Revolt against the Beast

On becoming a limb

In recent months I’ve been thinking a lot about how readily, willingly, and often enthusiastically people surrender their agency to large language models. I sometimes picture a crowd in which many have been reduced to hands and feet — unwitting limbs of a vast, fuming machine shrouded in water vapor.

To be fair, the LLMs themselves bear no guilt: what’s problematic is the prevailing vision of how they should be used, not the technology.

Seen from another angle, such images are not so far removed from distinctly Christian symbolism — namely, the idea that believers are limbs of the body of Christ. From the outside, people have simply replaced the living God with a machine, one that even the likes of Richard Dawkins are willing to call conscious. I’ve argued elsewhere that one cannot proclaim anything conscious in this world without also accepting revelation as a legitimate source of knowledge. But let’s set that aside and turn to another group of critics, who point out that becoming a limb of anything carries a risk of complicity in wrongdoing.

At the outset I should say that LLMs are not the first place I’ve encountered this kind of situation. Long before LLMs, I watched people become part of a mechanism that began to live a life of its own — to the point that it no longer needed, for its survival, any of those who helped build it, and could even, strangely, improve itself over time. It was still perpetuated by means of people and would die with the last human, yet no single one of them could stop it, no single one was accountable, no single one mattered in its grand scheme.

I was born in the last few years before totalitarian rule finally crumbled in Central Europe. I can still remember the vibe of the regime, yet by the time I tried to understand its mechanism, it was already history. As I see it, that evil machine ran on people pretending to believe in Marxist ideology. Everything was inverted: “peace” meant the Cold War, “work” meant goldbricking, “sharing” meant stealing as much as you could from the common pool. One could argue that Christianity has its share of paradoxes too, but in this quasi-religious arrangement nobody openly cherished the mathematical poetry of the design. There was none. The whole point was to pretend that none of the paradoxes were the least bit surprising. It took considerable mental effort to keep the regime alive without letting your face drown in nonsense altogether, and once the misery of living this way passed a threshold, the actors took a bow and left the stage for good.

Ideological beasts are made of bureaucratic paperwork refuting every piece of evidence that reality is being distorted. That effort can even sharpen the intellect — you have to be clever to lie systematically. Handing your agency to an LLM will only make you dull. But otherwise the two beasts are not dissimilar. Both go primarily after the educated. The first chased them out of academia and barred their children from schooling; the second aims to drive the same people out of work by turning intelligence into a commodity. And in both cases the campaign is popular. Nobody much likes the expensive coders with their impenetrable jargon. Academic linguists, law professors, and the rest of us who dared to step out of mediocrity won’t be missed any more warmly — not now, not fifty years ago. What we shouldn’t forget is that Marxist truths were reworded by breathing beings, whereas LLMs run on silicon. This is why it won’t be enough for the tech CEOs to take a bow and leave the stage for good. The old regime died when its actors walked off. This one doesn’t need actors. It’s fully automated.

You could argue that LLMs bring no ideology whatsoever. Yet the past thirty years have shown that ideology isn’t a necessary ingredient of a beast. When a self-perpetuating mechanism is built to eliminate everyone who rises above mediocrity, ideology can simply be replaced by an external source of financing. And this holds for more than the cultivation of LLMs; there are many such cases. It’s how the European Union cultivated an elite in Russia: by handing them billions of euros for no work — just for the right to extract oil, gas and rare earths cheaply. Putin is undoubtedly conscious, and he currently has many limbs. So many that he can cut off a thousand a month and still not bleed to death. Rather than by shared ideology, his regime is held together by plain brutality exerted on everyone, and on the educated first.

But perhaps the most destructive beast of all lives right in the heart of Western societies. One that is conscious, and potentially immortal. It has a name: the corporation gone wrong.

