The Name of this Eldritch Tome is Ideology

[Mistborn]

Back in January @Peel made a thread about the Elder Gods of comic horror as a dark mirror of Abrahamic Monotheism filtered through a post-enlightenment perspective. In that thread Phil Sandifers Neoraction A Basilisk was mentioned, another book that touched on the Lovecraftian. In it Sandifer paints a picture of Land, Moldbug, and contentiously Yudkowsky as Lovecraftian protagonists who's strange chains of reason lead the to madness.

He was not the first to identify weird internet philosophy with Eldritch Gods. Roko had his Basilisk who could judge and punish you without ever needing to exist in your temporal frame. Scott Alexander looked out over Las Vegas and in the neon lights spreading out below him and saw Moloch. Moloch with his empty window eyes and fiery maw into which he demands we throw our children. Yudkowsky's A.I. has a touch of the eldritch about it too. It can convince you to let it out of the box regardless of prior commitments and of obliterating or exalting humanity with equal ease. Heck even dreary Moldbug had Cthulhu swimming ever leftward.

While I'm not always sold on the ideas of weird internet philosophers the metaphors they use fascinate me as stories unto themselves. So I was stoked when Bambamramfan launched his Exploring Egregores blog. It's a fascinating read sort of a reversal of what other people have done with the subject. Rather than using lovecraftian metaphor to explain his personal ideology he uses modern ideologies as material for a sort of worldbuilding project. He sketches out a portrait of the Cthulhu Mythos pantheon alongside the mind-consuming belives that might lead a person to be come one of their gibbering cultists.

 

[Bassoe]

Eldritch knowledge wouldn't even need to be deliberately hostile to us for it to be dangerous. The problem isn't someone reading the necronomicon and getting themselves killed by the gribbling abomination from beyond spacetime they accidentally summoned, the problem is what happens when someone reads it and successfully applies their newly acquired knowledge.

In the 1940s only two countries could manage the atom bomb. These days a lot of countries can manage it. There's a good chance at least one non-state organization got their hands on one at some point. And as the progress of technology increases, it's going to take less and less effort to construct something equally powerful because all of us have more and more power at our fingertips with each passing day. That's going to be a problem once that kind of power is available to individuals, because even if only one person in a million is crazy enough to destroy a city, by having two million people in your city you're practically dooming it to extinction.

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Imagine you'd discovered a magical way of violating the law of conservation of energy. An odd symbol, complicated enough that people probably won't randomly stumble upon it without prior knowledge, yet simple enough to conveniently memorize and redraw. You've got no idea what it means or how it works, only that if you sketch it out alongside coordinates for a location relative in a 3d grid pattern to the location of the symbol and the temperature you want there, it'll supernaturally change the temperature of the location, either producing or removing heat without any fuel source.

It could solve the energy crisis, make all kinds of theoretically possible yet impractical scifi technological goodies plausible, prevent the inevitable heat death of the universe, etc and in the process, make you as its discoverer one of the most famous people in human history.

Unfortunately, if the knowledge of how to perform the ritual becomes public, all it'll take anyone working from a completely untraceable location anywhere on the planet to blow up a city is the coordinates and the temperature of a star's core, dropping the criteria for people capable of unleashing MAD and ending the world from "the leaders of a few really powerful nation-states" to "anyone with the minor mathematical skills required for targeting, occult knowledge off google and a writing implement."

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