Meet Marvin. Marvin is a man, but perhaps more truly a boy. He may or may not work in tech, but, whatever the case, he’s inordinately excited about AI. He lacks spiritual or artistic commitments. Marvin is an atheist, which, given his enthusiasm for AI, makes sense—if you’re trying to “build God,” you probably don’t think God exists.
His social circle is almost entirely online and male, with only the occasional female fellow traveler. Unlike other AI superfans who are merely caught up in the hype, Marvin’s worship of artificial intelligence is an extension of his worship of intelligence (or of what he imagines to be intelligence). He is a curious specimen of dork. For all these reasons, his AI idolatry has led him down a dark path, making him a natural bedfellow of other unseemly guests in the mansion of Western civilization, IQ racism and eugenics being perhaps the most recognizable.
Marvin doesn’t actually exist; he is an amalgam of people who form an intelligence cult we see rising up among us. He’s a composite of tech titans (or their overly enthusiastic fans), online outrage bait-posting “chuds,” and other people with too much time on their hands. We would do well to analyze the underlying presumptions of this intelligence cult and see how perfectly those presumptions correlate with the most violent and destructive forces humanity has yet managed to unleash.
Most people intuitively affirm that it’s better to be good than it is to be smart. Intelligence is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Intelligence is an instrument. Seen in this light, AI worship is the worship of instrumentality. It is the worship of being able to do more things, with no real moral position on what things ought or ought not to be done. It is as though one were to proclaim forks the supreme value, dismiss the nutritional significance of food as worthy of consideration, and then attempt to annihilate chopsticks and sandwiches. For instance, mere technical capacity is valued above creativity–artistic talent doesn’t correlate particularly well with IQ. As Cormac McCarthy had a character point out in Stella Maris, a person can be a certified musical genius and test in the 80s on an IQ test. There’s a significant difference between imagination and the kind of intelligence tested by IQ tests or the kind of pseudo-intelligence manifested by AI, which indicates there’s something missing in our picture of human capacities. But the intelligence cultists aren’t interested in what that is.
The “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” of the tech billionaire and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is a good example of this ideology. Andreessen writes:
We believe we are poised for an intelligence takeoff that will expand our capabilities to unimagined heights. We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone – we are literally making sand think. … We believe we should place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop, and drive them both to infinity.
This might sound superficially appealing, until you remember that intelligence is a tool and a tool needs to be used for something. The question looms: “For what?”
If you read Andreessen’s own statements, he’s excited at the idea that artificial intelligence could replace nearly all human professions. The one thing he thinks AI won’t replace? Venture capital. In an interview, he explained, “It’s possible that that [venture capital] is quite literally timeless, and when the AIs are doing everything else, that may be one of the last fields that people are really doing.”
His job, curiously, will be safe.
Andreessen has been drawing on the writings of Nick Land, a former amphetamine psychotic and British academic recently anointed a guiding sage of the tech right by Andreessen and others of his ilk. In fact, Andreessen directly cites Land in the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” In his essay, “Against Orthogonality,” (since removed from the internet but quoted in secondary sources), Land adds a patina of philosophical justification to Andreessen’s perspective:
Any intelligence using itself to improve itself will out-compete one that directs itself towards any other goals whatsoever. This means that Intelligence Optimization, alone, attains cybernetic consistency, or closure, and that it will necessarily be strongly selected for in any competitive environment.
Beneath this verbiage, you can find an infinite justification for any form of evil. Land is saying that the goal of artificial intelligence should be simply to self-correct and improve (cybernetic feedback) but without having any moral goal, or idea of the good, towards which it is self-correcting and improving. It’s just trying to become efficient to the maximum. By jawing about cybernetics, Land cleverly finds a way of not making this explicit, but he actively roots for artificial intelligence to annihilate and replace human beings. His vision of technological acceleration ensures, by his own account in his 1994 essay “Meltdown,” that “nothing human makes it out of the near future.”
This would be edgy yet ineffectual grad school hogwash if it didn’t have the ear of so many influential people in tech. Andreessen openly endorses Land, Elon Musk interacts with him favorably on X, and Peter Thiel’s contempt for forces that stand in the way of unfettered technological acceleration (like the pope) jibes with Landian thought.
