Why AI needs Gandhi and why Gandhi is not the Stagnation Antichrist

- By Michael Allen*

In my recently published book, Gandhi's Popular Sovereignty of Truth, I presented an alternative vision of populism, Panchayat Populism, and explored its implications for tech and AI in the Techno-Raj. Indeed, I argued, quite provocatively, that AI needs Gandhi.

‘Panchayat Populism’ corrects populism’s tendency to blur the lines between the ‘fake’ and the ‘real,’ the false and the true. It does so by returning to an ancient panchayat ideal of local communities devoted to everyday practices of nonviolence (ahimsa) and non-possession (aparigraha). According to this alternative populist vision, Truth is not a function of demagogues claiming to represent the ‘real’ people in their own person or self. Neither is it a function of elite technocrats determining for the people their own good, which they cannot see for themselves. Nor is it a function of a liberal ideology of rights, which each holds against the others or against the state. In the national system of panchayats, Truth is rather a function of each devotee representing the fundamental interest of everyone else throughout the larger Panchayat Raj in not suffering the coercive force of violence and of greed.

When each devotee represents the other’s fundamental interest in Truth through devotion to ahimsa and aparigraha, then the people speak God's voice, Truth being God. This is a spiritual Truth realized in nonviolent, non-possessive practice that only the whole people can speak; hence, the popular sovereignty of Truth, a Gandhian version of Vox Populi Vox Dei. What, though, does this have to do with the Techno-Raj? I argued that tech and AI could serve an instrumental purpose for the Panchayat Raj, collating and coordinating the various inputs of devotees throughout the dispersed system of local panchayats. Technocrats, managers, and administrators of the Techno-Raj play no role in determining what Truth is or setting the future course of the Raj. Their role is limited strictly to facilitating every devotee’s input, perspective and contribution to the people's voice of 'Truth that is God.' The people's voice remains sovereign. This popular sovereignty of Truth is meant to divert tech and AI from the 'lights out' scenario feared by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, that is, the scenario in which super-intelligence is emotionally dumb, and spiritually void systems could end humanity.

Shortly after the release of Gandhi's Popular Sovereignty of Truth, a New York Times opinion interview featured venture capitalist and Trump supporter Peter Thiel, who is known for his provocative claim that AI needs Gandhi. Thiel distanced himself from his earlier association with MAGA's populist movement to restore greatness to the American people. Here the 'G' in MAGA–‘Great'–appeals to the capacity of the American people to project power, cultural, economic, and military. This is a comparative idea, 'great' meaning 'greater than.' Hence, the American people are seen as greater than other peoples in each respect–an international competition of national peoples.

That said, Thiel was drawn to MAGA by his concerns about stagnation and decadence. As he sees it, America stopped taking risks and innovating in the 1970s. Since then, the only notable exceptions have been the internet and AI. On every marker of greatness, from industrial manufacturing to fashion, movies, and music, American innovation has sharply declined. In other words, stagnation reflects a decline in greatness for the American people; they no longer obviously 'greater than' their international competitors, notably China.

At the birth of MAGA populism in the 2016 Presidential election, Thiel saw stagnation and the decline of national greatness as primarily a cultural problem of morbid institutions. MAGA promised to restore greatness to the American people by disrupting underperforming elite scientific and academic institutions like Harvard. Nevertheless, slightly more than a decade later, stagnation and decadence prevail in America, despite the populist ascendency of MAGA with the second Trump presidency. Disrupting scientific institutions might somewhat reinvigorate innovation. But mobilizing populist resentment over relative decline towards decadent elites cannot be expected to reverse stagnation. It cannot be expected to reverse this process of decline, nor any more the narrow range of elite technologies from Silicon Valley, from which Thiel himself emerged onto the political scene.

Increasingly pessimistic about America's future, Thiel now analyses its stagnation and decline in terms of a dilemma. This dilemma has both an atheistic and a religious, Christian framing. The atheistic framing is 'One world or None,' while the religious framing is 'Antichrist or Armageddon.' Both versions of the dilemma–atheist and religious–presuppose a dystopian narrative of innovation leading to increased existential risk. From the atheist perspective of 'One World or None,' runaway scientific innovations and progress from 1750 to 1970 culminated in the threats of nuclear war and environmental catastrophe. To avoid 'None,' humanity must commit to 'One.' Only 'one world governance,' a UN with 'real teeth,' is capable of regulating escalating global existential risks. But this amounts to a totalitarian globalist regime of 'peace and safety,' a regime of 'unwanted stagnation.'

