The Faustian bargain was once a bad deal. The demon Mephistopheles offers you—a man in full at the dissatisfying limit of your great knowledge and success—even greater power and pleasure; you accept these things, but they make you less of a man. What, after all, does it profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul?
A few tweaks by Goethe, however, and the Faustian bargain became a good deal. Now, Mephistopheles bets he can actually satisfy you with an attainable measure of pleasure and power; these you wrest, with his aid, from the gods, mastering war and nature to the degree that you create a new world where a new kind of people, the beneficiaries of your liberating work, can live free to strive without limit. Dying happy, more than the man you were, you surrender your soul to complete the bargain—but the intervention of the divine feminine redirects it toward God in heaven. Even your soul is more and better than it was before you made the bargain.
Thanks to Goethe, Faust is largely seen today as the image of the sovereign man, whose liberation into full or complete human power is defined by his grant of this power to the human race. In this modern fable man shakes off his debt to the old gods, even Prometheus and Dionysius. Contemporary interpreters are not incentivized by this fact to linger on Faust’s odd soteriology. What matters to today’s Faustian is that the use and development of technological progress to master the universe is a good deal, one that we can consciously and competently know from the outset is a good deal. Mephistopheles can be counted on to deliver on his end of the bargain. He is not a trickster or a cheat. He is not a deceiver. No nightmarish realization of our foolish entrapment awaits. At worst, Mephistopheles promises only the soul’s obliteration in “the eternal empty,” hardly a hellscape of torturous regret.
The contrarian investor Peter Thiel interprets the Faustian vision as one that hinges on defining the future with precision: “You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it,” he writes in Zero to One. “But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it.” The definite optimist must first define his own will in relation to its object—what he wants and why. Fail here, and the already difficult effort of wielding the will becomes insurmountably hard. Mastery—of both the will and the future—slips away.
If the definite optimist becomes the master, the definite pessimist, who prepares for a specifically bad future, becomes the survivor; but the indefinite man, whether optimistic or pessimistic, becomes a slave, reduced in his stature not only by the mastery wielded by others but by the breakdown of his own agency, both outward-facing into the world and inward-facing into himself. The logic seems neatly to recapitulate the Faustian payoff: master the technique of applying your will to the world, and both you and the world (that is, others who will become more like you) will be better off, perhaps extraordinarily better off.
But Thiel recognizes that, at the limit, Faust’s high-modern quest opens onto postmodern vistas—not just out there in the world, but within, down to the very core of the Faustian identity, complicating the neat calculus of its grand bargain. From the definite optimist standpoint, Faust’s satisfaction with mastering war and nature in order to create new living space for a newly liberated and agentic people can’t pause or stop at a certain point short of definite futures made obvious by the logic of technological development. To become more and better of a man, a masterful man, just to halt at an arbitrary or random point in the process, doesn’t pause or decelerate one’s self-improvement—it throws it into reverse. One regresses, even decays, probably in what will swiftly become a surprisingly accelerating way. Giving up on mastery speedruns the path to slavery, including the slavery to death.
Yet the obvious definite future of human acceleration itself—literally how fast we make ourselves go—leads immediately, Thiel emphasizes, to focus the will on traveling near, at, or perhaps even beyond the speed of light. What is curious about travel at faster-than-light speed, as Thiel recently remarked on Joe Rogan’s podcast, is that it seems to tell us something very clear about the identity of entities, for example “aliens,” who would or do travel at that speed.
“If you have faster-than-light travel,” he argued, “there’s something really crazy that has to be true on a cultural, political, social level”—a fork in the future arises. Along one fork, your society requires “complete” and demonic totalitarian control: “no one can act independently of anybody else, no one can ever launch a warp drive weapon, and everybody who has that ability is in like a mind meld link” that destroys even the possibility of “libertarian individualistic free agency.” Along the other fork, the opposite arrangement holds: everyone must be “perfectly altruistic, non-self-interested; they have to be angels.” For any faster-than-light civilization, Thiel concludes, “it’s not that they might be demons or angels. They must be demons or angels.”
At the speed of light, in other words, the Faustian bargain slips Faust’s bonds. The Faustian bargainer can no longer expect the good deal of becoming the fully realized man—more and better than he was before, satisfied in his free mastery of himself and his expandable world—because the price of acceleration beyond light speed is, if perhaps not his soul, then certainly his humanity. What can it profit a Faustian man to gain the universe but lose his self? How could cosmic mastery be enough to satisfy the man who must sacrifice all self-mastery to unlock it?