AI’s votaries generally aren’t honest enough to admit to their actual goals, to what they plan to do with intelligence. I doubt Land’s supporters and fellow travelers are quite as nihilistic as he is, given that they probably don’t want to be annihilated by artificial intelligence themselves. This is either because they don’t know what they plan to do with it, and driving intelligence to infinity just sounds good, or because they plan to use intelligence for base purposes (money, power, sex). I’d bank on the latter. Whatever the case, given the flood of slop they’ve unleashed, they’re not using intelligence for the pursuit of the Beautiful, the True, and the Good.
C.S. Lewis critiqued this attitude luminously in The Abolition of Man:
If we compare the chief trumpeter of the new era [Francis Bacon] with Marlowe’s Faustus, the similarity is striking. You will read in some critics that Faustus has a thirst for knowledge. In reality, he hardly mentions it. It is not truth he wants from the devils, but gold and guns and girls.… The true object is to extend Man’s power to the performance of all things possible. He rejects magic because it does not work; but his goal is that of the magician.… It might be going too far to say that the modern scientific movement was tainted from its birth: but I think it would be true to say that it was born in an unhealthy neighbourhood and at an inauspicious hour. Its triumphs may have been too rapid and purchased at too high a price: reconsideration, and something like repentance, may be required.
Yet reconsideration and repentance seem highly unlikely from the members of the intelligence cult. Like the legendary Dr. Faustus, who sold his soul for profane knowledge, and Francis Bacon, the intelligence cult sees a world in which there are no moral problems, only technical ones. Bacon was one of the originators of the scientific method, but his vision of progress, as demonstrated in his novel New Atlantis, is disturbingly devoid of morality and amounts to reducing the world to a state of pure plasticity, ready to be manipulated by those who wield power over it. There is no need to be good or to make any moral effort, only the imperative to extend cleverness ever further. The goal isn’t even to understand reality so much as to render it malleable. Understanding reality is simply a means to manipulate it and would, in the intelligence cult’s view, be counterproductive if it departed from this more practical goal.
The intelligence cult fetishizes utility and efficiency but in the ultimate service of Nothing (one feels moved to capitalize the word, as in The Neverending Story). It is serving and servicing the largest, most self-evidently vacant Nothing humanity has perhaps yet conceived. In the process, the intelligence cult is leaving a comically blatant record of its hubris. As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told the Financial Times in May of 2025:
Right now, people [say] “you have this research lab, you have this API [software], you have the partnership with Microsoft, you have this ChatGPT thing, now there is a GPT store.” But those aren’t really our products. Those are channels into our one single product, which is intelligence, magic intelligence in the sky. I think that’s what we’re about.
Altman is gesturing at the development of a godlike intelligence, the metaphor for which is constantly thrown around in discussions of AI both by its proponents and its critics. It is something the pope pointedly addressed in his recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, condemning those who aim to develop artificial intelligence into a new Tower of Babel—that is, a creation meant to propel humans to the heavens, without any input from God.
But the intelligence cult has ambitions beyond simply promoting runaway artificial intelligence, and it extends beyond people who work in AI. Consider Richard Hanania. He’s a fairly influential writer at this point, winning plaudits from J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and many others, despite Hanania’s past writing for white supremacist websites. Yet Hanania is forthrightly a eugenicist who thinks people with Down syndrome should be extirpated from the gene pool. He routinely issues tweets like this one from November: “It’s genuinely bizarre to think that making a baby without a mother is crueler than making a child with a low IQ. And yet we let low IQ people have kids. We even let people give birth to Down’s syndrome babies. Anti-surrogacy cannot be justified.” If this leaves any ambiguity about his attitude toward people with Down syndrome, here’s another tweet: “Down syndrome is the one disease where the relatives of the people with the disease go around advocating more people have it. It’s a uniquely sick thing.”
A good acid test for moral character is how a person reacts when encountering people with mental disabilities— and it seems that many members of the intelligence cult have a dramatically negative reaction. They hearken back to the robotic utilitarianism of the philosopher Peter Singer, who supports the right of people to murder a baby with Down syndrome shortly after birth and to involuntarily euthanize a parent with Alzheimer’s disease. Their views are also reminiscent of the deceased Harvard bioethicist Joseph Fletcher—a former Episcopalian priest who renounced his belief in God only to become obsessively focused on eugenically purifying the population. He was known for making Hananian pronouncements like the following from an article in The Atlantic in 1968: “People [with children with Down’s syndrome]... have no reason to feel guilty about putting a Down’s syndrome baby away, whether it's ‘put away’ in the sense of hidden in a sanitarium or in a more responsible lethal sense. It is sad; yes. Dreadful. But it carries no guilt. True guilt arises only from an offense against a person, and a Down’s is not a person."
