A.I. And The Vampire Story: A Halloween Feature
Monsters, Myths & The Mechanics of Mass Formations
Artificial General Intelligence is just one of the possible monsters that could confront us in the years to come. Those of us looking at the types of existential threats we face imagine that somehow in the timeline-distortions of James Cameron’s horror franchise, “The Terminator” that Skynet attains consciousness, determines human beings are a threat to the planet, or to the existence of the AGI itself, and turns on humanity. We imagine that this digital golem condenses out of cyberspace, or escapes a digital black box, manifesting reflexive self-awareness and algorithmic reason without a conscience. We wonder what tricks or treats it might bring us if it happens, but there are many potential demons and ghouls that could arrive at our doors in the years to come, and some have already coalesced into hoards lurching against the west, moaning and wailing, and pounding on the door of what modernity has built.
In late October 2021, on a brisk Tuesday afternoon in Ottawa, Canada, I had my first encounter with the mass. Billboard Chris, Chanel Pfahl and I walked into a crowd of an estimated three-hundred people, a seething, chanting, costumed mob.
It separated us, enveloped us in banners and shouted slogans. Its constituents reinforced the psychic integrity of their formation, mutually thought-stopping with shrill, hysterical screams from behind the ubiquitous sea of masks, “don’t listen to them!” Eyes wide and empty. The same look of hysteria, hatred and fear on every face betrayed their collective possession.
Our harassment was short. Maybe ten minutes of jostling, pushing, and screaming while police looked on. Probably less. It was hard to tell.
We managed to regroup and fumble into Elston’s vandalized rental car with our bent and spray-painted billboards.
The mass pounded on the windows.
We drove away stunned.
Many people have since stood with Chris Elston on his crusade to have conversations with people, to protect children from the harms of gender ideology, and many more have been confronted with mob manifestations of wokeness; from progressives attempting to derail criticism of books at school board meetings; to BLM riots; to Pro-Hamas encampments and marches in cities across the west.
On the day of our mobbing, progressive activists mobilized their digital hoard into the IRL throng with the support of a provincial legislative representative who activated his base; the Ottawa public-school board, which sent an urgent e-mail decrying far-right hate and bigotry to the parents of 72,000 children; and an Ottawa city counsellor infamously known as a self-righteous, moralizing thing, who went on local media as part of her failed bid to become mayor.
“No place for hate!” the mass chanted.
“Trans rights are human rights!”
My experience on that street in 2021, while stunning to me, was more frighteningly, unremarkable. It’s a new normal.
Different topics. Same group patterns. For most of us, what’s happening on our streets is a form of forgotten evil not seen in our lifetimes, reminiscent of the politically charged civil unrest in Europe in the 1930s.
I could roll endless reels of examples from the last few years. You may have your own story. There was the cancellation of Warren Farrell at the University of Toronto; the mobbings of Jordan Peterson; the Evergreen Scandal that drove Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying from their teaching profession and the hysterias over Halloween Costumes and safe spaces at Yale in the Christakis incident.
All increasing signs of a totalizing western social malaise.
In our society, whose collective identity is rooted in the individualism of the classical liberal doctrines, we have forgotten that in times of stress, humans can coalesce into toxic and destructive groups where the group itself behaves as a single collective psyche under a shared identity. In some ways these shared identities are like the memes we learned about from Richard Dawkins, and we could think of them in terms of collective responses to environmental stressors; whether they are adaptive or not is another question.
As these groups form, we are sometimes aware of the group affiliations, for example, under political colors or under loyalties to sports teams, and sometimes the lumbering mass is completely unconscious. These Cultural Complexes, in Jungian terms, are underpinned by archetypes, which are fundamental patterns of human behavior. In the case of sports affiliations, the archetypes is of competition; in the case of politics, cultural complexes coalesce around the archetypes of the left (Openness and Progress) and of the right, (Conscientiousness and Tradition). Individuals in the group are interchangeable, running the same sets of emotions, algorithmic responses to threats, while chanting the same slogans. These Cultural Complexes can be benign, they can be constructive and adaptive, and they can be destructive and evil.
Mattias Desmet tells us that we are vulnerable to destructive aggregates of human behavior when we collectively suffer from free-floating anxiety, which can trigger behaviors like scapegoating to bring about a release from our psychic suffering. It’s something we call Mass Psychosis or Mass Formation. In the investment industry we call these periodic flourishing of delusions: manias and bubbles. In other cultures, and in other times, these phenomena have been viewed as collective possessions by gods or demons, or they have been viewed as thought forms possessing agency known as egregores and tulpas. Despite the supernatural language however, these phenomena are entirely natural. The only difference in our current times is that our digital social networks have allowed for their rapid, widespread proliferation.
