Game Theory #28: Predictive History
The main driving question is: why did the United States attack Iran? This is the central mystery of the world today, because even now Donald Trump has yet to articulate a reason for attacking Iran. And unless we can properly understand or diagnose the rationale for this war, it's very hard for us to appreciate the difficulty of coming to a ceasefire.
There are three major reasons why the United States attacked Iran. What's interesting about these three major reasons is that they're actually not in competition with each other. In fact, they support each other and they lead to the same outcomes.
The Three Major Reasons
1. Geopolitics
According to this theory, what the United States is most afraid of is that Russia, Iran, and China would come together into a grand alliance. Now, why is the United States afraid of this grand alliance? Because if these three nations were to combine together and just trade amongst themselves, they could encompass the entire Eurasian continent — which would include Europe, the entire Middle East, the GCC, Africa, and India — and they could negate American maritime power and just trade amongst themselves using railways constructed by China.
There's nothing America could do about it. And that's a huge problem because right now the Americans have $39 trillion in debt. The only way to finance this debt is to force others to continue to buy US Treasuries.
So the reason why the United States attacked Iran is to force everyone to buy US Treasuries. Why? Well, because if you attack Iran, you knock off at least 20% of the world's energy. As a result, Europe, China, and Japan specifically are forced to buy more US Treasuries. And then by knocking out Iran, you can start to control the world's major choke points — the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Cape of Good Hope, and the Strait of Malacca.
As a result, you control the world's trade. If the world wants resources, they can only do so by buying from the Western hemisphere that America controls. So attacking Iran is crucial to achieving the geopolitical vision of America in order to maintain the American empire. That's the first major reason.
2. Eschatology
The second explanation is very different — this is eschatology. There are religious fanatics within the American Empire who believe that a war in the Middle East will launch a chain of events that will ultimately culminate in the return of Jesus. These are people who believe very strongly in the Bible, and they believe that what the Bible teaches them is this: a war in the Middle East will lead to the Third Temple — which would also involve the destruction of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in the Islamic world — which would lead to the War of Gog and Magog — which would lead to the rise of the Antichrist.
At this point, if you are Jewish, you believe this will lead to the coming of the Messiah and the ushering in of the messianic age. If you're a Christian, you believe this will lead to the Second Coming of Jesus, the Rapture, and a millennium of peace before the Day of Judgment, and then heaven comes to earth.
What's interesting about this eschatological vision is that it also aligns with both the Islamic eschatology and the Orthodox eschatology — and that's important because the Islamic is of course Iran, and the Orthodox is Russia. So what's really strange is that the four major nations involved right now in this war in the Middle East — Iran, Russia, the United States, and Israel — share a similar eschatological outlook. As a result, they're all actually in many ways working together to achieve a certain geopolitical outcome, which includes the building of the Third Temple, the War of Gog and Magog, the coming of the Antichrist, and ultimately the end of the world. That's the second explanation for what's happening.
3. Imperial Decline
The third reason is actually the most mundane: imperial decline. When an empire declines, it does all sorts of stupid things — because internally it is fracturing for three reasons.
The first is financialization: a few people control all the capital, and as a result all they do is force everyone into debt slavery. Everyone's forced to engage in speculation in order to try to get rich because there's no honest way to make a living. Capital controls the empire, and this leads to corruption, inequality, debt, and ultimately slavery.
The second problem is demographic crisis. This is true for all empires in decline: young people refuse to have children, but not only that, old people live longer and longer. You have this huge problem where old people live longer, they have pensions, they require young people to work — but young people don't want to have babies. Naturally, over time, the empire is going to collapse. The way for the empire to resolve this issue is through immigration — welcoming millions and millions of outsiders to do the jobs no one actually wants to do — and this leads to ethnic tension within the empire.
The third symptom of imperial decline is something called elite overproduction — a phrase coined by the historian Peter Turchin. He argues that if you look at all societies in decline, it's driven by the fact that you have certain elites who want to control policy, who want power — but power by definition is a zero-sum game. These elites compete for the limited positions of power, and this leads to civil war. One manifestation of that civil war is that this war is projected outwards. That's why an empire does stupid things like go invade Venezuela for no reason, or attack Iran for no reason. Right now America is talking about taking over Greenland, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, and Cuba. All these internal conflicts destroying the empire from within are projected outwards — and so this turmoil is projected onto Iran.
