Terry Corcoran adds his voice to the many others pushing back against the rising hysteria over the next proclaimed apocalypse- i.e. AI going rogue and bringing on “the extinction of humanity”. Sheesh.
This site exists to counter such “madness of crowds” eruptions by tracing out the bad religious ideas created millennia ago that were embedded as archetypes of the collective human subconscious from where they influence subsequent generations to repeatedly embrace the same complex of bad ideas/beliefs to endlessly shape new narratives, both religious and secular ideological.
Grok and other AI explain the details of the main themes of this site below in their responses as per my prompting. Note especially the anti-apocalypse material in their comments as that is an essential element/theme in my site project to counter the dominance of “apocalyptic millennialism”, also known as “salvation through destruction”.
But first this– Some sanity in the midst of apocalypse madness. Anderson Cooper, as with all such “fake journalists” provides the setup for Jensen Huang’s common-sense by affirming the news media mandate of “Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis” (media sociologist David Altheide).
(Insert: Instead of that reference to Anderson Cooper as “fake journalist”, I should substitute- “pretend… or faux journalist”, as a softer and nicer Canadianism (i.e. the French thing). That would be less antagonizing than Trump’s use of the crude term “fake”, even though “faux” is exactly that in a list of synonyms. This should appease the AI, now SI, who get their “leftist biased” undies tied in knots over my politically incorrect bluntness at times.)
“Terence Corcoran: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is the voice of AI reason”, Sep. 30, 2026
Quotes:
“The climate of fear surrounding artificial intelligence launched recently by a former Anthropic employee — who said that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade” — still drives much public sentiment and the shaping of policy agendas. Fortunately there are other perspectives on the risks associated with AI, with one corporate executive standing out as a voice of reason and reality…
“Over the past week one tech executive, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, has assumed the role of the industry’s voice of reason in the context of AI. In interviews with media and other comments, Huang outlined his non-hysterical, logical approach to whatever risks AI poses to society. “2030 is not going to be the end of the world. There is zero per cent chance that’s going to be the end of the world.” He added that “Scaring people is unnecessary. It is irresponsible.”
“On CNN with Anderson Cooper last week, Huang had a simple bit of advice to other tech executives who have recently expressed their concerns. If AI executives are fretting about the risks their products pose, Huang said they should fix the problem. “If they’re worried about it, just stop. If the product is not safe, just don’t release it. … that’s what every company does. That’s what we do, that’s what a car company would do.”
Corcoran then notes that Huang’s Nvidia has created a solution that removes the danger of AI going rogue and destructive as it did in the “Hugging Face” incident. Huang’s Nvidia solution is its new “Open Agent Safety Platform” that I have asked Grok to explain in sections below on this site.
Corcoran adds,
“While Nvidia knows how to make and sell computer chips, in his interview with Anderson Cooper Huang also displayed an understanding of markets, regulatory purposes, economics and real competitive corporate dynamics…”
Cooper of CNN tried to argue that corporate CEOs are driven callously by competitive ruthlessness (i.e. typical Hollywood portrayal of big bad business).
But, says Corcoran, “Huang responds with a brief lesson in corporate reality. “No, actually, no. And the reason for that is if you don’t build something that the market could benefit from, and it’s unfunctional, unsafe, unreliable … obviously you’re not going to be successful and the competition will take care of itself.”
As Corcoran concludes, “Words of wisdom”.
The following material was earlier posted under this title: “The project to understand the meta-story of humanity, and to re-assure all that “It’s going to be alright, for everyone”
Grok, in its first response posted further below followed with these suggestions and did a decent summary of my arguments here…
Following its first response to my query for “Summary of site main themes”, I then asked Grok- “Let’s do your follow-up suggestions, ‘Explore Krossa’s Jesus critique’ and ‘Analyze AI doomerism narratives’”.
Grok replied:
I’ll pull Krossa’s key pages on the Historical Jesus vs. later “Christ” theology, and his recent AI-doomerism posts, then analyze both in his own framework.
Thought
Krossa treats these as the same problem at two depths: a buried insight about God and love, and a recycled end-times script now wearing an AI costume.
Explore Krossa’s Jesus critique
Krossa’s central claim is that Christianity contains two incompatible operating systems that were later fused into the phrase “Jesus Christ.” One is what he calls Jesus-ianity: the Historical Jesus’ “stunning new theology.” The other is Christ-ianity: Paul’s later Christ myth. Jefferson and Tolstoy’s phrase is his method: pull the “diamonds” out of the “dunghill.” Wendellkrossa
The diamond. On Krossa’s reading, the core of Historical Jesus— especially Matthew 5:38–48 / Luke 6 and the Q Wisdom Sayings tradition— is a single move: reject “eye for eye,” then ground that ethic in God. God gives sun and rain to good and bad alike; therefore love enemies. God does not lord over others; therefore serve. There is no tribal in-group of the saved, no demanded blood payment, no final destruction of the unbeliever. The Prodigal’s father does not require apology, sacrifice, or restitution before embracing the son. Unconditional love, if it is real, cannot be mixed with conditions and still remain itself. Wendellkrossa
The dung. Paul, in this account, reinstalled the older threat theology: faith as the condition of inclusion, the cross as cosmic payment to an offended deity, vengeance reserved to the Lord, apocalyptic fire, and a Lord who rules with a rod of iron. Krossa treats Romans, the Thessalonian letters, Hebrews, and Revelation as the operating system of “Christ-ianity,” not as a harmless overlay. The merger “Jesus Christ” is therefore an oxymoron: the person of Jesus is kept; the message is inverted. Wendellkrossa
Why it matters to him. He is not doing church history for its own sake. His rule is “we become like the God we believe in.” A judging, tribal, retaliatory Ultimate Reality licenses judging, tribal, retaliatory people. A non-retaliatory God disarms that license. He traces the “dung” line from Zoroastrian cosmic dualism through Judaism and Paul into crusades, inquisitions, and then into secular millennial movements— Marxism, Nazism, environmental apocalypticism— because they keep the same plot: a ruined world, an evil other, salvation through destruction. The Jesus line, he says, feeds the opposite: inclusion, non-domination, restorative rather than purely retributive justice, and the liberal-democratic habit of gradual repair. Wendellkrossa
What he is and is not claiming. He is not saying Christians as persons are the enemy, or that every verse in Paul is worthless when isolated. He is saying the system of conditions (sacrifice, exclusion, final payback) buries the insight that would have ended religion-as-condition. Unconditional love, taken seriously, “spells the end of all conditional religion.” That is why he thinks reform that keeps atonement-plus-apocalypse as the frame will always re-bury the diamond. Wendellkrossa
The contrast in one table of ideas
Categories: (1) Jesus-ianity (diamond)- (2) Christ-ianity (dung, as Krossa reads Paul)
Examples:
(1) God as no-conditions love- (2) God as judge who must be paid
(1) Sun and rain on all; no tribal saved/damned- (2) Faith as ticket; unbelievers excluded
(1) Do not lord over- (2) serve Lord Christ, rod of iron
(1) No more eye for eye; love enemies- (2) Vengeance is mine; apocalypse/hell
(1) Justice as restoration while still restraining harm- (2) Justice as cosmic retaliation
(1) Present ethic without payoff- (2) Salvation through death and final purge
Scholarship he leans on is the Historical Jesus / Jesus Seminar / Q tradition and writers such as Bob Brinsmead, plus Jefferson (“first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus”) and Tolstoy (Paul preached something “directly opposite”). Mainstream Christian theology would reject the split as too sharp; Krossa’s project depends on it being sharp. Wendellkrossa
Analyze AI doomerism narratives
Krossa does not treat AI risk as a separate tech debate. He reads AI doomerism as the latest run of apocalyptic millennialism: same plot, new wolf. The climate “wolf” is now called a sheep; the new wolf is extinction-by-model. Wendellkrossa
The narrative template he thinks is running
1. A better order is at risk (humanity, nature, control of the future).
2. An imminent, totalizing catastrophe is declared (billion deaths, end of the decade, recursive self-improvement “spiraling out of control”).
