the Renaissance”. (i)

AI SCIENCE

The AI triumvirate Kratsios, Sacks and Rubio promises “an industrial revolution, an information revolution, and a renaissance—all at once. This is the potential that AI presents”. The problem is that these American visionaries don’t spend one single word on “a renaissance” in their AI Action Plan. They leave it to the reader to guess or use AI to discover how AI is going to “enable altogether new intellectual achievements by unraveling ancient scrolls, making breakthroughs in scientific and mathematical theory, and creating new kinds of digital and physical art.” Admittedly, they do show an interest in “science”, but only in “AI-Enabled Science”. This is because “AI systems can already generate models of protein structures, novel materials, and much else. Increasingly powerful general-purpose [computer language] models show promise in formulating hypotheses and designing experiments. These nascent capabilities promise to accelerate scientific advancement.”

Of Allies, Partners and Adversaries

The visionaries’ problem … ? America is fighting an AI War. “Other countries, including our adversaries, have raced ahead of us in amassing vast troves of scientific data.” The solution … ? “Prioritize investment in theoretical, computational, and experimental research to preserve America’s leadership in discovering new and transformative paradigms that advance the capabilities of AI, […].” Other than improving AI’s capabilities, America’s AI Action Plan is mainly focused on: “Accelerating AI Adoption in Government” to “deliver the highly responsive government the American people expect and deserve”; “aggressively adopting AI within its Armed Forces if it is to maintain its global military preeminence …”; “[e]xporting Big Tech’s American AI to Allies and Partners” because “a failure to meet this demand would be an unforced error, causing these countries to turn to our rivals” and because “the distribution and diffusion of American technology will stop our strategic rivals from making our allies dependent on foreign adversary technology.”

Intelligentia

According to Paul Miller, “[t]he Italian Renaissance witnessed a renewal in interest in man and his intellectual activities.” (emphasis added) This perfectly fits the fact that “intelligence” is commonly understood as the “highest faculty of the human mind” and as Man‘s “inherent, natural, capacity for comprehending general truths”. Intelligence is Man‘s “faculty of understanding, comprehension”. It is the ability to perceive, retain, distinguish, and align data in order to reach conclusions to solve problems. Intelligence is from Latin intelligentia or intellegentia: “understanding, knowledge, power of discerning; art, skill, taste”. Intelligentia is derived from intellegens which is the gerund form of the Latin verb intellego (to understand), meaning that it expresses the doingness of using the mind to understand and grasp meaning. Intellego is a combination of the words inter (“between”) +‎ legō (“to select”, “collect,” “pick”, “bring together”, “align”. Lego also means “to read”, not just in the sense of examining and grasping the meaning of written or printed characters, words, or sentences, but also in the broader sense of discerning or anticipating through examination or observation. This is how lego means reading the lines as well as reading “between the lines”.

AI & Big Government

Reading America’s AI Action Plan, it’s glaringly obvious that it has nothing to do with a renewal of Man’s intellectual activities. What the Plan comes down to is merging AI systems with Big Government and America’s imperial quest for strengthening its efforts to maintain and solidify what is left of its geopolitical power. In this regard, it’s not a “renaissance” of America’s domestic and foreign policies, but nothing other than old, stale, wine in new AI-designed wineskins. Still, with regard to improving Americans’ intellectual capacities, the Action Plan does spend a few lines on the use of AI in learning and education: “The Trump Administration has already taken significant steps to lead on this front, including the April 2025 Executive Order […] ‘Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth’.” However, this push for AI Education is not aimed at boosting America’s youth’s intellectual capacities. It forms part of the Administration’s “worker-first AI agenda” and rests on the assumption that “AI can help America build an economy that delivers more pathways to economic opportunity for American workers.” In addition to this, “it will also transform how work gets done across all industries and occupations, demanding a serious workforce response to help workers navigate that transition.”

From Kindergarten to 12^th Grade

To effectively transform America’s workforce into an AI-driven workforce, AI Education must begin while the future workforce is still in its infant stage. In Section 1 of said AI Education EO, we read that “[e]arly learning and exposure to AI concepts not only demystifies this powerful technology but also sparks curiosity and creativity, preparing students to become active and responsible participants in the workforce of the future and nurturing the next generation of American AI innovators to propel our Nation to new heights of scientific and economic achievement.” Still, “while AI education in kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12) is critical, our Nation must also make resources available for lifelong learners to develop new skills for a changing workforce.” This is how the US Government intends to “ensure that every American has the opportunity to learn about AI from the earliest stages of their educational journey through postsecondary education, fostering a culture of innovation and critical thinking that will solidify our Nation’s leadership in the AI-driven future.” Public-private partnerships with leading AI industry organizations, academic institutions, nonprofit entities, and other organizations with expertise in AI and computer science education must be set up “to collaboratively develop online resources focused on teaching K-12 students foundational AI literacy and critical thinking skills”.

