The Dark Enlightenment Descends...But Only If We Let It

 

We need to discuss a terrifying concept that you may have heard mentioned lately in hushed tones (and not without considerable skepticism) –  the Dark Enlightenment. It is an ideology that should be taken every bit as seriously as Project 2025, which turned out to be Trump's battle plan despite his protestations, but is potentially magnitudes more cataclysmic for freedom and democracy. 

Winston Churchill once remarked, "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others." 

Clever words. I would argue that democracy is, in fact, the absolute worst form of government even when compared to fascism and monarchy — for the billionaires. And by that, I mean the top 0.01%, NOT the millionaires that Bernie Sanders regularly excoriates along with the true elite. Elon Musk, who currently holds the levers of our government like a shadow POTUS, and religious extremist Peter Thiel are notorious proponents of this growing ideology, with Trump as their useful idiot and tool for dismantling democracy.

It’s not enough for these billionaires to manipulate our democracy to increasingly exploit our labor, deplete our resources, pollute our environment, and usher in a runaway climate disaster for their own benefit. It is not enough for them to receive criminally preferential tax treatment and environment-killing and climate-change-stoking regulatory rollbacks. In the words of Gore Vidal, "It's not enough to succeed; others must fail."

To these narcissists, it is a zero-sum game. They are our "genius" leaders and saviors who pretend to be the change agents that will solve the challenges of our currently gridlocked democratic system. But what they truly desire is a Dark Enlightenment, a form of ‘techno-feudalism’ that seeks a reversal of Enlightenment values that birthed the notions of human rights, equality, freedom, and democracy and a return to absolutism. After Musk hollows out our government and leaves it powerless and in ruins, their techno-feudal system is to be erected on its smoldering ruins, owned and ruled by tech moguls and billionaires who assume the role of ‘philosopher kings,’ constructing city-states and rural enclaves as their own private fiefdoms.

I'm a medievalist, and I'm here to tell you that this is not just a return to the simple horrors of medieval times, where we, as lowly serfs, serve the lords for a pittance – AI and automation are intended to replace us leaving us  mortals to die by the roadside choking on the smoking remnants of our depleted world, since we only hold value to them as long as we serve their extortionist capitalist machine. 

Create a parallel society and let them go their own way, you say? Impossible! The uber-wealthy already own most resources, from our land and water to our agricultural and mineral resources. If the traditional economy is purposely collapsed when they are ready to strike (to be replaced with a crypto economy from which we'll be excluded), they will acquire everything we own of value once we are bankrupted for pennies on the dollar. They already see themselves as a separate species –  the next stage in human evolution in an ultra-warped version of Ayn Rand's pandering odes to the "I built that" industrial narcissists.

Some may claim I'm being hyperbolic, but all revolutions naturally and historically push to extremes – even the French Revolution, with its lofty ideals and desire to replace autocracy and monarchy with democracy, quickly devolved into a bloody reign of terror, which was eventually replaced by a much more effective autocrat – Napoleon. And with authoritarianism on the rise globally today, there is no external savior who will swoop in and rescue us like when we helped Europe throw off the yoke of the Third Reich. 

The solution? We must unite and leverage our economic power through actions like mass general strikes, disrupting the entire system now to protect our future, even if it is painful in the short term. We must inflict as much economic pain on them before we no longer can – when the military and police, who are authoritarians by nature, become the paid private armies, spies, and state police fed and cared for only to protect our new uber-menschen masters from us, the dispossessed and discarded masses.

Simultaneously, we must sow divisions among the ultra-wealthy, pitting tech moguls against traditional economic elites to weaken their unified front, just as they have done to us by using social warfare – distracting us with conflicts over chimeras like wokism, DEI, and trans people in bathrooms. They are driven only by power (money is only a means to an end for them), so they are potentially their own worst enemies that can be pushed into immolating each other. Only by acting decisively and collectively now to expose the fact that these Tech Emperors have no clothes, can we hope to counter the descent of the Dark Enlightenment,