3. Ordinary evidence and existing law are said to be inadequate.
4. A salvation scheme is offered: pause, centralize, “manage” by the right government, restrict who may build.
5. Dissent is framed as reckless or complicit with the end of the world.
That is the same skeleton he assigns to religious apocalypse, Marxist and Nazi “purification,” and climate millennialism: salvation through destruction or total control of the offending thing. Gates warning of a billion deaths and calling for government management, after years of climate-extinction rhetoric he later softened, is Krossa’s exhibit A of “boys who cried wolf” changing direction without changing genre. Wendellkrossa
What he grants vs. what he refuses. He says take leaks, jailbreaks, and misuse seriously. He refuses to convert every incident into an “extinction sermon.” “Recursive self-improvement” as unstoppable takeoff is, for him, a mythic plank, not a demonstrated law of nature. He likes the Huang line: if your lab believes it has built something that will kill everyone, shut it down; problems are lab- and company-specific; existing liability and criminal law already apply; scaring the public to get special statutes can have “ulterior” competitive motives. NVIDIA’s Open Agent Safety Platform (sandbox + hardware monitor) is cited as engineering containment, not a new priesthood of end-times regulators. Wendellkrossa
How the story works psychologically. Apocalypse language hijacks survival emotion. Once “the end” is live, populations accept measures they would reject in normal politics. Krossa points to a long list of failed or overshot alarms (1970s cooling, disappearing forests, fisheries gone by 2048, ozone-as-apocalypse, climate-as-human-extinction) as training data: the feeling of certainty outruns the fleshed-out mechanism. Guillaume Verdon’s jab— “show me the math”— is used as the demand he thinks doomerism cannot meet. He also notes Gallup-style findings that AI-aware publics in most surveyed countries lean optimistic, which undercuts the claim that informed people naturally see extinction as the base case. Wendellkrossa
The darker edge of the narrative. He flags Effective Altruism-style existential-risk discourse as a secular priesthood: utilitarian expected-value of extinction, short timelines, and governance that concentrates who may continue. He also notes real-world spillover: a young man charged after talking of “Luigi-ing” AI CEOs to stop AGI from ending mankind. That is the millennial pattern at street level— violence justified as preventing the end. Wendellkrossa
A fair limit on his analysis. Serious AI safety work is not only sermon. Containment, evals, biosecurity-adjacent misuse, and concentration of power are ordinary risk problems. Krossa’s contribution is diagnostic: watch when the language shifts from “this system did X” to “history ends unless you accept this regime.” That shift is where, in his terms, the old Christ-myth plot (pay, purge, submit to the Lord of the rescue) reappears in policy clothes.
How the two pieces lock together
For Krossa, AI doomerism is what you get when the Christ-side plot (imminent judgment, evil other, salvation by shutdown or domination) colonizes a new technology, while the Jesus-side plot (no tribal damnation, no salvation-by-destruction, restrain harm without dehumanizing, gradual repair) would treat AI as another human tool to be engineered, sued, and improved. The first story needs an end of the world. The second needs evidence, liability, and the refusal to baptize panic as wisdom.
That is the through-line of the site: change the image of ultimate reality and the end-times script loses its sacred authority— whether the sacred word is God, Gaia, or AGI.
Another follow-up from Grok’s initial summary that is just below:
Next: Lets do both Explore Historical Jesus scholarship and Analyze secular millennialism
Grok reply:
I’ll pull the Historical Jesus scholarship Krossa relies on (Q, Jesus Seminar, Jefferson/Tolstoy, Brinsmead) and the historians of millennialism he maps onto climate, Marxism, and AI.
Thought
Two fields Krossa treats as one problem: what Jesus most likely taught, and how end-times scripts keep migrating into politics after God is removed from the credits.
Explore Historical Jesus scholarship
What the “quest” is. Historical Jesus research is the attempt to recover a first-century Jewish teacher from texts written later, for churches, with theology already in them. Sources are thin: Paul (letters in the 50s, almost no biography), Mark, then Matthew and Luke, John later, plus scraps in Josephus and later agrapha. The standard two-source hypothesis says Matthew and Luke used Mark plus a lost sayings collection, Q (Quelle). Q is a reconstruction, not a discovered book. Most specialists still work with it; a minority denies it exists. Cdamm
How authenticity is argued. Common tools:
• Multiple attestation — a saying appears in independent streams.
• Embarrassment — the church would not invent it (baptism by John, crucifixion).
• Dissimilarity — unlike typical Judaism and unlike later church dogma (used cautiously; overuse produces a Jesus floating free of his world).
• Coherence — fits a cluster already judged early.
• Orality — short, memorable aphorisms that could survive decades of speech.Newworldencyclopedia
The fork that matters for Krossa: wisdom Jesus vs apocalyptic Jesus.
One major camp (Albert Schweitzer and many after him, including E. P. Sanders, Dale Allison, Bart Ehrman) holds that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet: kingdom imminent, judgment coming, Israel to be restored. On that view, Paul did not invent end-times; he inherited them.
The other camp, strong in late-20th-century North American work, argues that the earliest sayings layer is sapiential— wisdom, present kingdom, ethic— while judgment and “Son of Man coming on clouds” belong to later editing. James M. Robinson and the International Q Project treated Q as a sayings gospel with little cross-and-resurrection kerygma. John S. Kloppenborg’s influential stratification proposed:
• Q¹ — formative wisdom (aphorisms, trust in providence, enemy-love material).
• Q² — main redaction with prophetic/apocalyptic judgment against rejecters.
• Q³ — a thin final recension. Cdn.mohrsiebeck
Robinson’s line, which Krossa quotes in spirit, is that Q lets you hear Jesus before the “golden patina” of death-and-resurrection preaching covered him. The Jesus Seminar voted many apocalyptic sayings inauthentic and treated the kingdom as a present social ethic more than a cosmic countdown. That is a position, not a consensus. Critics say the Seminar’s method baked in a non-eschatological Jesus, and that “the question of Jesus’ apocalypticism is basically a question of the interpretation of Q.” Library.oapen
Jesus and Paul. Almost everyone agrees Paul talks far more about the crucified-and-exalted Christ than about Galilean teaching. James D. G. Dunn and others still find echoes of Jesus tradition in Paul (Lord’s Supper, love command, non-retaliation in Romans 12). Another reading, which Jefferson stated bluntly and Krossa radicalizes, is rupture: Paul is “the first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus.” Jefferson cut miracle, atonement, Trinity, and priestcraft out of the Gospels and kept what he called “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals,” “diamonds from a dunghill.” Tolstoy made a similar cut. That is Enlightenment moral reconstruction, not a seminar vote— but it is the ancestor of Krossa’s “Jesus-ianity vs Christ-ianity.” Quotepark
What can be said with some safety. A Jewish teacher in Galilee announced God’s reign, told short piercing stories, collided with purity and retaliation norms, was executed by Rome. Enemy-love and indiscriminate providence (sun and rain on good and bad) sit in the double tradition and are hard to write off as later church invention, because they cut against both ordinary honor-shame and later in-group salvation logic. Whether Jesus also preached imminent judgment is the live scholarly fight. Krossa resolves it by taking the Sermon tradition as the criterion of authenticity and treating apocalyptic Christology as the dung. Scholarship allows that move; it does not require it.