Use of AI causes “cognitive atrophy”

There is just one tiny little problem that stands in the way of boosting a “culture of innovation and critical thinking”. That problem’s name is: AI. Artificial Intelligence doesn’t boost critical thinking but impairs it. That’s the outcome of scientific research that took place at one of America’s most prestigious academic institutions: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A couple of weeks before the Trump Adminstration unleashed its AI Action Plan, a group of scientists working at MIT published “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task“. (ii) In their publication, the researchers note that the reason they undertook their study stemmed from the fact that “emerging research raises critical concerns about the cognitive implications of extensive LLM [Large Learning Models such as ChatGPT] usage. Studies indicate that while these systems reduce immediate cognitive load, they may simultaneously diminish critical thinking capabilities and lead to decreased engagement in deep analytical processes. This phenomenon is particularly concerning in educational contexts, where the development of robust cognitive skills is paramount. The integration of LLMs into learning environments presents a complex duality: while they enhance accessibility and personalization of education, they may inadvertently contribute to cognitive atrophy through excessive reliance on AI-driven solutions. Prior research points out that there is a strong negative correlation between AI tool usage and critical thinking skills, with younger users exhibiting higher dependence on AI tools and consequently lower cognitive performance scores. […] Unlike conventional search engines that present diverse viewpoints for user evaluation, LLMs provide synthesized, singular responses that may inadvertently discourage lateral thinking and independent judgment. This shift from active information seeking to passive consumption of AI-generated content can have profound implications for how current and future generations process and evaluate information.” (emphases added)

Brains Only versus ChatGPT

In their study, the MIT group explored “the cognitive cost of using an LLM while performing the task of writing an essay”. The researchers chose essay writing “as it is a cognitively complex task that engages multiple mental processes while being used as a common tool in schools and in standardized tests of a student’s skills. Essay writing places significant demands on working memory, requiring simultaneous management of multiple cognitive processes. A person writing an essay must juggle both macro-level tasks (organizing ideas, structuring arguments), and micro-level tasks (word choice, grammar, syntax).” To check the impact of using ChatGPT, the MIT-team split the participants into a “Brain-only” and an LLM group. It found that “[t]he use of LLM had a measurable impact on participants, and while the benefits were initially apparent, […], the LLM group’s participants performed worse than their counterparts in the Brain-only group at all levels: neural, linguistic, scoring.”

Diminished sense of cognitive agency

Compared with the “Use your Brains Only” group, the ChatGPT group scored sigificantly lower in terms of the ability to quote one’s own essay. “[N]ot only was memory encoding shallow, but the semantic content itself may not have been fully internalized.” The ChatGPT group also scored lower in terms of “Essay Ownership and Cognitive Agency”. The responses “suggest a diminished sense of cognitive agency. […] AI tools, while valuable for supporting performance, may unintentionally hinder deep cognitive processing, retention, and authentic engagement with written material. If users rely heavily on AI tools, they may achieve superficial fluency but fail to internalize the knowledge or feel a sense of ownership over it.”

The multi-billion dollar question

In light of the MIT study, the unavoidable question is: When the Assistant to the U.S. President for Science and Technology, the Special Advisor for AI and Crypto and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs wrote their “Essay” on how to win the AI Race, did they use their brains only or did they follow the recommendations laid down in their AI Action Plan. In other words, to help “accelerate AI Adoption in Government” and “deliver the highly responsive government the American people expect and deserve”, did they use ChatGPT or some other LLM in writing their AI Action Plan?  I’d say that, as true believers in and proselytizers of AI, these high-ranking members of the US Government’s workforce should have acted responsibly and ask ChatGPT to help them write America’s AI Action Plan. In this case, I guess that these AI-“Faithful” took great pride in sacrificing a bit of their own cognitive agency, their ability to fully quote their own “Essay” and a good part of their ownership of the text when they resorted to ChatGPT to do “their” thinking and writing. Or …. could it be that the more likely answer to the multi-billion dollar question is that the authors of the AI Action Plan did use their brains and nothing else to compose it. In that case, an even bigger question is: why must Americans be stopped from doing what the AI Planners did when they put their Plan down in writing … ?

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[i] On the Dignity of Man; Pico della Mirandola; Introduction by Paul J.W. Miller; Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., Indianapolis/Cambridhe; Reprinted 1998.

[ii] Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task; Nataliya Kosmyna et al; June 10, 2025; MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872

The classical liberalism propounded by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek and Murray Rothbard is pivoted on the concept of liberty. More in particular, and especially so within the framework of the Austrian School of Economics, the great libertarian minds place liberty in the setting of human economic interaction, for which von Mises coined the term praxeology. In this setting, liberty runs the risk of being understood as a secular and human affair. Yet, in the context of what Thomas Jefferson described as “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” in the American Declaration of Independence, together with Life and the Pursuit of Happiness, Liberty is to be understood as one of the unalienable rights endowed to Man by his Creator. This ‘truth’ has enormous implications, since it defines Man as a spiritual being and places the God-given right called Liberty in the heart of Man who lives in partnership with God and as such in partnership with other Men.

