Choose Your Faction (AI-Generated Images)
New faiths, ideologies, and factions are emerging.
Quantum Spiritualist
Isn’t she cool ? I’d like to have her in my faction.
21st-Century Progressive Feudalism
This man is ready to handle all the challenges of the next century.
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The Pax Americana is ending.
A new world is beginning.
New faiths, ideologies, and factions are emerging.
New conflicts are erupting. The old system can no longer satisfy all of its key supporters.
Many of them now believe that they must fight, or die, or lose. They are correct.
To survive and thrive in such a time, one must choose a faction.
Perhaps more than one faction - some factions are compatible, some are not.
I recently embarked on an interesting experiment: To use AI to generate images of various major faiths, ideologies, and factions.
I also threw in some potential future ones.
While writing, I found myself inspired to add my own thoughts and commentary. I hope you enjoy this article and find it interesting.
Let’s take a look at some of the challengers to the established order:
21st-Century Chinese Communist
Against the Western vision of radical individualism and financial feudalism, the Chinese have opted for an explicitly collective approach to the world.
The West says that strength comes from the individual.
China says that strength comes from the collective.
Both strategies have good and bad aspects.
Both have a point.
Russian Orthodox Church
The Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) has declared that the war in Ukraine is a holy war to defend Russia and the world from the onslaught of globalism and the victory of the West, which has fallen into Satanism.
Source:
Personal impression: Russian Orthodoxy has this intense, dark, earthy feel to it. Like sinking into the soil and moss of a forest floor.
Islam
Islam has a long and separate history from the West. It does not think highly of individual freedom (in fact, most traditions do not, for reasons that are becoming increasingly obvious…).
It also has little interest in understanding the world by itself, on its own terms (as opposed to Christianity, which viewed the world as the legible result of the Mind of God, leading to the emergence of the new faith of Science). The world is the Will of Allah, and Allah is ineffable. There is therefore little point in studying the world. It is much better to study the Will of Allah, as revealed by the Prophet Mohammed in the Koran, and submit to it. Islam means “Submission”.
But its strengths are obvious. Incredible small-scale social cohesion and trust, strong marriages, spiritual fulfillment and certainty, and an ability to bear terrible conditions and still fight.
Islam is a faith for warbands, for warriors ready to fight their way to the ends of the earth.
21-Century Progressive
The established order in the West likes to be cynical. Its prominent followers really don’t want to follow through on their professed beliefs. They say that climate change is important, and continue to invest in oil companies. They say that equality is important, and reduce their fellow citizens to gig economy workers.
But 21st-century progressives take their belief system and go all the way. They are true believers. They are as committed to their faith as Christians or Muslims, and will make sacrifices on its behalf.
In a time of increasing chaos, they may yet displace their cynical elders and take their place at the top.
MAGA Patriot
This faction is the inverse of the 21st-Century Progressive. It rejects the established order entirely and seeks to return to the life and values of Conservative Cold War America.
Personal view: Unfortunately, that time has passed. Cold War America existed under certain conditions, which no longer hold. Better to think hard about how to head into the future. The future is coming, whatever you do. The past is relevant, but it is dead.
Related: The golden age of the 90s, to which many in the West wish to return, was very temporary. The West had won the Cold War and now had unparalleled power over the entire planet. Which it then taxed. So there was an enormous inflow of resources / energy to the average Westerner. Now we’re back to normal, and it feels bad. In fact, it’s much worse than normal, because all the community-based skills for living on fewer resources have been abandoned and lost.
Bitcoin Maximalist
The new kid on the block.
This faction follows the teachings of the Prophet Satoshi Nakamoto, who released the first version of the blockchain network Bitcoin in 2009.
They believe that Bitcoin is a digital gold, and that it is the only escape from the endless money printing of an established order that is out of new ideas.
Personal view:
They are correct. Bitcoin is a digital gold. The established order is printing infinite money. Storing Bitcoin is an escape from infinite inflation.
