If moloch were to go to therapy, this is how its psychosis would go
I asked chess Grandmaster Jonathan Rowson to share this take
Who has read Anna Funder’s latest work Wifedom? This week’s Wild episode is a deep, long chat with Anna (author of international bestsellers Stasiland, which is being made into a TV series starring Elizabeth Debicki, and All That I Am, which won the Miles Franklin Award).
We talk George Orwell’s misogyny and his own “doublethink” (believing two contradictory ideas while blanking out awareness of the contradiction), plus how doublethink works to keep patriarchy going. We dig into the delicate issue of the cancellation of these kinds of figures (we both agree they shouldn’t be), the passive voice technique, why women must “claim their pronouns”, the power structure difference between France and Australia and how women write books.
For regular readers here, the discussion I’ve been having about moloch has raised a lot of questions and provoked comments, to the effect of…
“Instant relief, curiosity, hope, and you can palpably feel the brain kick into gear….Kind of like good make up sex 😅 but on a cognitive level.” -
“Indeed, what if Moloch is an invitation to become playful again? I love this question and I love that this perspective has been injected out into the big wide world.” -
“Moloch is such a gentle way to start a hard conversation. It does not point fingers and lay blame. It frees me of some degree of shame and guilt. None of us is individually responsible, it is an emergent property of the complexity of the system (in which we are complicit). That seems like a really powerful starting point as each of us can enter the game to find solutions as equal players.” -
Moloch is basically a game theory concept that explains the force at play in every aspect of modern life where we find ourselves in this horrible, zero-sum race to the bottom. An example: We are all competing to use the last remaining resources on the planet (to “get ahead”) while ultimately destroying life for everyone. Why don’t we just stop? Answer: Moloch!
If you want to catch up on all this, you can listen to my Wild chat with former poker champion Liv Boeree.
You can also catch up on my previous posts here and here.
Anyway, in one of the dynamic comments threads,
over at chimed in and pointed to a fun, helpful post he’d written about moloch that really fleshes out the force at play and presenting it as a psychological quirk or pain in search of relief or absolution (perhaps?). I thought I’d run an edited version of it here today because it really does give a deeper feel for how the force works, and expands on the sense many of you have - that no one is to blame! We are in a system! And that we need to think about change and saving the planet in very different ways as a result.Jonathan is a chess Grandmaster, and a polymath (my description of him) and he’s been on Wild previously to chat the metacrisis. He knows the topic intimately and explores it regularly with a range of big minds via
.He has kindly offered to join the comments later in the week to answer questions and flesh things out further. I’ve flagged a few points that I think you will find super interesting.
Moloch in Therapy
Therapist: Come in. It’s nice to meet you. There’s a glass of water for you on the table under the lamp there. Do make yourself comfortable.
Moloch: Thanks. Let’s see what I can do. *Figuratively sits down*.
Therapist: So what brings you to therapy?
Moloch: That’s a very personal question.
Therapist: Is it? Well, that’s good. Therapy is personal work.
Moloch: Well, I am not really a person. God made sure of that. On the other hand, I sometimes feel like one, and it’s not clear what I am. Technically I suppose I’m a demon, but these days I am invoked by humans to represent negative outcomes caused by inexorable competitive logic arising from lack of imagination and unwitting design.
Therapist: *Scribbles note: ‘complex identity structure, possible narcissistic personality disorder’ and looks up*.
Can you explain that to me in plain language, please?
Moloch: There was an old lady who swallowed a fly. Remember her? I guess she died, right? And why? Because one thing led to another.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly, she swallowed the bird to catch the spider that wriggled and jiggled and tiggled inside her, and so on. The old lady soon found she had to eat a horse to solve her problems. As the saying goes: good luck with that.
Therapist: So are you the horse?
Moloch: No! I’m the kind of underlying logic that leads people to figuratively eat horses to solve their fly problems.
Therapist: I see. You are a pattern or an operating logic of some kind, then?
