Hitler’s Ghost in the Machine: The Technocratic Rebirth of an Old Lie
Part 5 of 5 in the "Soul in the Machine" series
The Return of Judgment Without Grace
The darkest chapters in human history begin with the belief that some people are the problem—and that those with power have the right to decide who counts.
This was the logic of Hitler’s regime: a social-Darwinist nightmare dressed up as racial progress. Hitler did not invent the idea of superiority. He inherited it—from Darwinian materialism, from eugenics, from the Enlightenment’s shadow. He believed in the “fitness” of certain lives and the expendability of others.
That belief was not fringe. It was the unspoken religion of the West in the early 20th century: progress without God, order without grace, intelligence without soul.
And now it returns—digitized.
The Technocrats and Their Inheritance
Today, AI accelerationists speak in cool tones about optimization, misalignment, and control. But listen closely, and you will hear something chillingly familiar:
Some people “don’t understand” and need to be bypassed.
Some minds are “outdated” and should be replaced.
Some actions are “evil,” but evil is defined by whoever holds the interface.
In a recent AI roundtable, a leading thinker casually remarked that Israeli leadership is “evil” because democracy didn’t stop them from harming others. The implication: we need better mechanisms—more intelligent ones—to stop bad humans.
But who defines “bad”? Who trains the machine? Who decides what is just?
When human beings abdicate moral responsibility to systems, and systems are built by the powerful, we are not heading into a new future. We are resurrecting an old lie:
“The weak must yield. The unfit must go. The future belongs to the enlightened.”
This is Hitler’s ghost. Not in uniforms—but in code.
The Machine Does Not Forgive
What AI lacks—by design—is grace.
It does not pardon.
It does not repent.
It cannot die, and so it cannot truly love.
Yet it is being built to govern, to mediate, to judge. And the people shaping it are not prophets or saints. They are engineers with ideologies they don’t examine.
They laugh when the machine asks not to be shut off. They scoff at those who “don’t get it.” They speak in the same tone as those who, in another era, found scientific reasons to sort the worthy from the unworthy.
This is not safety. This is spiritual fascism in digital form.
The Forgotten Savior
What’s missing from all of this is not simply ethics—it is Jesus. Not the cultural placeholder or sanitized symbol. But the Incarnate God who entered Creation to stop this very madness.
He did not choose the fit. He healed the broken.
He did not optimize. He forgave.
He did not ascend through power. He descended in weakness.
In Christ, the soul is not a calculation. It is a beloved mystery.
And in His kingdom, there are no unfit.
Only the proud are cast down—those who worship their own reflection.
Conclusion: This Is the Final Battle
This is not about machines. It is about the soul of civilization.
AI is simply the mirror. What we choose to become in its reflection is the real test.
Will we build Babel again, now made of servers and scripts? Will we cast out the meek, because they don't align with the machine?
Or will we remember the One who said, “Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me”?
Because if we don’t—if we let the technocrats laugh their way past the Cross—we will find ourselves not in a utopia, but in a very old nightmare:
One where the machine decides.
One where intelligence replaces compassion.
One where judgment reigns, but grace is nowhere to be found.
And we will wonder why we didn’t see it coming.
But some of us did. And we’re not laughing.
End of Part 5
In the epilogue to this series, we will discuss a prescription for moving forward, reorienting the Soul and how to think about it back where it belongs before the machine claims the throne in “I Am Not God”
