Enough articles have already been written on the “Zizians” that to add another would feel like an exercise in vanity, if any of them seemed to want to go into the ideas. Some get surrounding information blatantly wrong (
“post-rationalists tend to think an evil, world-destroying AI is inevitable”); the best,
by Wired’s Evan Ratliff, who claims to have “read this corpus in its entirety more than once”, disclaims “attempting to summarize LaSota’s or Zizian thought as “an almost impossible exercise”. At a glance this is fair.
The “glossary” archived from Ziz’s blog sinceriously.fyi has over 200 distinct terms - including idiosyncratic definitions of existing terms (“Singing”, “Magic”), ones borrowed from SFF franchises (“Khala”, “Zentraidon”), and completely original neologisms (“Cancerfference”, “Core Attack Inversion”). These are not simply arbitrary renamings of familiar ideas; they are all highly specified concepts that inform and contextualize each other. One has to wonder, however, how much the cultivated aura of Ziz’s thought as an “infohazard” - an idea that will take over vulnerable readers - is mixing here with mainstream media’s increasingly central fear of mimetic contagion, from misinformation to shooter manifestos.
As an academic critical theorist, there are legitimate fields dedicated to studying, preserving and understanding dense, self-referential, eccentric intellectual systems like Ziz’s, even ones that have body counts; but I’ll piss off too many of my colleagues by comparing Ziz to Hegel or Heidegger, so I’ll move to my more informal area of expertise and posit that Zizianity is best understood as an occult system. “Occult” is not the same thing as “a cult”, but has a pronounced tendency to collapse onto it; and Zizian thought can be productively compared both to one of the world’s paradigmatic occult systems, Thelema - the new religious movement promulgated by the infamous Aleister
“Mr.” Crowley - and one of its paradigmatic cults, Scientology.
Notably, the violence that has put Ziz in the news does not stem from the formally cultlike (hierarchical, authoritarian) elements seen in Scientology (or even the organized Thelema of the O.T.O.), which Ziz consistently rejects. If she retains a personal, charismatic authority, it is in spite of the strongest tenets of her belief system, and likely even her own intentions. Ziz in fact devotes a good deal of her own thought to resisting the dangers of conventional cults: including MIRI, which she considers one, but also
“the one cult that gets to define that word to exclude it”. I will nonetheless be using “Zizianity” to refer to the belief system as a tongue in cheek riff, not only on Christianity but “Crowleyanity”, which Crowley warned against Thelema becoming, in order to distinguish the occult system from its failure mode.
Rationalism, Zizianity, Thelema and Scientology all respond to some of the same core problems of modernity. On one hand, since the decline (and diversification) of religion, there is no “one cult” that gets to define the transcendental good for which the individual must sacrifice their desire; on the other hand, individuals, to whom the right has been permitted to define their own teleology, do not seem to know what they want or how to get it. All accept, in some sense, a “scientific” criterion for their claims, albeit one that has to go outside the accepted domains and methods of science. Thelema advocates an “experimental method” to mysticism and Enlightenment; Scientology calls itself “Scientology”, and Zizian thought is a fork of “rationalism”. And while religious and political worldviews offer transcendent systems of meaning outside that criterion for the individual to subordinate themselves to as an individual, these occult systems accept the maximalist burden of the modern individual’s mandate, and propose some way of refining the individual - not merely through “self-help”, but through heroic discipline, rigour and suffering - into something capable of knowing both what it wants and should do (which will, ideally, be nearly identical), without doubt, self-sabotaging patterns, or moral conflict.
For Ziz, this is called the
“Core”: “the deepest frame in the call stack of the mind”, which “has infinite energy” and “contains terminal values you would sacrifice all else for, and then do it again infinity times with no regret”. The Core is deeply similar to the “True Will” in Thelema, to which its infamous single commandment - “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” - refers. What you want, or think you want, is not necessarily what you Will - the incarnation can be deceived by various illusions, both external and internal, and True Will must be arrived at by an arduous magickal process of undoing them. For rationalism, these are cognitive biases; for Scientology, “engrams” (traumatic memory-images); for Zizianity, they are
“structure”, secondary information-compressing algorithms such as “habits, judgement extrapolations, narrative, identity, skills, style, conceptions of value, etc.” Using these is unavoidable, but “all structure that “acts against” the intent of its core is fake”.
It is probably not accidental that Thelema was contemporaneous with the “discovery of the unconscious” by psychoanalysis, and Scientology defined itself against it. Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy remained agnostic about the existence of a valid self under all the unconscious mechanisms and simply tried to align them practically with their surroundings, while traditional religions such as Christianity had always tried to align them with a higher value, and early Buddhism or Stoicism dissolve them to an impassive awareness of their artificiality. But the occult systems take a leap of faith that there is, somewhere, a coherent agent which can genuinely say
“I like being my unmodified autonomous self more than I dislike…. the sum of things bad for me on Earth excepting their interference with my work” - in order to justify the burdensome freedoms modernity struggles for.