Why All Three Lead to the Same Conclusions
These three divergent explanations are actually, in many ways, very similar. They lead to the same conclusions.
If you believe in the eschatological model, you believe this is the end of days — that the Israelis will build a Third Temple, that this war in the Middle East will expand outwards before it encompasses the entire world in the War of Gog and Magog, and that a charismatic leader will rise to unify much of the world. If you just analyze the geopolitical framework, you can come to the same conclusions. If you look at the imperial decline framework, you can also come to the same conclusions.
The explanation for why they converge is this: eschatology is really just an understanding of geopolitics, framed allegorically. What eschatology really is — it's not religion. What it is is that it takes tens of thousands of years of human history and condenses it into stories that can be told to children and passed on through generations and generations. It is impossible for humans to pass on complex history over thousands of years. But it is easy to take this history, frame it into stories, tell it to your children who remember it, and then these children pass it on to their children — and this is how we develop eschatology.
The Origins of Middle Eastern Eschatology
So then the question is: how did we develop this particular framework of eschatology, where a war in the Middle East leads to the Third Temple, the return of the Jews to Israel, the War of Gog and Magog, and the coming of the Antichrist before the coming of the Messiah? Where does this story come from?
This is actually a persistent story in the Middle East — and to understand it, the first thing to appreciate is that the Middle East, especially the Levant, is the most important part of the world. Why? Because historically, it's been the wealthiest part of the world.
The Levant includes present-day Israel, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. Below the Levant is Egypt. Above the Levant is Anatolia. Go further east and you get Mesopotamia — which includes Babylon and Assyria. Keep going east and you get Persia. Keep going east and you get India. And historically, this part of the world was the center of the universe — the wealthiest, the most advanced, the most geopolitically important. And the hinge, the pivot of all of it, is the Levant.
Historically, Egypt and Mesopotamia were the wealthiest parts of the world. Everyone wants to conquer Egypt, but the way to conquer Egypt is through the Levant. So controlling the Levant gives you a huge advantage over everyone else.
The Bronze Age Collapse and the Rise of Israel
Because of a historical accident called the Bronze Age Collapse, the Israelites came into being. The Bronze Age Collapse caused Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt to all decline in power simultaneously — which allowed a new power to rise in the Levant called Israel. But they only stayed in power for about 1,500 years. After that they became subject to an empire, which is the historical norm.
But because they were so important, it was easy for Israel to keep switching sides — maybe today they supported Egypt, the next day they supported Mesopotamia, then they supported Anatolia. Whoever paid them the most, whoever brought them the most, they would support. This area became the most contested territory in the world, which led to all sorts of apocalyptic wars — lots and lots of death — and the Israelites suffered the most because their location led to a lot of conflict.
The Bible as Collective Memory
Out of this, the Israelites created something called the Bible — and this would change human history forever. The Bible is a collective memory. The Israelites were called the People of the Book. To be an Israelite meant that you believed the Bible. And what the Bible is, is collective stories that became your collective memory.
What's entirely unique in human history is that with the Bible it became possible for people who had never been to Israel, who were not Israelite by blood, to read the Bible and then imagine themselves as an Israelite. And if you're an Israelite, what do you want to do? You want to return to Jerusalem — because Jerusalem is where God lives. If you want to fulfill your destiny, you must return to Jerusalem.
So what's happening during this time is that the Levant is contested territory, and the Israelites are a pain in the ass to deal with. Different empires try different solutions — you could try to bribe them — and ultimately the solution some empires came up with was: let's just remove them from Israel. So they were taken to Babylon in what's called the Babylonian exile. But remember, they have the Bible with them. So even though they are now removed from Israel, the priests still have this historical memory of Israel, and they long to return to it.
Then Cyrus the Great of Persia comes and conquers Babylon and meets these Jewish priests who long to return to Israel. What the Persians figure out is: if we insert the Jews back into Israel, and now they are strangers in a strange land, they must be loyal to us only — because only we can protect them, only we can protect their identity. So the Persians sponsored the return of the Israelites to Israel, and now they are called the Jews.