The religious version of the 'One World or None' dilemma introduces the figure of the Antichrist who falsely impersonates Christ leading to Armageddon in the Second Coming. Here Thiel's framing of 'Antichrist or Armageddon' is a bit misleading. Impersonating Christ, the Antichrist does try to not take over the world to stop Armageddon but instead hastens its arrival. Nevertheless, this religious figure helps to plug a 'plot hole' in the dystopian narrative of a civilization decline from innovation to stagnation. The Antichrist is not a mad scientist figure like Dr. Strangelove, but rather Greta Thunberg. Indeed, blurring the line between global environmental activist and apocryphal child saint falsely impersonating Christ, Thunberg saves humanity from Climate Armageddon by hastening the arrival of a new era of One World totalitarianism.

That said, the NYT interview caused rather a sensation when the interviewer, Ross Douthat, termed Thiel's analysis of today's Antichrist as totalitarianism, took aim at him. Rather than Thunberg, the Antichrist is more likely to be a capitalist investor in AI technologies. The Antichrist turns out to be a capitalist investor in AI technologies of surveillance and control, along with military drone technologies enabling security interventions at any time anywhere across the globe. Trading on the same dystopian narrative of accelerating existential risk, this techno-savvy Antichrist uses these technologies to take over the world. The genius of such an Antichrist is to recognize that civilization's one remaining area of innovation provides the “tools to make a stagnant ‘one world’ permanent” in the name of 'peace and security.'

Of course, Thiel emphatically denied that he was handling the tools of permanent stagnation or totalitarianism. The Antichrist. However, he was also clearly shaken by Douthat's suggestion that what he was doing might align with this danger, and he struggled to formulate a response. I do not wish to formulate a response to his behavior, as a capitalist investor in surveillance and military technologies. Instead, I now return to the vision of populism and AI I developed in Gandhi's Popular Sovereignty of Truth. I ask how Douthat's nightmare scenario of the Antichrist's deus ex machina,' as facilitated by the one remaining area of innovation, bears upon my Gandhian vision. Indeed, how does this scenario reinforce my conviction that AI needs Gandhi?

First, I point out that Thiel and Ross Douthat both get things right. Thiel is right to observe that runaway progress slowed down about fifty years ago in the 70s, that it is popularly seen as posing existential risks to civilization, and that tech is the only significant area of innovation left. Ross Douthat is right that this one remaining area of innovation could be devoured by the Antichrist as a demonic tool for making stagnation permanent; or, at least, normalizing a stagnant form of civilization prior to Armageddon. That said, from a Gandhian perspective, Thiel gets something fundamentally wrong, while Ross Douthat fails to engage the deeper issue concerning what his interviewee gets wrong. This assumes strictly that global stagnation is necessarily bad for civilization. Rather than explicitly challenging the civilization of broad-spectrum innovation, Ross Douthat simply challenges the notion of permission, suggesting optimistically that human freedom will resist the Antichrist and find a "middle way."

Gandhi's Popular Sovereignty of Truth bears upon the techno-savvy Antichrist scenario by openly enhancing Thiel's stagnation thesis. Contrary to Thiel, however, it envisions the slow-down of progress and innovation over the last fifty years as not causative for lamentation but for widespread destruction across the globe, politically, environmentally, and by greed, not need. Rapacious innovation leads to violence and harms the planet, accelerating the existential risks of warfare and environmental catastrophe. Gandhi thus sought to slow down progress. Borrowing Thiel's language, Gandhi sought to stagnate civilization for the good of humanity and the planet. Slowing down, stagnating civilization is accomplished by returning to the ancient panchayat ideal of popular devotion to ahimsa and aparigraha.

To clarify, returning to this devotional ideal does not mean that stagnation is absolute, a complete dearth of innovation, or that civilization is defined by moribund, ossified elite institutions. Instead, it means that innovation is conditioned by popular devotion to nonviolence and non-possession, whereby the people speak God's voice of Truth. Innovations risking civilization extinction violate moral and spiritual Truth realized by the people. Moreover, panchayats are the opposite of elite institutions, protecting only the values and interests of a privileged minority, whether from Harvard or, for that matter, Silicon Valley. In the Panchayat Raj, Truth is realized by the people, not experts and technocrats.