Thelema considers the problem of morality both irrelevant and resolved, somehow, by the mystical nature of True Wills: “The order of Nature provides a orbit for each star. A clash proves that one or the other has strayed from its course.” Thelema’s distinct metaphor of individuals as “stars” with natural “orbits”, of course, derives from the mechanistic scientific imaginary of its time, as Scientology’s does from both science fiction and psychoanalysis. Ziz emerges from a computer science paradigm and Yudkowsky’s idiosyncratic version of decision theory. Yudkowsky simultaneously believes a “timeless” decision theory is essential to negotiating with artificial intelligences so intelligent they might be able to predict your future decisions from the positions of your subatomic particles, but “terminal values” are “orthogonal” to such a theory, hence the paramount importance of developing an AI with values compatible with our own as a species. Individuals are composed of “utility functions” that determine their relative preferences, and “decision strategies” that determine how they get them. These components make up Cores - the decision-making self that remains if all unconscious or contingent structures (structure is always determined by Core, and ultimately serves Core’s interests, but not necessarily optimally) are either dissolved or optimized. Every encounter with an Other is an Alignment problem in miniature.
Fortunately for Ziz, the relevant Alignments are not as infinitely multifarious as for Yudkowsky. All Cores can be sorted into three transcendent categories based that other popular nerdy sense of “Alignment”: Dungeons & Dragons’ “Good”, “Evil” and “Neutral”. (She doesn’t seem as interested in the Lawful/Chaotic axis, which is the preoccupation of
Yudkowsky’s latest epic fanfic.) As Thelema, Scientology and Zizianity all claim to mediate relations between hypothetical absolutely free individuals, they require ethical principles that are completely object-independent; that apply equally to an infinity of possible intrinsic motivations. The AI pessimism associated with Yudkowsky assumes that, beyond the impersonal and power-dependent logic of game theory (for a deeper critique of this frame read
Harmless’s Anti-Singularity), infinite motivations cannot be reconciled. Ziz, on the other hand, defines Alignments not in terms of motivations but decision strategies.
Good Cores
decide to terminally value each other’s well-being and preferences, and therefore can always coordinate with each other to find non-zero-sum pathways for achieving their values, at cost of deferred gratification or remaking the universe. Attempts at coordinating with Evil (which prefers its own interest as long as it can win), on the other hand, are doomed to collapse under the zero-sum, hierarchical dynamics that another influential rationalist, Scott Alexander,
called “Moloch” or “Cancer”, the convergent pressure to hoard resources to “kill, consume, multiply, conquer”. Neutral Alignments correct both self-interest and altruism to the values of their social surroundings. True Neutrality is in a sense impossible for fully realized Cores, as it requires falsification of Core preferences. Which narrows it down to two - Good and Evil. So regardless of all other possible values and preferences, all agents of any scale or structure can be divided into Good or Evil. Simple enough?
Unlike other terminal values, alignments are not inherent, arbitrary traits produced by evolution, but
“choices made long ago” when the Core first decided how to trade off its own values against another’s, building all its future structure to be consistent with this choice. Veganism is
“one of the most visible and strong correlates” of Good alignment because it demonstrates a commitment to the wellbeing of other agents regardless of their mental architecture, their social or biological proximity. But even for Good people, Ziz tellingly admits, “it’s important not to succumb to the halo effect. This is a psychological characteristic. Just because you’re a good person, doesn’t mean you’ll have good consequences…. Good people can be dangerously defectbot-like. They can be ruthless, they can exploit people, they can develop structure for those things.”
Ziz focused less on these dangers of Goodness than on the distortions produced by structure built around coordination with Evil people and institutions, encoded in the collective social mind she refers to as
“the Khala”. In
“The Matrix Is A System”, the post that long headed her blog, she argues that any “stack” of social structures whose members depend on it for food will eventually bend their choices and values toward it (yet another reason for veganism). In Bay Area rationalism and Effective Altruism, that meant Silicon Valley capital - and with “tpot” superstars like Luke Farritor now stripping the government for parts at DOGE, that analysis at least seems to have aged well. Hence the importance of “jailbreaking” Good people to be “sociopaths”, in a sense meaning
“forbidden socially unconstrained knowledge of social constraints, social reality, social interactions, and society”. Most clinically identifiable sociopaths, of course, are Evil, but according to Ziz most
people are Evil or at least “non-Good”; Evil sociopaths understand their own Core motives, and the limits of others’ constraints on them, better than people who have surrendered to society.
It should be fairly obvious by now how one gets from these premises to the violence committed by the Zizians; what’s remarkable is how much one doesn’t. The basic premise is close to that spelled out by Crowley in
Liber OZ: “Man has the right to kill those who would thwart these rights [to live in the way that he wills to do: to work as he will: to play as he will: to rest as he will: to die when and how he will]”. Few if any Thelemites have actually killed on these grounds, if only because they recognize the overwhelming inertia of state violence would divert, and thus invalidate, most Wills enacted by it (as argued in
Moonchild). Scientology, with its centralized infrastructure capable of coordinating violence and claiming to represent the only valid way to arrive at Operating Thetan, can and does justify almost any killing its institutional hierarchy can get away with.
