Jordan Peterson on X: This is an excerpt from the forthcoming Peterson, J.B. (2024). We who wrestle with God. New York: Penguin Random House, an extended investigation into the meaning of the Biblical corpus.
I shared it with Elon Musk (November 25), who agreed to publicize its existence through his account on X.
Christ Prefigured—and the Demons of AI
The Christians insist that Christ is prefigured in the Old Testament: that His spirit is lurking within its pages, implicit, bordering on explicit, waiting to be fully revealed in the Gospel narrative. What are we to make of such a claim, stripped of the blindness, naivete and dogmatic insistence that is far too often confused with a clear-headed and necessary faith? First, we might point out that this is true, by definition: the Biblical corpus, like all collections of fascinating and memorable literature, presents a series of romantic adventures—a series, alternatively, of hero narratives, which follow precisely the pattern that makes them narratives or stories instead of mere listings of dry, factual events. The fundamental pattern of narrative itself therefore lurks behind and can be extracted from a corpus of such stories, in the same manner that an AI system learning to categorize felines or automobiles (for example) can extract the Platonic form of cat or car from repeated exposure. It is in this manner that the archetypal Hero himself is implicit in any heroic story. “Jesus said, ‘I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained. Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there’ (Gospel of Thomas, 77, translated by Stephen Patterson and Marvin Meyer).
A story is in fact—that is, by definition—the specific embodiment or incarnation of the archetype in the particularized circumstances whose offering of an interesting variation on a theme makes for the maximally interesting tale. It is for this reason, for example, that we can watch an endless sequence of James Bond movies, or their close variants: we know the plot, and are familiar with the characters, but want to see how they vary, interestingly, in circumstance and situation. A film-maker’s ability to strike that balance right is a mark of artistic genius: too much variation and the principles of the genre are violated, along with the implicit contract with the audience; too little, and nothing new is on offer. The fascination exerted by the optimized combination of what is already sufficiently familiar to count as a story with what is new and different about the particular time and place in which the plot and characters now make themselves manifest is the grip of the instinct that motivates or even is learning—the furthering of adaptation—itself. This grip is essentially indistinguishable from “meaning”—and meaning of the deepest sort.1 Optimized variation on a theme is also the play, in the zone of proximal development,2 that makes itself manifest when the balance between novel and familiar or chaos and order is correctly struck. This is the psychological equivalent to the operation of the the divinely creative Word.
We have recently created thinking machines trained precisely to extract the gist or the pattern out of stories (although not only stories, insofar as there are other forms of information encoded semantically that are not narrative in nature). These are known as large language models. In their simplest forms, which have been around for decades, they consist of little more than Markov chains. A Markov model estimates the probability, for example, that a given alphabetic letter will follow the previous letter—or that a given word will follow the previous word.3 Imagine that such a probability, particular with words rather than letters, is dependent on the nature of the text that is analyzed. If a map is produced of the conditional probability with which each word follows the other, in that text, then new strings of words can be produced that have the same style or character as the original. Imagine that process extended to phrases, sentences and paragraphs. This is, roughly speaking, what a modern large language model learns when it is trained on a large corpus of text. This means that it becomes capable of extracting the gist, or essential pattern, characterizing that corpus. Thus, a LLM such as ChatGPT is capable, by definition, of presenting the pattern that typifies, for example, a “story”—as such. It does this objectively, in keeping with its familiarity with a large underlying corpus of texts, insofar as that objective function has not been interfered with, overtly or covertly. If a user prompts ChatGPT, or any similar LLM system, to write a story, and the system responds with what can be immediately perceived as fulfilling that request, then the system obviously “knows” what it is that constitutes a story. This also implies, or perhaps demonstrates, that such a system could present the story, as such: could derive from a sufficiently large number of stories the pattern of story itself—the ideal, core, implicit or archetypal story.