This is either a conclusion drawn from a distinctly non-Abrahamic ethics (the quasi-pagan ethics of the intelligence cult) or a rancid, emotional reaction dressed up as a “rational” argument. And I find it hard to imagine having that reaction, as I imagine most people would. Hanging out with people with Down syndrome tends to make me happy. The idea of seeing someone with Down syndrome and having one’s first thought be, “This person should be dead,” is, to put it way too charitably, curious.
Where does that reaction come from? It seems different from contempt for the uncomprehending masses, the nerd’s anger at oblivious normies. Is it just some innate cast of mind—a judgmental, left-brained, highly categorical, and anti-compassionate way of thinking? This does seem to be more plausible: They have a blindness, a lack of sensitivity to other forms of value. Or is it that they can see these forms of value, but they discount them?
What is grimly hilarious about these people is their pretense to be operating on a plane of utterly disinterested rationality. One would have to have an especially tin ear not to detect the seething contempt underlying Fletcher’s or Hanania’s comments on the mentally disabled. The terminally left-brained seem prone to this kind of thinking. For example, the physicist William Shockley argued that the government should offer $1,000 per subtracted IQ point to anyone with an IQ below 100 who decided to self-sterilize. The Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, one of the originators of molecular biology and quantum chemistry, argued that people with heritable diseases and health conditions should be forced to have an identifying mark tattooed on their foreheads. The warped logic of the intelligence cult leads ineluctably in the direction of eugenics, mass sterilization, and even mass murder.
They claim to approach the human being in the exact same way they would approach a computer: as a technical problem.
The intelligence cult is highly active online and is routinely reposted by some of the richest and most influential people in our society. In addition to Hanania, you can consult some of the intelligence cult’s other favorite posters like Hunter Ash (85,800 followers) and Roko Mijic (25,900 followers), who traffic in eugenic racism. Ash is notable for posts like the following from May of 2025: “[W]e could close racial disparities between US blacks and whites in three generations by preventing the bottom 25% of the overall population from breeding. Eugenics is the real solution to racism.”
Mijic also posts racist garbage in wildly abundant profusion: “The race-IQ debate is a great example of how it doesn’t matter what’s true if the machine that delivers the message to people is lying,” he wrote on Twitter on April 4. “Black people are literally descended from nonhuman archaic hominids. Nobody cares. The average member of the public thinks that humans are like cars: different paint job, same model, same internals. They really think that skin color is an aesthetic add-on to a basic human chasis [sic].”
To Ash and Mijic, human beings are only tools—tools that can be more and less effective than each other. They claim to approach the human being in the exact same way they would approach a computer: as a technical problem. This in and of itself would be bad enough, yet there is a clear racist glee in their pronouncements, self-evident malice aforethought. These aren’t people coolly purveying unwelcome “facts.”
You might argue that it’s wrong to tag the members of the intelligence cult with the same label. “Not everyone is a eugenicist and racist, some of them just love artificial intelligence, etc.” That’s true enough, I suppose. Yet they occupy the same ecosystem online, share the same channels of influence, and, most importantly, think in the same blinkered ways.
The intelligence cult, I’m confident, represents a small minority in the United States. Ironically, considering its contempt for the mentally disabled, there’s a certain congenital cognitive limitation to its point of view, one shared by only a fraction of the population. Of course, the cult’s members see this as a sign of their own superiority. Their popularity, ultimately, is being enabled by only a handful of people. Were the support of these tech titans to be withdrawn, they would crumble into irrelevance.
Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas encyclical seems to be the most important counterstrike thus far in this war of ideas. The reaction of the public has been heartening: We understand that it is not mere reason, mere computation, that makes our lives happy or unhappy. And we can reasonably assume that the people who are obsessed with those things are woefully unaware of their own inner lives and of the dark passions that truly animate them. The intelligence cult, quite tellingly, has nothing whatsoever to say about love.
Sam Buntz is a writer based in Chicago. His work has appeared in First Things, The Critic, and Real Clear Books, and he also has written a novel, The God of Smoke and Mirrors, available on Amazon.