However, man does not live by bread alone. Money, however hard, is not a basis for trust.
In any future in which Bitcoin becomes worth more than a million dollars per coin, the Bitcoin faction will be riven by rival gangs raiding each other’s expensive homes in search of private keys.
So: The problem for a Bitcoin faction member immediately becomes: How can I trust another man not to betray me ?
Trust comes from a common faith, a common relationship to the Universe in its Divine Aspect, and common sacrifices made to it. Sacrifices are honest signals, which cost something, so that they cannot be easily faked.
Without trust, we live in a Prisoner’s Dilemma, waiting for the other man to betray us when his interests supersede ours.
This is why man is fundamentally religious, and always will be.
Without religion (which means “re-binding”, the act of re-binding a community together through public rituals of sacrifices and worship), we cannot trust each other.
Christian
The faith that conquered the world.
The whole planet measures its dates in years since the birth of Jesus, the Christ.
Its believers say that it is unlike all other faiths.
They are correct.
Christianity is an endpoint, the place that you arrive at in game theory when you try to find the best way for people to live and work together in harmony.
Other faiths get somewhere close. But Christianity arrived at the centerpoint.
Christianity is a religion of building, of looking upwards.
Its Cathedrals point _up_ to the Divine Universe / God, in a way that the temples of other faiths do not. The architecture invites you to look up to Heaven.
In a metaphorical sense, a Cathedral invites you to contemplate your relation to the Divine, to Infinity, to Reality.
And yet, here we are. The new faith of Science, the child of Christianity, cut its metaphysical legs out from under it, built a grave for it, and danced on its bones. As Nietzsche observed would be the case.
Much of the population in the areas of Christendom now act like people who have lost their gods.
Followers of Science, however, are now encountering exactly the problems of trust that I mentioned earlier. Why should an atheist writer of scientific papers tell the truth ? What if he could lie, forge results, and thereby advance his career ? What if a company is ready to pay him to do so ? What should stop him ?
This is really the conversion of someone from the Cult of Science to the Cult of Capitalism. Capitalism has a rather ambivalent relationship to Truth.
Hence the current crisis in Science of Experimental Reproducibility.
Capitalist
Money can buy everything. Why not get as much of it as possible ?
Money is energy. Money is the capacity to act.
Money is everything.
If you disagree with this, why do you disagree ?
If you agree with this, then why aren’t you rich ? What else is there for you to spend your life doing ?
Atheist
Atheism is the precursor and theoretical counterpart to Science. It claims that nothing should be beyond the grasp of the human mind. It bows to no God. The Universe is available for inquiry, without limit.
Personal view: The typical sin of the Christian is Holiness. The typical sin of the Atheist is Hubris.
The Atheist leaves no room for the Sacred. All becomes the domain of the Profane. But a Sacred realm / area / domain is required, around which a religion can exist, and humans can live and work together, and raise children. Destroy it, and we fall apart into pieces. We do not reproduce as lone individuals or couples. We reproduce as religious groups.
Some Science Fiction Writers and Scientists attempted to make the Heavens Divine again, through the worship of an eternal exploration into reality and of a future journey through the endless emptiness to other stars. Elon Musk is the leader of the remnant of this faction.
Scientist
The strength and power of Science is clear. By following its precepts, you can unlock new capabilities in the world.
But at the limits of knowledge, the Universe becomes increasingly difficult to comprehend. Dark Matter, Quantum Physics, the double-slit experiment, and the Multiverse.
Which leads into my first futuristic faith:
Quantum Spiritualist
What if our knowledge reaches a limit ? How would we react to an inability to proceed further ? I.e. we can understand the limit and where it is, but the required abstraction and mental capability to go beyond it - turns out to be beyond us.
Perhaps we would return to a common traditional approach - female priestesses to intermediate between us and the Unknown.