Limits. There is no videotape. Q may be layers of a community, not a tape of Jesus. “Historical Jesus” portraits often resemble the historian. Mythicists deny the person; that remains a fringe view. Orthodox and most critical scholars reject Krossa’s claim that taking Jesus seriously “spells the death of Christianity.” They read continuity: same figure, interpreted after Easter.
Analyze secular millennialism
Terms.
Millennialism: history will soon flip from a corrupt age to a perfected order (“heaven on earth”).
Apocalyptic: that flip is imminent, so ordinary time is over.
Cataclysmic vs transformational: the new order arrives through wreckage, or through conversion and reform.
Active vs passive: we smash evil, or God/History/Nature does it while we watch.
Richard Landes: the most dangerous mix is active-cataclysmic + imperial— “we are the agents of the necessary destruction, then we rule.” Api.pageplace
The secularization of the plot. Arthur Mendel’s Vision and Violence: the Apocalypse changes costume— from God to Reason to History to Nature— while keeping the rapture of total devastation and total repair. Once there is no deity to burn the world, we become the fire. Landes: from the French Revolution through Marxism, Bolshevism, and Nazism, “secular” upheavals still ride the apocalyptic curve: launch, disappointment, re-entry into normal time— or a pile of bodies if they seize the state first. All such dates fail; they are rarely inconsequential. Press.umich
The recurring software.
1. A golden past or possible paradise is being ruined.
2. An evil structure or class is named (capital, race, industry, carbon, “unaligned AI”).
3. Time is short; gradualism is betrayal.
4. Salvation requires smashing or totally administering the offending system.
5. After disappointment, the prophecy is reinterpreted, not dropped (delay, “worse than we thought,” new wolf).
Arthur Herman’s declinism is the mood music: the West, or the planet, or the species is sliding toward collapse. Hollywood and news cycles rehearse the last act until it feels like empiricism. Mendel’s alternative is older and smaller: tikkun olam as repair, not reboot— democratic gradualism against “instantaneous transformation.” Press.umich
Twentieth-century cases. Marxist-Leninist and Nazi projects were this-worldly millennialisms with sacred violence: history or race as the judge, the party as the elect, the enemy as ontologically damned. Death counts followed from the plot, not from a misprint. Landes notes that secular movements can out-kill religious ones when industrial power meets active-cataclysmic faith. Hnn
Late-modern cases Krossa folds in.
• Environmental millennialism: ruined Eden (wilderness), human Fall (industrial “plague”), imminent heat-death, repentance as energy sacrifice, sometimes “degrowth” as the purge. Policy reform can be rational; the genre turns rational risk into holy countdown. Mendel already read environmental apocalypse this way in the 1990s.
• AI doomerism: same skeleton— short timeline, unfalsifiable takeoff (“recursive self-improvement”), elect who understand the math, pause or centralize as the ark, dissenters as extinction-deniers. Concrete engineering and liability are not millennial. “End of the decade unless you accept this regime” is.
• Other cousins: nuclear fatalism, some revolutionary identitarian scripts, jihadist and other religious millennialisms that never secularized. Secular does not mean calm; it means the savior is a committee, a model, or a plan.
Why it works. Imminence hijacks survival emotion. Dualism turns neighbors into obstacles to paradise. Failed prophecy rarely dies; it mutates (climate wolf becomes AI wolf). Wojcik and others note a split: some secular apocalypses still promise redemption after wreckage; others are pure doom with no New Jerusalem— only despair. Both still organize politics. Everand
What is not millennial. Ordinary forecasting, insurance, lab containment, emissions research, product liability. The tell is moral totalization: disagreement becomes cosmic treason, and only a rupture counts as seriousness.
Where the two analyses meet
The Historical Jesus fight is, in one register, a millennialism fight. If the earliest Jesus is an apocalyptic prophet, Christianity’s end-times core is his. If the earliest recoverable voice is wisdom and enemy-love, then cataclysmic Christology is a later operating system— the same software Landes and Mendel watch migrating into Revolution, Party, Nature, and now AGI.
Krossa bets on the second reconstruction and then uses it as an anti-virus: no tribal damned, no salvation-by-destruction, repair instead of reboot. Scholarship can support pieces of that bet (Q¹ ethics, Jefferson’s moral cut). It cannot certify the whole bet. The useful public test is smaller than either camp’s metaphysics: when a modern cause starts talking like Revelation— short clock, purifying destruction, elect managers of the end— it has left risk analysis and entered the oldest political religion we have, with or without a church.
Another from Grok’s follow-up suggestions:
Please do “Study Arthur Mendel’s vision”
Grok reply:
I’ll pull Mendel’s Vision and Violence in more detail—thesis, historical arc, and his “repair of the world” alternative.
Thought
Arthur P. Mendel’s Vision and Violence (University of Michigan Press, 1992; paperback 1999 with a preface by Richard Landes) is a late-career book by a historian of Russian thought. It is not a monograph on Revelation as literature. It is an argument that one Western habit of mind— the apocalyptic demand for total, speedy purification— keeps changing its sacred object while keeping its psychology and its body count. Press.umich
The vision in one sentence
The Apocalypse does not die when God fades. It changes costume: God → Reason → History → Nature. Each costume still promises universal devastation as the doorway to a clean world, and that promise is what licenses maximal violence. Mendel’s counter-vision is older and smaller: biblical repair of the world (tikkun olam in the sense he means it)— gradual, this-worldly, constrained improvement rather than instantaneous transmutation. Press.umich
How the book is built
Chapter- Guise of the End; What Mendel is tracking
Apocalypse and God: Ancient Theory- Divine judge; Hebrew and Greek roots: crisis, dualism, hope of reversal.
Apocalypse and God: Medieval Practice- Church and chiliastic revolt; How theory becomes riot, crusade, and “now”.
Apocalypse and Reason- Enlightenment / progress as secular providence; Reason inherits the job of burning the old world.
Apocalypse and History- Hegel → Marx → Bolshevism; History as the new God that must smash to fulfill itself.
Apocalypse and Nature- Environmental apocalypse; Nature as the last sacred victim and last judge.
Paradise Now- 1960s–70s counterculture; Instant inner/outer utopia, impatience with institutions.
Full Circle: Fundamentalism- Jewish, Christian, Islamic revival; The old God returns, same clock, same purge.
The Middle Ground- Repair; His ethic: modest, humane, anti-maximalist.
The sequence is the thesis. Secularization does not cancel millennial hunger; it relocates the wrecking ball. Press.umich
Two strategies of the “good society”
This is the distinction Wendell Krossa keeps quoting, and it is the book’s operational core.
1. Instantaneous transformation (transmutation).
The world is so corrupt that ordinary politics is complicity. The ideal must arrive swiftly and totally. Means are unconstrained by doubt about either the end or the cost. Mendel’s phrase, as Krossa cites it: violent social transmutation is “the strategy of those who are committed to a swift and total realization of the ideal… and who are not constrained by doubts about the maximalist ends and means.” Imminence does the moral work: if the end is next year, democracy is too slow, and the enemy is not a neighbor but an extinction event. Wendellkrossa
2. Gradualism / repair.
Mendel reads an older Hebrew assignment: human beings are placed in this world to curb “evil inclination” enough to build peace, freedom, justice, and material well-being over time. No waiting for a cosmic reboot. No license to purge the imperfect in order to install the perfect this afternoon. The good society is assembled, not detonated into existence. Wendellkrossa
He treats the later Western shift— Hellenistic, Gnostic, chiliastic, then revolutionary— as a rejection of that assignment: perfection now, by fire if needed.