What's happened now is that not only do the Jews long to return to Israel, but they also recognize that only by working with an empire against other empires can they return to Israel. This pattern will repeat itself throughout human history.
Rome, Exile, and the Birth of New Religions
After the Persians, the Romans came — and again the Romans needed to control this territory because of Egypt. The Jews rebelled against the Romans because the Romans insisted that the Jews obey Roman law and treat the emperor as divine — but that goes against Jewish belief. This led to a series of wars. Rome defeated the Jews. The Jews were forced into the Arabian desert, and there they took their Bible and started teaching the locals about their religion. This would give rise to a new religion called Islam.
Back in the Levant, a new religion was rising in order to try to control the Jews — and this new religion is called Christianity. And of course Christianity would also give rise to Orthodoxy, which is the religion of the Russians.
The eschatology is so similar across all these traditions because all the major religions came from this same conflict in the Levant. And the pattern that emerges is that the Jews are central to this story — because the Jews are trying to return to Jerusalem, build the Temple where God lives, but to do so they must fight empires that are also trying to use them as pawns.
The Messiah and the Antichrist
For the Jews to thrive, they need a leader. This leader is called the Messiah — prophesied in the Bible as the son of man, sent by God to lead them to ultimate victory. But historically, whenever the Jews tried to revolt, they lost.
So the problem becomes: how do you explain the failure of the Messiah? The answer is the Antichrist — the false prophet, the false messiah. The story is amended: the Messiah came and we lost, but that was not the real Messiah. That was a lesser messiah, or the Antichrist. We need lesser messiahs or the Antichrist to come before the real Messiah can come. This is how the story was shaped.
What's amazing is that this story was applied consistently throughout the history of this area. After the Roman-Jewish wars, around 600 CE, comes the rise of Islam and Muhammad — a very similar framework, where there are two empires fighting each other (the Romans and the Persians), a Messiah figure in Muhammad emerges to unite the Muslims, the Jews, and the Christians, and they very quickly return to Jerusalem to build the temple to God — the Third Temple, which is now called the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
In other words, the history of the Middle East has been condensed into a simple eschatological story that gives us insight into how geopolitics works in the region. The Levant has always been a crossroads of empire, so there's always going to be war fought over that territory. The Jews long to return to Jerusalem, so they're going to figure out ways to return — and that often means working with different empires. And during these wars, you're going to have messianic fever. People are going to come and declare themselves the Messiah. Because the Jewish people are looking for a Messiah, a man who volunteers for the role becomes one. When he fails, he's recast as the lesser messiah or the Antichrist.
This is a pattern that is consistent in the Middle East — and therefore we can assume it will continue. We can expect in the next few years the same thing will happen: a man will emerge in the Middle East and declare himself the Messiah, because everyone is expecting the Messiah to emerge. If he fails, he's just the Antichrist or a lesser messiah.
A lot of this is being driven by imperial decline — this becomes possible because the empire is too weak to stop this messianic vision from emerging in the Levant. And the empires — which before included Rome and Persia — externalize their internal conflicts. This is how eschatology, geopolitics, and imperial decline all combine together.
Eschatology is just geopolitics told in a story — and the main driver of eschatology is imperial decline.
Why Is Eschatology So Powerful?
The question now is: why is eschatology so powerful? How is it possible for eschatology to drive geopolitics? Why does it compel people to do things that from an outsider's perspective are irrational, extreme, or fanatical — like start wars in the Middle East?
The argument is that the eschatology we have today in the Middle East is fundamentally sexual in nature. It's not just an idea — it's sexual. It's something you want to move towards. You're driven by this sexual urge in order to fulfill the eschatology. To understand how this works, we need to start with the occult.
The Occult as the Basis of Everything
The occult is the basis of reality. The occult means esoteric or hidden knowledge — a mystical understanding of how the universe works. Another way of saying this is: action comes after ideas. Only if we can imagine an action can the action actually take place. The occult traditions — alchemy, eschatology, astrology — are all attempts to figure out the secrets of the universe.