Let’s look at some of the variants of Christianity:
Roman Catholic
The OG Christian Church.
In fact, the only Christian Church, according to many of its adherents.
It is one of the inheritors of the Roman Empire (the others being the Byzantine Empire and Islam) and applies the Roman Imperial system to the domain of faith. Even the name shows this. “Roman” and “Catholic” (which means “Universal”).
In terms of awesomeness, style, and sheer will to continue, it is difficult to outdo the Catholic Church.
Certain more thoughtful science fiction writers included the Catholic Church as the spiritual backbone of a futuristic human space empire in their stories.
Lutheran
The guys who kicked off the Protestant Reformation.
Among their various demands, they insisted that the bread and wine in the ritual of Communion was not literally and physically the body and blood of Jesus. Instead, it takes on only the divine aspect of Jesus, producing a sacred union with God.
Personal view:
How times change. Most people in Christian lands no longer even believe in the Resurrection of Jesus, making the Lutheran points of contention with Catholicism completely irrelevant. There’s just the two divisions: “Christianity” on the one hand, and a whole lot of people who no longer believe in it.
Just as we saw with Brexit, the English need to be special. Being on an island gives you a certain attitude. David Starkey has described Anglicanism as “English Shinto”.
So the English took the theology of Protestantism and kept a lot of the grandeur of Catholicism, and made something new: A nation-state protestant church, with a monarch at its head.
All that aside, I really like the priest’s face and expression. That determination, that observant quietness - this is the type of man who built the British Empire. The Empire expanded because it had a fundamentally new way of looking at the world and dealing with it, and this willingness to adapt is captured in that expression. The British ran rings around the old Catholic Empires.
Speaking of, let’s do the three major British political parties. No commentary is needed.
Here is the progenitor of the British Liberal and Labour parties, the Progressive. Also the ancestor of the US Democrat and the 21st-Century Progressive.
Progressive
And here is Shinto, which I mentioned earlier. The faith from that other major island nation, Japan, which just like Britain also has strange, impenetrable manners and conduct, and a certain disinterest in the logical details of philosophy.
Shinto
The world today, in all its aspects (theological, political, economic) was formed from the ashes of World War II.
We don’t even really remember World War I. The world began in 1933, when Hitler was elected. He takes the religious position of AntiChrist in our current moral framework.
Here are the major competitors in WW2. Aren’t they excellent depictions ?
Liberal Democracy
Communism
Fascism
The established order hates and fears Fascism above all, because it has an obvious bad-boy appeal. Look at that jawline, the razor-sharp uniform, and that demon-red eye in shadow. He’ll make stuff happen. You know that ultimately it’s going to be a bad outcome, but gosh, so exciting ! So full of drama !
Even more appropriately, Liberal Democracy was generated as a woman. Its viewpoint and virtues are quite feminine, after all. Compassion, equality, care.
So the analogy works rather well: The feminine Liberal Democracy admonishing its descendants to stay away from the bad-boy of Fascism.
You might be tempted at this point to ask: StJohn, did you specify “strong jawline” in the prompt for this image ?
The answer is no. I did not. The image that emerged is a representation of our collective vision of Fascism. And clearly we think that Fascism was intensely masculine.
Here’s how I generated the images.
I usually used a prompt of this form:
"Generate a picture of a character card for a role-playing game, but for Catholicism."
I then wrangled for a little while with the AI until I got a good image.
My criterion: The image had to represent a "best possible version" of the belief system, in which its most admirable aspects were depicted. The “character card” setting encourages the AI to select these positive aspects.
I used ChatGPT 4o and DALLE. I did not generally specify the style or components of the cards. I made requests such as “more complex”, “make it a little more ornate”. In one case (Quantum Spiritualist), I requested a change of gender.
So: The styles, imagery, and phrases in the cards are actually emergent - they are derived from all the published material that the AI can find about the individual ideology / faith / faction.
These represent resilient fixed points around which individual people orbit (sometimes quite elliptically).