For the human person convinced no pause, halt, or reversal of technological advancement is viable for the human race, the specter of faster-than-light travel calls into question the very possibility of definite optimism. Theoretical scientists and theorists of technology, from David Deutsch on down, might rhapsodize over the universal and posthuman wonders of computation and consciousness, but definite optimism hinges on the plausibility of choice in agency—if not always independently setting clear goals, at least purposively sculpting, adjusting, or correcting for unfolding futures over time. In wiping human agency from the event horizon, postulated posthuman singularities reveal the specter of a looming breakdown of human will caused by too deterministic—not too indeterminate—a view of the future.
Human Resources
Faced with this problem, already apparent in the way many millions are responding to today’s pace of technological advancement by opting out of free agency and individual selfhood, some Faustian technologists in Silicon Valley are scrambling to scale as fanatical a cadre of human overachievers as possible—high-energy, high-agency people motivated by the good version of the Faustian bargain that plausibly promises to leave them better off as more prosperous, more powerful, more fully realized human selves.
This crash program, which amazingly seems not yet to have been described in terms of a new Manhattan Project, does of course entail, and perhaps even courts, human crashes. Under the extreme and increasing pressure of overcompensating for the social collapse of the Faustian will touched off by the tyranny of posthuman scenarios over the accelerationist imagination, individual technologists, as well as partners, teams, and rival factions, all struggle with the industry’s new wave of crashouts, oneshots, meltdowns, and burnouts. Hemmed in by the prophets of ultimate human sacrifice to ultimate technology, today’s ontological underdogs strain for victory in the inner battle that must be won for the outer battle not to be lost.
If a given human person, replete with vision, courage, freedom, and will, cannot even keep him or herself together while trying to secure a future for human agency, then the future becomes both too vague and too particular, not just postmodern but posthuman: a future inspiring the vast majority to choose now the forms of their destroyers, rather than waiting for them to arrive on alien terms.
The lone hope of threading this needle rests on a new birth of self-mastery. The rush toward computational superintelligence is pushing the predicament of the Faustian overachiever to a point of crisis. Self-mastery demands deep discernment and experience in the realm of recursion, and recursive improvement, intentional and purposeful, is now considered to be the key pathway—to some, perhaps even the criterion—of artificial superintelligence (ASI). If the humans building toward recursive computational self-improvement are themselves unable to master their own personal process of salutary recursion, the results are very likely to be catastrophic, unpredictable, or both, on the individual as well as the social or even planetary level. One concludes that “AI safety” is actually very difficult to define, much less somehow achieve, without clearly defining and achieving human self-mastery—from the level of the individual technologist to that of the society or the civilization as a whole.
To know mastery of a thing is to know the thing itself. But what is mastery itself? Many valences of the concept of master have tugged and pulled over the centuries. In the modern age, when the obsession with power was at a peak, the definition of mastery was made to kneel before the maximally oppositional power gradient of master/slave. Yet Hegel swiftly slipped the leash of that linear structure by recursively reconceptualizing the two apparent opposites as mere thesis and antithesis, the great precursors to a greater synthesis, spiraling upward in both power and—crucially—authority.
Power without authority tends to fail even on its own terms, but philosophers and theorists have struggled to define authority since the modern age. Max Weber, classifying types of authority as charismatic, traditional, or rational-legal, hardly settled the debate. The most ancient and unbroken tradition and model of authority is divine authority. To the detriment of Weber’s taxonomy, which reduced religious authority to a subcategory of the charismatic (itself a term redefined away from its original meaning of divine grace), the authoritative power of faith, tradition, reason, and law all stem quite logically on simple theological terms from divine authority. In the wake of modern social science’s inability to provide a sounder conceptual account of authority than theology, philosophy and theory have struggled inconclusively to do so ever since.
From Power to Authority
Whatever the twists in the trail, the exploration of mastery involved in self-mastery keeps recalling to us that mere power is not enough—a challenge in this moment because power is not very mysterious, while authority, so stubbornly connected in its very conceptualization to the divine, seems inescapably mysterious at heart. The student of self-mastery is confronted constantly by this mystery because of how intimately and unquantifiably human authority relates to the part of the human person that is not simply a creature of the self. Our bid for mastery over our environment, like the claim over our identity made by our humanity itself, arises not entirely from our self-will, but, more radically, from the substrate or ground of that will, which is the givenness of the part of our being our will had no say in receiving or inhabiting.