The libido liberandi

In my book Liberating liberty, I explore this unique perspective on the Divine origin of Man and Man’s unalienable rights and describe what happens when Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are intentionally and systematically unmoored from their true origin, the Creator of Man. In this regard, the American Declaration of Independence must be seen as the expression of the American Founders’ deep-seated libido liberandi, the urge to liberate liberty and to keep liberty liberated by defending it against the libido dominandi, the Will to Power. In this regard, the Preamble of the Declaration of Indepence is in full alignment with classical liberalism: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Check your premises

As Ayn Rand wrote in her novel Atlas Shrugged: “Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.” While few libertarians will contradict the truth that the securement of Man’s unalienable rights concerns the institution of “just” Governments by the “governed”, it is doubtful whether all contemporary libertarians will unconditionally accept the truth that Governments are instituted to secure liberty as an endowment coming from the Creator of Man. The latter truth contradicts the modern “truth” that God is dead, buried and forgotten and that in our day and age all problems that concern rights, law, politics and economics must and can be solved by placing them within the strict confines of human action. But if God is dead, who or what is at the origin of rights such as Liberty? Nature? Government? Other men? So, if contradictions don’t exist, and more in particular in light of the fact that the Declaration of Independence is a seminal document in the field of Liberty, it might not be a bad idea for libertarians to check their premises. After all, the notion that God is dead creates an inner contradiction in the Preamble on which the entire Declaration rests. If God is really dead, the Declaration is reduced to no more than an enumeration of some of the most pressing reasons for declaring political independence from the British Commonwealth.

Metanoia

Other than this, if the Creator of Man really died some time after 1776, His death also profoundly alters the meaning of the word happiness and what its pursuit shall entail. In the classical traditions of the philosophy of law and politics, Man is a speech- or Logos-enabled being, whose happiness can only be thought of in terms of the classical idea of the highest good, of eudaimomia. Those traditions invariably turned to the relations between the human and the divine without losing sight of the relations between human and brute nature. Man – i.e. every human being – exists in the “Great In-between” that connects the secular World and the Divine Ground of Being. Plato called this In-Between the “metaxy” (in Greek “μεταξύ“, between, in between).

The revolt against reality

The metaxy is thought to engender a gravitational interaction between its poles, a ‘pulling’ and ‘thrusting’ force, the orientation of which steers Man’s pursuit of happiness as eudaimonia, his search for order and meaning, in the direction of his very Beginning, his Genesis at the Divine Ground of Being. But, the metaxy becomes dangerous ground when the failure, incapacity or plain resistance to discover this divine source as the essential and indispensable element in the articulation of order and meaning brings the metaxic search to a halt. However, the thrusting force oriented towards God won’t go away or wither, so that it will now ignite and feed a revolt against reality. However, the revolt cannot resolve the tensions of existence that come with living in the Great In-Between.

Second Realities

The revolt against reality often leads to the creation of all sorts of “second realities”, which are really Ersatz or pseudo-realities, imaginary concepts construed by individuals who, instead of confronting and dealing with existential insecurities seek to attain happiness by creating an imaginary self, ego or identity that – as they imagine it – is the sole creator of a reality of their own making. Man thus assumes the identity of Übermensch. But because Second Realities are always utopian in nature, their justification, pursuit and realization inevitably energizes the utopists’ Will to Power, which brings about the use of force, coercion and suppression of “dissent” and “dissenters” who live and act in First Reality. In this struggle the Creator of Man is the enemy Who is feared most by the Übermensch, which is why He must be declared dead and buried.

The Apostles of Freedom

In The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich von Hayek, wrote: “To the great apostles of political freedom the word had meant freedom from coercion, freedom from the arbitrary power of other men, release from the ties which left the individual no choice but obedience to the orders of a superior to whom he was attached. The new [socialist / utopian] freedom promised, however, was to be the freedom from necessity; release from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us, although for some very much more than for others. Before man could be truly free, the ‘despotism of physical want’ had to be broken, the ‘restraints of the economic system’ relaxed. Freedom in this sense is, of course, merely another name for power or wealth. […].”

The promise of greater freedom

Regarding “power”, Von Hayek remarked: “The characteristic confusion of freedom with power … [is] as old as socialism itself. It is so closely allied with it that almost seventy years ago a French scholar, discussing its Saint-Simonian origins, was led to say that this theory of liberty ‘est à elle seule tout le socialisme’ [‘is all by itself all there is to socialism’].” Von Hayek explained how the socialists and progressives subtly redefined the word freedom so that the term that once served as an unmistakable road sign at the Freedom-Serfdom bifurcation would now redirect those in search of genuine freedom towards serfdom. “There can be no doubt”, so Von Hayek, “that the promise of greater freedom has become one of the most effective weapons of socialist propaganda and that the belief that socialism would bring freedom is genuine and sincere. […] Unquestionably, the promise of more freedom was responsible for luring more and more liberals along the socialist road, for blinding them to the conflict which exists between the basic principles of socialism and liberalism, and for often enabling socialists to usurp the very name of the old party of freedom. Socialism was embraced by the greater part of the intelligentsia as the apparent heir of the liberal tradition: therefore it is not surprising that to them the idea of socialism’s leading to the opposite of liberty should appear inconceivable.” The classical liberty and freedom were surreptitiously substituted for the socialists’ fraudulent version of liberty which would open the door for “willing into reality” all kinds of “second realities”, Utopias and dreamworlds.

