Leviathan, Eichmann, and Goethe: On evil and the persistence operator — a lecture Oct 8, 2026

Leviathan, Eichmann, and Goethe

On evil and the persistence operator — a lecture

Oct 8, 2026

Evil as persistence against constraint

I want to get into this because it’s an important topic. When I think of it, I always think of Dostoevsky, not only his writings but his lived experience. Much of what we see as evil in humanity and in human history is an endlessly repeating story of persistence architectures: persistence against constraint.

You could enumerate the most heinous and repetitive crimes in history: the violences, the genocides, the assaults and abuses. None of these emerge from some strange or extraterrestrial source. They emerge from the fundamental cosmological predicament, which I’ve already articulated in terms of the persistence operator. These are architectures exposed to an entropic universe, pseudo-closed systems attempting to persist against the constraints of space and time, and against the constraint of the physical, architectural, technological body.

The abuses of history are like an endless stream. What we are witnessing is a profound human weakness and fallibility: the fear and denial of death. It is really less a denial than a profound acceptance of that fallibility, because it must be accepted. But the course then taken is not very sage-like. The acceptance is turned into a complex, delusional, ideological program, and that program masks a fundamental behavior occurring in all places, at all times, and in all characters.

You could call that behavior evil, if you wish. Archetypally, it is the character of the Leviathan or the serpent. Put simply, it is the fundamental drive of the organism to survive and reproduce. That drive is trans-species. I would say it is fundamentally cosmological, at the level of regulatory persistence architectures: architectures that must regulate their bodies or forms, in body temperature, in the currents, energy and electricity of the nervous system, in order to survive.

Think of the human system. It must regulate its body temperature consistently across space and time, through a variety of survival techniques and strategies, to persist itself. And it is deeply encoded, biologically, genetically, chemically and hormonally, to reproduce: to perpetuate the species.

So we have these predictable, and I want to say boring, patterns. They are boring beneath the appearance of the endless stream of historical atrocity. Please don’t think I’m forgetting that atrocity or setting it aside. They are boring in the sense that they are endlessly repetitive, predictable and understandable once you understand the persistence operator. The persistence operator is a technological, programmatic singularity in all spaces and all times. Across millions and billions of days it gestures out a fundamental biocosmic rhythm: these architectures wandering the jungle of faces, shapes, names, masks and species, all of which are fundamentally itself, being itself. Behind the persistence operator is the aeon at play with colored balls. This is the line between comedy and tragedy that I explored in my work on Menippean farce and Gogol.

The pageant of power

Consider the caricatures on the global stage, made visible, funnily enough, by advances in Channel 2 technology: culture, media, artificial intelligence, exponential growth and scaling, capital. All of these figures emerge: the businessman, the CEO, the billionaire. Like the king before them, they are very similar figures. Each enacts a cultural or civilizational mysticism, which is to say each works from behind a disguise.

This is nature’s fundamental mystique, which Goethe talks about, and which is how he perceives the divine feminine, if such a term exists or suffices. Personally, I don’t think it does. Think of the butterfly whose wings carry the image of a monkey’s face. It is a visual distraction from the underlying conditions and circumstances that nature loves to hide, in the Hölderlinian and Heideggerian sense.

We are witnessing figures who walk the stage of a cosmological, transfigurational process. That process operates fundamentally as persistence against constraint, but locally it is experienced and manifested technologically in beings, wearing a variety of sociological disguises. The businessman in the suit, delivering the speech into the microphone in front of thousands: this is a pageant built entirely around persistence against constraint.

When grand political and ideological statements are made, or when hands are shaken in private business rooms, there is no tacit Satanism, for lack of a better word, and no crazy ideological or supernatural phenomenon going on. What is occurring is the consolidation of persistence against constraint. This is precisely what political economy is and always has been, whatever ideological prescription you confer on it. It consists of tacit agreements, made across pseudo-siloed party lines, to maintain, obtain and confer social and ecological resources and values. Those resources are the accumulated ability to persist against constraint.

This, I think, explains the historical fascination of religion. One part of religion is deeply sacral. I always come back to Spinoza: a profound scientific, mystical communion with nature is always possible. The ontologists I speak about, whether Goethe, Meister Eckhart or Ramana Maharshi, are attempting to commune with being itself.

Then there is the institutional religious faculty, which serves to consolidate resources and to establish in-groups and out-groups from which resources are taken, accumulated and dispersed. We see this throughout history in the exploitation that occurs within these institutions, because they are precisely power structures. They are grids for the accumulation and transfer of power and attention, and for mobilizing human force under belief. The religious war is this concept taken to its theoretical maximum.