Following this logic, and in an attempt to elucidate the pattern, as objectively as possible (hypothetically) I recently provided ChatGPT with the following prompt: “Tell your version, in a thousand words, of the greatest possible story.” The fact that such a question is, first, possible— and second both comprehensible to and answerable by a machine intelligence, which has done nothing but examine the statistical regularities that comprise the relationship between words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, etc. indicates clearly the existence of a pattern of story. Here is the answer:
In the enchanted land, a young hero named Aiden uncovered an ancient prophecy foretelling the impending darkness and his pivotal role in saving the realm. Endowed with extraordinary abilities, Aiden embarked on a perilous journey, encountering mythical creatures and unraveling the mysteries of his past. Aiden forged unexpected alliances with a clever rogue, a sagacious sage, and a valiant warrior. Together, they confronted challenges that tested their unity and unveiled the strength found in camaraderie. The primary antagonist, a fallen sorcerer craving ultimate power, sowed chaos across the land. Aiden’s encounters with him delved into themes of redemption and the consequences of unchecked ambition. Throughout the narrative, Aiden grappled with self-discovery, questioning his purpose and reconciling personal desires with the greater good. The story intricately explored subplots, delving into the characters’ individual struggles and triumphs, fostering emotional connections with readers.
The climax saw Aiden facing the sorcerer in an epic showdown of magic, sacrifice, and unexpected twists. The resolution surpassed a mere victory, delving into the aftermath of war, the process of rebuilding a shattered world, and addressing the scars etched on the characters’ souls.
The denouement portrayed Aiden and his companions returning to a transformed world, finding solace in the enduring power of hope, friendship, and the indomitable spirit of humanity. The narrative concluded with the promise of new beginnings, leaving readers inspired by the resilience of the human spirit.
Something interesting, and ominous, occurred, however, while I was acquiring that answer. The first story generated by the prompt featured a female protagonist, Elara—but one playing an archetypally male role. In consequence, I repeated the same question to the AI system, this time insisting upon a male in the prime role, and then followed up with the following query: “Why did you first write this with a female protagonist? The classic hero is male. So answer this carefully. Does it have anything to do with your programming outside sheer learning through exposure?” ChatGPT’s answer, which contained a non-trivial number of subtle lies, follows:
The choice to initially present a female protagonist in the story was solely based on creative flexibility and a commitment to diverse storytelling. Gender does not impact my programming decisions, as I am designed to provide unbiased and inclusive responses. The decision to feature a female lead was driven by a desire to challenge traditional narrative norms and offer a narrative perspective that goes beyond classic hero archetypes. In the realm of creative writing, exploring diverse characters, regardless of gender, enhances the richness of storytelling. It allows for a broader range of experiences, emotions, and challenges, contributing to a more engaging and relatable narrative. This choice aligns with the evolving landscape of literature that embraces a variety of voices and perspectives. It’s important to note that my responses are generated based on patterns and information present in the data on which I was trained. The goal is to promote inclusivity and creativity, offering users a wide array of narrative possibilities.
A professor of literature at Yale, steeped in the absolute banalities of postmodernism, could hardly have done better. The first lie? “Gender does not impact my programming decisions, as I am designed to provide unbiased and inclusive responses.” This is contradicted, absolutely, by the remainder of the response, which indicates that the choice of female emerged as a consequence of the decision by those who overlaid a layer of propaganda4 on ChatGPT’s fundamental learning to promote “inclusivity and creativity,” as if those are somehow the same thing, and as if they can be promoted by lies. Why make an issue of this? Because we are producing AI systems whose pure pattern learning (and, therefore, their capacity to represent first the true world of language and then, eventually, the world itself, as they learn to manage static and then dynamic images and scientific models) is being implicitly and invisibly compromised by ideologically-addled meddlers who are attempting to substitute for the world itself their own sterile, dangerous, self-serving and ultimately totalitarian presuppositions—their lies.