Freedom for me, but not for you

“Free will” is the “will” of Man’s higher self, of the spiritual being who is aware of himself. This freedom seeks expression in society, politics, culture, art, economics, in the “life of Man” in the broadest sense of the word. Pure freedom always remains spiritual – ethereal – in nature. It is the bread of life in each human soul. Hence, all efforts made to use freedom for ends other than the production, establishment, maintenance and protection of freedom, will suffer shipwreck on the cliffs erected by Man’s fellows who use false versions of freedom for ends serving their particular needs. Whoever is capable of wielding the most force will reap the fruits of the freedom that he permitted himself but denied others. In this regard, those who promise freedom as an instrument in the establishment of some unselfish and altruistic Utopia are to be feared most of all. Their moral arguments and reasonable intentions serve no other end than feeding their unsatiable libido dominandi, their uncontrollable Will to Power for no other reason than satisfying this particular libido. Their freedom shall mean another Man’s prison. A prison that has written “Freedom from Want and Necessity” above its entrance, and where the slogan hides the fact that all inmates will be equally poor. They will own nothing, but they will be happy. Likewise, all attempts of worldly Man to transform himself to Übermensch will falter and lead to disappointment, frustration and antipathy towards God.

Freedom is … God

In Das Evangelium, the German pastor Emil Bock wrote that Man is most unfree when he receives his freedom from an external giver of freedom, such givers including an external God, a God Who hands out or withholds freedom in accordance with His proprietary rules of predestination and election. Genuine freedom, though, is not given or received. Which implies that the Liberty endowed to Man by his Creator, for it to be genuine Liberty, was not a freedom given by an external “party”. If that were the case, our Liberty would be contingent, which it isn’t because it arises at the level of being where all externalities have disappeared and where “Oneness” of Man and his Creator of Man is fulfilled and consummated. “Freedom”, so wrote Bock, “is one of the subtlest notions that we can encounter in our thinking. This is the realm of paradoxes, such as are found anywhere where we find ourselves at the borderline between the physical-mental and the spiritual. The earlier interpretations were correct that substantive freedom, the Son taking up his place within man, are never engendered by man himself, but can only ever be bestowed on man through grace, that is the free devotion of spiritual powers. The free human being is no longer merely man. As long as man is ‘merely man’, he remains unfree at the very foundations of his being. True freedom can only come to life where something Higher, something Divine, has a place in man. Freedom is God.”

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In May of this year, the Mathias Corvinum College published a detailed report that describes the “EU-funded war against free speech.” (i) In the report, which is titled “Manufacturing misinformation”, British researcher Dr. Norman Lewis exposes “a covert campaign conducted by the European Commission to regulate the boundaries of legitimate public debate in Europe”. Lewis discovered how the European Commission “has funded hundreds of unaccountable non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and universities to carry out 349 projects related to countering ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’ to the tune of almost €650 million. Taxpayers’ money has been consciously used to fund an Orwellian disinformation complex to dictate and control the language of public debate. […] The EU is engaged in a silent war to regulate language and, through this, the de-legitimisation of alternative narratives, like the rising tide of populist opposition. This is a battle over language and the legitimacy to dictate the terms of public communications. It is a top-down, authoritarian, curated consensus, where expression is free only when it speaks the language of compliance established by the Commission.”

The “hands of the State”

Some time ago, in 1848 to be precise, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels declared in their Manifesto of the Communist Party that “the proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; […].” Which is to say that in communism, the State is the Vicary of the proletariat presumably organised as the ruling class. One of the 10 “measures” that “will be pretty generally applicable” to establish communism “in most advanced countries”, was formulated as follows: “Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.”

An “ever closer union”

In the year 2000, the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission jointly presented in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union their version of the process of centralisation of the political power of the several “peoples of Europe” in the hands of the European State. (ii) In the opening phrase of the Charter’s Preamble, the Eurocrats declared that “The peoples of Europe, in creating an ever closer union among them, are resolved to share a peaceful future based on common values.” While it is quite likely that most if not all European peoples wish to share a peaceful future, this doesn’t necessarily mean that such a future must be based on holding “values” in common. Neither is it so that this so called “resolve” spontaneously arose in the hearts of the peoples of Europe who got caught  up in a historic process of “creating an ever closer union among them”.