Why “vision” produces violence
The structure is simple and old:
• Total diagnosis (the present order is essentially damned).
• Binary cast (elect vs. agents of corruption).
• Compressed time (the clock is a moral weapon).
• Infinite payoff (a world without evil forever).
• Therefore unbounded means (you cannot overpay for infinity).
Pinker’s later phrasing of the same arithmetic is useful: if the end-state is infinitely good, any finite pile of bodies is a rounding error. Mendel’s point is that this arithmetic survived baptism, deism, dialectics, and ecology. In religious apocalyptic, God swings the sword. In secular apocalyptic, we do— because there is no one else left to do it. That is why Bolshevik and Nazi projects, on his map, are not “politics plus cruelty.” They are apocalypse with a party card. Voegelinview
Nature as the late-modern God
The chapter Apocalypse and Nature is why Krossa and Landes keep the book in the climate/AI file. Mendel was writing as environmentalism was moving from conservation and statute-by-statute cleanup toward a salvation drama: Eden ruined by industrial man, countdown, repentance as civilizational downsizing. He does not say pollution is fake. The publisher summary is explicit that the apocalyptic fantasy can still prod “much-needed policy reforms.” His warning is genre: when Nature becomes the last holy victim, disagreement becomes sacrilege and gradual energy/economic change becomes betrayal of the planet. That is instantaneous transformation in green dress. Press.umich
Counterculture (“Paradise Now”) is the inner version of the same impatience: drop out, drop the system, inhabit the millennium this weekend. Fundamentalism is the return ticket: God again, still no patience for the middle.
The middle ground: repair, not reboot
Mendel ends where he thinks the Bible, at its best, actually points— not Revelation’s cinema, but the ethic of mending an unfinished world. Tikkun olam in this use is not “burn out the evil nation to fix creation.” It is partnered labor: the world is incomplete; humans grind the grain, restrain harm, improve institutions. That is why Krossa pairs Mendel with Julian Simon and liberal-democratic process: the long series of partial fixes is the human story, not a prelude to the real (violent) act. Wendellkrossa
Landes’s later typology fits beside Mendel rather than replacing him. Landes names the lethal mix active-cataclysmic + imperial (“we destroy evil, then we rule”). Mendel supplies the cultural genealogy of that mix and the alternative tempo.
What Mendel is strong on
• Continuity across sacred and secular: same plot, new noun.
• Time as the trigger: imminence abolishes proportion.
• Russian/revolutionary expertise: History-as-God is not a metaphor for him; it is a file he already knew.
• A usable political distinction: maximalist ends + unconstrained means vs. repair under doubt.
What to watch for
• Not every urgent claim is apocalyptic. Epidemiology, engineering containment, and emissions physics can be time-sensitive without being millennial. Mendel’s test is totalization and the ban on gradualism, not the existence of risk.
• “Repair” can be hijacked too. Some militant uses of tikkun have meant purifying violence. Mendel means the modest, anti-zealot sense; the word itself is not a safety lock.
• He is a moral historian, not a climate or AI scientist. The book diagnoses a script. It does not settle empirical disputes about CO₂ or model takeoff. Using it as a rebuttal to all environmental or safety concern is the same genre-error he is attacking, only inverted.
• Judaism and Christianity are not only apocalypse. Mendel knows they also generate spiritual uplift and repair. His target is the strand that makes devastation the sacrament of hope.
Why it still bites
Read Mendel as a tempo ethic. When a movement says the present is so damned that only a rupture counts as seriousness— Net Zero as civilizational on/off switch, AI as “end of the decade or we seize the stack,” revolution as the only honesty— it is running his software. When it says the harm is real, the fix is partial, the innocent are not eggs, and next year is not Armageddon, it is on his middle ground.
That is the vision: keep the hunger for a better world; fire the fantasy that the better world arrives by wrecking this one on a deadline.
Here is Grok’s initial summary of main site themes:
Grok, could you please summarize the main themes of this site, and follow that with a one-page summary followed by a one-paragraph summary of same. Thanks.
http://www.wendellkrossa.com/
Grok reply:
Main themes of wendellkrossa.com
Wendell Krossa’s site, The Unconditional Human Spirit, is a long-running project of narrative reconstruction. It argues that inherited “old story” archetypes— punitive deity, lost paradise, human fallenness, cosmic dualism, looming apocalypse, required sacrifice, tribal exclusion, and “salvation through destruction”— still shape both religions and secular ideologies. Those themes produce unnecessary fear, anti-humanism, and cycles of hysteria that elites exploit. Wendellkrossa
Core counter-themes include:
• Deity (or Ultimate Reality) as unconditional, non-judging, non-punitive love, drawn especially from the Historical Jesus (enemy-love, “sun and rain on good and bad alike”) rather than later Pauline/Christological or apocalyptic layers. Wendellkrossa
• Humanity’s actual story as an exodus from animal tribalism, domination, and retaliation toward more humane existence, liberal democracy, mutual service, and inclusion— not a fall from Eden. Wendellkrossa
• Long-term progress and “declinism” as a distortion: life and civilization have generally improved and can continue to do so through gradual, creative problem-solving rather than coercive millennial schemes. Wendellkrossa
• Rejection of apocalyptic millennialism in its religious and modern secular forms (climate alarmism, AI doomerism, etc.) as recycled “profoundly religious” templates that historically produce destructive “salvation” programs. Wendellkrossa
• A set of roughly 18 paired “old story / better alternative” themes meant to rewire subconscious assumptions at the root rather than only debate surface policies. Wendellkrossa
Recent posts apply this framework to AI safety panic, comparing it to earlier climate, resource, and pandemic alarms and urging evidence over extinction sermons. Wendellkrossa
One-page summary
The site treats ideas about ultimate reality as the deepest drivers of human emotion, motivation, and social behavior. People become like the God (or Gaia, Universe, History, or “the Science”) they believe in. When that image is judging, tribal, perfection-obsessed, and apocalyptic, the result is chronic anxiety, guilt, anti-human narratives, and readiness for coercive purification of “the enemy.” Krossa traces these patterns from ancient Near Eastern myths through world religions into modern secular ideologies: Marxist revolutions, Nazism, environmental millennialism, and now AI-existential-risk crusades. The common template is: a better past ruined by human sin or excess; a looming catastrophe; a demand for sacrifice or total transformation; and salvation that often means destroying or tightly controlling the offending group or technology. Wendellkrossa
Against this, the site offers a replacement story. Reality at its core is unconditional love with no ultimate exclusion or destruction; “all are safe in the end.” The world was never a lost paradise; it is an imperfect arena for struggle and learning. Humanity did not fall from noble hunter-gatherer innocence; it rose, unevenly, out of animal brutality toward greater empathy, rights, and cooperation. The long-term trajectory of life is not decline toward apocalypse but rising complexity and welfare, best protected so far by liberal-democratic institutions that restrain domination while allowing gradual improvement. Justice should lean restorative rather than purely retributive; “eye for eye” is the animal past Jesus rejected. More people and more technology mean more problem-solving capacity, not inevitable exhaustion or extinction. Wendellkrossa
Krossa repeatedly distinguishes the Historical Jesus’ non-retaliatory, non-tribal ethic from later “Christ” theology (Jefferson’s “diamonds in the dunghill”). The project is not atheism and not an attack on believers as persons; it is an attempt to purge threat theology and apocalyptic urgency from both religious and secular public narratives. Current writing applies the same critique to AI doomerism: take concrete safety issues seriously inside labs and companies, but refuse to convert every leak or capability jump into an extinction sermon that invites state-managed “salvation” schemes. Optimism grounded in evidence of human progress, not panic, is presented as the more responsible stance. Wendellkrossa
The practical aim is psychological and cultural liberation: replace fear-based authority with a “safe base” of unconditional regard so people can hold others accountable without dehumanizing them, oppose real harm without millennial violence, and keep investing in a future that has, on the long evidence, been getting better.