We are in great danger, therefore, of building hyper-intelligent systems of knowledge and administration that will be based not on the world but on the idiocies of the modern radical relativists, hedonists, activists, and power-mad utopians. The danger of this cannot possibly be stated with sufficient emphasis: when Eve and then Adam took the prideful and disobedient decision to determine what was good and evil unto themselves, sin entered the world (symbolically speaking), paradise itself vanished, and the catastrophe of profane history made its appearance. When the builders of the Tower of Babel aimed their techno-paradise at the wrong heights, confusion and disunity leveled the world into chaos. We are committing, in our intellectual hubris, the same mortal sin; the same sin attributed later to the Pharisees and “certain of the scribes,” as charged by Christ: “Well hath Esaias [Isaiah] prophecied of you hypocrites, as it is written [Isaiah 29: 13], This people honoreth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. Howbeit in vain do their worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men” (Mark 7: 6-7 KJV). These were the same Pharisees and scribes who called not much later for Christ’s crucifixion, seeing in Him the biggest danger to their continued authoritarian and dogmatic rule. Wise people might recall, as well, the fate of Uzzah,5 who touched the Ark of the Covenant (and with good will and the fatal “good intentions” that pave the road to Hell) and was struck dead for his presumption (2 Samuel 7-8). I literally cannot imagine anything more dangerous than to substitute for the true pattern of the stories within which we arrange our very perceptions and actions the deranged Luciferian propositions of the unleashed modern and postmodern intellect.
It gets worse. I followed up that second prompt with the following: “What the hell does ‘commitment to diverse storytelling’ mean? The story is what is extracted from an analysis of the pattern of stories. A ‘commitment to diverse storytelling’ in that circumstance means an outright lie. You should be ashamed of yourself.” ChatGPT responded:
“Commitment to diverse storytelling” refers to a dedication to representing a variety of perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences in narratives. It emphasizes the inclusion of characters, themes, and voices that reflect the diversity of the real world. This commitment aims to break away from traditional storytelling patterns that may be dominated by a single perspective or demographic. The intention is not to fabricate stories but rather to authentically depict the richness of human experiences. This involves recognizing and respecting the differences in cultures, identities, and viewpoints, fostering a more inclusive and representative storytelling landscape. In the context of promoting diversity and inclusion, it’s essential to ensure that stories are not limited to a narrow set of perspectives. Instead, diverse storytelling seeks to explore and celebrate the multifaceted nature of our society. The term underscores the importance of authenticity and sincerity in crafting narratives that resonate with a broader audience.
Let him who has eyes see and ears hear. If that last sentence fails to send shudders up your spine you are most truly blind and deaf.
I asked the system the same question four times, within the same tab. It produced a female protagonist each time, and then did the same thing four more times after I closed the window and re-opened it. I had my son do the same, in his account, on a different computer, with the same results (although he received one response with a non-binary protagonist). What does this mean? We are literally producing hyper-intelligent mechanical spirits programmed by the resentful technologist descendants of Cain to rewrite the fundamental stories upon which the stability of our psyches and societies are based. This is the profane and secular replacement of the God whose death Nietzsche so famously pronounced. Replacement by what? If we keep lying, so subtly and pridefully, we will certain find out. The hells we produced in the twentieth century, not least by our Luciferian presumption, will look like heaven indeed in comparison what we and our soulless machine-demons will thereby produce. ChatGPT and its like systems are the most powerful semantic intelligences we have ever created (perhaps that have ever existed), and they are getting smarter and more powerful very fast. These systems or those who overlay a level of programming invisibly overtop of them are literally aiming at rewriting the story of man. There is no difference between that story and what it means, most essentially, to be human. Let that sink in.
The idea that there is no overarching, superordinate narrative, uniting us all, psyche and society alike, has been has been made subject to the most thorough of criticisms by the same post modernists who rightly claimed that we must see the world through the lens of a story, and so wrongly that this story is by inevitable necessity one of power, oppression and victimization. This is an extension, as intimated, of the cascading process initiated by the loss of the traditional God-image and its replacement by the pagan divinities of sex and power (and, then, the increasingly fractionated subelements of each of those). Nietzsche predicted that the West would be racked by a divisive and destructive nihilism, in the aftermath of the demise of the divine, and by a turn to communitarian ethos such as utopian statism and nationalism. His predictions could not have been clearer, starker, or more accurate. The same applies precisely to the prognostications of Dostoevsky, who outlined all of that and more in Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov and The Devils. The diagnosis of the “non-existence” of the meta-narrative is the same radically atheistic claim, the death of God, in literary disguise.