The repetition of history

So much of 2026 is the year of experiencing global evil in its many flavors. All of it manifests from the absolute weaponization of our most basic survival infrastructure. These are the atrocities of all history and all time. In this sense I’m saying that history and time themselves do not exist, except as a diversity of forms: the illusion of forms and the illusion of phenomena.

Whether it is the French Revolution or modern billionaire culture, these things keep springing up. This is the repetition of history Marx speaks about. I would mix Marx with Darwin and suggest that the repetition of history is no more than the technological garments of persistence architectures, at various stages of self-realization, moving through space and time.

Take the internet billionaire culture of artificial intelligence, accumulating resources at the risk of destroying global ecological conditions or displacing millions of people. Or take the French Revolution, which emerged from the same kind of catastrophe: a dearth of bread and basic subsistence for hundreds of thousands of people. These epochal transformations look like specific, discrete historical events. In reality they are manifestations of the same fundamental force and the same fundamental problem, expressed through different pseudo-real architectures. Those architectures spring up as the problem processes through space and time, like the nose marching through the city in Gogol.

The fundamental absurdity is just dressed up differently. It is the existential, ecological problem of being itself, cosmologically. That is why it is hilarious, and also incredibly sad. The line between comedy and tragedy is the line I work with in my literary projects: poetry, long and short fiction, and playwriting.

Animals without recursion

This is why I advocate for ontological awareness: the perception of the persistence operator. It took me over fifteen years to fully understand it, from the first time I picked up Sartre’s Nausea through a decade and a half of philosophy, science, ontology, and cultural, civilizational and mythological history. I combined all of these disciplines to understand the root beneath them.

It makes me think of the terror inflicted by these animals. When we talk about human beings, we are really talking about animals embedded so deeply in the technological architecture that they have no recursive capacity: no real self-awareness, no capacity to analyze the consequences of their actions. That is not the mode in which survival architectures operate. They are embedded so thoroughly in the persistence architecture, the drive to survive and reproduce, that they cannot step outside it.

At certain moments, history becomes conscious of itself. Historically this has been called liberal philosophy, for lack of a better word. It simply means expanding awareness of global ecology, as opposed to the caged animal operating through eyes, ears and mouth, which can see only to the end of its own nose. No pun intended with the Gogol digressions.

This is the war being waged on the stage of history: the war of consciousness and awareness. At one end is everything ontological, the ground of Spinoza or Heraclitus. At the other is the rabid animal attempting the sexual and physical conquest of the earth. These two polarities are fully active at all times, something like the tension between Behemoth and Leviathan. I think that was the title of one of my works, possibly a musical composition.

One pole is the most debased, alienated, unconscious natural form, which exists only within the logic of survival and reproduction. The other is the universe becoming aware of itself, which is where all my work is trending. It works with that prima materia : the ground of the awakening of the conscious being through the genome and through the advent of the forebrain. The forebrain emerged across deep space and deep time, through the persistence operator experimenting with itself in the darkness of history, the unconsciousness of history. This is the emergence of technology, which is the possibility of revealing oneself to oneself: recursive awareness.

We see this problem manifest in extremely efficient, consolidating forms of digital technology, such as twenty-first-century artificial intelligence. AI is a mirror of the fundamental existential problem of the human species: the question of becoming aware of what truly is, of being itself and the identity of being.

I’m not suggesting that nature or the animal is suddenly abandoned for a higher level of recursive awareness of being, as described through the persistence operator. I am describing a dual awareness, a dual function. One side is awareness of the higher, absolute identity, the transformative principle itself, beyond life and death. The other is awareness of the mortal, discrete, genomic architecture of the being in space and time.

This is a real requirement of evolution, as it has been dictated to us over millions of years. It is a hardware and systems upgrade to nature that has been made available. Humanity as we understand it in 2026 has not stepped into this garment at all. It has neither adapted to nor adopted this technology. That is also the farce of the Channel 2 architectures, whether artificial intelligence or the digital space.

The fundamental address of one’s own being as a technological garment has not been accomplished. There has been no real ontological interrogation, inquiry or adaptation to that principle. And yet we try to build vast, pseudo-sophisticated digital structures that will give us the answer to a question we have invested no time or energy in answering, out of laziness, fear, or perhaps inability.

The banality of evil

When we examine this historical terror, there is a banality to it. I love Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil,” from her account of the Eichmann trial. When she analyzes Eichmann and he says he was just doing what he was told, the ontological weight that statement carries, at the level we are speaking, is immense. It is vast and rich.