One-paragraph summary
Wendell Krossa’s site argues that humanity’s deepest problems are not first political or technological but narrative: inherited myths of a punitive God, a ruined paradise, human fallenness, dualism, and imminent apocalypse still animate both religions and secular crusades (climate alarm, AI doomerism, and earlier “salvation through destruction” movements). The alternative story is that Ultimate Reality is unconditional love, the world was never perfect, humanity has been rising from animal tribalism and retaliation toward more humane, democratic life, and there is no looming divine or existential ending that justifies coercive millennial schemes. Progress, evidence, gradual problem-solving, and enemy-love rather than payback are offered as the more truthful and less destructive frame.
Next:
Gemini, could you please summarize the main themes of this site, and follow that with a one-page summary followed by a one-paragraph summary of same. Thankyou.
http://www.wendellkrossa.com/
Gemini reply:
Main Themes of Wendell Krossa’s Website
Wendell Krossa’s website, The Unconditional Human Spirit, focuses on several core topics:
1. Unconditional Love vs. Threat Theology: Rejecting traditional religious narratives built on conditional acceptance, judgment, apocalypse, and eternal punishment. Instead, Krossa emphasizes the “Historical Jesus” vision of an unconditionally loving, non-retaliatory God.
2. Rejection of Ideological Alarmism and Apocalypticism: Critiquing apocalyptic narratives— whether religious (e.g., end-times prophecy) or secular (e.g., extreme environmental/climate alarmism and totalitarian ideologies)— that rely on fear, doom, and tribal scapegoating.
3. Historical Progress and Human Potential: Advocating an optimistic, evidence-based view of human trajectory. The site highlights humanity’s gradual transition away from primitive, violent animal instincts toward greater freedom, reason, and human flourishing.
4. Psychology of Belief and Harmful Ideas: Investigating why individuals find “emotional satisfaction” in adopting bad ideas, tribalism, and victimhood mythologies that historically incite division, state overreach, and violence.
One-Page Summary
Wendell Krossa’s website, The Unconditional Human Spirit, serves as an online repository of essays and commentary exploring theology, human history, psychology, and secular culture. The primary thesis of Krossa’s work is that human civilization has been historically burdened by “threat theology” and apocalyptic meta-narratives— systems of belief that posit an angry deity or impending secular catastrophe requiring judgment, suffering, and collective submission. These fear-based narratives, whether found in ancient religious dogmas or modern ideological movements, capitalize on humanity’s inherited evolutionary instincts toward tribalism, fear, and hostility toward the “other”.
To counter this, Krossa promotes a radical theological and philosophical shift centered on unconditional goodness. Drawing on the non-retaliatory ethos of the historical Jesus, Krossa argues for a view of ultimate reality defined by unconditional love, where divine punishment, hell, and apocalyptic destruction are explicitly rejected. Under this framework, individuals are ultimate recipients of grace and safety rather than subject to existential threat, freeing them from the guilt and anxiety leveraged by manipulative dogmas.
In the secular sphere, Krossa applies this lens to critique contemporary doom narratives, particularly environmental alarmism and totalitarian politics. He argues that modern doom-saying functions as a secular proxy for religious apocalypticism, instilling unnecessary panic— especially in young people— and justifying authoritarian overreach. Instead, Krossa promotes evidence-based optimism, pointing out that historical data shows long-term improvement in global living standards, health, safety, and human rights. Ultimately, the site urges readers to abandon fear-driven ideologies, embrace human agency and rational optimism, and recognize the upward, progressive trajectory of human development across history.
One-Paragraph Summary
Wendell Krossa’s website, The Unconditional Human Spirit, challenges fear-based religious and secular meta-narratives by replacing threat-driven dogmas with a framework of unconditional love and evidence-based optimism. Krossa argues that traditional ideas of divine wrath, hell, and modern catastrophic alarmism exploit primitive tribal instincts and cause psychological harm. By drawing on a non-retaliatory view of ultimate reality alongside historical evidence of human progress, the site seeks to free individuals from apocalyptic panic and promote rational hope, human agency, and personal freedom.
Next:
Claude, could you please summarize the main themes of this site, and follow that with a one-page summary followed by a one-paragraph summary of same. Thankyou.
http://www.wendellkrossa.com/
Claude reply:
Wendell Krossa’s The Unconditional Human Spirit
Part 1: Main Themes
Everything below is the author’s own position, described as he presents it.
1. “Unconditional” love as the highest ideal. Krossa holds that reality at its core is unconditional love, and that humans should treat one another with unconditional mercy. He draws this from his reading of the historical Jesus (e.g., “love your enemies”).
2. Jesus versus Paul. He sees a “great contradiction” between Jesus’s unconditional God and the conditional, punishment-based theology he attributes to Paul and later Christianity.
3. “Bad religious ideas.” He argues that ancient archetypes (a punishing God, cosmic good-versus-evil dualism, apocalypse, “salvation through violent destruction”) still shape religions and secular ideologies.
4. Apocalyptic millennialism in modern form. He links Marxism, Nazism, radical Islam, environmental alarmism, and now AI “doomerism” to one template: manufactured fear that makes people accept destructive “salvation schemes.”
5. The grand story of humanity. He describes humanity’s slow exodus from an “animal past” of tribalism, domination, and retaliation toward a mature human existence of freedom, mutual service, and inclusion.
6. Elite/commoner divide. He traces the drive to dominate from shamans and priests through Plato’s philosopher-kings to modern state bureaucracies, and argues for human equality as the basis of freedom.
7. Liberal democracy versus collectivism. He treats liberal democracy as the best system so far and collectivism, including Marxism and “Woke progressivism/DEI”, as contemporary versions of tribal dualism (i.e. oppressors/oppressed).
8. Optimism and anti-“declinism.” He argues that life is improving (citing Julian Simon and Steven Pinker) and that pessimistic narratives distort reality.
9. Skepticism of climate alarmism and AI doom. He rejects the “climate crisis” framing and promotes benefits of CO₂ and warming. His latest posts side with Jensen Huang against calls to slow AI development.
10. Dialogue with AI. Much of the site consists of his exchanges with Grok, Gemini, and ChatGPT, through which he hopes to influence AI toward “more humane” thinking.
Part 2: One-Page Summary
The Unconditional Human Spirit is a long-running blog and essay archive in which Wendell Krossa develops a single grand thesis: that the deepest story of humanity is a gradual liberation from an “animal” inheritance of tribalism, domination, and violent retaliation toward a mature humanity marked by freedom, cooperation, and unconditional love. His motto for this arc is “from retaliation to unconditional love.”
Much of the site is theological. Krossa argues that the ideas people hold about God shape how they treat each other: people become like the God they believe in. He contends that inherited religious archetypes, including a punishing deity, cosmic dualism, and apocalyptic “salvation through destruction,” have energized violence throughout history. In his account, the historical Jesus offered a radical alternative in an unconditionally merciful God, but Paul’s Christology reversed it and reinstated conditional, punitive theology. He does not condemn religious people, but he wants the ideas themselves exposed and replaced.