As we have known since ancient times, we find ourselves in the position of the plausibility of our dominion arising from characteristics preexisting how we choose to feel about them, reason about them, or act on them. It is awkward, and ultimately unsatisfying, to try to settle for a self-mastery that restricts itself only to the part of our being that arises from our preferences, opinions, and will. Indeed, self-mastery inevitably demands we exercise an authority over the self higher than the whims and wishes it acts to make its own. Whether that points toward mastery unto posthumanity, or simply a higher or truer form of our humanity, hinges on how we understand our relationship to the aspect of our human being which is more and other than merely the self—that is, the aspect which is inherently outside and beyond recursive enclosure. Any serious reckoning with our human status in the context of computational superintelligence must lead us to a place beyond recursion.
In the onrushing moment, our ability to preserve human self-mastery—even more from the authority our machines seem to hold over us than the power they do—will hinge on our capacity to comprehend, trust, and embody the authority from which our own power to master ourselves receives both its vitality and its virtue. As master cyberneticians know, to well-govern (kybernan) the self is analogous to properly piloting (kybernan) the ship—ships of state, or silicon, very much included. But who among our cybernetic virtuosos has mastered the paradoxically recursive, but not entirely recursive, art of self-mastery? Who can speak well to us with authority we can trust—the authority that issues from the mysterious paradox of self-mastery—about mastering our machines before we choose to become their slaves?
So far, the movements raising their voices as if to try earning that trust have more entrenched than expanded their own group identities. The extent of their overlapping fragmentation would make a full taxonomy unhelpfully burdensome to pick through. A more useful exercise, looking at a handful of the leading groups, focuses on their answers to the question of what authority accessible from within us enables us to pursue and experience mastery over the self.
None of the following approaches merely appeal to power or powers, but rather to faculties, entities, or phenomena that definitively confer access to practices and outcomes, the potency of which in mastering the unruly or sabotaging self is supremely salutary. That is, they appeal to authorities in virtue of their authoritativeness:
- Vitalists summon the inner authority of the body, whether more physiological and neurological (Andrew Huberman) or philosophical and mystagogical (Costin Alamairu);
- Transcendentalists appeal to the authority of consciousness, whether more in the key of wellness practices, New Age spirituality, or syncretism—between, say, Buddhism and physiology (Yuval Noah Harari);
- Rationalists invoke free reason: in this vein, neo-stoicism (a la Ryan Holiday) has of late waned in influence relative to the neo-utilitarianism of the Effective Altruists—which appeals to impartial moral reasoning, calculating intelligently about the proper scale and scope of application, but which has significantly shifted its sense of authority toward the more cultlike modality of the postrationalists;
- For the postrats, a shadowed sort of spiritualism, led by charismatic gurus or spirit guides, occupies the throne of authority; eternal archetypes and vision quests in the tradition of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell promise self-mastery through intuitive integration of the ultimate cosmic patterns;
- From there, one can readily slide out of cult mode into occult mode, where the authority of True Will brings the self to heel by unleashing a magical kind of radical autonomy. Whether more through chaos magick (in the Crowley-Parsons-Aquino line) or time-transcendent numerology, often of Kabbalistic influence or provenance, the occultist can shape and reshape both inner and outer reality through ritual on command;
- Yet occultism can serve as a portal or catalyst (as in the case of Nick Land) to the authority framework of accelerationism—which, as the reigning movement within tech culture today, merits especially close focus.
Faster, Inc.
Among the accelerationists, Marc Andreessen recently rose to interviewer David Senra’s bait to affirm “zero” levels of introspection—“as little as possible.” The stated reason—“Move forward! Go!”—is velocity of speech and deeds, like Teddy Roosevelt’s credo “Get action!” in a context where all agency converges on unceasing technique.
But an esoteric reason is discernible just below the surface here, a kind of meta-teaching: set a baseline of maximum intensity, and watch as the impact sends ripples of reaction throughout your ecosystem. Praise, hate, friendly critique in the messy middle—while lower-agency beings take their places in the discourse dynamics ritual, you, master of your destiny, create breakout space to compound and scale your agency. Act, act, act, while those you disrupted react, and soon you’ll open up exponentially expanded distance the hard work of building can backfill, faster than critics can deconstruct or fans can toss garlands. The spatiotemporal envelope you have spun up, a kind of pocket void revealed to be the uncanny precondition of building things, enables you to be out there reshaping reality while others are held back there in the emergent past by “you,” the virtual self left in your wake—and in their OODA loop.