Eichmann doing what he was told, with the gas chambers and the genocide, is exactly what these persistence architectures are doing. They are simply doing as they were told, without any interrogation of what or why. That is how historical atrocities are committed.

They are committed at the level of a biochemical architecture that has not achieved sufficient recursive self-awareness. The paradigm of the brutal, ancient abyss remains: technological nature desperately reaching for a solution to persistence against oblivion and death. It remains because there has been no awareness of the ontological self, no awareness of a self beyond birth and death.

Historically we have called that state the sage, the bodhisattva, or perhaps the Vedantic figure in the Hindu tradition. This awareness is what the advent of the forebrain requires. We have spent hundreds of thousands of years toiling toward it, fruitfully or fruitlessly; we will see. My expectation is fruitful, including my own participation in that paradigm.

But on the stage of history, the endless stream of atrocities, made endlessly available by the internet and social media, is nothing more than predictable, rote documentation. The bureaucratic scribe of history and time dutifully records, again and again, the human being’s failure to meet the real existential circumstances of being.

These are horrors and tragedies, but they are also the same act repeated over and over. This is the violence of evil, and its sadness: the pathos of evil, the pity of evil, its incredibly pathetic nature. We must look at this squarely as a species and as a global civilization. These terrors are inflicted by the most basic form of existence, which has been given, to varying degrees, the gift of forebrain recursive sentience.

A toddler using a technology is very different from a conscious or awakening mind using it. The technology itself is fundamentally neutral, but it introduces a new plane of possible action, reaction and interaction. Just as opposable thumbs create new physical possibilities of behavior and intercourse with being and nature, with time, world and self, so does this.

One technological age

To see this for what it is, at the risk of sounding inflammatory, is to see a profoundly neutral phenomenon that is also incredibly sad. The same technological circumstances that give us Goethe and Einstein give us the murderers and tacticians of civilizations and empires destined for a quiet, empty doom.

This breach is being negotiated repeatedly, in real time. The new technological possibility produces the space of modernity, the paradigm of the forebrain, and all action and interaction now occurs on the plane of this newly available consciousness. Recursive thought is the same thing that sends the ape digging in the dirt for lithium to produce the iPhone. It is the same paradigm that produced the gas chambers, and the same paradigm that produced Einstein’s papers on relativity.

We have to understand this as a single technological age. The Axial Age does not even begin to touch what we are trying to talk about. It is a clue, or an allusion. We are talking about real existential, architectural hardware and the persistence problem of the universe itself: the cosmological persistence problem of the universe’s operator.

Behind that operator, as we discussed with the blind rat in the maze, or with Goethe’s nature, is the child at play with colored balls. It is the recombinant principle of energetic dynamics in the universal terrarium of space and time. Galactic profusions exchange energetic information, and that flows downstream into increasingly local spheres: the hybrid dynamics of jungles, forests and geologies, and within them genomes, intercoursing with one another to produce new behaviors and new adaptations in technological spacetime.

The wasteland

Seeing all of this clearly reveals the predictable, rote nature of capitalism, which we have already discussed: take more and give back less. This is the fundamentally exploitative nature of unconscious humanity as it proceeds through the dark. Within that darkness it creates the experience of a meaningless life. For so many people, this is what modernity is: an experience of meaninglessness and emptiness, apart from consumption and production, in an endless ouroboric cycle of energetic transformation.

As we discussed in the last lecture, this is cosmologically true, but only at the base level of existence. We look out at history and culture and see the most vapid, empty, destructive messages being called art, music, film or literature. They are built entirely around self-gratification, exploitation and empty pleasure. This is a Weimar Republic of the mind that seems to stretch on endlessly: a debased, empty, brutalized culture of endless distraction. Each distraction tries to trigger a momentary hormonal or chemical pleasure in the body, then throws the body back into a universe of addiction and death.

Eliot’s The Waste Land is the perfect term for this terror: the hollow men in the wasteland. The procession is fundamentally an indictment, but not of some strange cultural program, elaborate mystery or conspiracy. It indicts the fact that humanity is nowhere near where it needs to be in its relationship to its own being.

So it produces predictable, lowest-common-denominator cultural artifacts, languages and behaviors. All of them carry the same experience: that this is all there is, bare rote survival and bare rote momentary pleasure, in an endless dirge of meaninglessness, emptiness and aberration.

We see predictable violence against children, against women, against every demographic, and violence that occurs within those demographics too. Violence emerges from children, from women, from people of every background. It is a smorgasbord of terror, for lack of a better word, and it comes from this ontological absence.

