Soft comforting tyranny: Technocracy, Christianity and the Age of AI
Off Topic: A long-lost sci fi warning on trading freedom for safety
This is an essay I’ve wanted to write for a long time. I grew up on science fiction. My mother had me reading Ray Bradbury when I was nine, but I had been writing sci fi short stories since shortly after I learned to read and write - so about six or so. We were Asimov fans; she read his two-volume autobiography to me when I was ten. One of my earliest memories was being about three and annoyed with my mother for keeping the count-down of the Apollo Moon Launch on the television; it was pre-empting Star Trek. It wasn’t until much later in life that I started to understand what the underlying philosophical assumptions of that worldview were, and how effectively they had been propagandised - aerosolised - through the increasing popularity of the science fiction genre since the 1960s.
In the middle of lockdowns, I bought and re-read Asimov’s Foundation series, and what I read, the brazenness of this propagandistic tone, was really shocking. But that technocratic, atheistic progressivism was the worldview I was raised in, and from which I consciously broke away in my early 30s. It was only after I had come out of that Matrix that I understood how complete its global take-over has been. It was a strange experience to reread Asimov’s paean to Enlightenment Materialist utopianism while watching the much less attractive reality unfold daily as lockdownism - 2020’s unique contribution to the history of totalitarianism - spread all over the world in a matter of days.
They’re already cheaper than some cars. Butlerian Jihad? Anyone?
In today’s extra post for paid subscribers we’re going Off Topic to examine how two competing metaphysical worldviews - technocratic globalist utopianism and Aristotelian-Christian realism - collide in the realm of science fiction. Through a close look at Jack Williamson’s1 darkly prophetic 1947 novella With Folded Hands, we’ll explore what these imagined futures reveal about human nature, freedom, and the true cost of a world where suffering, scarcity and striving are forcibly eliminated, along with freedom, creativity and all human agency; the price of total safety is slavery.
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