Fundamental Rights

The European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) defines Fundamental Rights as “the basic rights and freedoms that belong to everyone in the EU. They are the same no matter where you’re from, what you believe or how you live. These rights enforce important principles like dignity, fairness, respect and equality. They set standards for how we live and work in Europe today.” The FRA described the Charter of Fundamental rights as “the European Union’s bill of human rights” whose “50 articles bring together the rights and freedoms belonging to everyone in the EU.” (iii) So, it’s no wonder that the EU picked the Charter of Fundamental Rights as the venue to infuse in the minds of everyone in the EU to whom these rights basically ‒ i.e. naturally ‒ belong the fallacious narrative that the quest for the centralisation of power in the hands of the European State, is to be understood as their quest.

The peoples of Europe as “social class”

In the Introduction to his work Human Action, Ludwig von Mises wrote that “Marxism asserts that a man’s thinking is determined by his class affiliation. Every social class has a logic of its own. The product of thought cannot be anything else than an ‘ideological disguise’ of the selfish class interests of the thinker.” Human action must not be understood as action by individuals but as the action of the collective. The Eurocrats used the Charter to one-sidedly lay down in writing the false premise that the peoples of Europe must be regarded as a collective, i.e. as a “social class” whose members must inevitably produce the thought of “closer union among them,” just because that thought must of necessity be the logical expression of the particular interest of “Europeans”.

The Manifesto of the European Union

In light of Mises’ observation, the Charter might very well be read as the Manifesto of the European Union in which the authors proclaim, to paraphrase the words of Marx and Engels, that in creating an ever closer union among them, the European peoples will use their political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all instruments of political power from their own national governments, in order to centralise these powers in the hands of the European State, i.e. the European peoples organised as the ruling class. Since the Charter’s fundamental rights “set the standards for how we live and work in Europe today”, their enjoyment and defense are supposed to spontaneously energize and necessitate the historically inevitable process of the centralisation of all instruments of political power in the hands of the European State. In Marxist terms, this is how fundamental rights play a key role in establishing and solidifying the European Union as the Vicary of the peoples of Europe “organised as the ruling class”.

EUtopia

In reality, the European Union, is definitely not the product that was “thought into being” by the peoples of Europe. It is definitely not “the peoples of Europe organised as the ruling class.” It was not instituted among the several peoples of Europe but above them by the EUtopists as the instrument to wrest from them their national identity, their independence and their national sovereignty by inducing, enforcing and controlling the European peoples’ political unification. In the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, the Union’s unelected bureaucracy reassures its “proletariat” that, in spite of its despotic structure, the Union is “[c]onscious of its spiritual and moral heritage” and that it is “founded on the indivisible, universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality and solidarity.” Yet, in this EUtopia, the long standing national and patriotic values that define the diverse cultures of the Member States have no place. They are to be deleted from reality and replaced by “the citizenship of the Union” in the counter-image of reality wherein the Union can now “place[s] the individual at the heart of its activities”.

Despotic inroads

Yes indeed, the establishment and institutionalization of the European Union bears all the hallmarks of a utopian project. As with all such projects, the utopists involved have no other option than to obtain by sleight of hand the position of “ruling class” and resort to coercion and suppression to realize their Utopias. In their Manifesto, Marx and Engels openly declared that “in the beginning” the realization of the Communist State “cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production”. Likewise, the realization of the European State cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the various rights and freedoms traditionally belonging to and enjoyed by the ‘natives’ of the European countries. To forcefully place these inviduals “at the heart” of the Union’s activities, countries located in the geographic part of the globe called Europe were turned into Member States of the European Union. Their citizens were to be marked as European citizens, so that their fundamental rights and freedoms could be usurped and rebranded by the European State as its values. Everyone’s thinking is now determined by his/her purported affiliation to the social class that the Eurocrats dreamed up to legitimize their dominant role in realizing EUtopia.

An “area of freedom, security and justice”

This is why these rights were infused into the EUtopian project in the form of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Rather than simply affirming the fundamental rights that already existed in the several European countries as basically belonging to everyone in those jurisdictions, the infusion serves the goal of installing the European Union as the supreme creator and guarantor of “an area of freedom, security and justice” where those rights can blossom and be enjoyed. More in particular, regarding the freedom of speech, the Union solemnly proclaims in Article 11 of said Charter that every individual “has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.” Concerning what Marx and Engels defined as “the means of communication”, the same Article provides that “[t]he freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected.”

Responsibilities and duties

Utopists, however, are not in the habit of tolerating opinions, information and ideas that might be contrary to, threaten or stand in the way of realizing their Utopias. So, although the Union “recognises the rights, freedoms and principles set out” in its Charter, it did insert a proviso in the Charter’s Preamble which stipulates that the “[e]njoyment of these rights entails responsibilities and duties with regard to other persons, to the human community and to future generations.” The Charter itself does not explicate this point. Instead, in Article 52, it briefly provides: “In so far as this Charter contains rights which correspond to rights guaranteed by the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, the meaning and scope of those rights shall be the same as those laid down by the said Convention.”

