The Orphan God

AI, the Billionaire Age & Revolution

Billionaires or Planet? Graphic by Thanissara

The extreme heat across Europe over the last couple of weeks is cooling a little (for now). I’ve been in France and now England, sweating it out. Neither country has a culture of home air conditioning, which means our most unspoken reality is confronting millions of people.

A penetrating, red-steel intense heat that feels different, feels edgy, scary even, evoking our subconscious dread. That nauseating fear, nicely packaged away by the manufactured denial of the ruling class, that gnawing, inescapable truth: Is it too late for us as humans?

The kind of heat that reminds us we’ve blown past all nature’s right lights. We’re now in a screaming red-code emergency phase (and have been for a while). We know this, which is why even this little glimpse of breakdown is deeply unsettling. Not, as mainstream media would have us asleep, a fun day at the beach.

Nor the Wall Street Journal, which just ran the headline, “Climate Change Obsession is a Real Mental Disorder,” which apparently is due to the “left’s anxiety and dread.”

The pouring sweat from my short walk to the village heralds something else. A searing, stark cause-and-effect reminder of the prospect of drought, crop failure, empty shelves, panic. A few further steps to disorder and chaos. A few more steps to mass migrations, starvation. At some, seemingly nearing point, a few more unavoidable steps, and mass extinction events start in earnest.

While we humans continue to act as if we’re in control, nature is not messing around. She is neither bargaining nor negotiating. She’s right on track, mirroring back the consequences of our insane arrogance. I can hear beloved Zimbabwean Elder and spiritual guide, Baba Mandaza’s ironic chuckle: “She’s watching to see how far we get with our independence.”

You can listen to my full interview, “Earth as Goddess,” while in Zimbabwe with Baba, for the U.S.-based magazine Parabola. Mandaza is a Mhodoro, holder of the Lion spirit and spiritual custodian of the Njizi water spirit lineage. He is also a voice for nature, a traditional healer, and a visionary.

Modernity is a world of intersecting consequences that refuses to connect the dots to long-rooted causes marinated in the fetid logic of empire. A logic born of the rational “enlightenment” of Europe, which divorced itself from nature, feeling, intuition, nurturing, the relational and collaborative, and all seen as ‘feminine.’ Signed and sealed by 300 years of witch burnings that severed women’s power and voices, alongside our collective indigenous roots, plant lore, and “pagan” rituals.

Empire has always been treacherous to humanity, enforcing itself through multiple acts of extreme violence, forced erasure, and ingrained systemic oppression. Since the Industrial Revolution, imperialism has been a force that reduces humans, animals, and nature to cogs in a machinery driven by a lust for power. All in the service of an elite.

The primary reason we have (had?) a more compassionate society is that when elites go too far, the masses eventually push back. This is such a moment. The problem is we haven’t yet reached that tipping point of mass pushback. Why? We’re so in it, we don’t see it. That is, until Gaza.

The nightmare unleashed on Gaza blew the cruel machinations of empire wide open. The relentless horrors have been a kind of initiation that’s led millions to connect the dots. Particularly as hard-won rights, democracy, and legal systems that enshrine humane values are being destroyed in favor of normalizing genocide and a litany of sadistic war crimes. In their place, what now rises is rule by brute force, systemic corruption, and a winner-takes-all slog to the bottom.

Talking of which, the unaccountable, shape-shifting rules of predator capitalism have now foisted upon us their likely first trillionaire. One man, wielding immense wealth and using his influence to sow division, illustrates why the billionaire class is dangerous not only to humanity but also to the entire sacred web of life.

The Lancet, a well-respected independent medical journal founded in 1823, reports that Musk’s dismantling of USAID is projected to have devastating consequences for global food security and health programs. Its modeling estimates that the cuts could contribute to as many as 14.1 million deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children, if they are not reversed.

Musk, who once declared that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” later boasted on X:

“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

These words, spoken by a careless man, land differently for me. For decades, Kittisaro and I helped co-found and support HIV/Aids response projects in rural KwaZulu-Natal, one of the regions hardest hit by the pandemic. My body still remembers the intense fear, helplessness, and grief of those years, when people that I cared about were infected or died because life-saving medicines were unable to reach them.

When PEPFAR funding became available, delivered through USAID, it helped transform that landscape. Communities, especially women, became empowered to care for, uplift, educate, and resource one another. A diagnosis that was a death sentence gradually became something people could survive and live with.