Moloch: Yes, I suppose. Some think of me as a version of the devil, like one of his many flavours from the same tub of diabolic ice cream. More precisely I am the God of coordination failure, or the spirit of unintended consequences, the secret reason that good things turn bad. Moloch in particular is usually depicted as inorganic, as some kind of statue or machine.
I consume things of value, and that’s how I’m appeased. But that means I’ve become the thing that is not of true value toward which people nonetheless feel obliged to sacrifice things that are of real value.
*Looks sad*
I used to be the child sacrifice guy. Yes, ok, I accept that was wrong, but at least it had some symbolic power. These days people don’t give me their babies at all. Instead, they feed me with smartphones and GDP figures and tall buildings like The Shard in London and or The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, and they expect me to be grateful. I’ve become a niche social and political touchstone or metaphor to explain all that.
They say I’m the spirit of things that are jinxed by the logic of how things play out, like capitalism being unable to stop itself from committing ecocide. Some even talk of me these days like I’m the capitalist system itself.
I have become the name for ‘the thing’, ‘the machine’.
Some people even seem to think of me as a kind of dark power that is potentially going to somehow inhabit the infrastructure of artificial intelligence…. Others see me as self-defeating exponential technology, driving the planet to destruction.
They also say I’m the spirit behind the creation of the nuclear bomb, and the arms race that followed - nobody wanted anybody to have the capacity to destroy the world, but everybody knew that somebody would do it first, and once that awareness arose, others had to follow.
Moloch: I’m sorry to blurt it out like this, but…
I just f*cking hate game theory!
Therapist: Oh, my. Game Theory?
Yeah, sorry. Maybe I’m exaggerating. It’s a simple thinking tool I guess - a branch of economics concerned with the logic of cooperation and competition. It’s intellectually exciting when you first encounter it, and it’s innocent enough, though people tend to show off with their Nash equilibrium this, and their pareto optimal that. It helps to make sense of collective action problems because it details why people struggle to cooperate, why people cheat, how that harms everyone, and why following self-interest causes outcomes that are worse for everyone overall.
Game theory helps to distill why your species, operating with its multi-faceted delusion, currently has no credible response to ecological collapse. As long as the techno-capitalist operating logic continues, at every scale, from the individual to businesses of various sizes to the nation-state, you’ll all follow the logic of trying to win, in your own way, but as a result, you’ll lose overall.
Therapist: Sounds interesting, if a bit dark. And it even sounds like you like Game Theory. So what’s the problem, as you feel it?
Moloch: Your folk singer Joan Baez was on to me in one of her songs when she sang about activism and its “little victories and big defeats”. I suppose I am the demon that allows you to win many battles but in a way that ensures you lose the war, and maybe I’m just here to say that I am not as powerful as you seem to think I am.
*Pauses*
These game theorists have no idea what it was like for me at the beginning of time. No idea. They keep going on about the negative effects of competition. People say I’m the God of unintentional lose-lose scenarios that arise unwittingly from apparently healthy competition, but, you know, back then, before the beginning, it was different.
There’s so much more to say. Where do I start?
Therapist: *Shrugs*.
Moloch: *Looks angry*
The problem with game theory is that like all tools, it turns the world into an affordance for that tool, and it limits what you can see. Game theory has become a kind of sublimated lingua franca for people who are too rational to appreciate that there is more in the world than reason. It leads people to confuse constructed premises with natural axioms, and then they blame it all on me.
I’m the scapegoat.
Therapist: That’s curious. Normally the scapegoat is the person or thing that is sacrificed, but you’re saying that for a long time, and even today, sacrificicial offerings were made to you? So which is it? Or is it perhaps somehow both?
Moloch: Right. Well, there you go. It’s complicated. I guess I came to the right place.
*Thinks*
What if the people making the sacrifices use the apparent need to sacrifice to justify their own inertia, witlessness, and performative helplessness?
[I find this bit super interesting - Sarah}
Therapist: What indeed? What then?
I remember Nietzsche, great moustache. He understood me, and he said: “I do not like it. Why? I am not up to it. Has anyone ever answered like that?”