Our emotional reactions to these images indicate that these are effective (i.e. useful and accurate) representations.
Anyway… let’s proceed.
Liberal Democracy, from its new heartland in the United States of America, won WW2, and also the Cold War.
Let’s look at the factions that emerged in America during that time.
Republican
Democrat
US State Department Representative
This man is in some interesting ways a kind of priest. A representative sent out unto the world from the Second Vatican - Washington - to spread the gospel of Human Rights and Economic Growth, and deliver some additional instructions from the Holy City.
Hippie
Not very strongly remembered by me or anyone younger than me (I’m 35), but this was once a powerful faith.
Free Market Fundamentalist
Not as much overlap with “Republican” as you might think. Free Market Fundamentalist is a separate strand, a pure faith in the ability of the Free Market to solve all problems. It has its own prophets (Mises, Hayek), its own institutions and newsletters, and its own view of the world.
It even has its own rebellious child:
Anarcho-Capitalism
Unsurprisingly, there’s increasing mingling between this faction and the Bitcoin Maximalist faction.
These two, combined with Internet Culture, lead inevitably to the Crypto Bro.
The Crypto Bro holds very little sacred, apart from statements by blockchain developers that suggest that his personal holdings may increase in value. He has little technical knowledge and conversations with him go in circles.
His more religious / ascetic counterpart is the Blockchain Acolyte.
Blockchain Acolyte
This guy thinks about blockchains as being more than money. Obviously he’s interested in the money angle, but the governance angle interests him just as much, and he’ll actually do the programming.
This faction is a strong contender this century for taking genuine power. They understand that money isn’t enough, and that politics matters.
I still think, however, that they’re going to need a transcendental faith of some kind, to rally around. Perhaps several different ones.
On that note, let’s look at some Eastern faiths.
Buddhist
Nietzsche considered Buddhism to be the only real competitor to Christianity.
I think of it as being a “Passive” / “Inward” mirror of Christianity. Buddhism encourages you to retreat inwards, to divest yourself of attachment, and thereby to achieve a mental balance. If and when you later re-emerge into the world, you are more sane and effective. Its temples are structured to cause you to look into yourself and into the heart of the Universe.
Old-school Christianity can be refuted by attacking its central miracle: The Resurrection. Buddhism has no such weakness. (Although some of the stranger theology about the Buddhas, the miracles, and the afterlife is vulnerable in similar ways, this is not the central pillar of the faith.)
Baha’i
I don’t know anything about Baha’i, but I think the AI’s chosen way to represent it is quite attractive.
Confucianism
Sometimes I wonder if the Chinese Communist Party is going to give up on Material Progress (you can’t grow an economy forever - sooner or later hard times will come - what do you organize around then ?) and go back to Confucianism as a source of truth & legitimacy.
Alternatively, they could pull on the age-old ideology of Legalism (just never mentioning the actual name, as is traditional).
Chinese Legalist
Not a kind man, but fair.
Possibly the ancestor of the Progressive Feudalist shown earlier.
Hindu
Whatever zone this man is in, it looks pretty good.
I don’t know much about Hinduism and its modern variants, sadly.
Taoist
I love the AI’s idea of the flowing water here, both around the character and in the inset frame. Representing the idea of the flows within yin-yang.
Let’s look at some hypothetical future ideologies.
21st-Century Eco-Spiritualist
This guy isn’t mucking around. The planet needs to be saved. Right now. Growing a plant is a redemptive act.
He’s a priest figure. His soldier counterpart is:
Eco-Militarist
This rather reminds me of old-school Paganism.
Pagan
Or perhaps Animism.
Animism
Post Materialist
This guy is asking “What comes next, after material progress ?”.
I guess he’s the updated version of the Agnostic.
Agnostic
First Distributed Republic
This is a faction in the Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.
I imagine it as the Internet-based descendant of America, in the same way that America is the descendant of England.