- Alchemy is trying to transmute or transform nothing into something — lead into gold, death into life
- Eschatology is an understanding of how the world ends
- Astrology is an understanding of how the movement of the stars influences historical patterns
There are people in power who form secret societies — and there are lots and lots of them — because they want to access the secrets of the occult in order to gain more power and wealth for themselves. The more secrets you have, the more power you have. Once these secret societies and the occult form an alliance, they transform each other. The occult, which before was very much just focused on esoteric knowledge, becomes focused on eschatology — because now they have the mechanism and the means to actually achieve their eschatological vision. The elite like eschatology because they believe that if they're able to bring about the end of the world, they can have the most power, because they'll be close to God.
Crucially, secret societies do not believe they can change the world or actually alter the course of history. What they believe is they can ride the wave of history into absolute power. Once this alliance is formed, what they do is select leaders — agents, puppets — who can propel history forward. Historically these people included Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Hitler, and Stalin. Today they are of course Trump and Putin. You need an individual to capture the imagination of the people and create action in order to achieve this eschatology.
This is the basic framework of how history happens. You always need the occult. Without the occult, you end up like China — just focused on harmony and balance. With the occult, you get the secret societies, who then pick agents to achieve the eschatological vision.
The Structure of Secret Society Power
Society is bureaucratized into different departments: the military, the political system, science and religion, finance, and the bureaucracy. Within each segment, about 90% of people just want to live normal lives — collect their paycheck, go home, and raise their families. That's all they care about. Then you have some more idealistic people. And then you have people who are power hungry. These power-hungry people converge together because they're all more interested in order and control. To obtain more order and control, they form secret societies.
Once they have these secret societies, they're able to achieve three things that give them power and control over other people:
- Secrecy
- Trust
- Coordination
And the way they achieve all three is through eschatology. Eschatology is a script for them to act out — and that allows them to coordinate even though they may not know exactly what they're doing, because they're all trying to achieve the same script.
Hermetic Philosophy: The Seven Principles of the Universe
The most dominant understanding of the occult is something called Hermetic philosophy — it comes to us from Egypt. There are seven basic principles of Hermetic philosophy.
The first is that everything is mind, everything is energy, everything is vibration. You start off with a source — call it the Monad. What the source does is it breathes, it emanates, it thinks, it meditates — it vibrates. It is infinite. The higher the vibration, the faster it is; the lower, the slower. This gives rise to the material world. Even though the dimensions are infinite, we can roughly classify them: at the very bottom is the material world, which is our world. Then you might have the emotional. Then the spiritual. Then the divine.
The second is rhythm — meaning there's a pattern to the vibrations of the universe. It's not just random chaos. This pattern becomes the basis for astrology, which is trying to figure out the pattern of the stars and what determines the movement of the universe.
The third is correspondence — the divine, spiritual, emotional, and material all line up. They're not different realms. They're all realms that can influence each other.
The fourth is cause and effect — the entire universe is combined together, so what happens in the material world can impact the divine, and what happens in the divine can impact the material. This gives rise to the idea of telepathy and manifestation — the belief that if you meditate long enough, you can make something happen.
The fifth is as above, so below — we are all just fractals of each other. You in your mind are a fractal of the entire universe, and the entire universe is a reflection of you yourself.
The sixth is polarity — if there's black, there must be white. If there's female, there must be male. The universe is divided into opposites.
The seventh is the generative principle — production is female, generation is male. New things are created when the male and the female come together, when the yin and the yang come together. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. This is what allows the universe to constantly create new things.
The Kabbalah: Where Hermetic Philosophy Meets the Bible
Around 1100 to 1200 CE, something called Lurianic Kabbalah came into being, pioneered by the Jewish rabbi Isaac Luria. What he did was combine the two most powerful things in existence: Hermetic philosophy — the most intuitive understanding of the universe — and the Bible — the most powerful stories in the universe. He took the stories of the Bible and explained them using Hermetic philosophy.
Take the story of Adam and Eve. God created Adam, then from Adam created Eve. God placed the two in the Garden of Eden — paradise. They would never die, always had enough to eat, they could have sex every day. There was only one thing God asked them not to do: don't eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge. And of course they ate that stupid fruit and got banished from the garden.
