From the Longbow to Anthropic: Eros, Thanatos and Staying Accountable to Killing
Loving Life Fiercely and Deeply
Tell me, what should I be outraged about this week, beloved? The war, the climate, the rape, the trafficking, the food supply, the billionaires, the Lying mcLiars in charge?
What if instead, I crawl around on the floor with this small boy; dice carrots for a fine and sturdy soup; put the lights on low and move this body from the love inside of me? Or step out into the cold night, praise the winter moon, raise a grateful voice to the naked sky? Kneel, and kiss this crystal ground?
This week the United States government demanded unfettered access to Anthropic’s AI system. Anthropic refused two things: to allow its technology to be used in autonomous weapons systems, and to enable mass domestic surveillance of American citizens, as their toddler AI can’t be trusted with drone warfare. In response, they were blacklisted and threatened with criminal prosecution. The government called this refusal arrogance. A disastrous mistake. A betrayal.
I see it as the most important moral stand taken by a corporation in recent memory.
This essay was written last night, as a little history trip through the progressive depersonalization of violence. I was making the case for staying deeply human, for feeling, and for our individual and collective voluntary withdrawal from all systems of war and domination.
Then, this morning, we woke up to the news that this government, along with Israel, bombed Iran. Among the dead: sixty schoolgirls.
Sixty schoolgirls.
No one person walked into a school and shot a bunch of kids. None of you would do that, right? But your government, enabled by technology, is doing that. Today, in our name.
Wake up, beloveds. Wake up.
— February 28, 2026
The Soldiers That Would Not Fire
In my 2016 book Indivisible: Coming Home to True Connection, I explored the research of Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, whose work on the psychology of killing reveals something remarkable and almost never spoken aloud: most soldiers, given the chance, would not kill.
In World War II, nearly 90% of soldiers did not fire their weapons at the moment of decision. They lowered their guns. They pretended to shoot. They played dead. It wasn’t cowardice, it was from the body’s oldest knowledge: thou shalt not kill, this is a person, I can’t.
That refusal isn’t weakness but rather Eros, the drive toward life. As I wrote then, and believe more fiercely now: Eros always trumps Thanatos, given half a chance. Grossman’s research shows that the desire to live and to let live, runs deeper than the desire to destroy.
The military has attempted for 70 years to condition that refusal away. Grossman describes how after WWII, the military changed targets from bullseyes to human silhouettes, then added red balloons filled with paint to simulate blood, and gradually trained the hesitation out, generation by generation,until by Vietnam more than 90% of soldiers fired.
So, a military success… but a human catastrophe. That generation came home destroyed. Thirty percent developed PTSD. Two thirds were still suffering twenty years later. We called it “disordered” but that is a misnomer, as it was an intelligence, a natural response to horrific actions. The soul saying I was there, I did that, that happened. A conscience that is the last line of defense against unlimited violence, one of the ways human beings stay accountable to killing, which, however agonizing, is vital to life.
From the Longbow to the Algorithm
Every technology of war has been, underneath its military purpose, a technology of distance. The longbow. Artillery. Aerial bombing. Each one pulling the killer further from the moment of death, from the face, from the eyes, from the specific and irreplaceable person who will not come home. Each one making it incrementally easier to act without feeling the full weight of what is being done.
This is the through line from the first arrow loosed at a distance to the drone operator sitting in Nevada, watching a screen, pressing a button, then going home to dinner. The killing happens somewhere else, rendered in pixels. The accounting is deferred, across chains of command so long that no single person feels the full weight of what the system does in all of our names.
Now, autonomous weapons propose to remove the human being entirely from the moment of decision. The killing happens in a space with no witness. No nervous system carries it. No soul splits under the contradiction. No one wakes at three in the morning with the face of the person they ended rising up through the dark.
This is precisely what the United States government demanded last week: build us a tool that can do this. Remove your restrictions. Make your intelligence available for all purposes, without condition, without limit, without the friction of a human conscience anywhere in the chain.
And Anthropic said no.