Two days after our adventure in the seething mass, which caught a fragment of the Canadian news cycle, I was at a business event and the CEO of a Canadian artificial intelligence firm offered to use their AI to find out what Canadians thought about gender ideology. The A.I. came back just a few days before Halloween describing a spike in online conversation in Canada following the incident. It showed us positive signs that Chris was achieving his goal of starting conversations about gender ideology. It also gave us a picture of online sentiment: that most people were against child medicalization, even then.
AGI and machine sentience are still vague boogeymen for most but there is no disputing that AI tools have suddenly exploded into our collective consciousness. GPTs are generative apps that compose poems, write research essays, and business communications and they can increasingly create graphic images and sophisticated videos that blur the line between reality and machine fantasy. Early on, these tools produced chimera of six-fingered, three-armed people, but outputs are rapidly shapeshifting into slicker and slicker simulacra of reality.
The AI we used was more benign, better understood today as a large language model (LLM), which was designed and trained to search and scrape existing public information online, as well as conversations on social media platforms, to map public opinion. It uses social media as a proxy for public opinion polling. Its developers note that it predicted Trump in 2016 and Brexit.
Its algorithm analyzes topics or phrases like “Trans Rights Are Human Rights” or “Intersectionality” to understand the dimensions and boundaries of online conversations about them. It reports the range of sentiments and beliefs about the topics being analyzed giving the major conflicts, propositions, objections and counter-arguments related to the topics. It can map the rise and fall of issues and graph memetic surges in the collective digital consciousness. It can provide data dating back to the event-horizon of social media and the smartphone. It can analyze sentiment by country, region, state, province and even zip code. It can give data by age and sex, parsed by red and blue affiliations.
One of the fascinating and relevant applications of this specific tool was that it had been used by researchers to identify patterns of suicide contagion online in collaboration with one of Canada’s largest telco providers as part of their project to raise awareness of mental health issues.
After a year of discussions and periodic peeks at the online conversation about gender ideology, and after consulting numerous names and organizations trying to understand and push back on gender ideology, we undertook a series of clunky and costly AI deployments. While Chris continued his mission of one-on-one conversations, a small group of stakeholders behind the scenes sought to understand the digital landscape looking for patterns of influence, coercion, and grooming, and hoping for glimpses into digital networks that might be influencing tweens and teens to identify as the opposite sex.
We began with the kernel of the public sentiment LLM and built two statistically valid sample populations; one for the US and one for Canada. We asked what, at the time, seemed like the most salient questions we could ask about the exponential rise in phenomenon of adolescent transgender ideation, Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, and I founded a Canadian non-profit called APISC Digital Research Foundation (Adolescent Peer Influence and Social Contagion).
We called our AI, Meili, named for the Norse god of travelers, the mile-stepper, and we deployed him into digital territories to observe and report. Our supporters often heard me describe Meili by illustrating the differences between tourists and travelers with a maxim I had learned in my youth: that a tourist goes places to see what they want to see, while a traveler goes to see what is there.
In the old days of AI, back in the fall of 2022 and the early months of 2023, these digital missions required a small team to aggregate the data into usable dashboards and our queries were taking between three and six weeks to process. Today a query takes less than ten minutes, but despite the revolutionary advances in technology, the real shortfall came from the questions we were asking and the scale of patterns we were looking for.
At the time, few people recognized that the patterns of trans-identification we were seeing were symptoms of something much larger than a peer-mediated social contagion like anorexia, bulimia or suicide. We were looking for teen girls commiserating with each other in online groups, and perhaps for identifiable patterns of trans-identified males proselytizing a cult, but we were surprised, disappointed and befuddled by what Meili came back with. Our heat maps of online conversations showed partisan and regional divides that varied by Red States and Blue States and by age and by sex. The conversations about detransition were more prevalent in states that removed barriers to access for medical treatment, which had removed or undermined parental consent, and had long-established laws facilitating secret transitions. One of our advisors suggested that in addition to the heat-maps, that we verify when these hot states instituted their Comprehensive Sex Ed curriculums to see if we could show correlations.