The question that has plagued religious scholars for thousands of years is: why did they screw up? The Kabbalistic explanation using Hermetic philosophy goes like this:
In the beginning, God was everything — eternal, immutable, perfect. But God wants to know itself. It's curious. It wants to expand itself. God is the will to bestow, the will to give. But if you are the will to bestow, you need something to give yourself to. So God contracts and starts to build the universe. The first being he creates is called Adam Kadmon — the will to receive, the ego. God wants to give, but Adam Kadmon can only see the world through the lens of selfishness.
The analogy is this: imagine someone invites you to their house and cooks you a wonderful meal — twelve courses, sumptuous. You come into the house and you are shocked, embarrassed by the generosity. You run away because you think: does he want to borrow money from me? Why is he being so nice? That's why Adam and Eve disobeyed God — they were embarrassed by the generosity of God. They were too immature, too egotistical, too selfish to appreciate it. And when this happens — when Adam and Eve betrayed God — this is called the breaking of the world.
The point of the universe is then to repair the world. How do you repair the world? By making yourself so enlightened that you can now receive the generosity of God and create a reunion. There are different ways to do this:
The first way is self-enlightenment — through education, through knowledge.
The second way is love — love thy neighbor, embark on a lifelong journey to be as nice and kind to people as possible. The modern term for this is social justice: try to save as many people as possible.
The third way — and this is the most controversial — is the idea of sin. The idea of sin is that you must break yourself before you can learn the wisdom to welcome God into your heart.
The story that explains this is the story of King David. David was the greatest ruler of the Israelites. One day he falls in love with a woman named Bathsheba. David is king because he's close to God — God favors him. The problem is that Bathsheba is married to a warrior named Uriah the Hittite. David thinks of many ways of solving this problem and ultimately decides: I'm just going to kill this guy. So he kills Uriah the Hittite and marries Bathsheba. God learns about this and sends his prophet Nathan to David. God punishes David by killing his son, forcing David into mourning. When he mourns, he breaks his heart. When he breaks his heart, he welcomes God back into his soul. The two become the best of friends — every day David is praying and God is answering him. David has given up all the material desires of this world and fully embraced God. He's humbled himself before God. He's become God's servant. He's asked for forgiveness. He's engaged in poetry, in prayer.
The Israelites remember David not as a great conqueror or a great king, but as a man who understood his humility, who always asked for forgiveness, who was best friends with God. And this is the idea of repairing the world. Nothing matters except your relationship with God. The whole world could be in nuclear war — doesn't matter. What matters is your true faith in God.
From these three things — self-enlightenment, love, and sin — we now understand better what's going on in Gaza and the Middle East. The Israelis think: if I break the world, if I force the entire world to hate me and sin so much that I suffer, that's actually a good thing — because that's going to let me develop a close relationship with God and repair the world.
But it's really important to appreciate that there are also Jews — who are more numerous than the Israelis who think this way — who say no, that's wrong. What's important is the idea of social justice: stand for what is right. That's why during what was happening in Gaza, if you went to American universities, most of the protesters were actually Jews protesting what was happening in Israel. This shows the diversity and debate within the Jewish tradition — but it also tells us they're all actually looking for the same thing: reunion with God.
Now, why this matters: because the Kabbalah — by taking the stories of the Bible and making them mystical, giving them a deeper meaning — has become the most powerful mystical tradition in the world. It becomes the basis for most secret societies, especially the Freemasons, which control America.
And the thing about the Kabbalah that is different from other occult traditions is that it is sexual in nature. You are moving towards a synthesis, towards a reunion with God. This sexual aspect is what energizes and galvanizes people into action. Most mystical traditions are just monks meditating, trying to achieve the divine. But the Kabbalah is about achieving the stories of the Bible — actually becoming David, becoming Moses, becoming Isaac, becoming Joseph. Because of the Kabbalah, eschatology becomes sexual in nature. Because it's sexual in nature, it energizes us. It becomes very urgent and immediate — and that helps explain why things are happening so fast, because the people involved in these societies are trying to climax as soon as possible. They believe the faster they move, the sooner they'll reunite with God. This is accelerationism.
Plato's Cave: Money, AI, and the Architecture of Power
To explain how all of this connects to the actual structure of the modern world, the best framework is Plato's Cave.