The Zizian relation to violence is a more paradoxical and brittle structure; almost always prejustified, but rarely clearly prescribed. “Really, deterrence, mutual assured destruction, is our only defense against other humans”, she bleakly concludes in
“Punching Evil”. For most people, this might just sound like what the state is supposed to do, but for say, trans people in the United States, who can’t expect to be avenged by the state and might soon need to be avenged
against it, it seems more relevant that “[for] most of history…. a human who had no one who would avenge them was doomed by default. Now it seems like most people have no one who would avenge them and doesn’t realize it.” But by extrapolating all decisions out to “timeless” decision theoretic compatibility with all beings, Ziz allowed herself to escalate to MAD purely based on hypotheticals: “If you truly irreconcilably disagree with someone's creative choice, i.e. their choice extending arbitrarily far into the past and future, ultimately your only recourse is to kill them”. In practice this mostly meant
things like roommate drama would sound like this: “I said if they were going to defend a right to be attacking me on some level, and treat fighting back as new aggression and cause to escalate, I would not at any point back down, and if our conflicting definitions of the ground state where no further retaliation was necessary meant we were consigned to a runaway positive feedback loop of revenge, so be it. And if that was true, we might as well try to kill each other right then and there.”
This goes some distance to explain why the majority of Zizian violence has been petty interpersonal tit-for-tat, not the proactive execution of a radical ideological agenda. Their targets have not been CEOs, like fellow rationalist Luigi Mangione, or slaughterhouses and animal testing labs, like other vegan radical groups, or even critics and ideological enemies like cults such as Scientology. But the pattern also speaks to a broader failure of the coordination “jailbroken Good” was supposed to be best at. The Zizians never came close to building their own “full stack”; despite decoupling from the fucked incentive structures of capitalism near the top, they remained beholden to it at the bottom. At one point Ziz even attempted to make
“not actually much money” by crabbing - a violation of her own ethics that resonates uncannily with “Cancer”.
That risks are incurred in the process of ‘jailbreaking’ is known to every occult system that attempts it, and is usually the basis for their authoritarian tendencies; initiatory hierarchies ensure the safety of the practitioner. The reputation of Zizianity as an “infohazard” is partly promoted by Ziz herself. Ziz refers to the “psychological state of running conscious reflective computation in structure close to core, bypassing a lot of built in instincts and emotions” as
“the Void”; a century earlier, Aleister Crowley similarly identified it as “the Abyss”, and warned that anyone who attempts to cross it while clinging to any element of their particular ego would
“lose their structural unity, and must be fortified by continuous doses of dope in anguished self-preservation”. This description resembles
Ziz’s of a “Vampire”, one of her categories of “Undead”: “vampires consume blood as pica [inedible material eaten out of compulsion]…. floating through rotten food in a vain effort to taste anything, because they cannot find the comfortable dissolution of their agency zombies can”.
This article is already too long and I don’t have room to go into the categories of “Undead” or what that exactly means; suffice to say “Vampires” are abusers, “Zombies” are normies, “Liches” are the sort of ideologues one finds in Evangelical Christianity or Left Twitter, “Death Knights” are vengeful nihilists. The Zizians reference popular media and sf tropes as much as they do for the same reason they are purist vegans and treat mundane decisions as cosmically binding: they cannot imagine consuming something without making it a part of them, a theoretically correct attitude in the Abyss (“Every accretion must modify me…. I am not afraid of losing myself to it, if only because it also is modified by myself in the act of union”).
The vocabulary probably helps Evan Ratliff “locate the essence of her aspiration: to attain a hero’s role…. She yearned for action in support of [an unassailable moral] code, the kind of action that most humans—and rationalists—lacked the moral fortitude to pursue.” A week earlier, Chris Arnade wrote controversially in The Free Press that “
all men need to feel like the hero—if not over the course of their lifetime, then at least every now and then”. By tacking this need to gender he unavoidably interpellated it in the culture war as much as he disclaims that the model of violent macho heroism. For me, the deeper paradox of his argument is its conflation of heroism as “rescuing, protecting, building, solving” - acts of the Core - and as social approval based on mimetic models - structure in the Khala. Ziz herself makes this critique in the fascinating post
“Hero Capture”.
In a society straining under an accelerating
“polycrisis”, there is a greater need for heroic action than ever before - but such action must be originary: mimetic models simply will not be available. Therefore, more and more people - the best and brightest - will throw themselves into the orbit of the Void, attempting to “jailbreak” themselves from the social fabric that constrains heroes. More and more will be captured - the
“psychedelic conversion narratives” popular in post-rationalism might be another example (and depending on its political use, not necessarily a more benign one). Ziz herself developed a substantial toolkit for identifying and combating these structures before succumbing herself. I hope others can jailbreak these structures themselves from the cultic trap of “Zizianity”, one which like many others take the form of an ultimatum to take a choice of conceptual structure as absolute proxy for one’s goal; the game theoretic structure of personal conflicts, for instance, as proxy for saving the world. If the proxy is false, it will inevitably break down into incoherent decisions, each one becoming its own inflated metaphor for all others. The world might be a lot more interesting if Ziz had managed to keep
one star in sight.