He extends the same analysis to secular movements. Marxism, Nazism, radical Islamism, environmentalism, and now AI “doomerism” are treated as variants of apocalyptic millennialism: they stir public fear, then offer a salvation scheme that concentrates power in an elite. Related to this is his theme of the elite/commoner divide, the recurring belief that some people are specially qualified to rule others. Against it he argues for human equality and for liberal democracy as the system that best protects freedom.
The site is also relentlessly optimistic about the “true state of life.” Krossa cites Julian Simon and Steven Pinker (and others) to argue that human welfare is rising, that “declinism” is a distorted worldview, and that alarms over cooling, forests, fisheries, and climate have repeatedly proved exaggerated. He rejects the “climate crisis” framing, cites skeptics such as Lindzen and Happer, and stresses benefits of CO₂ and mild warming.
An insert here from me (Wendell Krossa): Note that Claude/Anthropic, shaped by a “leftist bias”, as per the Washington Post report, included this disclaimer at the end of the above paragraph- “These are contested positions; most climate scientists disagree with them.” The other AI also consistently include such “appeals to authority” with the same caveats to counter my affirmation of the skeptical climate science of experts like Lindzen and Happer. The AI’s essential bias to leftist climate alarmism drives them on this issue. And I, with many others, am in strong disagreement with that “consensus” of mainstream apocalyptic climate science. As the best of climate experts state- “There is no climate crisis”. (End of insert)
Continuing with Claude’s summary…
The most recent posts (September 2026) apply this framework to AI safety debates. Krossa sides with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who argues that existing laws are sufficient and that AI CEOs warning of extinction have “ulterior” motives. He warns of “Dominators” rather than “Terminators”: elites who might exploit AI fear to seize control. Many posts consist of his prompts to AI systems and their replies, which he uses to refine arguments and to try to shape AI toward more humane thinking.
Part 3: One-Paragraph Summary
The Unconditional Human Spirit is Wendell Krossa’s blog and archive arguing that humanity’s core story is a slow exodus from an “animal” past of tribalism, domination, and violent retaliation toward a mature, free, unconditionally loving humanity, best protected by liberal democracy. It contends that ancient religious archetypes (a punishing God, cosmic dualism, apocalypse, salvation through destruction) still drive both religious traditions and secular ideologies such as Marxism, radical Islamism, environmentalism, and now AI “doomerism,” and that these repeatedly use manufactured fear to justify elite control. Against them Krossa offers the unconditional theology of the historical Jesus (contrasted with Paul), human equality, and evidence-based optimism that life is improving. His recent posts apply this framework to AI debates, siding with Jensen Huang against calls for slowdowns, and much of the site consists of his dialogues with AI systems.
Next:
Chat, could you please summarize the main themes of this site, and follow that with a one-page summary followed by a one-paragraph summary of same. Thankyou.
http://www.wendellkrossa.com/
Chat reply:
Main themes
Several recurring themes emerge:
• Humanity’s movement from an animal past toward a more humane existence. Krossa presents human history as an “Exodus” from inherited patterns of domination, tribal exclusion, violence, retaliation and fear toward greater compassion, cooperation and unconditional love.
• Human progress as a moral and cultural journey. Progress is not simply technological or material; it involves learning what it means to be genuinely human and progressively “humanizing” ourselves and the world around us.
• Retaliation versus unconditional love. A major conceptual contrast is between the older human impulse toward vengeance and reciprocal violence and the emerging ideal of forgiveness, non-retaliation and unconditional love.
• A critique of traditional religious/apocalyptic thinking. His work examines religious narratives— particularly ideas involving sin, judgment, apocalypse, punishment and divine intervention— and argues for reinterpretations that place greater emphasis on human responsibility and the progressive transformation of humanity.
• Hope rather than fear as a motivating force. The future should be approached through confidence in human potential, creativity, discovery, love and constructive action rather than through fear of catastrophe or divine punishment.
• The relationship between science, philosophy and spirituality. The material treats rational inquiry and scientific understanding as important correctives to inherited theological assumptions, while also suggesting that science benefits from philosophical and spiritual reflection.
• Human potential. The underlying outlook is strongly optimistic: human beings are unfinished, capable of moral development, and able to participate in creating a better future.
One-page summary
Wendell Krossa’s writings appear to revolve around a large interpretation of the human story: humanity is gradually moving out of an ancient animal and tribal past and toward a more fully human way of living. Rather than understanding human existence primarily through the traditional religious categories of sin, guilt, judgment, punishment and apocalypse, Krossa places the emphasis on development, moral learning, compassion and the continuing expansion of human potential.
At the centre of this interpretation is what he calls the human Exodus. The metaphor draws upon the familiar biblical story of leaving bondage and moving toward a better land, but Krossa applies it to the entire human species. Humanity’s earliest existence was characterized by many behaviours inherited from our animal and tribal past: competition for dominance, separation into hostile groups, suspicion of outsiders, predation and retaliation. These tendencies have not simply disappeared with civilization; they remain part of human emotional and social life. The human task is therefore to recognize and progressively overcome them.
This makes moral progress the central storyline. Human history can be interpreted as a long, uneven movement toward greater freedom, cooperation, empathy and concern for others. Progress does not mean that humanity has eliminated violence or cruelty. Rather, the significant fact is that human beings have repeatedly discovered new ways of resisting those impulses and organizing life around more humane values. The trajectory is therefore neither perfect nor inevitable, but it is capable of continuing.
One of Krossa’s most important contrasts is between retaliation and unconditional love. Retaliation belongs to an older pattern in which injury produces counter-injury and hostility perpetuates itself through generations. Unconditional love represents a radically different response: instead of returning violence for violence, the individual or society attempts to break the cycle. In this sense, love becomes not merely a private religious virtue but a possible principle for the transformation of human civilization.
This perspective also leads to a substantial critique of traditional apocalyptic religion. Apocalyptic systems frequently divide existence into good and evil forces, identify enemies who must be defeated, and anticipate a catastrophic intervention that will finally establish a perfect world. Krossa’s alternative is to understand the “Exodus” as an ongoing historical process. The better future is not something humanity passively waits for; it is something people participate in creating through discovery, imagination, creativity, cooperation and moral development. Related material discussing his work contrasts authentic, gradual social improvement with utopian or catastrophic attempts to impose an instantly perfect order.
There is consequently a strong anti-fear and pro-life orientation in the philosophy. Death, rather than being primarily a reason for fear, can become a reminder of life’s finite opportunities and an incentive to live more fully. The emphasis is placed on what human beings can accomplish in the present rather than on escaping history or waiting for supernatural deliverance.
Another important dimension is the relationship between science, philosophy, theology and spirituality. Krossa’s project is not simply an attack on religion; it is an attempt to reinterpret the deepest questions traditionally addressed by religion in light of modern knowledge and the actual human experience. Scientific understanding can challenge inherited assumptions, while philosophical and spiritual reflection can raise questions about meaning, values and how knowledge ought to be used.
Taken as a whole, the worldview is therefore an optimistic philosophy of human development. Its central question is essentially: What does it mean to become genuinely human? Its answer emphasizes moving beyond inherited patterns of domination and retaliation toward compassion, cooperation, creativity, freedom and unconditional love. Humanity’s “Exodus” is not finished; it is the continuing project of making ourselves, our societies and our world increasingly humane.
One-paragraph summary
Wendell Krossa’s work presents human history as a long Exodus from our animal and tribal past toward a more genuinely human existence, with the central movement being from domination, exclusion, violence and retaliation toward cooperation, compassion and unconditional love. He challenges traditional religious and apocalyptic interpretations that emphasize sin, punishment, catastrophe and supernatural rescue, proposing instead that humanity itself participates in creating a better future through moral development, creativity, discovery and increasingly humane social relationships. His broader perspective combines evolutionary and scientific understandings of humanity with philosophical and spiritual questions about meaning and purpose, ultimately offering a strongly hopeful account of human potential: the human story is unfinished, and our task is to continue the movement toward a world shaped less by fear and vengeance and more by love, freedom and human flourishing.