By way of illustration, while Andreessen today is commercially popularizing Col. John Boyd’s famous military doctrine of winning all fights by Observing, Orienting, Deciding, and Acting faster than the enemy, his venture capital firm published seven years ago a speech on the OODA loop by advisor Peter Levine, delivered two years before that at the firm’s annual invite-only future-facing summit. Called “The End of Cloud Computing,” Levine’s address implicitly identified the OODA loop with cybernetics itself. “You move from five billion devices to a trillion devices that all need to be managed and coordinated together,” he forecasted. “Every industry will be subject to this.” Present-day critics roasted Andreessen so heartily—ackshually, you terminal nerd, Marcus Aurelius was an introspectionmaxxer—that they hardly even noticed they were erasing themselves from the future, already disappearing over the rearward spatial horizon, trapped in the time crystals of their hijacked OODA loops.
And yet, a theory of self does survive this process of hyperstitious time-travel. The optimal amount of effort to divert from one’s acceleration is not set by the goal of zero introspection, but rather, yes, “as little as possible.” Absolute zero is notoriously difficult to measure, much less attain, on a metric as seductively qualitative as introspection; relative zero—as little as possible under the circumstances of optimizing for as much acceleration as possible—leaves a ghost of introspection to haunt the halls of the OODA loop’s recursivity machine. There is a curious incuriosity that can’t help but spawn somewhere metaphysically “near” that ghost, and indeed the inevitable whisper of curiosity about the incuriosity—is it doing its job? is it keeping two sets of books?—manifests with still more of a hall pass, still greater a remit, within the region of selfhood cabined off from “self-consciousness.”
At first glance, this terrain of de minimis self-consciousness and imposingly maximal destiny may seem strikingly similar to the well-trod realm of late-modern social theory. In the mid-‘80s, Christopher Lasch followed The Culture of Narcissism with The Minimal Self, an urbane jeremiad that traced the collapse of the overextended high-modern “imperial self” under the pressure of its own manifestations. “Human beings have shrunk to the point of invisibility,” Lasch concluded, “while the images they have made of themselves, grotesquely enlarged to gigantic dimensions and no longer recognizable as human images at all, take on a life of their own.” Like the meme where the “panican” wojak and the “planican” gigachad share the same speech bubble, the only point of contention between Andreessen and Lasch seems to be whether the minimized self unleashing a vast new universe of speed and power is “a good thing” or bad.
But the question of duration divides them. Whereas Lasch insists that the minimal self, bound to the titans of its own creation, can only die, necessitating a psycho-spiritual escape from both modern secular and ancient pagan notions of selfhood and mastery, the American Dynamism position advanced by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and a host of fellow travelers bets firmly on the thesis that humans and titans can coexist indefinitely, tending not toward the annihilation of the human person or of Man—as postmoderns from Foucault to Baudrillard detailed—but the ascension of self and species toward a higher state of being.
Masters of the Universe
It is a wager for which the brothers Jünger, Ernst and Friedrich, set the table beginning as far back as the 1930s, although not until decades later did the elder, more famous Jünger grasp the full scope of the stakes. “Technology is not a world of neutral means,” he argues in The Worker (1932); “it is the epidermis, the visible skin of the Gestalt of the Worker. Just as the knight once put on armor as the outer form of his rank, the Worker puts on technology as the outer form of his Titanic rank. The machine is therefore not something that man has invented and now uses; rather, man himself is dressed in the machine, and the machine is the clothing in which the new race appears.”
But fifty years later, in an interview with Die Schere, Jünger warns that “the Worker still needed the organic substrate, the human being as bearer. Today we are moving toward a stage in which the elemental powers detach themselves from the organic altogether. Then the uniform is no longer worn by a living soldier; the uniform begins to move by itself.” Within Jünger’s later notebooks, language evocative of Ballard’s The Crystal World or Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation is to be found in his 1959 essay “At the Wall of Time,” the force of inorganic animation is joined by that of an “anonymous spiritualization” which ensures “the person is dissolved” in the impure and diluted residue left behind by crystallization. The final matter to be determined is exactly “what will crystallize?” After the collapse of both human and Titanic selves, only a closed cybernetic loop remains: the mineralization of the spiritual and the spiritualization of the mineral.