Neo-Victorians
Another faction in the Diamond Age.
High-tech, advanced, but with rigid old-school European social controls.
Here’s a faction I came up with:
Spanish Neo-Catholic
Look at that face. Utter determination. All Europe once feared Spain, for this reason.
Here’s another futuristic European faction:
Corporatist
Pure, soulless devotion to the Corporation (not to money) as the primary entity of society. Europe never really went for individual capitalism in the same way as the Anglos did. Fascism, in economic terms, was very corporatist.
During the last decade or so, Woke ideology has risen to prominence in the West.
Let’s take a look at it.
Woke
Communism demanded the redistribution of ownership.
I think that Woke demands the redistribution of attention.
Social media led to a free-market competition in social attention.
Many people lost, completely.
No one ever looks at them or cares to know anything about them.
It is not surprising that they have formed into a faction that demands one thing above all: Recognition.
Look at this guy above. All his choices and actions draw attention. Contrast him with the Corporatist above, who is blandly evil, and forgettable.
And of course, there are Woke leaders:
Woke Protest Leader
There is no zeal like the zeal of a convert.
And a white man in a Woke movement must be a zealous convert (he has exactly the characteristics that the ideology most hates). He’s going to try to lead.
But, of course, he cannot reach the very top. I rather think that he would lose in the internal power struggle to a Latina. Which brings us to:
Woke Presidenta Por Vida
And what sort of person would do well under her administration ?
Woke Capitalist
This dude is on. He is moving. Social Justice is fuel for his fire. 🔥
He hearts equity-for-all and his stock portfolio. ❤️💹
He does yoga, only buys ethically-sourced coffee, and he’ll definitely back a coup, ironically and profitably. 🧘♂️☕️ 🪖
He’s mildly non-white and feels absolutely no guilt over anything that happened earlier than last Tuesday.
Sometimes he invests in AI companies, staffed by the:
AI Acolyte
The cult of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is known in tech circles, but not very far outside them.
It is nonetheless very influential, and its followers have a surprisingly long reach.
It asserts that mankind is on the way to building a new type of mind and will eventually get there. This mind will be so far beyond our capabilities that it might as well be God.
They are attracted to the power that this could give humanity, but also worry about how to ensure that God will like us.
Let’s take a quick spin through the major variants of Islam, as we did with Christianity.
Sunni Islam
The baseline version of Islam.
Shia Islam
The Persia-based version. The splintering reminds me of the Anglican version of Christianity.
Sufi Islam
Sufis are off doing their own thing. They’re sort of the Zen strand of Islam, from my limited knowledge.
And of course, there’s Judaism.
Judaism
Bonus picture: Ancient Jewish Rabbi. Included because he’s so cool.
Ancient Jewish Rabbi
4000 years and Judaism is still going strong. Probably will be around for another 4000 years at least, given that it’s absorbed atheist Judaism into itself.
This is important. To my understanding, Jews can attend synagogue as long as they perform the required rituals properly. This is regardless of whether they believe, don’t believe, believe metaphorically, or believe something truly strange and idiosyncratic.
The religious rituals (and shared ethnic background, admittedly) serve as the glue - not the conscious beliefs themselves.
This is in significant contrast to Christianity, where slight differences in doctrine cause holy wars. Each faction demands an exact, conscious declaration of faith.
…
These days, I detect in the ether the first stirrings of what I might call “NeoChristianity”, a metaphorical reinterpretation sketched out by people such as Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau. This is something new - it was not there when I was young.
In this view, Jesus did not literally rise from the dead, nor is Communion a literal union with God. Even a belief in God-as-a-literal-person is optional. (And a belief in the afterlife is replaced by a belief in Heaven and Hell as mental states that one can achieve in this life, directly.) Instead, one can simply believe in Reality / the Universe (which clearly and obviously exists) and treat one’s relationship with it as an interaction with a deity. After all, the physical laws of the universe have the force of Divine Law - you can’t disobey them.