It has taken a while to recognize that we didn’t have the resources, nor had we developed the perspective to understand what Meili saw and reported to us. At the time, the collective intelligence of our working group and the team from the AI firm was insufficient to understand what we found. More broadly, our collective western consciousness didn’t have the language to describe the problem.
What we found was wide-reaching and totalizing; Gender ideology was but a subset, perhaps even the pathological byproduct of wokeness, expressed through the self-harm of the most emotionally sensitive subgroup of the mass, like sclerosis is a manifestation of alcoholism. We realized that it was mediated, not as much through digital networks as through our most fundamental infrastructure, the institutional policy frameworks and administrative apparatus of public education, medicine, corporations, all levels of government and most emphatically by the self-professed defenders and legislators of human rights. Maria Hughes refers to it as a culture-bound syndrome, the product of a diseased system. In Canada we call this system the administrative state.
What Meili couldn’t observe or understand was that our institutions had become possessed. But in his scouting missions into online communities, he led us to those questions and pointed to a need to evolve our current language, or to have an ontological renaissance, to understand the nature of the problem.
In my last article for Reality’s Last Stand I wrote about an ancient idea that describes how psychological patterns scale from the individual level to group level by proffering an explanation of the Hermetic Maxim: As Above; So Below. My defense of Astrology met with mixed reviews, with many comments showing readers were stuck on labels, and I believe that if we can set aside some of our initial heuristic responses to the language of monsters, there is a useful metaphor to describe the current state of institutional capture by progressive ideology. Without getting into an atheist vs religion debate, these are simply linguistic tools that describe social phenomena which allow us to make broad generalizations about them.
We often hear that the woke mind virus, or parasitized mind, is constituted by predatory behavior that weaponizes compassion. Andrew Lobaczewski, the author of “Political Ponerology,” a book about the emergence of evil in political systems, observes, based on his experience in medical school in Poland following WWII, that the totalizing capture of institutions by the communists required only a small percentage of sociopaths to attain political and institutional power; perhaps five or six percent of the population.
Jung observed in his 1958 essay, “The Undiscovered Self,” that while in a normal peacetime state, a society may only see a tiny percentage of people in the population expressing pathological behaviors; as stressors increase, and as systems become more corrupt, some people in society, who would not otherwise allow themselves to express their latent pathology, are emboldened or infected in some way, and begin to act upon those pathologies creating a group coherence.
The subject of Cluster B personalities, narcissism, and narcissistic abuse has exploded in popularity online in the last few years online and some of the most popular critics of woke pathologies frequently talk about dark triad/dark tetrad personalities infiltrating institutions. Narcissism, Machiavellianism, Psychopathy and Sadism, are all character traits associated with these phenomena, but how do we communicate the nature of these things without putting the public through psychology degrees?
The answer is simple: virtually every child in the western world is familiar with these character types by the time they’re eight or ten years old – except they’re taught that these monsters are only make-believe and that there are no such things.
Let’s explore an old story about a type of predator that requires sustenance from their prey. They exploit others for the sake of their own gratification and what is called ‘narcissistic supply.’ They require this supply to maintain the vitality of their self-image and they extract it from their victims through manipulation, seduction and parasitization.
The truly terrifying ones are superficially charming, intelligent and charismatic. The stories tell us that they are so good at controlling their victims it’s like they hypnotize them, or seduce them, to bring them under a spell. In some stories these predators dispatch their victims in a draught, but in others they infect people, who infect other people, and build fiefdoms by taking over whole towns and even kingdoms. They empower others as their minions to exploit and control using the same tactics.
When the vampire arrives in the village, he seduces the archetypal damsel. Perhaps she is a widow, or an innocent maiden, who exemplifies goodness and virtue. Let us imagine that she is a patron of the local orphanage, helping needy and suffering children. The vampire, presenting himself as generous, compassionate and as driven by the desire to help the marginalized. He plays to her sympathies and professes his commitment to the virtuous cause.
He charms and lies about his intentions. He courts her to get her accept him into her house, and then when they are alone, as she surrenders to him, he tests her with his first, small bite. He does this with the other influences in the story one-by-one creating an inner circle, a rank of lieutenants operating in a reality distortion field based on his rules.
After a while, as the boundaries of his victims weaken and collapse, the vampire’s inner circle finds themselves trapped, dependent on their addiction and insatiable hunger for ‘supply.’ They can’t recover their individual conscience, and go along, enabling and even defending him as his predatory corruption spreads.
His mafia, his minions, his flying monkeys defend him in the name of their own self-preservation. He's a vulnerable eccentric that needs protection. A misunderstood victim. He really means well.