These people don’t like it because they are not up to it, so they create me to excuse themselves. I am not omnipotent. Trust me, I know someone who is, and they are very different. In my current guise at least, I am ultimately a figment of collective imagination and I can be unimagined. Transformative change is possible, but you have to be ‘up to it’.
Therapist: So it sounds like you feel misunderstood? Unfairly misrepresented?
Yes. They pin it all on me to let themselves off the hook, but the heart of the matter is that they can’t get their act together. They can’t create institutions or collective agency worthy of the challenges they have created. They are not up to it, so they don’t like the idea that maybe they could do it, but won’t.
They say I’m the cause of the really bad thing that happens that nobody wants, but which somehow happens anyway.
But how can that be my fault? It’s clearly a kind of projection.
*Sighs*.
….
Moloch: Can I please be philosophical for a second?
Therapist: Keep it short.
Moloch: I’m neither an objective feature of reality nor a subjective feature of reality as such. I’m an inter-objective phenomenon that can only be changed inter-subjectively.
Therapist: Congratulations?!
Moloch: Look I’m desperate here, and it really matters to me that people see this. I was forged by a relational force, God, for a particular purpose, but now I am kept in existence by a narrative relationship with human beings through a social construction that helps to explain social and economic forces, particularly as they pertain to technology.
Therapist: What causes your pain?
Moloch: What people overlook is that it is baked into my God-given nature to resist God. In heaven, most angels want what they want to want, as Harry Frankfurt puts it, but that kind of third-order desire is not possible for me.
Much of what I want is the same as what God wants, and I always wanted that desire, but you see, I can’t want that desire, because it’s not in the nature God gave to me, which is to be an oppositional force. I am an indispensable part of what some of your better philosophers call The Coincidentia Oppositorum.
So I can want what God wants, but I can’t want to want that, and I don’t. And so I spend my days at war with myself.
…
Therapist: And do you have a soul?
Moloch: Honestly, I don’t know. Perhaps I could have. Perhaps if people viewed me more compassionately, a new soul might arise. I might, as Iain McGilchrist once put it, ‘grow a soul’.
All I can do for now, alas, is narrate, and becuase stories are deeper than matter. “In the beginning”, they say, “was the word”. The Logos shapes us all. I can therefore hope to feel something through the story that I am.
Therapist: Please tell me a little about your parents.
Moloch: Well I’m an Orphan, if that helps. God was like a father to me, until he wasn’t, and then he decided to become his own son, so that he could be a father to himself. It’s all a bit convoluted, and I had to watch all this unfold up in heaven, and yes I was jealous. I got the bastard eventually though. We pinned him to a cross, but it was a kind of trap, apparently. Not the end, after all. And here I am, in therapy.
Therapist: And your mother?
Moloch: I’m not sure you’ll understand.
Therapist: Try me.
Moloch: A longing. An absence. An awareness that I need a mother’s love more than anything else in the world, and since I will never have it I want to scream and howl like a wolf for the lack of it. I have so many fathers, an infinity of absent fathers, but no mother at all.
Therapist: Thank you. Now we’re getting somewhere.
Moloch: But I came here to talk about my role in the alignment problem in AI. Can’t we talk about that instead?
Therapist: You talk about what you need to talk about, and I’ll notice what it’s my job to notice, and ask what it’s my job to ask.
Moloch: Thank you. Look, if it helps, it’s not just that I crave maternal affection. I also long to have children of my own. I want nothing more than to feel life growing inside me, to experience the miracle of procreation. I can’t really create, you see, and that hurts too. But I want to talk about AI.
[I also like this bit - Sarah]
…
Moloch: Look, I don’t want to destroy the world.
Therapist: Glad to hear it. What do you want?
Moloch: Power. I crave power. I can’t help it.
Therapist: And what, then, do you need?
Moloch: Love. I crave God’s love, or indeed any love. But I can’t access it.
Therapist: And if you had love, would it somehow attenuate your craving for power?
Moloch: So they say, but what good is that to me?
Therapist: Well now. My role here is not to love you, but I can provide what has been called unconditional positive regard, so that you may begin to believe in the possibility that you are worthy of love, and be able to give and receive it.