The Oppenheimer Problem
How can we kill more and feel less, asks the sick mind of domination.
When we built the Atom bomb, we at least produced Oppenheimer, reckoning the toll of his invention. Scientists writing desperate letters, spending the rest of their lives trying to contain what they had made. Now I am become death.
The autonomous weapon is the institutional answer to Oppenheimer. How do you wage unlimited war, without the resignation letters, the sleepless nights, the physicists weeping on television? You remove the human from the moment entirely and make the system the killer. You distribute the moral weight so thinly across so many people (engineers, procurement officers, legal frameworks, algorithms) that no single person ever has to feel what the machine does in their name. Fractional murder by logistics.
We must name this for what it is: immoral. The deliberate engineering of a system designed to kill while exempting every human being involved from the knowledge, the weight, and the consequence of having killed. The corporation as citizen, soul less.
The Manhattan Project was immoral. The demand made of Anthropic last week is immoral.
Love of Life is the Strength of the Soul
They called it “woke” to honor life, and called it arrogance to say a human being must remain responsible for killing, and called it a disastrous mistake to refuse to build weapons that fire without a soul behind them.
What is actually being said is that love of life is weakness.
That any accountability to killing is somehow an obstacle. That the companies willing to build instruments of death without restriction are the patriots, and those who hesitate are the enemies.
This is the oldest choice the human soul has ever faced: life or death, connection or domination, Eros or Thanatos.
The Accounting Always Comes Due
What no individual carries does not vanish. It moves into the culture. Into the soil. Into the bodies of the children of the killed, and their children’s children. Into the ambient dread that a civilization feels and cannot source, the violence it cannot explain, the hollowness at the center of its most triumphant moments.
The debt is never cancelled, it is only deferred, and it accumulates interest.
And here is what I also know, from everything I have studied and lived and taught: metanoia is real. The word comes from the Greek. It means a complete turning, an instantaneous change of direction, not gradual reform, not incremental policy change. A turn. Available to any human soul, in any moment, including this one.
The soldiers who would not fire knew something in an instant that all the conditioning in the world could not permanently override. Oppenheimer knew it the moment the light rose over the desert. It breaks through. It always breaks through, because it’s what we are, underneath everything we have been trained to become.
That knowing is still there, in every human being working in every company building these systems right now. In every general approving every strike. In every engineer writing every line of targeting code.
But the body knows, and the soul knows. This is one thing that remains stubbornly, irreducibly, magnificently human.
A Prayer, Not a Policy
So I am not writing to Congress. I am not writing a petition or a policy brief or a letter to an editor. I am praying. To the engineers, executives, generals. The lawyers who write the terms of service that route the killing through legality. To every ICE officer who tells himself he is just following orders. To every human being with a nervous system and a soul who is, right now, inside one of these institutions, working on one of these systems, telling themselves it is legal, it is necessary, it is not their decision to make:
It IS your decision. It has always been your decision. We all get to choose inside the places where we work. Every node in every system is a human being who can stop. This is not idealism. This is what the research shows, what history confirms, what every body already knows and cannot permanently unknow. We can stop.
May you feel everything tonight. May the distance collapse. May the faces of the sixty dead schoolgirls and their grieving families come in your dreams. Or the children of war the world over. May you wake in the dark and know, with the certainty that lives below argument, below career, below contract, what you are building and simply choose to stop.
Not after the next review. Not pending the ethics board. Not when the political climate shifts. Now. The door is always open.
The soldiers can come home. The accounts can be drained and given away. The deportation orders can be torn up. The targeting algorithms can be switched off. Metanoia, the instantaneous turn toward life, is available to every human soul, in every institution, in every moment. Including and especially this one.
We are not killers by nature. We are, at our deepest, creatures who love. Eros always wins, not because it is stronger than Thanatos in any given moment, but because it is what we actually are. Because the soldier’s hand that trembled before it fired was telling the truth. Because Oppenheimer’s face, breaking open, was telling the truth. Because the body, given half a chance, chooses life.
Stay awake.
-CMM