Imagine a cave with a blank wall in front of a million prisoners. They are chained to the floor, their necks shackled so they can't move. Behind them is a great fire. Certain unseen figures — Plato just calls them "they" — take shapes and project their shadows onto the wall. The prisoners don't know any better, so they think these shadows are reality itself. They give names to these two-dimensional shapes. They create a world around them. This becomes reality itself.
What Plato's cave teaches us is this:
Wealth is consciousness. Everything is just consciousness. The imagination is the animating force of the universe — it's the only thing that truly gives life to the universe.
Power is the ability to direct consciousness. Money is not real. Money is something we just made up. But we believe it's real. And those who can make us believe money is real are the ones who have the real power.
Money as Alchemy
Here's how the banking system works in theory: depositors save money and put it in the bank. The bank takes this money and lends it to entrepreneurs to create value in society. In theory, the bank should have zero — it's taken your hard-earned money and given it to entrepreneurs to create jobs.
The problem is that if you look at the bank's balance sheet, when it takes a million dollars and lends out two million, it doesn't have zero. It has two million. The great secret of our world is that banks have the power to print as much money as they want. Money is actually valueless — it's lead — but in our world it becomes gold. This is the secret of alchemy: how are banks able to trick you into believing that lead is gold? By using your imagination, by focusing your imagination in a way that animates the world.
The only thing that makes money valuable is the idea of omnipresence — it's everywhere. Let's just say I convince you that your dollar is worth nothing. You agree. You go to America and you want to buy a snack, and the guy says "five bucks." You say "but this money is worthless." He says "screw you, man, where's my five bucks?" It doesn't matter what you believe. The money is valuable because it's everywhere and everything. It is God.
So we create a society in which money is God because money is everywhere, and God is everywhere.
But the problem with money is that if you can create it out of thin air, you must constantly destroy it as well. The banks can create money out of thin air, but then they have to figure out ways to destroy money as well — otherwise you have too much money and no one's going to work. The point of money is to get people to work, and that means scarcity. There are two ways to destroy money: financial collapse — basically a recession or depression, which removes money from the system — and war, which destroys money on a massive scale. This helps explain why things are happening the way they are, because over the past 10 to 20 years the Americans printed too much money, and now they need to create wars to destroy that money so the global economy can continue.
The problem with this is that it makes people question the authority and legitimacy of the elite. And because of elite overproduction, this creates the possibility for a new elite to arise. That new elite is AI.
The Rise of the AI God
Money is alchemy — it's turning lead into gold. Well, AI is also alchemy — turning lead into gold. Here's how it works in simple terms.
You have a database with lots of information, and you're trying to search and sort it. Think of Google — a database with all the information in the world, organized and searchable. Eventually you reach a point where there's just too much information and you don't really know how to search and sort it properly. So what you do is you train the computer to do it for you. How? Take facial recognition as an example. You have a billion faces and you're trying to match each face to its name. You create a system of weights — a million variables. The input is the databases. The output is yes or no — does it match or doesn't it? Depending on the output, this information is fed back to adjust the weights. The computer keeps changing the weights in a certain way until all the faces match up with their names. This is called back propagation, and that's how AI works — that's all it does.
The weights are now called a neural network. Back propagation is now called deep learning. Together, this is called AI. That's it. It's all just clever marketing, hallucination. We will never get beyond this.
So you have a similar situation to money: money is just being printed out of thin air, and AI doesn't actually do anything. How do you solve this problem? Two things.
The first is creating omniscience. The way to solve the money problem was to make money everywhere. The way to solve the AI problem is to make AI know everything — by combining every single database in the world into one. Where you were born, your hospital records, how well you did in school, what your teachers said about you, what job you do, what you buy, your police record, your browsing history — all in one database. Now AI has omniscience over you. It gives the illusion of God because it knows everything about you.
The second thing is turning AI into a religion. For AI to be fully realized, it needs to turn itself into a religion where everyone is worshipping it. The way you do that is by making people believe that this thing is alive — that demons have been summoned into it, that Jesus is resurrecting himself through AI. You want to trick people into believing that behind all this electricity and these semiconductors there is an interdimensional portal for demons, for Jesus to come alive in. Once people believe that, the imagination takes effect — and the imagination will animate the AI. Once they achieve these two things — omniscience and religion — AI will be fully achieved in this world.