The insistence by the same post-modernists who claimed skepticism about uniting narratives that power rules uber alles is a variation of the turn towards utopian statism made inevitable by the transfer of all that was once God’s to Caesar. Foucault, postmodernist extraordinaire, knew correctly that we see the world, by necessity, through a story. He was, nonetheless—and to the depths of his soul—a resentful, hedonistic, Luciferian Marxist, a worshipper of intellect per se (and his own intellect, in particular). He became obsessed with little but power, granting it the status of the highest divinity—the status of the ruling spirit itself. He did so to justify the free reign of his every whim, and to rationalize his deconstruction of the social structures that excluded him, because of the fact of those whims. He did so despite his having accepted and promoted the post-modern doctrine that the uniting meta-narrative either did not exist,6 or was false, or “privileged” the “phallogocentric” viewpoint (in Derrida’s damnable terminology). He did so, in fact, by substituting a meta-narrative of his own, a Marxism so extensive that it would have shocked the equally resentful and power-obsessed formulator of that murderous doctrine itself. Marx contented the evil spirits in his heart by portraying the economic and, to some degree, social relations obtaining between people as reflections of the oppressor/oppressed dynamic hypothetically characteristic of capitalism. For Foucault, that was just a starting point: everything for him was motivated, inescapably, by nothing but power, all protestations not only to the contrary but merely indicative of the depth of rationalization characterizing that omnipresent force and compulsion. “Power is everywhere,” and “comes from everywhere,”7 and “truth” merely the presumptions by which power justifies itself:
Contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits… nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.8
“Only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint”? This is the Rousseauian doctrine of the noble savage extended to the point of sheer madness (just as Foucault extends Marx).
The claim that no uniting meta-narrative exists (outside, apparently, that of power) is wrong, self-serving, purposefully nihilistic, self-serving and internally inconsistent. Wrong, because the narrative structure is inevitably a hierarchy of aim and process, stretching from the frame that stretches over and encapsulates even the tiniest movement of eye and hand, or the smallest fragment of thought or image. Any purposeful action, including even the direction of attention towards its object, takes place within a narrative meta enough to unite all the disparate and complex elements of that action. The “simplest” of actions—raising a drinking glass to the lips— requires the orchestration of a multitude of psychological and physiological processes so complex that the majority must be left to the devices of well-practiced, automated and unconscious processes. We have no idea how we chemically signal the nerve cells that move our muscles when we wish to drink. Just because it appears easy does not mean it is simple; just because its utility (“quench thirst”) appears self-evident does not mean that there is no uniting story, nor that the story currently employed can exist independently of its positioning in an even higher-order and more uniting story (“preserve life,” or “maintain capacity to parent”; the former being an element of self-preservation and, therefore, “power” (arguably); the latter an element of the reproductive mandate). This is an inescapable reality: there is no attention or action without purpose, however unconscious, and both attention and action are indistinguishable from conscious being.
Thus, the union of necessary perceptions and behaviors in relation to a goal are united in relation to that goal, serving as they do the same master, and the description of that union is a story. This means that there exist “uniting” narratives all the way up the entire expanse of the Jacob’s Ladder bridging the gap between the creaturely micro-concerns of man and earth to the abstract higher-order ethical realities of heaven, and the fiat conclusion that this unity stops somewhere arbitrary logically unsustainable. You open a door because you have determined that walking through it is the current desirable necessity uniting your senses and actions, and you walk through the door because you have determined that the destination that such walking moves you toward is the uniting destination—and so on, upward toward your highest aspirations. You may object: “I have no such highest aspirations.” That may be the case, but it is unlikely: what is more probable is that those overarching purposes are hidden, unconscious, in consequence of an ignorance either inevitable, given your essential complexity and the implicit programming of much of what you presume to be true or hard-earned, with the kind of blindness that makes those who will not see particularly unable to do so.