For the American dynamist concerned about preserving the high-modern human-Titan symbiosis, the minimal self’s residual disposition to break the accelerative circuit on both intro-retrospective and extro-prospective grounds must somehow be mastered without either annihilating the self or even being seduced into the decelerationist drama of trying to annihilate the self—a more terrible and daunting challenge the longer one looks at it, as introspects from Shakespeare to Houellebecq and from Nietzsche to Baudrillard perfectly well understood.
In fact, the puzzle of self-mastery—its stubborn gesture beyond itself, to a place that enquires after not just the what of its purpose but the why—has already laid claim to a quantum of dynamist ergs. Lejla Johnsen, Investment Partner at a16z Speedrun, recently announced “Emotional Agility” to be one of the firm’s “Big Ideas for 2026.” This year, she argues, “isn’t about keeping up with the machines,” but “becoming calm, clear, and powerfully human;” rather than “resisting AI,” we must recapture “our innate capacity for emotional resilience, self-connection, and relational depth.” Yes, “machines master precision,” but “only humans master meaning, presence, and connection.” The “speed of change” imposed by the race to ASI “is pushing us toward what truly matters: self mastery. We can’t control the external, but we can strengthen our internal operating systems by using tools that scale emotional intelligence, foster faith, and bridge the isolation AI risks creating.”
In this call to action, a cynic has much to critique. At the surface level, he might apply all the well worked-over tropes about the superficiality of the VC-backed hypebeasts and the lip service of the moneymakers forever a step ahead of the wreckage of their failed investments. But at a deeper level, mere cynicism gives way to a richer, more pungent form of doubt. For it is very easy to signal one’s profundity in contemporary terms simply by reference to self-mastery as the quintessence or apotheosis of self-improvement. One pseudonymous X account, calling itself “Machiavelli Bot,” expertly broadcast exactly that in a single post: “The mind loves shortcuts,” it runs, “and shortcuts create fragile people. Mastery comes from boredom, repetition, mistakes, and the humility to stay a student longer than your ego wants. Every time you chase a quick win, you trade long-term authority for short-term dopamine.”
Beginning once again at first glance, it appears the account is critiquing the accelerationists from the ground of the philosophical, the foundation of unaided reason which technologists have been seen to favor often enough for them to seem to many to be philosophers in virtue of their being technologists. None less than Robert Greene—the loud orange cover of the trade edition of his 48 Laws of Power signaling furiously from many a techbro’s bookshelf—fell back on the intellectual-grindset take in an X post promoting his new book on Mastery.
“To rise to the level of mastery requires many hours of dedicated focus and practice,” he begins. “You cannot get there if your work brings you no joy and you are constantly struggling to overcome your own weaknesses. You must look deep within”—wherever that may be—“and come to an understanding of these particular strengths and weaknesses you possess, being as realistic as possible. Knowing your strengths, you can lean on them with utmost intensity. Once you start in this direction, you will gain momentum. You will not be burdened by conventions, and you will not be slowed down by having to deal with skills that go against your inclinations and strengths. In this way, your creative and intuitive powers will be naturally awakened.”
More color and detail than Machiavelli Bot, to be sure, but more than a little cribbing from (say) Jordan Peterson—“only through discipline can you achieve true freedom”—or Goethe, who toyed with tautology in claiming “anything that liberates the spirit without an increasing growth in self-mastery is destructive.” Begged questions shimmer from beyond the inner walls of the blood-brain barrier behind which these gurus so confidently hold court. Where, after all, is “within?”
How deep within must you go, and how are you supposed to know, if indeed knowledge alone is your proper guide? Common sense and experience shows that in certain contexts, often those that shock expectation, one’s greatest strengths can suddenly become or expose severe weaknesses. Is it not then irrational to intensitymaxx your greatest strengths? Is strength itself rational? Cannot superb rationality superbly fool the super-rational into believing his genius is his greatest, insuperable strength? If the brain, or the mind, or whatever “consciousness” might be, is not actually located in the deep of the “within” what is? How can you find it? Are you prepared to properly appreciate—or even survive—this descent, or whatever you find at journey’s end?