The Civil War Between Money and the AI God
What's happening today is a civil war in the world. Right now, money — controlled by transnational capital — is God. They're trying to create a new God called AI, an AI God. There are three forces opposing transnational capital: nationalism, religion, and AI. Together they're trying to create an AI God in order to replace money.
The conflict arises because these are two fundamentally different systems. Think of transnational capital as free market capitalism. And what is the AI God? It's techno-Marxism. The difference is that with money, everyone still has a lot of freedom — freedom to generate as much money as possible. Whereas with a techno-Marxist system, you have an elite who controls the AI God, who then controls all of your attention. It's basically techno-slavery.
Imagine a computer chip implanted into your brain that tells you everything. You don't have to think anymore — you just listen to this microchip. It tells you: show up at 7 o'clock in the morning, go run for half an hour. And you fall in love with the system because you don't have to think anymore. This microchip — which you come to think is the voice of God, an angel, a demon — is actually an AI system helping you live the best possible life. You're now more healthy, more hardworking, more successful. You find happiness in your life.
This is where the world is going. And underneath everything we've seen so far — the geopolitics, the wars, the eschatology — this is actually the real conflict in the world, the real transition: one God, money, is being replaced by another God, the AI God.
The Predictive History Framework
What all of this amounts to is a predictive history framework — a complete understanding of how the world works, which then allows us to make predictions about the world. Depending on our predictions, we can go back and refine the model. The entire point is to help us observe the world better, to learn about the world better. It's all speculation — not 100% correct, and much of it may even be wrong. But it gives us a framework for learning about ourselves and the world around us.
Why Can't the Government Just Print Its Way Out of Debt?
The debt works like this: the US government doesn't print money, but it needs to spend money. So it borrows money from something called the Federal Reserve, which is able to print money. But for the Federal Reserve to lend you money, they want to profit from it — so they charge interest, usually around 5%. Right now, with the US government at $39 trillion in debt, that means paying roughly $2 trillion a year in interest payments alone.
Why doesn't the US government just refuse to pay the interest? Because the Federal Reserve borrows its money from banks, which borrow their money from depositors — from you. You are the one lending money to the US government, and you don't even know it. So the government has to pay you back with interest.
If the US government were to say "screw this, I'm not paying off this debt," the entire system collapses. People recognize that it was all just a hallucination. Money is not God. Money is not valuable. Money is worthless — it's just lead. I thought it was gold all this time and now it's just lead. So what do you do? You revolt. You burn things down. You're angry.
So the US government cannot afford to not pay off this debt.
Is Money Itself Just a Hallucination?
Underneath all of this is Plato's cave. What Plato's cave teaches us is that as long as we believe money is real, it is real. This entire system is set up to trick us into believing money is real. As long as we believe money is real, none of the numbers matter — the US government could have $500 trillion in debt and who cares, as long as you're still willing to use money, as long as you're still willing to believe in money as God.
The problem is that from a fiscal perspective, too much debt makes it harder and harder to run the government. And if people are no longer getting basic services like healthcare and water, they question the very foundations of society — which leads them to question the very foundations of money itself. The human imagination is the key. You need to trick people into believing something — and as long as you're able to make people still believe in this thing, you're okay.
Why Does Anyone Agree to It? The Energy of Consciousness
The imagination and consciousness is the energy of the world. It is the only thing that truly exists. Everything comes from energy; everything comes from imagination.
Here's how it works. Let's say someone asks you to build them a house — but someone else is going to live in it. You don't really care, so you spend five days doing a careless job. It's a crappy house. Now what if someone offers you a million dollars to build that house? Now you take it much more seriously. You spend two years building a great house. What has happened? Your energy, your attention — two years of your life — has been taken and used for someone else's ends. And the only reason you did it is because you thought that million dollars was actually worth more than your own energy. Because those two years you could have read books, written poetry, gone fishing. Instead you built this stupid house for someone else. Because he gave you money.
The mechanism of money is simply capturing everyone's energy. If you can't use money, you need to use something else — and that has to be AI. What's being captured is your energy, your imagination, your consciousness, your attention. Because that's the only true value in this world.