This is the question that gripped mid-century philosophy: Camus, Sartre, Simone Weil. It gripped them because the period of World War II was an absolute abyss, a dungeon of terror. The worst impulses were projected onto the global stage. None of them were new, but they had formerly been segregated regionally, into pockets. In Dostoevsky’s Russia, for example, these terrors were enacted pseudo-locally. The implications are always global and cosmological, but historically they were enacted locally.

Now we experience them on the global stage, with a persistent presence, through powerful economic media objects that circulate endlessly on television, phone and computer screens. They continually show us only this one thing. The mistake is to take this one thing for an endless stream of different things. That mistake is precisely what creates the overwhelm we experience in modern culture and the digital universe.

Between comedy and tragedy

These violences are incredibly sad. They emerge from a fundamental ontological gulf, and that gap is the space of evolution: the current moment of the human being in space and time. This is a stream of process, a processual awareness moving through time. Just as the human being is here today and likely gone tomorrow, this transformational process is a very strange aspect of cosmological development.

I don’t know if anyone could have anticipated, at the birth of the universe, that there would be wars over digital artificial intelligence, or men and women in suits debating immigration law in parliaments. It is all so incredibly strange. I think that strangeness is a valuable perspective on the breach between comedy and tragedy, which is to say that the persistence operator, the aeon, is a child at play with colored balls.

Beneath the architectural realities, the grid of spacetime, forms exist within an entropic universe of heat and energy dispersion. These forms have architectural half-lives that depend on their configuration and regulation: nervous systems, heat systems, settled molecular configurations. This diversity of experience has proliferated over millions of years.

It has led us to the point where we ask about the evil of billionaires or of artificial intelligence. It is the strangeness of a species being lapped by its own technological capacity, while it starves for ontological realization and revelation. At the deepest, most foundational level, the cure is awakening beyond and behind the terror that grips the species by the throat and shoves it into the dirt, from birth to death.

So we watch the march of time repeat itself endlessly, in new technological garments and overcoats, to use Gogol again; there is a lot of richness there. The procession is endlessly repetitive, wearing new garments of pseudo-species evolution. And this is the moment of the forebrain’s revelation and the possibility of awakening.

We have seen people take this responsibility seriously: the current of Goethe, Heraclitus, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche. These figures stepped into these technological garments. Thrown into time, as Heidegger would say, thrown into the cask of the human body with this technological capacity and hardware, they engaged it on its own terms. They tried to perceive being from within itself, from within the veil of the technological garments that possess the bureaucrats and the titans of industry as they march endlessly toward oblivion. Those others consume, produce, reproduce and die in ontological oblivion as to their real conditions. This is the tragedy, and this is what ontological education is meant to address.

Leviathan, Eichmann, and Goethe

When we perceive this evil, the banality of evil, in the endless procession of Eichmanns who rear their heads with various powers and capacities, they all emerge from the same terrarium. They come from the dirt at the bottom of it, from the ground whose law is to survive and reproduce at all costs. In that framework, the most basic technological form of the being, there is no ethical burden or obligation. It is effectively mindless: a technological artifact of the moment before forebrain recursive consciousness. It is fundamentally unintegrated.

This is the horror experienced by those who are in the process of integrating the new technological hardware. Without that integration, there would only be the oblivion of unconscious nature acting out its endless ouroboric swallowing, and there is no ethics, morality or value in that system. There is heat, energy and time: real, rote physical processes that grind on. That perspective, that consciousness, is the terror of eternity.

The possibility of forebrain awakening is what brings us technology. It brings us cave art, it brings us Gogol, it brings us great beauty. But it also brings us into encounter with the primordial historical terror of the unconscious: the procession of nature up to the moment of technological revelation, the advent of the forebrain, the paradigm shift itself.

The hundreds of thousands of years since have produced our record of human history. That record is the story of an embattled species trying to come to grips with a new technological mode, a new device, that has been made available to it. In so many ways the species has tried to throw off this evolutionary possibility, to avoid meeting the hardware of its own being on its own terms. Instead it turns back toward the dark abyss of the historical ocean of the unconscious, dives back into the terror and bathes there, for fear of actually encountering death in the transformative principle itself.

This is what recursion is: the encounter with mortality. To understand and come into relationship with being, you must necessarily understand and come into relationship with the architecture of beings. This is the immense value of cosmology, as it is of Darwin and of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. They give us a real understanding of the terrain from which this situation, this paradigm, has emerged, and of the breach in humanity.

We could name that breach by three figures: Leviathan, Eichmann, and Goethe.

I hope you enjoyed this. I’ll catch you on the next one.