I am closely following the murky case of the Zizian cult, a story so illustrative of our times that almost no one dares analyze it. It is always easier to say that they are just criminals, crazy, or evil. This is not the case. I admit that Ziz, the leader of the sect, has a brain like gruyere cheese, but the fact that he has managed to influence so many other high-capacity young people is meaningful. And if it is confirmed that he was able to drive some of them to suicide with his ideas, we should try to understand this cult still better. In addressing the alleged suicide of one of its members, Ziz wrote in his blog: “Pasek’s right hemisphere had been ‘mostly-dead.’” I clarify for the uninitiated that Ziz believes that we have half a female brain and half a male brain, and that both hemispheres fight, perhaps over deciding who does the dishes at home.
Several members of the Zizians have been arrested in the midst of investigations into violent crimes. They are all the same: they are young, vegan, transgender, work in tech companies in Silicon Valley, love rationalist philosophy, and advocate anarchy.
A few weeks ago, I published a report about them in Spain. To write it, I had to read a good part of the literary production of Ziz and his followers, investigate their forums, even their deleted messages, and I swear I have never been so close to suffering an appendicitis in the center of my brain.
Everything about them is extreme. Their veganism is extreme. They believe that whoever kills an animal is just as guilty as whoever kills a man. So the vast majority of the population are their enemies. Their transsexualism is a strange element even for researchers. My theory is that, knowing their obsession with rationalist debate, they used estrogen from gender treatments to enhance their capacity for theoretical reasoning by boosting their verbal memory and other intellectual capacities.
Its members lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, even lived on boats for a time, and their jobs were technological. Part of the cult’s concern was the deep knowledge and threats of AI. In the cases I have studied in more detail, there is a surprising accumulation of people with obvious characteristics of social phobia and even autism.
Ziz invented a language full of nonintuitive metaphors to make his online conversations unintelligible to outsiders. This makes it difficult to understand his lengthy dissertations. However, there is one element in this story that is not new: rationalism. An etching by Goya comes to mind with the title The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. The interpretation of the title of the work has been discussed a thousand times, but I prefer to stay with those who believe that Goya meant that it is reason that produces monsters. Let us remember: the Terror had ended in 1794, and Goya painted his etching only five years later. The excesses of rationalism caused the Terror, and revolutionary logic justified mass executions in the name of the goddess reason. In essence, the French Revolution was nothing more than an exercise in a tediously magnified return to paganism.
No wonder Ziz also sought to quench their thirst for blood. The leader of the cult used to tell of the trauma he suffered when realizing years after the fact how, as a child killing ants in the shower, he had indeed inflicted a terrible torture upon the bugs. I have consulted the ants, but they preferred not to make any statements about Ziz.
In my research, I have been surprised to see that several members were interacting on social networks with people who, on the surface, seemed to be prominent professionals in technology companies. It is surprising to see how they grew apart, perhaps because of Ziz’s tendency toward radicalization. And it is also surprising that a strangely high number of these professionals who interacted on social networks with them were, for the most part, transgender. I am not trying to hatch a conspiracy theory, only to note a peculiar fact.
The role of the Center for Applied Rationality (CAR), the starting point for Ziz and others around him, is also unclear. It is confirmed that the Zizians were angry with the new direction CAR was taking and tried to attack one of their camps dressed in black robes and Anonymous masks. Certainly, the CAR camps or workshops, where they isolate you for a few days and teach you strange applied rationalism techniques, do not seem to be the best environment to keep your mental health in optimal conditions.
The investigation seems to be on the right track, and I hope we won’t have any more unpleasant surprises in the form of suicides. Interestingly, no one has blocked potentially harmful content from the Zizians’ blog. But be that as it may, I think the Zizians are the symptom of a larger disease. I don’t believe they’re just a side note on the local news page. These guys have read more books than all the other killers in the world combined. And these guys are children of a century that has endeavored to erase God and leave everything to reason.