Digital Politics, Spiritual War
As the present trajectory of technological development has reopened ultimate inquiries about our human identity and purpose, questions like those facing the merely philosophical approach to self-mastery are now becoming commonplace even among once-committed Silicon Valley rationalists. Signs are everywhere: amid an unprecedented surge in conversions to the ancient Catholic and Orthodox Churches, noted Berkeley philosopher of perception and consciousness Alva Noë was among those received this Easter into the Catholic Church. Mainstream media coverage of the rise in youth conversions has given exposure to new institutions like the Hamilton Society, a private monthly debate forum often hosted at San Francisco’s Star of the Sea Church (also Catholic). Elon Musk now argues that “if you take away religion, you get something in its place which is actually worse than what was there before.” Alex Karp affirms that “the best thing you could do in this country to help people… is expose them to religion.”
And, of late, a Silicon Valley reading group has gained outsized notice for working through Orthodox literary titan Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons (or, as sometimes translated, The Possessed). Associated with that book circle is an extensive analysis of the novel’s significance to what self-mastery might mean in the shadow of breakout recursive AI self-improvement. Published to possessedmachines.com, as “The Possessed Machines: Dostoevsky’s Demons and the Coming AGI Catastrophe,” the long essay elaborately processes the apocalyptic dread felt by the anonymous author, a recently-departed member of (presumably) one of the leading hyperscalers.
Watching the panorama of AI acceleration unfold, the author reflects, “I began to suspect Dostoevsky of a kind of prophecy.” So long ago, the novelist had mastered, “with terrifying precision, the psychological and social dynamics that emerge when a small group of people convince themselves they have discovered a truth so important that normal ethical constraints no longer apply to them. He understood the particular madness of the intelligent, the way abstraction can sever conscience from action. He understood how movements that begin with the liberation of humanity end with its enslavement. And he understood—this is the critical point—that the catastrophe comes not from the cynics but from the believers.”
The first line of my book Human Forever, which I wrote in July of 2021, is this: “Technology once made a god of America. Now America is technology’s slave.” On the second page of the book’s first chapter, I wrote this: “The programs, channels, apps, and virtual realities with which we saturated the world were supposed to make our control of the world complete. Instead the digital swarm unleashed a catastrophe.” Always a Christian of some sort, I now saw that the technological collapse of America’s godlike claim to globalized destiny fulfilled Tocqueville’s grim vision of a future where Americans, thrown back on themselves alone, become confined entirely within the solitude of their own hearts; soon thereafter, on a calm and drizzly Epiphany afternoon, I was baptised and received into my local Orthodox Church.
Taking Christ at His word, I did not associate catastrophe with the Lovecraftian horror of total human extinction, not at the hands of the digital swarm, of an evil god, nor of anything else. What was to come might at first include undue suffering beyond expectation—perhaps beyond comprehension, as Tesla once described tomorrow’s “man-made horrors”—but the decisive break, the fall of the false gods that tore away our excuses for naively indulging our favorite illusions, had already come.
That, I concluded, was enough to animate the necessary response: not one of centralizing panagogical control in the “altruistic” hands of a self-anointed clerisy, but of correcting—in the heart more than the law—against the linear overextension and the recursive self-consumption of the worshippers of information, intelligence, and consciousness. Christ, as St. Paul had written, “made us competent to serve Him in connection with a new Covenant, which is not a written code but a Spirit; for the written code inflicts death, but the Spirit gives Life.” Obedient in heart to that Life, we can by God’s grace have nice things. For “whoever is faithful with very little will also be faithful with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much.”
All of which is to say I was primed for sympathy with the author of “The Possessed Machines”—even hopeful to discover an awakening there about the recourse in the silencing of the heart to which Dostoevsky and his faith refer our overextended overintelligence. Sure enough, the writer avowed that Dostoevsky “saw something true about how intelligent societies destroy themselves,” both “the people who believe they are saving humanity as well as those who want to burn it down.”
But the writer ventured in uneasy conclusion that “perhaps,” like Dostoevsky’s Stepan Trofimovich, he or she was “constructing a consoling narrative from religious fragments I do not fully believe, trying to make sense of a situation that exceeds my capacity to understand.” It does seem clear the writer badly misses the point of the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac in concluding “demons are not external enemies but our own capacities turned against us,” which “must possess us fully,” driving “us over the cliff, before we can be healed.” Dostoevsky is hardly alone in recognizing that, while demons may bid us to turn our own powers against us, the acceptance and enactment of that bid is the working of our own will to sin.
What Dostoevsky leaves us with is not the swine that open the book in its scriptural epigram, but the people left to reckon with the implications of their demise. After their death, “those who kept them fled; and they went away into the city and told everything, including what had happened to the demon-possessed men. And behold, the whole city came out to meet Jesus.” Only, “when they saw Him, they begged Him to depart from their region” (Matt 8:33-34).