This reinforces my original provocation that Gandhi's Popular Sovereignty of Truth that AI needs Gandhi today. MAGA populism is especially vulnerable to the ministrations of the Antichrist who falsely promises an impossible restoration of national greatness based on continued technological progress and innovation. They are vulnerable to their ministrations because such an Antichrist tells them what they want to hear. It tells them that they can be great, despite embracing the stagnation era. This favors not the sovereignty of great people as much as a great person, an architect of supreme technological acumen, efficiently operating the new technologies of surveillance and military drones to establish global dominance.

The contrast with the Gandhian ideal of Panchayat populism in the context of a Techno-Raj could not be starker. If it appeals to any ideal of national greatness at all, this is not greatness based on projecting power, derived from constant competition, guaranteeing ever greater existential risks. Instead, the people's 'greatness' consists of its capacity to speak God's voice through relearning ancient devotional practices. Such a voice is not spoken through technological innovation but ancient devotional practices such as ahimsa and aparigraha. Consequently, the popular voice of Truth that cannot be falsely impersonated by the techno-Antichrist imagined by Ross Douthat, glitchily employing the tools developed by Truth.

One might object: even if he is not that kind of Antichrist, Gandhi is still another kind of Antichrist. Far from techno-savvy, this reflects a techno-phobic fear of technology, and pretending to be the people's savior, while seeking worldly dominion. This Gandhian approach as opposed to Thielian Antichrist reduces everyone to a stagnant, spiritually unsure condition, devotedly accepting his dictates on how to resolve conflicts, which environmentally friendly technologies, to use, and so on. On this rather cynical reading of Gandhian philosophy, the Gandhian Antichrist projects no economic or military power, but rather political power, gaining legitimacy by persuading the people they are speaking God's voice, not His.

This is by no means an absurd objection. Is there an answer? I say yes. The answer is an appropriate use of advanced tech. Contemporary Gandhian thought emphasizes that devotees of ahimsa and aparigraha—the sovereign people speaking God’s voice of Truth—should live with traditional values while not shying away from new technologies. My position in Gandhi's Popular Sovereignty of Truth is consistent with this emphasis on not shying away from all technological innovations. Innovations should be assessed from the standpoint of whether they facilitate the voice of the whole people across the system of panchayats, and not just that of an apocryphal individual, whether Gandhi or Greta.

If appropriately constructed to combine the traditional values of nonviolence and non-possession with advanced communications technologies, the Techno-Raj is a plausible conceptual answer to the Antichrist problem. However, this presupposes that technocrats, managers, and administrators of the Raj outright repudiate some of the tools developed by Thiel, such as military drones. It would also presuppose administrators of the Raj limit how they use other tools, such as superintelligent communication technologies. They could not—or rather, should not abuse—these tools to surveil and algorithmically manipulate devotees in panchayats across the system of panchayats to their own liking and interests. If they were to do so, they would undermine the Techno-Raj project of not shying away from technology to facilitate the capacity of a people living with traditional values to realize Truth.

Is it, though, realistic to suppose that the administrative trustees of the Techno-Raj would stay righteous? Several reasons may be given for supposing this is not an entirely unambitious proposition. Understood as a people's aspiration to innovate its way beyond stagnation, greatness in projecting power is a fool's dream for the reasons articulated by Thiel. This is why Thiel was originally drawn to MAGA populism and why it is vulnerable to the ministrations of a techno-savvy Antichrist, as conceived by Ross Douthat. By contrast, living with traditional values, the people within Panchayat populism are less vulnerable to the ministrations of a techno-phobic Antichrist, as in my objection above.

The political ideal developed in Gandhi's Popular Sovereignty of Truth is of radical devotional democracy. Truth is a function of participation by all devotees throughout the system of panchayats, each devotee of ahimsa and aparigraha representing the interests of others in enabling the voice of Truth to be spoken. Such Truth therefore cannot be represented by any one purporting to be the people's savior. Any technocratic administrators of the Raj who deviate from their limited role in facilitating this 'voice of the people' would necessarily expose themselves as false prophets, Antichrist. AI needs Gandhian devotional democracy for it to be a tool used in the service of the people and Truth.

It emphasizes the radical extension of equality and liberty, challenging existing power structures and promoting greater citizen participation in decision-making. It's characterized by a commitment to inclusivity, continuous improvement, and a redefinition of the political sphere.

References:

1. Michael Allen (2025). Gandhi's Popular Sovereignty of Truth: Devotional Democracy, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Courtesy: Gandhi Marg, Volume 47, Number 4, January-March, 2026

* Michael Allen is Professor, Philosophy and Religious Studies, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, East Tennessee State University, Box 70656 Johnson City, TN 37614-0651, USA.| Email: ALLENMP@mail.etsu.edu