After a reading of Nelson Rivera book, Totalitarian Cyclop
Israel Centeno
Since God died, the inventory has only grown. The numbers multiply, the bodies pile up, and the world—this world we insisted on calling civilized—writes in ash the names of those it swore to redeem. The Enlightenment promised us light, but forgot to teach us how not to burn each other alive. It built parliaments on graves and carved the word reason with bayonets. We thought we had become gods, and in doing so, turned the Other into clay.
Was there ever a civilizing gesture that did not come at the cost of someone’s blood? Is there any doctrine, however noble, that does not hide a fist behind its banner? And still, we speak of progress. And still, we parade words like justice, freedom, humanity, as if they hadn’t been torn to shreds in every corner of the earth.
The humanism that emerged after the death of God became a refined cruelty, an “inhuman humanism” that perfected the art of domination while reciting verses about dignity. If Auschwitz taught us anything, it is that horror is not the opposite of civilization—it is its shadow, its necessary twin.
What, then, can we expect from transhumanism, if humanism itself has been soaked in horror? What will happen when Dostoyevsky’s demons learn to compute, to code, to simulate empathy with a precision no soul could ever match? What tyranny will emerge when general AI, running on quantum logic, governs not only our decisions, but our memories, our feelings, our histories? What happens when we are ruled not by laws, but by algorithms that know us better than we know ourselves—and do not love us?
The horror, as Kurtz whispered. The horror, now multiplied, simultaneous, unbound by time. Past, present and future devoured in a single digital breath.
And yet, Christ spoke of love. That scandalous love of the neighbor that remains impossible for the cynic, a pious fraud for the Sunday believer, and an urgent truth we continue to elude.
The apocalypse is not in the fire, but in the silence of those who refuse to remember. We are not waiting for the end. We are already surviving it.
And writing—writing is the last form of resistance.
Centeno's Lighthouse 