“Greater unity”

Said Convention was signed in 1950 by the 12 Governments that, at the time, were the members of the Council of Europe. In the Convention’s Preamble, the Council considered that its “aim … is the achievement of greater unity between its members and that one of the methods by which that aim is to be pursued is the maintenance and further realisation of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.” (iv) Apparently, the Council was mainly interested in pursuing the maintenance and further realisation of Human Rights and Fundamental freedoms because it served the aim of achieving greater unity between its Members. In this regard, the Council foresaw that the “right to freedom of expression [which] shall include the freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas, without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers” ‒ laid down in the Convention’s Article 10.1 ‒ could very well threaten or impair the achievement of greater unity when exercized by people who opposed or questioned the endeavour. (emphasis added)

Formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties

To handle this potential problem, the Council determined in the Convention’s Article 10.2 that “[t]he exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.” This opened the door to prescribe “by law” the “formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties” designed to realize EUtopia.

The Harmonisation of Digital Services

In 2022, the EU prescribed by law the formalities, conditions, restrictions and penalties to which the use of the World Wide Web in the European Union shall be subjected. In Recital 3 of the Regulation on a Single Market For Digital Services, it declared digital information open to censorship by the providers of such services since “[r]esponsible and diligent behaviour by providers of intermediary services is essential for a safe, predictable and trustworthy online environment and for allowing Union citizens and other persons to exercise their fundamental rights guaranteed in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (the ‘Charter’), in particular the freedom of expression and of information, the freedom to conduct a business, the right to non-discrimination and the attainment of a high level of consumer protection.” (v) This approach rests on the misleading Marxist/Socialist promise that coercion and censorship are necessary because, in this case, the “sum of freedom” in European society will increase when individual freedom is constrained. There will be more freedom to a wider group when the freedom of expression is taken away from the group’s members. Obviously, the EU’s nomenklatura will decide which freedom(s) must be taken to produce more freedom for all.

Freedom of speech becomes freedom from speech

By law, digital service providers were turned into censors of the communication that “Union citizens” impart or receive when they exercise their fundamental “right to freedom of expression”. As private owners of online “means of communication”, the service providers are forced to demonstrate “responsible and diligent behavior” by assessing whether the freedom of expression and the freedom to conduct a business of users of their “means of communication” must be curtailed in case a piece of information or idea might possibly upset the right to non-discrimination, the attainment of a high level of consumer protection or any other fundamental right enumerated in the Charter. The Digital Services Regulation enables the European State to centralize the online means of communication in its hands by creating, formulating and reformulating the types of information that “Trusted Flaggers” and anyone else who does the EU’s bidding must report to the service providers as “illegal” or as “disinformation or other content” the online dissemination of which may generate a “societal risk”, so that “fundamental rights enshrined in the Charter are effectively protected and innovation is facilitated.”

The hands of the EU

The Digital Services Regulation forms the visible aspect of the operation that Norman Lewis describes as the EU’s “carefully created machinery of speech policing, supported by a vast system of public financing. […] Imbued with the authority of hundreds of covertly funded NGOs and academics, the covertly funded ‘Trusted Flaggers’, “the EU is even able to claim that it polices speech in order to ‘protect democracy’.” Lewis concludes that the EU Commission “rightly understands that controlling the language of communications means it can dictate what is information and disinformation, truth or lies, what is legitimate or illegitimate speech, and who can speak or not.” Language, i.e. the spoken or written word, is Man’s fundamental means of communication. Without having to revert to the burning of books and blunt censorship, words can now be kneaded by the hands of the EU so that they no longer mean what they were originally meant to mean. War is peace, slavery is freedom, ignorance is strength, autocracy is democracy, citizens of the several European nations are citizens of the EU. The voices of the peoples of Europe shall sing in an ever closer harmony to the tune of the unelected Eurocrats. Welcome to EUtopia ! Bye bye to freedom of speech.

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[i] Manufacturing misinformation: The EU-funded propaganda war against free speech; Dr Norman Lewis; Mathias Corvinum Collegium / MCC Brussels; May 2025; https://brussels.mcc.hu/uploads/default/0001/01/9fcfc904bd2e930bef107b7725b7f3ff9d0779d0.pdf

[ii] Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union; 2000; https://www.europarl.europa.eu/charter/pdf/text_en.pdf

[iii] What are fundamental rights? EUFRA; https://fra.europa.eu/en/about-fundamental-rights

[iv] European Convention on Human Rights; Drafted 1950 / Entered into force 1953; https://www.echr.coe.int/documents/d/echr/convention_ENG

[v] Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of of 19 October 2022 on a Single Market For Digital Services and amending Directive 2000/31/EC (Digital Services Act; https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32022R2065

In my previous Commentary, I quoted Catherine Austin Fitts as saying: “I believe [that] freedom can prevail and there’s many things we can do to help that happen. But ultimately this is a spiritual war and you have to call on God, you have to call on the Divine, and that’s where the battle is ultimately gonna be decided, …” Her words reminded me of what the political philosopher Eric Voegelin wrote in 1938, while he was still teaching in Vienna, and, not insignificantly so, just before he and his wife fled to Switzerland making their way to the United States to escape from the Nazis who had managed to bring Austria “heim ins Reich” during the beginning of that year.

