on reading Mein Kampf
12 January 2025- Written in Belgium, January 2025.
- Global Atmospheric CO2 at completion of essay: 426.02 ppm.
- While writing, multiple suburbs of LA were burning due to climate change.
I’ve never read Mein Kampf. My history teacher, Br. Kevin Paull, did though. He said it was the worst book he’d ever read. And he read a lot of books.
Reading Mein Kampf from a critical history point of view is important, even essential. As the evils of Nazism drift into sentimental soft-focus, their ills re-emerge from the swamp. Like a Hydra. We are forgetting, not because of the fog of memory, but because of the fog of lies.
But what if you read Mein Kampf because you appreciate its political insights? You don’t agree with everything, of course. But, you suggest, not everything in it is bad.
I’m sure that’s true. There are plenty of inoffensive letters in Mein Kampf. I’ve used them myself. Some whole words are fine. The sentences get pretty dodgy, but I imagine some of the phrases are innocuous.
Is that really the point, though?
Maybe you aren’t quoting Hitler at me. You’d never do that. But some of the ideas in the book drift into your thoughts, where they are received with a nod of approval, to mix with other thoughts and come out as speech. Maybe when you put it like that, it doesn’t sound so bad. Maybe if you don’t know the context, you’re not thinking so critically.
When I talk with a person, I try to be empathetic. I want to hear what they say from their point of view. I’m not going to listen to Hitler the same way. History has shown that his ideas are terribly evil, so they must be viewed with utmost skepticism and the most scathing of critical eyes.
We talk, and the thoughts that come out of your mouth: some of them come from Hitler. It’s hard to say which, exactly. I have better things to do than study all the details of Nazi ideology, and I don’t want to live my life interrogating the possible Nazi origins of everything my friends say.
So we can’t be friends. It’s exhausting. You made your choice, now I make mine.
And it’s not even that, to be honest. It’s not really that I’m worried about Hitler’s dumb ideas influencing me. I know who I am. It’s deeper, more suffused than that. I don’t want to live in a world where this kind of thing is normal. There should be a line.
I’ve studied a lot about human sacrifice. It’s one of the deepest and mysterious facts of human existence. It is so remote, a way of thinking that is utterly alien, yet history insists that it is human. Still, no-one is saying, “Human sacrifice wasn’t all bad. No, hear me out!”
That’s where Nazism belongs. An object of terror and wonder from the long-dead substrata of human experience. Yet here we are. Nazism has a shiny new coat, and a whole set of new ambitions that make Hitler look like a toddler taking his first steps.
This essay isn’t about Mein Kampf, not exactly. It’s about AI. Which includes Mein Kampf and things worse still.
You use AI because “you find it useful”. It’s “just a tool”.
Gas ovens are “just tools”.
LA is burning because people used machines that are “just tools”.
Nothing is “just” a tool. Tools are the most destructive thing ever invented. Tools are the difference between a stick and a nuke.
People are so easily fooled by skins. Take some bones, some organs and sinews, wrap it in some skin, and ooh la la, how pretty. Never a thought to what lies beneath.
You don’t “learn” from AI: it learns from you. It learns how to manipulate you, how to sate your desires or amplify your hatreds. Each time you use AI, you are teaching it how to steal your soul.
AI takes in a stream of ones and zeroes, manipulates them according to data-determined probability matrices, and spits out another stream of ones and zeroes. You don’t read AI, because reading is an encounter between a reader and an author. No, what you are doing is choosing to colonize your mind with machine unthought.
AI is a totalitarian technology. That’s not an incidental bug, it’s an essential property of how AI works. Joseph Weizenbaum—Nazi survivor and inventor of ELIZA, the first chatbot—saw this and spent the rest of his life warning us.
The thing about Cassandra, it’s not that no-one hears her. They hear perfectly well. They just think it sounds neat.
They heard all right. The Nazis hidden under the skin, waiting for the time of forgetting so they could shed. They built AI because they know what it is. They are colonizing the world’s minds, one by one, with terrible things. With machine unthought masquerading as human. Alien poison miring your mind, slithering deep into your soul to wait, to gestate and grow.
It’s not that there is one thought or idea in particular. It’s that we are normalizing dehumanization by choosing to dehumanize ourselves. And dehumanization is the first step of any totalitarianism. Of any genocide. Of any specicide. Even our own.
If you use AI, I’ll do what I can to avoid talking to you. I have only a few years left in this life. There are moons to see, breaths to feel, and humans to listen to. For a while.
Soon, I’ll be gone. Looks like humans might be gone too. Killed by “just tools”, or rendered unknowable by Unthought. We had our day, I guess. It wasn’t all bad. At least for now I can enjoy the time of sunset with other people. Listening to my own heart. Still human after all these years.