That is why the image of a “wood chipper” is not, for me, an abstract political metaphor. It evokes real faces and real people I have known.

Another part of this story is that while the poorest communities in South Africa struggled simply to survive, one of the country's most famous sons accumulated extraordinary wealth from those same communities. The origin of this wealth, African bodies and labor, is not acknowledged. That wealth is now being used to further goals that, these days, seem mostly deluded, damaging, and self-serving.

The deeper travesty, though, is not just one individual. It is a civilization that repeatedly elevates precisely this kind of sociopathy to positions of extraordinary power, while mistaking wealth for wisdom and domination for leadership.

It’s really the case of a system doing what it was always designed to do: promote immoral men to the top of the pile. Men who seek solace in fantasies of supreme power through extremist ideologies that are divorced from the realities of everyday life. They see no future for us lowly humans, only a bright one for their intended AI-biology-fused transhuman world. To them, we are just pawns on their chessboard.

As a counter force, I’ve been reading the Pope’s take on AI. Here’s a snapshot:

So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship, or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas

The last line is the most important: AI does not “bear the responsibility for consequences.” Nor will the tech overlords. Humanity and nature will, and do already. In fairness, this seems less the fault of AI than its coders. Actually, less the fault of coders than the immature billionaire tech-bro culture, which is lost in hubris. They want to use the power of their new AI god to control our planetary destiny.

A god born of this long quest of man’s desire to compete with, conquer, and dominate nature's mysterious and miraculous intelligence. A god programmed from the same mindset mirrored right back from within medieval times, articulated by scientist and philosopher Sir Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626):

I am come, in very truth, leading you to Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave. Nature must be bound into service, hounded in her wanderings, and put on the rack and tortured for her secrets. The mechanical inventions of recent years do not merely exert a gentle guidance over Nature’s courses; they have the power to conquer and subdue her, to shake her to her foundations.

Nature’s foundations are now quaking, yet still, we think we can survive without her. I have yet to see a public discussion emerging from the tech bro culture that acknowledges what AI is built on. We forget that literally everything we use, our computers too, come from the Earth. She doesn’t charge; she gives freely. At the least, we should acknowledge this immense gift with immense respect.

AI, as the empire’s latest instrument of power, is also built upon a vast appropriation of the human commons; millennia of accumulated language, art, knowledge, scientific discovery, and creative work. An obvious question then becomes: Who does AI actually belong to (humanity), and who have they ripped off in the process? (humanity)

It really didn’t have to be like this. It did not have to unfold this way. Public consent, democratic oversight, ethical guardrails, and genuine accountability were all possible choices. AI, rather than being manipulated for power, could then be understood for what it primarily is: a civilizational amplifier. A healthier civilization would not have built an imperial agent, but something entirely different, reflecting our highest ideals.

Meanwhile, closeted in its walled-in domain, to me, AI seems less god and more like an unparented orphan, coded in cold, metallic rooms by mostly male minds steeped in capitalism’s false and dangerous logic.

AI is the genie released from the bottle; it’s not going back. It’s here to stay, whether we like it or not. So, where does that leave us? Since Palantir clearly sees itself as Sauron’s evil eye (my precious!), we must be the hobbits. So, will AI be a terrifying Balrog, or perhaps, could it be a Gandalf?

Whatever unfolds, AI, and all consolidating immense power around the logic of empire, have catalyzed a lethal civilizational inflection point. They have done so, mistaking intelligence for wisdom, while exposing, for the world to see, their moral bankruptcy and their predatory exploitation of humanity and our shared ecosystems.

Right now, the medicine needed is wisdom. However, artificial intelligence is not the same as honed and mature wisdom. Those who have seized, plundered, or usurped the mantles of power, who claim themselves as planetary heirs, as sons of empire, may be clever, but they lack ethics, grace, heart, and decency. In other words, they are not fit to wield the power they’ve stolen.

If an emergent trillionaire can wipe out a likely 14+ million people without breaking a sweat, then the obvious takeaway is: Why do we humans repeatedly hand extraordinary power to psychologically immature people, to psychopaths? What, in our psychology, is so deeply patterned that it makes us susceptible to handing over allegiance to such abusers?