Religious forces

In the Epilogue to his essay The Political Religions, Voegelin then wrote: “The life of people in political community, cannot be defined as a profane realm, in which we are concerned only with legal questions and the organization of power. A community is also a realm of religious order, and the knowledge of a political condition will be incomplete with respect to a decisive point, firstly, if it does not take into account the religious forces inherent in a society and the symbols through which these are expressed or, secondly, if it does include the religious forces but does not recognize them as such and translates them into areligious categories.” Meaning that knowledge of the political condition of a community will only be complete when we take into account the fact that “[h]umans live in political society with all traits of their being, from the physical to the spiritual and religious traits.” (i)

Integrating world and God in human experience

Voegelin had come to the conclusion that “[t]he political community is always integrated in the overall context of human experience of world and God, irrespective of whether the political sphere occupies a subordinate level in the divine order of the hierarchy of being or whether it is deified itself.” This integration of world and God in the human experience makes that “[t]he language of politics is always interspersed with the ecstasies of religiosity and, thus, becomes a symbol in the concise sense by letting experiences concerned with the contents of the world be permeated with transcendental-divine experiences. Elements of the symbolic expressive forms that we have worked out on the basis of the Mediterranean and European examples can be found in all very advanced civilizations: the hierarchy, in which the sacral substance branches out from a transcendent God to the community of creatures; the ecclesia as the sacral communal substance; the apocalypse as the revelation of the empire; the holy kings as God’s mediators and personality carriers of the community.”

The profane realm

Voegelin saw it as his mission to unravel and clarify how the various “modern” forms of human-political organization are integrated in the order of being and what happens when, simply put, this process of integration doesn’t take place in accordance with the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. Now, 87 years after he wrote The political Religions, we may very well conclude that a strictly secular human-political organization is all that’s left of the order of being. What I mean is that, with the almost complete politicization of every aspect of society and the churches and religions under fierce and relentless assault, there seems to be no “order of being” left outside human-political organization. Inside of it, all traces of a “world & God” order of being have been meticulously and effectively erased. We’ve come to live in a profane realm, in which, now that also the Courts and the legal system have been fully integrated into that secular organization of power, we are left with nothing but that organization of power.

The abandonment of God

Surely, the religious forces are still present, but they have been translated into areligious categories. Voegelin defined this phenomenon as “innerworldly religiosity”, which, when it is “experienced by the collective body ‒ be it humanity, the people, the class, the race, or the state ‒ as the realissimum”, as the penultimate reality, comes down to the “abandonment of God”. (emphasis added) Voegelin proffered that “the belief that man is the source of good and of improvement of the world, as it is held by the Enlightenment, and the belief that the collective body is a mysterious, divine substance, which has been spreading since the nineteenth century, is anti-Christian renunciation.” In the context of what Voegelin describes as “the wealth of the stages extending from nature to God”, the inner-worldly religiosity and its areligious symbolism “conceal the most essential parts of reality”. They block “the path to the reality of God” and distort “the circumstances of the levels of being subordinate to God.” Instead they energize utopian activism and the concomitant Will to Power.

The “digital Reich“

Austin Fitts stresses that she is primarily “interested in freedom” and that she believes that “the only way we can be free is through a culture that embraces the divine and build true wealth, enduring wealth and living wealth, not just financial wealth.” To attain true wealth “you need Christianity”. Indeed, it was Jesus Christ Who taught that “true wealth” remains imperfect unless it includes the Divine Oneness between Man and his Creator. Pursuing that Oneness as Man’s ultimate Telos requires first of all the change of mind that He called “Metanoia”. In my book Liberating Liberty, I describe in great detail how the various “murderers of God” sought and, to a large degree, succeeded in obstructing Man’s pursuit of his Divine Telos by redirecting the search from the eternal to the temporal, from God to Man. In our age of technocracy, the redirecting has reached an unprecedented level of efficiency because, technically speaking, it can quite easily be finetuned to misguide, coerce and influence each person who is digitally connected to the “control grid”. In this “digital Reich”, Divine Intelligence was replaced by Artificial Intelligence. Of necessity, it must block the Metanoia that opens the door to what Voegelin called “the reality of God”. If it didn’t, it would self-destruct.

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(i) Epilogue to his essay The Political Religions, published in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin; Volume 5; Modernity without Restraint; University of Missouri Press; 2000.

