I Told You: Chaos is Coming

I acknowledge upfront that the “Zizians” and the grimy-but-fascinating story of their alleged violence is not a big deal, in any real sense. They’re a group of former computer scientists and financial market types who appear to have latched onto the effective altruism/rationalist movement and taken the AI risk, veganism, and animal rights parts to a certain extreme; the group has been implicated in at least eight murders. But there appears to be only a handful of them, and they’re a fringe of a fringe. I don’t have any interest in implicating the rest of the rationalist sphere in this, though I do think David Z. Morris is fundamentally correct that the culture of “existential AI risk” obviously has the potential to inspire violence and extremism. As he says, “Apocalyptic predictions, asserted with a confidence buttressed by weaponized misuse of ‘Bayesian’ logic, is driving young people insane by convincing them that they must take extreme steps to halt an imagined doom.” But one shouldn’t nutpick, and anyway I’m not really interested in this group’s ideology. I’m interested in them as a test case of what I’ve been saying for some time: that violence is coming, and that people will find a way to package it with meaning. They want to. They need to. They have to believe that it comes from something other than themselves.

I probably best expressed this belief in my post titled “Violence Is Its Own Party.” In that piece, I argue that there is a certain treacherous animal spirit stalking around in the WEIRD world, particularly among the young, a yearning for deliverance… and if they have to, they’ll take deliverance through violence. Our culture has erased transcendent meaning and left in its place short-form internet video, frothy pop music, limitless pornography, Adderall for the educated and fentanyl for the not, a ceaseless parade of minor amusements that distract but never satisfy. And people want to be satisfied; they want something durable. They want something to hold on to. They want to transcend the ordinary. And I’m afraid that, with God dead and the romantic ideal ironized into annihilation, the pure thrill of violence is one of the only outlets left to express the inexpressible, and committing violent acts is free. People make fun of me about all of this, but I’m quite certain. We are approaching a new era of cults, of terrorist cells, of mass shooters pouring out of our society like ants from an anthill in pursuit of a discarded candy bar. In a world that is not remotely atheist but still relentlessly secular, we are bound to find some folk worship of Shiva, people kneeling in reverence before the bomb like they do on the Planet of the Apes.

The Trump shooter’s utter lack of motivation, his blank and pathetic face, his relentlessly vapid existence are the 21st century. Maybe he had a political end in mind, when he incompetently squeezed off those rounds. Maybe the Zizians are true believers. The point is not that ideology, or the will to ideology, is absent. It’s that ideology itself has become a joke even among those who want to believe, just another object of nostalgic fascination in a culture where all deep meaning has been confined to the past. Conservatism and liberalism, libertarianism and socialism, ecoterrorism and fascism, these are all both said and heard now with imagined quotation marks; they are real, they change the world, people believe in them, and yet there is a generation of humans who cannot comprehend them as anything other than a mask to put on, as an emoji flag in a dating profile. Every human is an idea and we live in an era where no idea feels real. And if you feel like you’re nothing and nothing you touch or see or feel can serve as a load-bearing entity, where nothing has heft, well, few things in the universe seem more corporeal than the recoil of an assault rifle, the smell of cordite, the reddish browns of viscera. Chaos is coming, and it will come packaged in boutique philosophies the shooters don’t honestly believe.

If there is a cure, it’s the only one that’s ever mattered: if these bereft people can find the courage to reach for each other. I’m not optimistic.