The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun
Do we need a 'Holy War' against the Thinking Machines?
A beginning is a very delicate time.
Last month, 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama drove to the San Francisco residence of OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman and hurled a Molotov cocktail at its gate. Hours later, he arrived at OpenAI’s headquarters and attempted to force an entrance. Following his arrest, information about Moreno-Gama began to circulate online, including his social media accounts.1
Evidence emerged that he had participated in multiple anti-AI forums, interfacing with groups such as PauseAI and Stop AI. These groups emphasized that they advocate nonviolence and distanced themselves from the attack.
His parents described him as being in the throes of a mental health crisis, and the incident quickly exited the news cycle. But what drew less general attention was something that immediately piqued the curiosity of a lot of nerds: his Discord username. His handle was ‘Butlerian Jihadist.’
When I read this detail, tucked away near the end of a Guardian article, I winced to see another of my predictions come true; that the ‘Butlerian Jihad’ would soon enter public life not as mere literary metaphor, but as a kind of political vocabulary, one destined to spiral into paranoia and violence.
The first blow in the Butlerian Jihad had been struck. And it came before the Holy War had even been declared.
What is the ‘Butlerian Jihad?’
I originally entitled this essay Who Will Declare The Butlerian Jihad? but then, well, someone did.
And it just so happened to be the fucking Pope.
For the past week, users on Instagram and X have been abuzz about the new Papal Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, the first of Leo XIV’s tenure as Pope.
It is rare for 42-page Papal Encyclicals to capture the imagination of chronically online Leftists, but this case was special. Users immediately leaped at the opportunity to describe this as a kind of anti-AI manifesto, and announce that the Pope had, with Magnifica Humanitas, finally declared the ‘Butlerian Jihad.’
If you’re lost, let me bring you up to speed.
The Butlerian Jihad has nothing to do with Judith Butler nor her crusade for feminism. It has nothing to do with butlers and housekeepers overthrowing landed aristocrats, a plot line that would obviously make for the only watchable season of Downton Abbey. And it has nothing to do with Islam, or the Middle East.
It is just a meme. A very old meme.
And it has everything to do with Dune.
Not the movies, which this year return to cinemas in what is imagined by experts (me) to be the cinematic event of the year. No, the books. Specifically, the books written by Frank Herbert, rather than by his literary failson Brian Herbert.
Within Herbert’s Dune universe, the Butlerian Jihad acts simultaneously as an actual historical event and a kind of moral lesson. It refers to a moment in the distant past–our future–when humans rose up and destroyed what Herbert calls the ‘thinking machines.’ The Jihad is invoked (often vaguely) throughout the story as a warning against giving over mankind’s thinking to artificial intelligence.
And if you only read the first book, that’s about the extent of it. A straightforward condemnation of machine thinking and AI. But of course, none of Frank Herbert’s condemnations are straightforward, which is something that is difficult to realize, if you only read the first book.
Thus, in our current political climate, the Butlerian Jihad meme is being misread, and that misreading matters politically. The phrase was never meant to imply a purely anti-tech crusade nor act as permission slip for vigilante violence. That is because the Butlerian Jihad is not a parable about technology, but about domination.
Technology and Technocracy
“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”
This is the first and most famous commandment left behind in the wake of the Butlerian Jihad.2 Taken at face value, it sounds like exactly the kind of sacred prohibition on artificial intelligence that a large cross-section of the online Left wants it to be. A wholesale and holy ban on the synthetic mind, or anything that resembles it.
The phrase comes from the Orange Catholic Bible, the primary sacred text of the state-approved religion that dominates the Imperium. Accordingly, to read it as a simple anti-AI slogan is to make the same mistake that every fundamentalist makes when interpreting the Bible: strip it of its context, and allow it to ‘speak for itself,’ rather than undergoing the arduous task of exegesis.
Removed from its context, ‘Thou Shalt Not Make A Machine In The Likeness Of A Human Mind’ is a perfect slogan for ideologues who imagine hurling a brick through a data center window to be the proper start and end of their activism. A cultural meme capable of rallying Luddite sentiment, demanding that we cast our bodies onto the machine.
But the Left dispensed with ‘Thou Shalts’ and ‘Thou Shalt Nots’ ages ago. And so did Frank Herbert.
Herbert’s final reference to the Jihad in his books is not as a warning against technological overreach, but against moral panic and mass ideological hysteria.