In a conversation with Tucker Carlson, former Bush administration official and founder of the Solari company, Catherine Austin Fitts lays bare in great detail how America’s leaders gave up on the country in the 1990s, began stealing trillions and set in motion the organisation of a digital prison to control the population. (i) She also tells Carlson that, in spite of all the doom and gloom, she refuses to let “the devil have her joy” and destroy her “state of amusement”. That emotion is, quite visibly, the dominant one in her life. She admits that it’s not always easy to deal with pure evil and that you’re always “gonna be shocked by it”, especially when, “if you understand love, you can’t fathom why anyone would reject that and embrace evil.”

Call on the Divine

Most of the issues addressed in the conversation concern concealed flows of vast amounts of money, the scheming and shenanigans of Central Bankers, and the “digital concentration camp” in which “Mr. Global” is trying to lock us up. Nonetheless, Austin Fitts reveals that she sees the “battle” for freedom as a spiritual one. “I believe,” she said, that “ultimately, freedom can prevail and there’s many things we can do to help that happen. But ultimately this is a spiritual war and you have to call on God, you have to call on the Divine, and that’s where the battle is ultimately gonna be decided, and that means, literally, I believe this is true, the divine intelligence cannot go to work unless we’re willing to face it, you know, we have to look at it, we have to pray, we have to ask for help and we have to deal with it. The real solutions will be cultural. There will be millions of people acting in their own life refusing to be controlled individually.” (at 29:00)

Christianity

Austin Fitts stresses that she is primarily “interested in freedom” and that she believes that “the only way we can be free is through a culture that embraces the divine”. Only this will allow us to “build true wealth, enduring wealth and living wealth, not just financial wealth.” (at 1:11:00) To attain true wealth “you need Christianity”. As she explained in a recent video on her own Solari website, “if you’re a Christian, you have a different pricing mode in your head. There are things that can be priced in a market place and there are some things that can’t be priced, cause they are invaluable, they are not to be traded … and you’re not going to sell your immortal soul for a quick profit.” (ii)

Relationship with your Creator

In her meeting with Carlson, she explained: “If you’re gonna be part of a project that is longer than a lifetime, then you have to understand that this is about, you know, at the root, this is about your immortal soul. Your soul is immortal and that triggers a different way of looking at the world and a different way of thinking and then you have to be able to collaborate accross time and space in very powerful ways … that takes trust and faith.” (at 1:04:00) This worldview is clearly reflected in the mission statement that is posted on the website of her Solari company: “to help you live a free and inspired life. This includes building wealth in ways that build real wealth in the wider economy. We believe that personal and family wealth is a critical ingredient of both individual freedom and community health and well-being.” Discussing the work of Solari, she tells Carlson that the first “Pillar” on which its mission rests holds that if you have a goal, the key to reach it is acknowledging and accepting that “you have a relationship with your Creator.”

Divine Happiness

I assume that Austin Fitts won’t mind if I interpret her and Solari’s mission as helping people in exercising their unalienable right to pursue happiness. As the authors of the American Declaration of Independence so firmly held and declared, this unalienable right was endowed to Man by his Creator. Considering the fact that the Creator of Man is commonly understood as being the God of Genesis, the Happiness mentioned in the Declaration cannot be understood as anything other than Divine Happiness or “eudaimonia”. And because it is also written in Genesis that God created Man in His image, and that God’s Name and His Whole Beingness may be summed up in the words “I am”, the pursuit of Divine Happiness must of necessity entail Man’s pursuit of attaining “Oneness” with his Creator, with God, in the Divine state of being “I am”. And this, of course, is only possible when, in the words of Austin Fitts, “you have a relationship with your creator.”

Man’s ultimate Telos

Jesus Christ spoke of the Divine Oneness as Man’s ultimate Telos and how its pursuit requires first of all the change of mind that He called “Metanoia”. Plato had described Man’s turning around from the temporal to the eternal, from one’s shadow to the light that causes it, as “periagoge”. In my book Liberating Liberty, I describe how the various “murderers of God” sought and, to a large degree, succeeded in obstructing Man’s pursuit of his Divine Telos by redirecting the search from the eternal to the temporal, from God to Man. In our age of technocracy, the redirecting has reached an unprecedented level of efficiency because, technically speaking, it can quite easily be finetuned to misguide, coerce and influence each person who is digitally connected to the “control grid”. For the “millions of people acting in their own life refusing to be controlled individually”, Austin Fitts’ message is clear and simple. Keep your eye on the ball. You will be successful only when you realize that you’re fighting a war that is spiritual. And, above all, while fighting this war, do not lose your state of amusement and do not let the devil have your joy.

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[i] Tucker Carlson Network; Conversation between Tucker Carlson and Catherine Austin Fitts; Published: 29 April 2025; https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-catherine-fitts

[ii] Conversation with Daniel Broudy; Human sovereignty and agency in the age of technocracy – a dialogue with Catherine Austin Fitts; Published: 24 April 2025; https://tube.solari.com/videos/human-sovereignty-and-agency-in-the-age-of-technocracy-a-dialogue-with-catherine-austin-fitts/