MOLOCH

Re-controlling the uncontrollable.

Reclassifying a God.

Moloch, orginally considered a devil, is a process, an activity. Moloch's effect is to make you do things you realise are stupid to continue doing. Moloch puts you in a position of fear, fear of losing out, fear of missing out, fear of being left behind if you do not continue doing things you know are stupid and dangerous to continue doing. FOMO - Fear Of Missing Out, is a potent effect that dominates the Human Condition.

Peer pressure can be an overwhelmingly destructive force. It brought about a nuclear arms race, sustains foolish behaviour of all manner and brings about mass suicides. Moloch is the peer without equal.
Moloch, if considered a God, is a demonic deity who offers success only at the price of inevitable failure. The price to be paid for your desires is a treadmill into the pit of obliteration and desire is both temptation and destruction, delight and downfall. Moloch has been likened to the force motivating the rush to develop super-powerful artificial intelligence applications that all agree have potentially disasterous consequences. Those consequences are Donald Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns" tagged with terms such as 'catastrophic', and 'end of the world as we know it.'

An insightful take on Moloch can be heard in Liv Boeree's piece on Moloch and the Media Wars in the video below - well worth 16 minutes of your life to watch.

That which Lives and Dies

Moloch represents an induced way of thinking built on the assumption that we cannot break free of our isolation.
Our individual existence seems to rely on our personal defensive choices. Our individual existence is continually under threat from all manner of hazardous conditions in the 'rat-race' of human existence. We are told from an early age that your body is yours to protect and maintain and you possess a psychological entity behind the eyes - the self- that is the core of your existence. That which lives and that which will die.*

(* This is actually nonsense, but needs to be taken very seriously to understand the Moloch Effect).

Psychological Status

This is the key to our lack of control. Our psychological presence as a perceiving entity behind the eyes can feel its existence and fear its non-existence.

We should be aware that religious traditions have always been aware of the Moloch problem, and it is expressed clearly in Saint Pauls Letter to the Romans.

In Romans 7 a typical translation of what Paul says goes like this:-

"For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do."
Which simply states that we may know what we should do but chose to ignore that fact in pursuit of things we know we should not do, usually for the fear of being the one to be missing out if we do not follow the herd rushing towards the Cliff of Oblivion.

THE CHRISTIANS USE THE WORD SIN for this habit.
We are naturally sinful people.

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