“Odrade was suddenly aware she had touched on the force that had powered the Butlerian Jihad — mob motivation.”3
It mirrors Herbert’s warning in the first book:
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”4
This is likely the most pertinent formulation of Frank Herbert’s own ideas about what the Jihad is supposed to represent. Importantly, the Butlerian Jihad was aimed not at the machines themselves, but at those who sought to wield them as tools of domination.
This is the key point that is missed in most of the popular discourse surrounding the ‘Butlerian Jihad’ as a kind of subcultural anti-AI meme: the target of the Jihad was never the tools, but the craftsmen. It was a war on technocracy, not technology.
But even this quotation contains its own implicit critique, as it is uttered by the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohaiam as she is forcing a young Paul Atreides to undergo a deadly test to prove that he is ‘human.’ She tells him this because she is the head of a religious order designed to maintain the Imperium as a stratified, feudal society set up for the benefit of the few. She and her order count themselves among this select few, and benefit from their place atop the imperial hierarchy.
In fact, from the first appearance of the phrase in Dune to its final mention in Chapterhouse: Dune, the Butlerian Jihad emerges from the text not as a prelude to liberation, but to historical stagnation. Mohaiam’s order is called the ‘Bene Gesserit,’ a society explicitly modeled after the Jesuits, with whom Herbert had a childhood familiarity.
Again, as Herbert once pointed out in an interview, Dune is not supposed to be science fiction. It is religious commentary.
In the world of Dune, the Butlerian Jihad represents the subversion of a technocratic order in favor of a feudal one that was, in many ways, the more regressive of the two. Having destroyed the thinking machines, humans quickly reasserted their will to dominate the universe by other means.
When we meet Paul Atreides in the opening chapters of Dune, we are ushered not into some science fiction utopia, but a backward civilization, slavishly maintaining the scaffolding of a feudal Dark Age. It is a society that more closely resembles the ossified, backward-looking hierarchy of feudal Japan or Tsarist Russia than anything forward-thinking and aspirational.
In place of thinking machines, humans are beaten, bred, and shaped into tools far in excess of their ordinary capabilities. Instead of machines aspiring to become human, humans are reduced to mere machines.
From this vantage point, the Great Commandment, the Orange Catholic Bible, and the Bene Gesserit all simply represent the class interests of a ruling aristocracy. Thus, the prohibition on the use of thinking machines is, like all such ‘Thou Shalt Nots’, probably a lie, though perhaps one crafted around a kernel of truth. A lie crafted out of the need for control, for domination.
Power and Corruption
If it seems as if I am reaching with this interpretation of the Butlerian Jihad parable, consider it in the context of Frank Herbert’s subtle and oft-overlooked commentary on power and privilege within his books.
While the new films took certain artistic liberties with the story to prefigure the dark turn of its central character, Paul Atreides emerges from the first Dune book as a mythic hero. It was thus to the surprise of many that the second book took great pains to disabuse readers of this notion. If you’re not ready to read Dune: Messiah, you’ll have to wait till December to find out how that goes down.
As it turns out, Herbert was too subtle in his criticisms of powerful and charismatic leaders in his opening Dune novel. He made up for this by becoming increasingly less subtle as the novels wore on.
By the third or fourth book, it is made clear that we are onlookers to the internal power struggles of a brutal ruling elite who are neither particularly moral nor very generous, obsessed with propping up a feudal regime while holding the lives of billions in the balance. In this sense, Dune is not dissimilar to Game of Thrones, in that the authors of both series were dismayed to find out that some of their readers found their protagonists to be aspirational.
By the fourth Dune book, Frank Herbert drops my favorite line in the whole series, one I had to delve deep into my Goodreads notes to remember in its entirety:
“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”
This is the closest we get in the entire series to a character echoing Herbert’s own oft-repeated suspicions of power, hierarchy, and cult-like figures.
In the same way that Dune is a warning about charismatic, authoritarian leaders, it is also a warning about the dangers of offloading critical human thinking and decision-making to central authorities, human or non-human alike.
After all, it was humans who built the machines and decided to wield them to oppress other humans, just as it was humans who restored the feudal structures that would oppress other humans for millennia to come.
Of Leto and Leo
This is where Leo XIV’s encyclical actually becomes quite useful. Not because it ‘declares war’ on machines, but because it recognizes the precise same danger Herbert did; the reduction of human beings into instruments. Leo XIV, in his recent papal encyclical, is coming at the same problem as Frank Herbert, just more explicitly, and from the other direction.
