Kanye West, Elon Musk, AI, and Ahriman

is there an occult meaning to recent developments?

“Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler." - Ye

I confess I never liked Kanye West, or “Ye.” His music never touched, intrigued, or delighted me — quite the opposite. I always picked up a dark ambience; something throttled, narcissistic, soulless. I never could understand why so many people — younger friends — admired him. Lyrics like these didn’t seem worthy of such reverence:

Now if I f**k this model

And she just bleached her asshole

And I get bleach on my T-shirt

I’mma feel like an asshole

Ironically, it is only now — after his big Hitler reveal on Alex Jones — I am catching up, listening to his old albums, reviewing how cultural critics and Wikipedia editors framed Ye’s importance and influence. 

In The Cultural Impact of Kanye West (Macmillan, 2014), for instance, various critical theorists lavished attention upon his oeuvre. According to Julian Bailey, West “situate[d] himself among the late African American painters Romare Bearden, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the New York painter and social activist Keith Haring.” Sha’Dawn Battle explored how West “challenge[d] stereotypes of the construction of blackness,” while conforming to a hip-hop misogynistic status quo in his attitude to women, “questioning the authenticity of the revolutionary discourse he offers.” Critical theory is its own industry. We can now see how revolutionary Ye’s discourse truly was.

Years ago, I made friends with a lawyer who worked for Ye. He invited me to a concert in Newark for the Yeezus tour. Assuming I would meet the artist backstage, I took a copy of my first book, Breaking Open the Head as a gift for Ye (if I had done my due diligence, I would have known he doesn’t read books). I don’t remember much about the concert — a fog-shrouded pyramid; branded sneakers for sale; a part where he depicted himself as Jesus or perhaps talked to Jesus; one track where a woman came on stage so Ye could put her down, calling her “bitch," etc, as male rappers often do. Afterwards I saw him standing alone, looking lost and forlorn, in the green room. The show depressed me so deeply I couldn’t bring myself to say hello to him, even though I felt his sadness. 

I don’t care whether Ye’s Nazi / Hitler reveal is some calculated strategy, sign of a mental breakdown, or both. What interests me is how celebrities, at that level of stratospheric fame, channel and invoke energies—archetypal forces—from the collective unconscious. For whatever reason, this is the moment when a wealthy American black man, widely revered as a pop genius, deemed it necessary to call for violent retribution against Jews (“Deathcon3”) and praise Hitler for his accomplishments. 

We’ve somehow reached this low point in our collective story. There is an archetypal significance to it that we can’t deny or ignore. Of course, it may also foreshadow real-world consequences.

On the level of Jungian symbolism, I find it significant that Ye wore a black mask entirely covering his head. I recall reading a Jungian interpretation of the Nazi Swastika: That the Nazis reversed the direction of an ancient Hindu symbol which represented progress forward through the Yuga cycle. The reversed Swastika represented the regression of the Psyche, back beneath the “dark waters” of the unconscious. Ye’s black mask represents, similarly, a descent into the abyss, a fragmentation or disintegration of the Psyche; loss of identity.

Lately, Ye has been in the news cycle, often linked to Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Perhaps it is just me (please let me know your thoughts in the comments), but I connect the ongoing activities of these three to Rudolf Steiner’s prophetic idea of the “incarnation of Arhiman.” I will explain and unpack this in the next few essays.

When I consider what is happening mythohistorically, prophetically, I don’t find it coincidental that we are at a new threshold for Artificial Intelligence, accelerating toward the Singularity. Musk, red-pilled, appears to be twisting Twitter into a vehicle for the Right, reinstating White Supremacists and de-platforming AntiFa voices and Leftists, as this article from The Intercept reveals. His ongoing Tweets reveal his sympathies.

Perhaps this article from Vox, which simply follows the money trail, is most accurate about Musk’s motives: “Musk is… ruthlessly organized around his own interests. One of those interests is being perceived as a visionary who will reshape human society,” writes Elizabeth Lopato.

My theory is that there is more to Musk’s Right Wing turn than securing tax breaks from Texas. He must be aware of the profound societal implications, for humanity, of the rapidly evolving technologies he is pushing. He is a major investor in OpenAI, which has just made a quantum leap in capacity. It seems inevitable that AI will wipe out tens of millions of jobs over the next years, including middle-class professions such as accounting, copy writing, and legal clerking. Self-driving cars have arrived. Self-driving trucks and taxis will soon take away millions of working-class jobs in the US, and many more globally. According to Musk’s recent Neuralink presentation, chips in the brain are only a year away. Meanwhile, the San Francisco police have legalized use of killer robots.

While the creative applications of AI intrigue me, I feel more foreboding about these developments. Exponential tech is pushing us to a precipice where we either transition into some kind of socialism ( read Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism for a positive vision for this) with UBI, more empathy and better social services; or we lock in techno-totalitarian serfdom. It seems most likely we are going into hyper-surveillance slavery. In order to maintain their control, the technocratic, financial elite must fine-tune their mechanisms for keeping the people confused and distracted. This will be increasingly important as the climate breaks down, leading to droughts, famines, endless refugees, and mass chaos. I suspect this is why Musk has taken it upon himself, at this juncture, to reconstruct / manipulate “free speech” on Twitter — and why the Saudis were willing to support him in this otherwise poor financial investment.

Personally I don’t believe we can understand all of these dizzying, rapid-fire developments without an occult, esoteric perspective on what’s happening. For this reason, I want to explore Rudolf Steiner’s idea of the Ahrimanic incarnation, which I wrote about in past books.

As an investigator of the supersensible realms, Steiner proposed that there are invisible, supra-physical worlds which contain beings—forms of consciousness—unlike ourselves. These other dimensions impinge upon our material Earthly plane and seek to influence human destiny for their own purposes and agendas. As I explored in my books, various psychedelic explorations gave me direct experience of these difficult dimensions. They were not part of my belief system nor set of interests.

Steiner called himself an esoteric Christian. He believed that Christ’s incarnation was a necessary event in the intertwined spiritual evolution of humanity and the Earth. Steiner also expanded on the idea of the Biblical Devil. He proposed there were different “supersensible” (as well as “subsensible”) forces working through humanity constantly. Instead of the singular Devil, he called the two most important of these spiritual beings or powers, Luciferic and Ahrimanic. Lucifer (the word means “light-bringer”) is a force that pulls us upward and outward, toward beauty and genius but also arrogance and haughtiness. Ahriman pulls us down toward the mineral world, sterile rationality, and technology. Christ teaches us how to balance between these opposing forces.

Ahriman is the “being” that is in ascendancy right now. A century ago, Steiner proposed that the 21st Century would see an inevitable event he called “the incarnation of Ahriman.” Although he seemed to suggest that this incarnation would take a particular human form, I suspect it may be more a consequence of these rapid technological developments that Musk is driving (unless Musk, himself, is the Ahrimanic incarnation, which is not inconceivable!). Generalized AI, chips in the brain, and biotechnology could potentially lead to a metamorphosis of our human condition, where people become completely wired into a digital matrix, with no connection to any natural or spiritual reality, absorbed entirely within the digitized, virtual sphere. And in fact, many are eager for this.

If I take it seriously, Ye’s display of psychic fragmentation appears to be a sign of an ongoing descent into the abyss: A yearning to escape the human condition, surrender any ethical choice, though a complete narcissistic regression.

Something is happening that seems outside of logic and language to fully parse or communicate. I will keep trying. I would love to hear your thoughts.