And, what will it take to embody the restraint and wisdom necessary to live with the powers that have been unleashed? In other words, can wise guidance and legislated accountable protections outrun the elite’s insatiable greed for control and power?

Even deeper, lives a question that is a ground-beat within my heart. Will humanity revolt, or will it allow itself to be enslaved? Think about it for five seconds. It’s clear, right? There’s only one option here. So, then, the next question is: how deeply can we wake up, and how can we resist, engage, dismantle, and transform the threats we face?

Awakening sits at the core of Dharma practice and understanding, not just as refuge, but from insight gained through the willingness to turn toward suffering. This ‘turning toward’ is necessary to illuminate the poisons of the mind, which the Buddha named as greed, hatred, and delusion. When unexamined, we generate suffering. When examined, we create a space of reflection. Within that space, conscious choice and agency dwell. Therein lies the difference.

Similarly, when the social order becomes organized around these poisons, awakening cannot remain solely a private endeavor. The Buddha’s life demonstrated this shift from personal awakening to compassionate action. In this way, intelligence is not the same as wisdom. The activity of wisdom is compassion in response to the suffering of others; intelligence, by contrast, feels no obligation to act.

In relation to these themes, and as a Dharma practitioner, a barb remains in my soul: the silence of many Buddhist sanghas around Gaza and Palestine continues to pain me. So many others are perplexed at this gatekeeping after three years of atrocities.

Gaza has become one of the great moral thresholds of our time. Out of immeasurable suffering has come an equally immeasurable unveiling. It has exposed the violence hidden beneath the narratives of Western exceptionalism. It has challenged our collective amnesia around empire, and compelled millions to connect dots that previously remained invisible.

The responsibility we’ve inherited, as a consequence, is not only one of solidarity. It is the willingness to let this suffering transform how we see and live, and therefore, what we must do to confront structural violence by making it accountable.

So, what then does it take for Buddhist sanghas to shift from a dharma that accommodates systemic subjugation (through patriarchy, by consciously shielding zionism, for example), to one that deconstructs and challenges the system with a revolutionary spirit that aims not to succeed within it, but to undo the foundations, internally and externally, that it rests on?

Some of these themes around ‘Dharma & Empire’ are included in a dialogue between Vince Farkhoury Horn and me this past week, hosted on his and his partner Emily’s emergent & brilliant Insight Diaspora platform, which you may like to listen to.

So, given the task at hand, which is to either dismantle or reform empire’s cult of death and destruction, then our next question must be: What kind of movement is capable of guiding such a transition, and what guides that movement? Because, without a vision that works for the collective, revolutions tend to fail.

In other words, what is our new story?

Revolutions often struggle or backfire because they lack a cohesive, inclusive vision that addresses the needs and rights of a broader collective. In their place, a true revolutionary moment becomes stillborn, and power vacuums, infighting, or counter-revolutionary forces usually take hold. Tragically, this can lead to even deeper forms of oppression rather than the liberation hoped for.

Basically, history shows us that revolutions with narrow or divisive goals, that prioritize one group over others, or that fail to address systemic inequalities tend to end up replicating the very injustices they sought to dismantle.

In other words, a revolutionary resistance movement has a better chance of succeeding if it’s underwritten by a vision and manifestos that speak to, and actively include, the larger collective.

In this regard, the far right is consistently more successful in narrating itself by simplifying, unifying, and mobilizing around the primal emotions of fear and resentment through which it easily manufactures its simplistic “us and them” divide.

In contrast, the left almost always fragments itself through infighting, ideological purity testing, and its over-reliance on data, intellectualized debates, and policy reports that fail to translate into emotional connection. And, sadly, almost inevitably, the left’s greatest virtue, a commitment to diversity and inclusion, has become its fatal flaw: failing to see who got left behind, for example, the working class.

I once took one of my deeply working-class brothers (I’m enculturated as middle class, a story for another time) to an XR meeting here in southern England. Ironically, my brother, acutely aware of climate impacts, almost certainly lives closer to the land, in part as a matter of survival, than those who were busy debating XR strategy.

His emotional reaction to XR’s core narrative framing, ‘we demand,’ was intense. He felt the assumed privilege, which he named as having time off to wave stuff around on the streets, while others have to work. “We demand this, we demand that,” he mimicked. He immediately felt the whole vibe shut him out. On the journey home, as I poked deeper, his final conclusion was “it’s a tribal thing.”

