Politicians are hunkering down as they wonder who might be the next target following the Charlie Kirk assassination. The Associated Press writes that “politicians in both parties and at virtually every level of public service are suddenly being forced to deal with acute security concerns … some political leaders are canceling public appearances. Others are relying on a large police presence to keep them safe." The two unsuccessful attempts on the life of then presidential candidate Donald Trump and the successful assassination of Kirk by three seeming amateurs impelled by obscure ideologies have made it nearly impossible for bodyguards to predict where the next blow might come from.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, Ryan Wesley Routh, and Tyler Robinson (the case of Luigi Mangione will be omitted here) were unremarkable men who somehow became possessed – the word is used deliberately – with an idea to kill a man they had never met, even at the almost certain cost of long jail sentences. Terrifying in their unpredictability, perhaps the only parallel in history is the fear caused by the cult of the assassins, who came to Western awareness through tales recounted by Marco Polo, which went something like this: “Know o traveler that the old man of the mountain hath young disciples, who fed hashish from whose name 'assassin' comes, awaken to a vision of paradise that will be theirs forever would they but smite whosoever stands in their master's way.” The old man of the mountain actually had the power to make young men kill strangers, as this perhaps apocryphal story illustrates.
"Two men in the year 1092 stood on the ramparts of a medieval castle--the Eagle's Nest--perched high upon the crags of the Persian mountains: the personal representative of the [Persian] Emperor and the veiled figure who claimed to be the incarnation of God on Earth. Hasan, son of Sabbah, Sheikh of the Mountains and leader of the Assassins, spoke. 'You see that devotee standing guard on yonder turret-top? Watch!' "He made a signal. Instantly the white-robed figure threw up his hands in salutation, and cast himself two thousand feet into the foaming torrent which surrounded the fortress.
"'I have seventy thousand men — and women — throughout Asia, each one of them ready to do my bidding. Can your master, Malik Shah, say the same? And he asks me to surrender to his sovereignty! This is your answer. Go!'"
How many Thomas Crooks are out there? The power of the unseen hand from an obscure cult is no longer the stuff of fantasy, the AP writes. There is now a new FBI term for this threat: Nihilistic Violent Extremism, or NVE.
Experts say political assassins don’t always fall into neatly sorted partisan categories. In some cases, like that of Thomas Mathew Crooks, who shot Trump at a Pennsylvania campaign rally last year, there is little record of any political stances whatsoever. The FBI has said Crooks also had researched then-President Joe Biden as a possible attack target. Bruce Hoffman, who studies terrorism at Georgetown University, noted that the FBI has created a new category, Nihilistic Violent Extremism, to track the increasing number of attacks that seem to have no clear political motivation.
NVE is the name for the 'something' that got into their heads and made them do it. But just because an idea has no clear political goal doesn’t mean it has no existence. Dr. Gerard Gill describes Nihilistic Violent Extremism “as being motivated by a hatred of society and a desire to see it destroyed … what sets NVEs apart is their lack of ideological substance beyond a broad anger and hatred directed outwards at the world.” Is the desire for nothing something? Is evil an actual thing or just the absence of good? Is the Devil an actual consciousness or the absence of God? The debate goes back to the beginnings of religion and philosophy.
But this time the debate is not academic but urgent. A modern example of the theory of nothing “can be found in the Order of the Nine Angles (O9A). O9A is a satanist/occult collective that came into public knowledge in the 1970s… The collective subscribes to an ethos of cleansing, enlightenment, and evolution through moral transgression – which manifests in various ways in its adherents, including Nazism and extremism, though these are not mandatory – any evil or “sinister” expressions of devotion will do.”
Eventually, according to the dense and massive mythology of O9A, subversion of social norms and Judeo-Christian values will result in the breakdown of society. This is the project of current O9A members, projected to take at least another hundred years and bringing about the emergence of an entity called “Vindex,” who will lead a new and superior aeon.
O9A can be taken as a proxy for every nihilistic, incoherent ideology. It would be easy to dismiss such statements as gobbledygook if they did not resemble other self-proclaimed ideologies of evil. The biggest argument against evil simply being the absence of good is that it takes a characteristic form. There is an evil pattern, an infernal signature, which is why its visual signature is so distinct and recognizable. Students of WW2 will be familiar with the SS occult castle of Wewelsburg, the real-life Castle Wolfenstein with which 09A shares much symbology and imagery. If evil were purely random, one would expect there to be no recognizable pattern of evil things through history. But the members of O9A know what evil or “sinister” expressions of devotion to perform, just as the NVEs know who to target next time.
Perhaps it is worth pondering whether evil is an actual pattern or class of patterns and what this implies for designers of AI. Are we indifferent to what an Artificial General Intelligence might choose to guide its actions? Or will we learn too late, like our political leaders, that we have more to fear from what we teach the children than we will admit? Cafe intellectuals tend to treat the devil as a fairy tale. But "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. He shoots people and just like that... he's gone."