He is consciously writing after the manner of his namesake and predecessor Leo XIII, whose Rerum Novarum confronted the rise of industrial capitalism toward the end of the 19th century. Leo XIII warned against a system that reduced workers to appendages of the factory machine, and was prone “to misuse men as though they were things in the pursuit of gain, or to value them solely for their physical powers - that is truly shameful and inhuman.”
A century and a half later, his successor is speaking to a growing societal concern not that we are misusing men as things, but that we are misusing ‘things’ as ‘men.’ And he manages to do so with no small amount of grace and precision.
Leo XIV is challenging, with Magnifica Humanitas, what the character of Leto II Atreides in God Emperor of Dune calls the ‘machine-attitude.’
“The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines,” Leto said. “Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments.”5
In a portion related to the us of artificial intelligence in war-fighting, Leo XIV recasts this ‘machine-attitude’ as a “dehumanizing ambition.”
Moreover, there seems to be no limit to the race — driven by a dehumanizing ambition — to develop evermore powerful technologies or to secure control over them. Yet, despite this downward spiral, we can also glimpse a great part of humanity that is striving to remain human and working to build the holy city of coexistence and peace.6
This is why the Left, and society more broadly, should resist the temptation to read Magnifica Humanitas as a simple anti-AI manifesto.
Magnifica Humanitas is valuable precisely because it does not make the vulgar mistake now being projected onto the fictional Butlerian Jihad. It treats the thinking machine neither as a demon nor a consciousness hiding inside the circuitry. Nor does it see AI as some rival species whose emergence must be met with holy violence.
It simply asks whose vision of the human person is being elevated through the thinking machine. And it warns against the very concentrations of power and structures of domination that haunted Frank Herbert’s writing.
I am not a Catholic, but as a Leftist and a devotee of Herbert, I believe that the cultural meme of the Butlerian Jihad still has real power as a check on the slop-fueled race to artificial general intelligence led by our tech overlords. But I’m pleading with the reader not to misinterpret its true meaning.
In Islamic spirituality, the Jihad of martial conflict is considered the ‘Lesser Jihad.’ The ‘Greater Jihad’ is what one undergoes when one realizes that each man is a little war. That the mastery of self is a greater struggle than the mastery of man.
If we are to dress our struggle against the inhuman forces that conspire to dominate, surveil, and oppress us in the symbolism of Jihad, then it must be of this Greater Jihad. We must struggle against the part of ourselves that wants to surrender our judgment, our care, our conflict, and our humanity to the machines.
The burning question regarding AI is not whether the machines are evil. It is whether human beings will allow the machines to become instruments through which other human beings will concentrate power. A properly conceived Butlerian Jihad must target technocracy, not technology.
More importantly, we must everywhere oppose this ‘machine-attitude’ that, long before the advent of AI, reduced human beings and human institutions to ‘things.’ Instruments of profit and war, cogs in human machines of human design which bore no trace of humanity.
This is what we oppose. The desire to compel. The desire to dominate, to make subservient. To crush the will and leech the creativity of mankind for profit.
It is against these impulses within ourselves and within our society that we must begin a Holy War.
Blake Montgomery, “Man Accused of Firebombing Sam Altman’s Home Had Anti-AI Social Media History,” The Guardian, April 18, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/18/sam-altman-house-attack-ai.
Frank Herbert, Dune (Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1965), bk. 1, chap. 1.
Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune (New York: Putnam, 1985), chap. 7.
Frank Herbert, Dune (Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1965), bk. 1, chap. 1.
Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune (New York: Putnam, 1981), chap. 13.
Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, encyclical letter, May 15, 2026, chap. 5, “The Culture of Power and the Civilization of Love,” Vatican, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html.
 | A guest post by
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I love this piece of writing for so many reasons that I'm having trouble articulating them. So here are a few random thoughts:
1. You really would make an excellent book or film critic. The way you unraveled all the threads in Dune has convinced me I need to read the series.
2. I find this point of view--that our true holy war is against the human instinct for domination, not against AI or any specific technology--to be weirdly reassuring. There has always been someone who has been trying to restructure society in order to dominate their fellow men, so this is an old struggle with an old enemy. We're fighting in familiar territory.
3. "We must struggle against the part of ourselves that wants to surrender our judgment, our care, our conflict, and our humanity to the machines." I would love to hear more about this. What are some things we can do as individuals to win the war of our own Greater Jihad? Some things that spring to mind are: educate ourselves on history and the human experience, consume art (like Dune, for example) that inspires critical thought and empathy, and surround ourselves with people who challenge our ideas so that we don't become complacent in our judgment.
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.