Mark Juergensmeyer

Well, you know, you bring up, and, and we don't wanna get too, too deep into this, but I did actually, I've done some consulting gigs in, in Silicon Valley, and I've seen and heard some of the, um, you know, quasi-religious rhetoric when it comes to certain technologies, including this.

And, um, it j- it does remind me, there was, um, a book I read many years ago, Terror in the Mind of God, and, um, Juergensmeyer wrote it, and it was about communal violence and terrorism.

But the way that these people are talking about AI and looking to AI, it's as crazy and nutty as some of these extremist religious groups are.

And it's, it is mortifying because, you know, we're, we are gonna be giving, and we have given so much power to this artificial or super intelligence, I guess they're calling it now.

Does he regret what he did, or is he satisfied? In response, Roof insists, quote, "It isn't one or the other." In short, the normal relationship between agent and act is not found here, neither in terms of causation nor in terms of a sense of ownership over the act, resulting in pride or regret or responsibility.

Does it make sense to think of Roof's crime, his murder of nine churchgoers, as a performance? A sociologist, Mark, uh, Juergensmeyer suggests, quote, "Any incident of terrorism is a kind of performance violence, a dramatic act, uh, meant to achieve an impact on those who witnessed it." There's something right in this view.

Intuitively, terror feeds on spectacle.

But Juergensmeyer's, uh, account strains to capture Roof's language.

While Roof did perhaps want to make an impact through his action, his diminished sense of agency does not quite fit with the picture Juergensmeyer paints of the terrorist's intentionality.

Moreover, Juergensmeyer asserts that the drama of the terrorist, quote, "Is often one of cosmic war, an enduring battle that may be cast in Manichaean, uh, moral terms as being between good and evil, or in metaphysical terms as a clash between order and disorder." Unquote.

Again, this only partially captures what Roof describes.

Instead of good and evil, for Roof, the key distinction is between the awakened, who see reality rightly and respond rightly, and those who slumber.