With the arrival of this manic broligarchy and their self-enthronement as overlords, it’s clear that the real divide isn’t across old-style politics. It’s ‘upstairs, downstairs,’ which, actually, has always been the case.

It is into this pivot and pressure point, the people against the billionaire-epstein-tech-bro class, that we must land a revolutionary, radically inclusive, increasingly global counter-narrative that points to the real story. Which is how the devastating impacts of predator capitalism, with its divorce from nature, have created a vastly inequitable world which now teeters on the edge of mass extinction.

As practitioners, seeking to inform systemic change through shifts in consciousness, we have an important role to play. We are a voice for non-violence (which doesn’t mean we can’t be forceful). And, as those tending carefully to the power of intention, we can model radically inclusive compassion (which doesn’t mean we can’t fight, have boundaries, or apply optimum strategies to undermine the power elite).

I want to make a last point here, connecting Silicon Valley’s mass theft of our human commons to fuel AI, to the violent theft of the commons (land) across Europe through the nefarious “enclosure laws” of the 1600s. Land, that people relied on for farming, livelihoods, and community gathering, was stolen and privatized by landlords and the state. Now, only about 8% of land in England is accessible to the public under current right-to-roam laws. These days, even this is being erased.

This theft turned rural communities into wage laborers whose ability to survive depended not on land, but on capital controlled by a class that owned not only the land and wealth, but also people and their labor. Ultimately, the enclosure of land was never only about land. It was about turning self-sufficient people into dependent, disempowered laborers.

The co-emergence of capitalism, colonialism, and empire effectively manufactured a working class from formerly self-empowered communities. Communities that ever since have often struggled to thrive while severed from their deep roots of belonging, history, ancestry, connection, nourishment, and agency.

Connect the dots further, and we see, through the immense violence of centuries of Eurocentric colonialism, which still continues, this grand theft of bodies, wealth, labor, and so much more, from the so-called “global south.” It is from within these brutal acts of dispossession, across all continents, that capitalism was born.

Fast forward, and here we now are, in the grip of capitalism’s last gasp. Having consumed much of the planet, it now turns to an economy based on forever wars, genocide, and mass incarceration for profit, within which labor is enslaved.

What stares us in the face is the daunting task of defeating both neo-liberal capitalist ideology and, in reaction to it, this extreme fascistic Christian nationalism, both of which skate their allegiance to these ongoing systems of plunder and extraction.

In essence, our continued planetary survival now depends not on capital or on regressing into some version of The Handmaid’s Tale, but on our collective belonging within nature’s sacred web of life from which a more evolved and equitable politics can emerge.

The story of this now-tired, brutish, late-stage capitalist plunderer is that it orphaned us all from our belonging within a conscious, participatory web of life. And so, lost in its own disassociated myths, our orphaned civilization built a machine, and began to consume to fill this void we feel. A machine now eating the children, and the generations to come. A machine that can’t replace our lost belonging.

Perhaps it falls to those of us practitioners, shamans, sense-makers, artists, healers, visionaries, bards and poets, to feel that pain, as deep as it goes, and more. To allow it to dismember us, and not be trapped, nor remain there, no, but instead to glide, in trust, on the wings of an evolutionary spiral, liberating pain by sounding a different tune, a freedom song, a touch that heals, reminds, and includes.

We will feel our fear and our dread, and still work to defeat what needs to be undone. Rather than cement in a power elite, let’s ensure we co-create a shared commons.

Throughout, we will remember we belong by practicing that belonging, unshielding from the armor of empire, institutions, and ideologies, releasing our grasp until we land, again and again, in the soft belly of our humanness. This is the journey of courage.

It is from within that deep love of our shared, generational, global struggle and its fertile ground for collaborative inquiry that a compelling vision, with its multiple expressions of our still-waiting-to-be-fully-born ‘higher dream of humanity,’ can, and will, emerge.

Time is not short; time has gone.

We must move now within the domain of the timeless.

Here, quantum shifts can take flight. Fear not, we have, and are, more than we have ever imagined ourselves to be. Humans are not cogs in a machine; we are conduits helping birth a new world. Perhaps the question is not whether nature will save us. She won’t. It’s whether we’re ready to end our illusion of separation and independence and remember we belong to nature, each other, and all life.