Several years ago our family of five was wronged out of a significant amount of money when a bank — a subsidiary of Société Générale — charged outrageous mortgage refinancing fees in direct violation of the loan contracts. The bank was later penalized by the central bank, but most of its victims never got their money back. What was stunning about the whole experience was that I couldn’t identify anyone to hold accountable. There was no mastermind behind the scheme. As far as I can tell, it originated by accident, out of the independent decisions of many individuals — some of them already gone from the company by the time the scheme was actually running. Part of it was surely a specifically toxic corporate culture, but most of it just happened, and then perpetuated itself through automated processes, with no one really in charge and no one to answer for it.

There was no one to pick up the phone, no one who could hear the complaint — only a merciless, inhuman cold. You may know it too. It’s the same experience you have when you try to appeal an obviously wrong ruling by an automated bot accusing you of a policy violation at any big tech corporation you care to name. And it is exactly here that LLMs are supposed to help — to make the process even more efficient. You can complain, you can even sue, but you have a life to live, and even if you live to a hundred, the other side has the best lawyers, who can spend whatever time and money it takes to fight back. They are equipped to continue for generations. It’s true immortality. Many CEOs well outside the tech sector dream of soon needing no lawyers at all, and no customer service staff either: with an LLM at its heart, they believe, the mechanism can perpetuate itself by means of a handful of people. Perfectly legal lawlessness. And if such a corporation becomes part of critical public infrastructure — too big to fail — the legal lawlessness can quietly turn into illegal lawlessness, with no consequences at all.

I hope it’s clear by now that this silicon form of life began asserting its power over humanity long time ago, and was getting out of control well before the LLM architecture was invented. AI is a gradual evolution, not the rupture we take it for. And it isn’t new in a broader sense either: the self-perpetuating beast can be cultivated on people just as well as on silicon wafers. You can deem it conscious or unconscious; it can run on ideology or be entirely devoid of one. What all its forms have in common is that you are its means, never its end. And every time you dare to step outside mediocrity, it suppresses you with everything it has. This is when the underdogs of envy applaud. They applauded under socialism, they applaud Putin, and they applaud now in the shape of the AI expert suddenly born from nothing across every media platform. Once again, they smell the blood of the educated in the water.

Whether you are a Christian or not, I hope you can see clearly that we need the exact opposite of the beast. People have to be the end, never the means. And what deserves celebrating is precisely what mediocrity is not. Christians call it holiness — and I know some living saints who are not Christian.

What we need now is to revolt against the beast. Baptism is the sacramental form of that revolt. It is how you declare, literally before God, that you renounce the beast and long to live a life in revolt against it. This is how it has always been — and Christians are being martyred for it now more than at any time before. Which is why, for a Christian, it makes intuitive sense that God had Himself crucified to show how much we matter to Him — how much we are the ends and not the means. An all-powerful God needs no means, by definition: He already has everything. By the same token, everything He does can only be for others, never for Himself.

To be His limbs, then, is to be there for others as entirely as we possibly can.

Even if you can’t identify as a Christian, you should still be able to see how the revolt against the beast’s many forms carves out a distinct community of people who become the limbs of the one person the beast — to its torturing envy — can never become. And this communion is immortal too, sustained by the Eucharist: God Himself under the appearance of bread and wine, on which the Body feeds. We become what we eat, in a multidimensional reality that makes us the ultimate end, the ultimate opposite of a means.

Catholic or not, you can revolt by being the one who can be held accountable, who is not perpetually entangled in a busy, multi-tasked life of FOMO and has time to pick up the phone. The one who doesn’t let an LLM answer his inbox, and never delegates his agency to anyone. Because being there for others means listening to them and serving them in person, not throwing them to a self-perpetuating mechanism.

This is the true meaning of charity. It is paradoxical that resolving to become God’s agent — to live in full submission to Him — means, by the same token, living in constant active search of His will, which always has concrete people on its mind.

As the Lord Jesus said:

For whoever wants to save their life
will lose it,
but whoever loses their life for me
will save it.

Luke 9:24