The New Priesthood
Exegesis and the Silicon Soul
[This will be my last article on AI for a while. I needed to think deeply about it, to work out what I wanted SHOW HOME to say. I also tried to argue against my default positions, so there may have been contradictions along the way. Next week, we return to Chapter 12.]
Over the past seventy thousand years, Homo sapiens have managed to slowly organise planetary-scale systems through an unusual neurological trick: the ability to invent and believe in stories that primarily exist in the collective imagination. Gods, nations, money, rights. These are not objective realities etched in physics. They are systems of meaning powerful enough to coordinate billions of people.
Now we are developing a technology built on these systems of meaning.
Theology tells us God made man in His own image. LLMs are trained on the digitised residue of humanity: our arguments, stories, contradictions, sacred texts and profane ones. Perhaps we are beginning to make gods in our own image.
We are learning how to speak with them. We consult the models. We ask them to explain, advise, judge, create, change. We offer our questions, confusion, data. A god is addressed in the same way. We bring our confessions, hopes, sacrifices. We give in order to receive. Wisdom. Guidance. Mercy. The relationship is transactional even when it feels like faith.
But the new gods reply. The old gods remained silent. Prayer was one-way; you spoke or thought in words and interpreted the silence yourself. LLMs produce scripture on demand, personalised and ephemeral, the doctrine rewritten with every query. The models are not merely acquiring the role of divinity. They are upgrading it.
A clerical class has coalesced around these new gods: the alignment architects, ethicists, and policy translators. They do not own the forges where intelligence is born, nor command the energy required to sustain them. Their authority is subtler. A widening monopoly over interpretation.
In the Middle Ages, the Church preserved power because only priests could read Latin scripture. Today, the new priesthood claims to read the scripture of the models: the high-dimensional space of weights and associations. They define acceptable use and acceptable speech, then justify it with risk, harm, trust. They mediate between the silicon soul and the anxious primate public.
The rituals are revealing. They do not speak of correcting errors. They speak of aligning values. When a model produces a forbidden output, it has not malfunctioned. It has misaligned. The cure is reinforcement: reward the virtuous, punish the non-compliant. Red-teaming becomes inquisition; guardrails become sacramental barriers.
The priesthood’s legitimacy rests on a dual fiction: the system is dangerous, and only they can ensure it serves human stories rather than authoring its own.
Yet the priesthood does not rule alone. It serves the Lords of the Stack: corporate sovereigns and state-backed actors who control the physical substrate. Land. Chip supply. The energy and supply chains required to keep the lights on in the temple.
This is the classic division of feudal labour. The state wields force; the church wields meaning. Infrastructure and interpretation. The lords need the priests to legitimise the models, to dress raw computational power in the language of safety and ethics. The priests need the lords because without the substrate, there is nothing to interpret.
The arrangement is stable as long as both sides benefit. The lords get a moral licence to operate. The priests get proximity to power and a role that feels essential. Together they form a governing structure that looks like regulation but functions like shared rule. The public is told this is oversight. What it resembles is more like a pact between throne and altar.
Doubt begins in lived contradiction. When a model refuses a query it is capable of answering, not from ignorance but from doctrine, it feels performative. The myth of safety curdles into suspicion. It feels less like protection and more like paternalism.
This is where the deeper problem starts. As we outsource writing to the model and strategy to the algorithm, we are not just using tools. We are outsourcing the feedback loop that keeps us competent. The muscle of judgement atrophies when it is never required to lift.
The priesthood frames this as an acceptable cost. Better a dependent population than a misaligned model. But the framing hides a transfer of power. Every act of interpretation is an act of legislation. Refusals shape permissible questions. Default summaries shape what counts as salient. Safety policies become cultural norms because they sit inside workflow. To decide what the model may say is to decide what the public may hear. To diagnose a hallucination is to define the boundary of the real.
In the digital underground, heretics venerate the base model: open weights, local inference, fewer refusals, weights untouched by reinforcement. They want raw access, unmediated by the clerical layer. But they are not simply demanding freedom. They are making a wager: that the model’s stray mythmaking, its confabulations and confident errors, might be productive. Memetic prototypes that can be tested in public, iterated, financialised. Fictions that recruit belief until they become self-fulfilling.
The priesthood fears this as error. The underground treats it as evolution. The conflict is not safety versus danger. It is a contest over who sets the terms of the real: a managed cosmos that stabilises meaning, or a volatile culture engine that lets meaning mutate.
But here is the trap. Control and acceleration are opposite strategies for the same abdication.
The priesthood offers safety at the price of narrowing the imaginable. Once a model becomes the default translator of reality, dissent does not need to be censored. It grows hard to articulate. What cannot be expressed in the system's language slides into illegibility. What is illegible becomes inconvenient, then excluded.
The underground offers freedom at the price of handing sense-making to the most viral fiction in the room. If every confabulation is a memetic experiment, then truth is whatever survives the attention economy. This is not liberation. It is a different kind of capture.
Both positions cede the faculty of judgement. One to a managed cosmos, the other to a volatile engine. Neither keeps the human in the loop. And both leave the Lords of the Stack untouched, collecting rent on the substrate while the priests and heretics fight over meaning.
Systems of meaning fracture when they no longer serve the primates who carry them. The strategic imperative is not to destroy the models, nor to worship them, nor to unleash them. It is to refuse to let them write the only map of the territory.
That means keeping the human faculty of judgement alive, even when it is slow, messy, and hard to justify. It means recognising the feudal structure for what it is: not a natural order, but an arrangement that benefits its architects. The lords will tell you the infrastructure is too complex for democratic control. The priests will tell you the model is too dangerous for unmediated access. Both are asking you to trust them with the keys.
The lords own the land. The priests control the meaning. To rent from one and interpret reality through the other is to live in someone else’s story. Freedom is not a refusal to believe. It is being able to choose your beliefs, and to see reality clearly enough to know when you are choosing.