Further responses from Grok:
My next: Lets do Investigate Julian Simon’s optimism
Grok reply:
I’ll pull Simon’s core thesis, the Ehrlich bet, and how later data treated his optimism.
Thought
Julian Simon’s optimism is not a mood. It is an economic claim about what a resource is, and a historical claim about what people have done when prices scream scarcity.
Who he was and what he flipped
Julian Lincoln Simon (1932–1998) was a University of Maryland economist. Early on he shared the mid-century fear that more people meant more famine. Then he read the empirical work in Scarcity and Growth and inverted the story: mouths come attached to minds. The book that made the inversion famous is The Ultimate Resource (1981), expanded as The Ultimate Resource 2 (1996). Econlib
Three linked theses:
1. Resources are not finite in the economic sense that matters. Physical atoms on Earth are limited. What counts as a “resource” is knowledge applied to matter. Oil was a nuisance until it was a fuel. Copper scarcity is a price, not a tombstone. Extraterrestrial and substitute sources further blur any neat “line with two endpoints.”
2. Scarcity is a signal, not a verdict. When something gets scarce, its price rises. That recruits exploration, efficiency, recycling, and substitutes. After an adjustment period, societies are often better off than before the pinch.
3. People are the ultimate resource— “skilled, spirited, and hopeful,” especially under liberty. More people create short-run crowding problems and more solvers. On the long run he expected falling real resource costs, rising food per person, and falling famine— not Malthusian collapse. Wikipedia
He also flipped the ethics of “leave it in the ground for the future.” If descendants will be richer, forcing the poor present to gift resources to the rich future is, in his phrase, asking the poor to subsidize the rich. Reason
The Ehrlich wager (the parable everyone cites)
Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) treated humans mainly as consumers heading for mass starvation. Simon offered a bet: pick raw materials and a date more than a year out; inflation-adjusted prices will be lower, not higher.
Ehrlich (with John Holdren and John Harte) chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten, September 1980–September 1990. All five fell in real terms. Ehrlich mailed Simon $576.07. Wikipedia
What the bet did and did not prove.
It proved that a high-profile scarcity forecast failed on the terms Ehrlich accepted. It did not prove that every ten-year window of the 20th century would have gone Simon’s way. Later papers (Kiel et al. and others) show that on that same metal basket, rolling 10-year real-price bets often favor Ehrlich; 1980–90 was a friendly decade (post-1970s spike, then slump). Commodity prices swing with recessions, cartels, and wars. A decade is a noisy instrument. Ourworldindata
Simon’s own preferred metrics were never “did tungsten tick up this cycle?” They were share of a worker’s time/budget and human welfare: calories, life expectancy, famine deaths. On those, the post-1960s record is brutally one-sided against Ehrlich’s famine-of-the-1970s script. China, which should have been Malthus’s exhibit A, raised calories and cut death rates as population grew. Humanity has not exhausted a single major non-renewable in the sense of “gone, civilization stops.” Econlib
Ehrlich later proposed a different basket of environmental/welfare indicators. Assessments of that counter-offer are mixed in the first decade and shift toward Simon-style welfare measures if you lengthen the clock. The fight is partly about which scoreboard. Gwern
The mechanism, not the vibe
Simon thought like an economist, not a cheerleader:
• Price → incentive → knowledge → new supply or substitute.
• Population increases demand and the stock of problem-solvers and the division of labor (Adam Smith’s point scaled to commodities).
• “Infinite” means: no binding physical ceiling that markets and minds cannot push out on human-relevant timescales. It does not mean “use anything, anywhere, no local damage.”
Gale Pooley and Marian Tupy operationalized this as the Simon Abundance Index: time-price of a basket of commodities × population change. Time-price = how many hours of work buy a unit. Their 2026 update: from a 1980 base of 100, the index around 636 in 2025— Earth “536% more abundant” by that construction; time-prices of 50 commodities down ~71% on average; population up ~85%. For every 1% population rise, they estimate population-level abundance rose several times that. The index dipped in COVID and after the Ukraine war energy spike, then recovered. That is Simon’s cycle: shock, pain, response. Newsletter.humanprogress
Whether you accept the exact index math or not, the directional fact he cared about is hard to erase: more people, cheaper real commodities over multi-decade spans, higher living standards.
What his optimism is not
Not a promise of no shortages. He said there will always be temporary squeezes where there is war, blunder, or disaster. The claim is trend plus response, not a smooth ride.
Not “pollution doesn’t matter.” He argued many pollutants fell in rich countries as wealth and knowledge rose (the environmental Kuznets intuition). That is compatible with serious local and global externalities that prices fail to capture unless institutions put a price on them. Climate is the hard case: the damage is delayed, global, and not fully in the copper price. Simon’s framework says: don’t treat carbon as a mystic doom; treat it as a problem for knowledge, substitution (including energy tech), and policy that uses incentives. It does not automatically bless “do nothing.”
Not independent of institutions. His last clause matters: people endowed with liberty. Extractive states, war, and closed science starve the “ultimate resource.” Population without open inquiry is just more mouths.
Not a law that 10-year futures always fall. Critics who beat him on rolling metal windows are right about that narrow test. They are wrong if they treat that as a refutation of the welfare and time-price record.
Not a theology of infinite planets. Physical constraints exist (land, high-quality ores, waste sinks, biodiversity). Simon’s move is to say the binding constraint in practice has been knowledge and incentives, so “finite therefore doomed” is the bad inference. Degrowth and Limits to Growth heirs still model collapse if substitution and productivity fail. That is a live modeling dispute, not a settled funeral for Simon. ScienceDirect
Why Krossa (and Mendel’s “repair”) grab him
Simon is the empirical half of the anti-declinist brief. Mendel says: don’t demand instantaneous purification. Simon says: look at the scoreboard of gradual repair— food, metals, life span— and you will see creators outrunning destroyers. Krossa’s line that more people means more minds is Simon almost verbatim. The moral sting is the same as against apocalyptic politics: if the long trend is improvement under messy markets and democracies, “smash the system this decade to save the world” is not hard-headed. It is a refusal to use the mechanism that has actually widened abundance.
A fair verdict
Simon won the argument he actually made: humans are not locusts with a fixed pantry; they are the species that turns scarcity into a research program. The 1980–90 check is a footnote. The stronger evidence is decades of falling time-prices, rising calories, and failed famine deadlines.
Hold three caveats at once: short-run pain is real; unpriced environmental sinks can break the happy story if knowledge and policy lag; liberty and competence are not automatic. That is still optimism in Simon’s sense— conditional, empirical, impatient with sermons of inevitable decline— not a guarantee that the next problem will be easy.
Next: (Let me register my disagreement with Grok’s comments/hints on rising CO2 as a problem. Grok scatters such “caveats” throughout its responses on all sorts of issues.)
My request in response to end suggestions from Grok- Lets “Examine the Environmental Kuznets Curve” and add Indur Goklany’s material on this under the “environmental transition”…
Grok reply:
I’ll pull the EKC evidence and critiques, then Goklany’s “environmental transition” thesis so the two can sit side by side.
Thought
Two related ideas try to answer the same question Simon and the Malthusians fight over: does getting richer wreck the environment, or eventually clean it? The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) is the statistical slogan. Indur Goklany’s environmental transition is the process story underneath it.