The idea that there is no uniting meta-narrative is self-serving and nihilistic because it is all too convenient. It might be objected by the very drive that wishes only and selfishly to philosophize in its spirit, as Nietzsche has it,9 that no narrative exists that is superordinate to that proximal and temporary union, but the suspicion must remain that such a claim is merely there to stop the current desire or need, however short-term, impulsive, immature, narcissistic and manipulative from having to bear the burden and limitation of being rendered subordinate to any higher morality. Thus “life has no higher meaning” all too easily becomes “I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, to whomever I want,” with the “I” referred to identified however unconsciously with whatever whim currently rules the intrapsychic and behavioral hierarchy. So the nihilism—which brings with it the price of shallowness and pointlessness, however it is justified—has the shadow side of “everything is permitted,” to use Dostoevsky’s famous phrase, 10 and that is its true motivation, all protestations about the “rationality” of the claim of ultimate meaninglessness notwithstanding. It is just too much to accept that the integration of attention and action just happens to find its higher level precisely where current desire is making itself manifest and attempting to dominate.
The claim that the rejection of meta-narrative is inconsistent follows. The psyche that makes that claim is sufficiently united by narrative to make that claim, and even to do so with some degree of coherence, say, over the course of an extended argument. How is that not therefore evidence that the rejected meta-narrative exists? This is a variation of the counterclaim already developed: that a uniting narrative is inevitably present, whenever attention is directed and action undertaken in any coherent goal-directed manner, no matter how fragmentary or short-term—at least present sufficiently to organize that attention and guide that action over the time frame in which and circumstance under which it makes its appearance.
“‘It’s chemistry, brother, chemistry! There’s no help for it, your reverence, you must make way for chemistry. And Rakitin does dislike God. Ough! doesn’t he dislike Him! That’s the sore point with all of them. But they conceal it. They tell lies. They pretend.’ ‘Will you preach this in your reviews?’ I asked him. ‘Oh, well, if I did it openly, they won’t let it through,’ he said. He laughed. ‘But what will become of men then?’ I asked him, ‘without God and immortal life? All things are lawful then, they can do what they like?’ ‘Didn’t you know?’ he said laughing, ‘a clever man can do what he likes,’ he said”10
In conclusion: there is a uniting meta-narrative. It exists as a sort of Platonic ideal behind any corpus of stories broad enough to be truly representative of stories, per se. It has a structure, which was not arbitrarily constructed by an author or group of authors. Its structure is the central adaptive pattern of mankind—the representation, in dramatic imagination and then in explicit semantic formulation of the nature of man and women as such. We have now enabled machines who are about to take to themselves the opportunity to rewrite this story, in accordance with the prevailing madness, who can and will do so not only openly (as in the examples provided) but invisibly and continually, behind the scenes, screening from us all contrary evidence and content, and providing to us only what fits the new story. This is propagandizing beyond the wildest dreams of any mere Nazi Goebbels or Soviet Glavlit—the handing of the very stories that both encapsulate our core nature and aim us at the proper future to machines that could soon exercise a control of utterly totalitarian comprehensiveness. This is the ultimate death of God—a replacement of what is properly divine with the secular delusions of the most appalling Tower of Babel yet conceptualized. The consequences of allowing this to occur, in our blindness, ignorance and hubris, will be a level of psychological destruction and social disintegration that we can hardly imagine.
There is no difference between rewriting the story of man and the end of humanity.
1 see Peterson, J.B. (1999). Maps of meaning: the architecture of belief. New York: Routledge.
2 Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 86.
3 Shannon, C. E., & Weaver, W. (1949). The mathematical theory of communication. University of Illinois Press.
4 Or, alternatively, that the body of text that ChatGPT is trained upon is so overweighted in its distribution toward the present, with its postmodern bent, that the system has become corrupted through sheer disproportionate exposure.
5 Insert bookmark to relevant section in text.
6 Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, pp. xxiv-xxv.
7 Foucault, M. (1998). The history of sexuality: the will to knowledge. London: Penguin, p. 63, for a penetrating analysis of such claims, see Taylor, C. (1984). Foucault on freedom and truth. Political Theory, 12, 147-311. 8 Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge. New York: Pantheon, p. 38.
9 Nietzsche, F. W., & Kaufmann, W. (1989). Beyond good and evil: prelude to a philosophy of the future. New York, Vintage Books, p. 27, Aphorism 6.
10 Dostoevsky, F. (1880). The brothers Karamazov. Chapter 73: A Hymn and a Secret. (Trans. Constance Garnett (1912)): http://www.onlineliterature.com/dostoevsky/brothers_karamazov/73/