Fascism and Nerdvana

Last Updated on Sunday, 18 January 2009 07:48 Written by Brian! Sunday, 18 January 2009 06:14

A core of occultism ran straight through the Nazi movement. It only makes sense: fascism all but requires an abundance of magical thinking as there’s no other way to justify absolute rule by a “chosen” sub-group. See also: monarchies and divine right.

There’s a line of argument that says Vril: The Power of the Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton was among the occult influences on the Nazi Party. I don’t pretend to know Lytton’s mind, but it seems unlikely he was any kind of Nazi sympathizer or particularly embraced their ideas about racial superiority (at least no further than your average rich, white, 19th century European man). I mean, he died long before the political movement began. But, like Nietzsche, Lytton wrote down ideas that would have an unfortunate resonance with a certain kind of desperate maniac several decades later.

The short version of the book: there is an ancient utopian society under the Earth made up of superwise beings, the Vril-ya, who possess advanced technology to access an esoteric energy source, Vril, which allows them to manipulate reality by thought alone. It is posited that, eventually, the Vril-ya will run out of places to live underground and spill into the surface where mankind will have to make room or be obliterated. Or, more accurately, humanity will make room by being obliterated, as the Vril-ya don’t need the permission of a lesser race to expand their territory. The funny thing about this book is that it’s an early piece of science fiction; so early, in fact, that the genre’s tropes were not yet well enough understood by readers for them to identify it as fiction. Yes, a great many people took this thing seriously. If that seems silly, let’s remember that people ran screaming from early movie theaters when a train was shown zooming toward the camera; or that many people took Orson Wells’ famed War of the Worlds broadcast to be true. An audience is less able to identify fact from fiction when a new medium’s tropes are not yet fully grasped or developed. See also: early reactions to lonelygirl15; any internet rumor, lie, or April Fools joke you’ve ever fallen for; and some ARGs.

So, the growing Nazi movement had a rabid hunger to justify their unjustifiable ideas about their racial superiority and their destiny to rule the world. Is it any wonder that a book, widely regarded as true, about a race of supermen who are destined to rule the world through the superiority of their heritage, which also makes vague reference that this superior race counts Aryans among its ancestors (and, even further back, frogs, but shhhhh), appealed to elements within the Nazi movement? I mean, the Vril-ya will literally take over the world in the name of “lebensraum” — “living room” or “breathing space”. What better fairy tale could the Nazis have asked for?

Something about the Vril-ya hit me earlier today. They’re a precursor of The Singularity. It’s almost as hard to nail down a definition of the Singularity as it is post-modernism, but I like how this describes it:

…the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue. -John von Neumann

Now, exactly how, when, and why the Singularity is supposed to happen differs about a dozen different ways for each definition. But the basic idea is that we will be able to design a machine that is more intelligent than any human could ever be, if only by a little bit. This machine will then be clever enough to make itself (and/or new machines) far more intelligent than we could ever make them. This process will go on and on until the machines reach some kind of maximum saturation beyond which no further innovation can increase intelligence per millimeter of processing strata due to sheer limits of the laws of physics, at which point it will become necessary to transform more and more matter (the Earth, Solar System, galaxy, universe) into processing material to achieve greater intelligence. Even within this one schema of the Singularity there’s differing opinions over how long each phase would take or if some of them could ever be achievable.

In any event, you don’t see “humans” mentioned in the events listed above. I mean, it sounds pretty cool for the machines, but what does the Singularity do with people? There are those who claim the Terminator scenario. You know, the machines will advance to the point where they want to get kill us. It makes for a fun plot, but I’ve always found that a little too pat to actually play out. We’re projecting a particular habit of our own, i.e. resources and killing things to keep them, onto beings without the billions of years of evolutionary baggage that gave us that habit. A counter-argument to the Terminator scenario is that it will not make sense to differentiate humans from machines. That is to say, we will already be incorporating machines into our bodies, so by the time the machine intelligences advance beyond our own, they will already be a part of us and we will advance together. In this scenario, it is likely that there will be those individuals who do not wish to incorporate machines into their bodies, or who wish to do so to a lesser degree than that which will augment their intelligences. These people will be at the mercy of the superintelligent the same way an ant hill is at the mercy of anyone who walks by it.

The narrative of the the Singularity is the same as the Vril-ya: the “lesser races” are obliterated by the superior technology of an “advanced race” exercising its “right” to breathing room. So, is nerd heaven a fascist intelligentsia dressed up in sci-fi clothes?

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