When the mask comes off for the hero of the story, he or she sounds the alarms, but no one believes them. The spell of the vampire is totalizing. It’s too late. The lofty lies about virtue, goodness and trustworthiness are too entrenched, and too many of the townspeople are compromised. In the late hour of this legend, the naked evil of the vampire is even revealed to his closest victim, the virtuous and innocent maiden, but all she can do is watch in horror as it seizes power.
One imagines the vampire minions moving on the townspeople, their thirst insatiable, besieging the last bastion of truth, the barricaded church, where the holdouts against the corruption and terror, huddle in fear, waiting for either the doors to crash inwards on them, or for the dawn to arrive to give them a chance to turn the tables and hunt for the head vampire.
In the legends these predators can shapeshift when confronted, making them difficult to capture and contain. Locks cannot bind them. They can’t see their own shadows and cast no reflections in mirrors. The only weapons that seem to consistently dispatch them are crosses, holy water and sunlight. In the legends, the only way villagers freed themselves of the control of the vampire and his minions, was to besiege his lair with torches and pitchforks, driving the stake definitively through its heart, dismembering him, and exposing them to the light of truth.
The characters in the vampire story, the myth, describe real human circumstances. For those who have had the misfortune of dealing with such a personality in family relationships, the characters are the same at a small scale as at a large scale. The abuser in the system cannot ever accept the impacts of their exploitation. No mirror can show them. They deflect, project, reverse and cry victim at every juncture – sometimes with white-hot rage. They lack conscience and accountability and justify their abuse by accusing their targets of hurting them. In Jungian terms, they have projected all their shadows on the people around them, accusing others of the things they are doing, unable to see those shadows themselves.
From the outside, its impossible for the uneducated bystander and interlocutor to determine who is the perpetrator and who is the victim because reality has been so corrupted by lies – while the vampire cannot see themselves in the mirror and cast no reflection, their projections create a world of funhouse distortions where it is impossible to discern what is real and what is not. He has created a world of inversions.
And here, a layer I have not understood before, only recently emerging as a social phenomenon, is the power of Christian symbols, the cross and the holy water. We are seeing waves of public conversions to Christianity, and acknowledgement of the Cultural Christianity we are all embedded in, in some cases, as a reaction to how pervasive the reality distortion field of wokeness and gender ideology has become. Lit candles and a strong culture of Christian values, or any coherent mythos that centers truth and accountability, can resist the incursions of the vampire types. The churches’ customs of confession, atonement and their recognition of human tendencies towards sin, along with aims towards growth and betterment, are powerful weapons against these dark and evil forces.
There is value in stories that are metaphorically true, but literally false. They help us understand patterns of human behavior and give us insights into how we might protect ourselves from destructive forces and they tell us that in the fight against great monsters there are many characters and numerous roles.
What we all share at a certain stage of understanding of the existential threats we face is the temptation to deny or minimize the problem before us. Like the villagers enchanted by the wealthy charming stranger, who arrived in the name of helping the vulnerable, most of us want to believe in goodness. But there comes a tipping point in the story, when the masks come off, when it is revealed that the children of the village orphanage, who the vampire professed to defend, support, and help have either been corrupted or become his prey.
A myth in a way is a large language model. It gives us a telos and all the possibilities within the range of a defined pattern. It’s a narrative that survives shifting currents of history. What the AI provided us with was a way to measure, in hard data, the dimensions and boundaries of this modern vampire myth. We can map the takeover of our culture by showing the evolution of language related to the broader cult of wokeness. We can identify the small cohorts of head vampires, understand the power and influence of his minions. We can track the capture and collapse of institutions, and iterations of reality-inversions that the mass evolves in response to attempts to hold it to account. We can see the rise of the resistance and the impact of the heroes who first saw the monster and dared to speak out. We can measure the rise of the whistleblowers and track where the citizens of the digital village stand in the fight against the hoard of monsters.
We have often understood these aggregate social influences as conscious agents; as demons, egregores, as mass formations which infect and possess whole groups. We’re remembering, as we see the same patterns playing out in institution after institution, that these aggregate thought forms can bind in a destructive coherence, a type of extended, distributed collective intelligence, that when turned towards predatory and parasitic goals becomes an existential threat.
At this point in history at least, the AI is our ally.
It’s the evil that coheres in human groups and possesses them with destructive natural intelligence that we need to be most concerned about.