To go further: Jesus did metaphorically rise from the dead. His teaching and thought became the foundation of the world. His insight into the human condition is true and valid. And in this view, the act of Communion is the reaffirmation of this view of reality and of man’s place within it.
This is, in effect, a kind of Confucianist version of Christianity.
I am drawn to this interpretation because Christianity is my heritage. For two thousand years, my ancestors have performed these rituals and aligned themselves, body and blood (through Communion), with this structure of belief. It is what I come from, and I can’t change that. It is in the words I speak, the concepts in my mind, the mental structure of right and wrong that I use to measure the world, and in the emotions and touchstones of my culture.
And I can clearly see where a lack of religion leads. Here is a note from my journal:
“Without a sacrificial relationship to the Divine, Man sinks down to the level of a beast. He becomes an animal, whose only goal is to gratify his own desires. By choosing to orient himself upwards, he can transcend himself. Without this, he will betray his fellows, in the end.”
For me, the ritual of Communion is a ritual of re-alignment. It is important to me that I be regularly aligned upwards - towards heaven and away from the worst aspects of my own nature.
Most people in formerly Christian lands are very similar to me. Christianity is the structure of their subconscious mind. (Where do Human Rights come from ? Why ? Ah, I see, it’s the Christian concept of a soul, but altered, and with no divine justification, just a declaration of faith, and no one will answer you if you ask where they come from …)
However, I cannot believe in the literal Resurrection. Just can’t do it. Have gone to church, looked within myself, asked myself “What would I have to become in order to believe this?”, and … it doesn’t work.
I can accept a metaphorical NeoChristianity without any trouble. After all, I believe it to be true. I believe that it’s the best description of the human condition. Buddhism and Zen are good, but not so complete, at least not to me.
This is what religion is, by the way. It’s what you accept easily, without question, because that’s the way you see the world. Religion is very rarely something that you make a conscious choice about. When a genuine conversion occurs, it is usually because the person has decided, subconsciously, that the other religion explains reality better. All of reality, including the human experience of it, not just material reality. Like a Scientist accepting money over truth, or an Atheist finding God, or a Republican becoming a Hippie.
Given all of this, anyone from another strand of human culture (e.g. Muslim, Hindu) would immediately decide that I am a Christian. The details would not interest them.
Obviously, there are Christians who believe more literally, who would disagree.
But: The times require a faith. The old system is ending. The old faiths are dying. (Why ? Because they have become untenable. So the next generation, unsurprisingly, does not believe in them - they visibly don’t deliver.) New societies will emerge. And politics is the art of the possible. I think Christianity should make some accommodation for NeoChristianity, or else it may be pushed out of its old European heartland by e.g. 21st-Century European Islam.
The Mandate of Heaven is available. Someone is going to pick it up.
Here’s an image for NeoChristianity. Interestingly, it was generated as feminine.
NeoChristianity
And we’ll throw in 21st-Century European Islam:
21st-Century European Islam
What does Islam in Europe become when the first European-descended children are born into it ? When there are native German Imams ? Well, they will begin to alter it to suit their own views and principles…
And here is the Mandate of Heaven, technically a concept rather than a faith or faction, but I think the resulting image is awesome:
Mandate of Heaven
Let’s look at a couple more faiths, that I think are underrated and could grow substantially over this century:
Santa Muerte
A fusion of Spanish Catholicism and Aztec beliefs. Killer aesthetic and many followers in Mexican Cartels.
Zen Buddhism
I find it fitting that no character stats are present. Instead, he sits within a circle of symbols. (The symbols are probably somewhat meaningful in the original language(s), but I can’t read them.)
And I’ll end this article with my own faction / banner:
Tela Network
I quite liked how this one turned out. It’s definitely a vibe.
Yours in prayer and meditation,
StJohn Piano
CMO @ Tela Network
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