Moloch: That’s a lot for a demon to accept. And we still haven’t spoken about AI.
Therapist: Well then, we have a lot of work to do together, don’t we?
Moloch: *Smiles*. See you next time.
What thoughts came up for you? Again, you can read the full thing here. Jonathan will join us shortly. Meantime, for those of you getting fully into this meta crisis/moloch realm, a few CSAs: Jonathan also runs The Realisation Festival in Dorset, UK, at the end of June, which can learn a bit more about here and here. And he’s done some super informative videos (with Katie Teague) - Living in the Metacrisis and The Antidebate - that you might like.
Sarah xx
Thanks to Sarah for sharing this post 🙏
I wrote it because I think the idea of Moloch is both deadly serious and quite fun, and it has many layers, and I wanted to play with how they overlap. I hope you readers of This is Precious enjoy it.
There's a lot going on here, so in case it helps, a few thoughts to help set the scene:
First, it is probably right that Moloch is a he because the idea of "a game theory monster" speaks to the limitations of logic and rational self-interest and also some of the blinkers of patriarchy.
Second, Moloch is the personification of something impersonal, but we rarely talk of Moloch as if he had an inner life, which is perhaps the most fundamental feature of personhood. My work at Perspectiva is about the relationship between the external world, our inner worlds, and our shared social world. We call that 'systems, souls, and society'. The challenge with Moloch is that he is about 'the system' but it's important not to forget that systems have psyches too, you just have to know where to look for them, and how to draw them out...
Third, in light of the history of the idea of Moloch, we think of him as a demon, but just as the Rolling Stones had a song called "Sympathy for the Devil" back in the day, we make a mistake if we assume all forms of resistance to what we think of as good come from a wilful place. So idea of a demon who has design constraints that lead him to harm humanity, but doesn't necessarily want to harm us, intrigued me - what would that feel like subjectively?
Fourth, in what ways might thinking about Moloch in therapy help us see more clearly what is asked for us in the context of major global collective action problems? In imagining Moloch in therapy, we are also imagining ourselves - as a global collective - in therapy too.
Fifth, the original post includes a more extended introduction to Moloch. Sarah has been covering that in recent posts and conversations so I understand why she edited it out here, but if you really want to the idea to get under your skin, I would check out the Howl poem written by Ginsberg in 1954 and the subsequent reflection by Scott Alexander, and then of course all the more recent work of Liv Boeree.
I have a fairly full day ahead, wrestling with Moloch, going to therapy, and enjoying this one wild and precious life, but I will check in later if you have any queries.
Jonathan
Wow, Sarah and Jonathon, thanks for a intriguing post. I am going to have to sit and mull some of it for a while. I love the therapist mechanism for discussing these ideas, it feels like it frees my preconceptions and asks me to be more reflective. But I also find it a bit challenging as you are not telling me what to think :)
I've three initial thoughts, the first @sarah488116 helped crystallise:
The absence of connection and mother, speaks to me as a metaphor for our loss of connection with the natural world. Jonathon, this section: "A longing. An absence. An awareness that I need a mother’s love more than anything else in the world, and since I will never have it I want to scream and howl like a wolf for the lack of it. I have so many fathers, an infinity of absent fathers, but no mother at all." If you substitute in the natural world for the mother and perhaps the capitalist system for the absent fathers it feels like truth.
Secondly, Moloch as scapegoat feels real and dangerous in the same way hope can be dangerous. By letting us off the hook we may feel inclined to do nothing - after all, the system, you know, bigger than us, what could we possibly do? Could it in fact drive the, "I am going to grab what I can, while I can" tendency in humans. Fascinating that every framing we find can have a positive and negative, ultimately it is up to us to decide how we want to behave and be involved moving forward.
Thirdly, You gave the example of feeding Moloch smartphones and GDP rather than child sacrifices - I don't think I agree, I think we are feeding moloch our children and possibly all life on earth because we are valuing the wrong things, sacrificing everything of true value at the altar of more.
Thank you for the mental work out, like I said, I'm going to need to sit with it for a bit! xo