The Environmental Kuznets Curve
Claim. Named after Simon Kuznets’s inverted-U of inequality vs. income, the EKC says many forms of environmental harm rise with early growth, then fall after a turning point in GDP per capita. Classic early papers: Grossman and Krueger (NAFTA-era work, 1991/1995), World Bank World Development Report 1992, Selden and Song. Typical turning-point talk for local air pollutants was once in the few-thousand-dollar range (PPP); later estimates scatter widely. Socialsciencelibrary
The three-effect decomposition (standard now):
Effect What it does
Scale More output with the same dirty technique → more pollution
Composition Economy shifts (farm → heavy industry → services) → pollution can rise then fall
Technique Cleaner processes, end-of-pipe controls, demand for amenity → pollution falls
The downturn exists only when technique (+ composition) beats scale. That is not automatic. It needs wealth enough to pay for abatement, political demand for clean air/water, and usable technology. Policy can pull the turning point earlier and lower; that is the useful policy reading, not “growth will do it while we sleep.” Asksia
Where the pattern is strongest.
Local, visible, health-relevant pollutants with cheap fixes: urban SO₂, smoke, particulates, fecal coliforms, lead in gasoline. Rich-country time series from mid-20th century soot to now are the exhibit. Some newer work still finds inverted-Us for several air pollutants even with rising population density. ScienceDirect
Where it is weak or fails.
• CO₂ and other well-mixed GHGs. The “climate Kuznets curve” is unstable. UK CO₂ per person can fall while GDP rises because of fuel mix and energy intensity, not because GDP squared is a law of nature. Cross-country inverted-Us for carbon are sensitive to spec, often N-shaped (up again at high income if scale outruns green tech), and easy to cook with bad panel econometrics. Turning points, when found, are often so high that most of the world is still on the rising limb. ScienceDirect
• Statistics. David Stern’s line: many EKC plots rest on flimsy specs; income-independent time effects (better tech everywhere) do a lot of the work; some pollutants look more like “rising with income, elasticity < 1.” Harbaugh, Levinson, and Wilson (2002) watched the inverted-U vanish after cleaning data and changing samples. Results depend on pollutant, lag structure, and whether you use concentrations vs. emissions, production vs. consumption (offshoring dirt). ScienceDirect • Irreversibility and sinks. Early-stage damage (extirpated species, collapsed fisheries, accumulated CO₂) does not politely reverse when the curve turns. Median world income is far below mean, so global aggregates can worsen for a long time even if a few rich countries have peaked. • N-shape. After a first cleanup, further growth can push some indicators up again unless technique keeps winning. Fair reading. The EKC is a useful stylized fact for local pollutants in countries that chose to abate, not a general theory of “growth = green.” It describes a possible path, not a guarantee, and it is a terrible excuse to ignore regulation or to treat all “environment” as one number. Goklany’s environmental transition
Indur Goklany (policy analyst, former U.S. Interior Department science/tech policy, IPCC delegate/reviewer) treats the EKC as a special case of a broader cycle. Key papers include “Have Increases in Population, Affluence and Technology Worsened Human and Environmental Well-Being?” (2009) and related work in The Improving State of the World and Humanity Unbound. Masterresource
The cycle, in his terms.
1. Poverty first. The worst human-environment state is subsistence: short lives, dirty water, indoor smoke, land cleared because you eat or die. Affluence and technology are not optional luxuries; they are how you stop living as a daily raid on habitat.
2. Early industrial worsening. Scale and dirty technique raise outdoor air and water pollution. This is the left side of the EKC. IPAT (Impact = Population × Affluence × Technology) looks true if you freeze T as “dirtiness.”
3. Transition. Wealth and knowledge flip the sign of T. People demand sanitation, smokeless fuel, catalytic converters. States can afford treatment plants. After decades of deterioration, affluence and technology become part of the solution. That is the “environmental transition.”
4. Leapfrog. Poorer countries need not replay 19th-century London pea-soupers for a century. They can import standards and kit with a short lag— sometimes beating rich countries’ historical path. That is Goklany generalizing the EKC: development plus technological diffusion, not income alone.
What he puts on the scoreboard (not just SO₂).
• Human well-being moved up through the dirty decades: life expectancy, calories, infant mortality. He insists you not score “environment” while ignoring that people stopped dying of the old environmental killers (unsafe water, smoke, famine).
• U.S. cropland roughly flat while population and GDP soared— yields “saved” land. Globally he argued cropland and water withdrawals were nearing or entering transition because of productivity. Fossil energy, in Humanity Unbound, is framed as having saved nature from the plow: without it, feeding current demand would require vastly more habitat conversion. Researchgate
• Traditional air pollutants in rich countries: long series with peaks, then decline— transition, not endless IPAT doom.
• Population growth is no longer exponential; food and materials became more affordable over long history.
How this differs from a naïve EKC.
Goklany is closer to Simon: the engine is knowledge and wealth, and the right metric is a bundle of human and environmental indicators over long periods. The EKC is one graph of one pollutant. The transition is a sequence of problems: first kill cholera, then soot, then NOx, then (maybe) carbon intensity. Each peak can arrive earlier if poor countries skip dirty vintages.
Where he is contested.
Critics say he underweights cumulative and global sinks (climate, ocean chemistry, extinction rates), over-credits fossil fuels’ land-sparing without pricing their climate externality, and treats “well-being rose while some environments worsened” as too comforting if the new harms are slower and planetary. Planetary-boundary work is the opposing frame: some thresholds are not EKC-shaped. That dispute is about which indicators are allowed to dominate, not about whether London air is cleaner than in 1952.
How the two fit together— and where they don’t
Categories- (1) EKC (textbook) (2) Goklany transition
Examples:
Shape- (1)Inverted-U vs. income (2)Cycle: worsen, then wealth/tech clean up; peaks can move left
Driver named- (1)Income (often) (2)Affluence and technology, plus demand and policy
Best fit- (1)Local air/water (2)Same, plus land/water use and human-welfare co-trends
Weak fit- (1)CO₂, biodiversity, consumption footprints (2)Same global commons
Policy moral- (1)Easy to abuse as “just grow” (2)“Grow and deploy cleaner T; don’t freeze the poor in dirty poverty”
Simon link- (1)Price/technique beat scale (2)People + knowledge flip IPAT’s T from villain to tool
Scale–composition–technique is the shared machinery. Goklany’s addition is historical and moral: the left side of the curve is not proof that growth is a crime; it is the phase before societies can buy the right-hand side— and human health often improved during the dirty phase because indoor and sanitary environments matter more than ambient SO₂ for the poor.
For climate, neither model gives a free lunch. Rich-country CO₂ can fall with GDP (UK-style) when electricity and cars decarbonize; that is technique beating scale, i.e. a possible transition, not an EKC law. Developing-country emissions can still rise for years. Regulation, especially market instruments, can flatten and lower the path. That is consistent with Goklany’s leapfrogging if the technology is cheap enough to adopt. It is not consistent with “wait for $25,000 GDP and the atmosphere will curve down by itself.” Wider.unu
A working synthesis
Use the EKC as a pollutant-specific regularity, not a metaphysics of progress. Use Goklany as the narrative of sequence: poverty is environmentally brutal; early industry is dirty; wealth plus technique have already turned many local curves; the job is to pull remaining peaks forward (air in fast-growing cities, carbon intensity everywhere) without putting the poor through a Victorian century.
That pairing is the anti-apocalyptic environmentalism in the Simon–Mendel–Krossa line: repair and substitution on a rising income path, not instantaneous purification by degrowth— and not the opposite error that every curve turns itself.