The living people who should have learned from the lesson of the pigs reacted instead like the fabled Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s other masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov. Furious with Christ’s return, which will “trouble us in our work,” the Inquisitor is shaken all the more when his vow to burn the Lord is met only with a kiss. “There is a convulsive twitch at the corner of his mouth. He goes to the door, opens it, and addressing Him, ‘Go,’ he says, ‘go, and return no more… do not come again… never, never!’ and—lets Him out into the dark night. The prisoner vanishes.” These two references to banishing Christ in response to His promise of salvation clearly raise the troubling question of why such a gift would elicit such terror. A deeper question lies within: banish Him from where exactly—if not the self, the self in its innermost place, its deepest redoubt?
The Dostoevskian Moment
The answer to this deeper matter suffuses Dostoevsky’s corpus. As Dr. Timothy Bartel has observed, “the figure of the saintly martyr is continually present in Dostoevsky’s novels: In Crime and Punishment, the self-sacrificing Sonya helps the twisted and confused Raskolnikov, reading to him from the gospels of the resurrection of Lazarus to show how resurrection is possible even for a murderer like him. In The Idiot, the pure and ever-forgiving Prince Myshkin will not give up on loving the self-destructive and murderous Rogozhin, even when it costs the Prince his sanity. In The Possessed, the saintly bishop Tikhon offers forgiveness to the nihilist Stavrogin, and the selfless nurse Sofya tends and reads the gospel to the dying agnostic Stephen. Finally, in Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha lays down his whole life’s dream of being a monk to save the souls of his brothers.” But what about me, the self, rebelling against self-sacrifice, cries out to Christ and His witnesses! If you have come to open my eyes to my need to self-sacrifice, please turn right around and leave—and never come back!
But Dostoevsky doesn’t leave it there. What’s about the self that makes it reply in this rebellious way is not found, so to speak, in the self itself, but rather in what has enslaved the self at its core, in the heart: its passions, its dreams, its false gods, and empty idols. Dostoevsky, who “knew the gospel almost from the cradle” and “the lives of the saints… before [he] learned how to read,” felt the overwhelming compulsion to show his contemporaries that today, right now, at any time, only one authority could master the self by delivering it from its deathly bondage: the authority, as Paul had put it, of “Christ in me”—the divine love that brought forth life from the painful and frightening purification of the heart.
At its fullest extent, Christian self-sacrifice takes up, as did Christ, a cross for the sake of all. “There is only one way to salvation, and that is to make yourself responsible for all men’s sins,” instructs Elder Zossima—inspired by real-life saints Tikhon and Ambrose—in The Brothers Karamazov. “As soon as you make yourself responsible in all sincerity for everything and for everyone, you will see at once that this is really so, and that you are in fact to blame for everyone and for all things.” A terrifying prospect for devotees of other approaches to self-mastery: how am I supposed to do the work of mastering myself if instead I must put my time and effort into living out forgiveness and responsibility for all?
Most Christians, to be honest, probably don’t manage to live out their lives in the manner of Saints Tikhon and Ambrose… but even at a lower level, a much lower level, tensions and tradeoffs arise. Can someone who focuses first and foremost on breaking the stranglehold of fruitless passion and desire in their heart find the time and motivation to save the world? Unmask the Antichrist? Go abroad in search of monsters to destroy? Or even simply choose a good quest?
Doestoevsky’s Christian teaching tells the would-be self-master that fearfully beginning to draw up a list of what beloved goals you might have to surrender to God is already mistaken. Rather than driving away God now, to buy yourself time to deal with your worldly life, welcome Him now, with all the love and forgiveness for all that entails, and see what begins to happen to you one moment at a time. Trust that, indeed, if first you seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness, then all you really need here in the world shall be added unto you.
Perhaps paradoxically to some, the gospel according to Dostoevsky works both ways when it comes to our relationship with advancing technology. As one is not commanded to build more data centers, neither is one commanded to call in the airstrikes. As one is not commanded to put one’s faith in worldly elites (or otherworldly ones), neither is one commanded to fear those elites will wipe out the human race. As one is not commanded to use Bitcoin…
In and of themselves, our tools promise neither Heaven on earth nor Hell. The question is whether those who wield them, beginning with yourself, do so on the basis of an authority you can, to the bottom of your heart, really trust.