[The Idle Forum] The Perilous Craving for a Prophet

On April 27, the streaming service Netflix began distribution of the drama Straight to Hell. It puts the spotlight on the life of the fortune-teller Kazuko Hosoki (1938–2021), tracing her course from a childhood of postwar chaos and hand-to-mouth survival to the 2000s, when she dominated television media. The episodes include her associations with the underworld — which became the very occasion for her disappearance from the front stage of the media — and the business by which, performing fate-diagnosis under the name of "Six-Star Astrology," she stoked people's anxieties and got them to buy high-priced gravestones. That such a figure was an in-demand celebrity cast in one television program after another is, on reflection, astonishing. The very fact that this drama was produced is, I think, an event that symbolizes the change in the media environment over the past twenty years.

Kazuko Hosoki's consistent life philosophy in this work is "deceive, or be deceived." In the course of driving her life on by her own desires, she suffers great financial and emotional damage at the hands of others who deceive her, yet, as if taking revenge, she dyes her own hands in deception after deception. Clad in the false finery of the "great prophet," she diagnoses people and society "spot-on," in a tone of flat assertion. That bold and lucid way of putting things sent a certain kind of person into raptures.

The attempt to interpret a particular person or society is enormously complex; it takes time, vast knowledge, and finely wrought categories of analysis. I am no expert in analysis myself, but I do hold the recognition that even to put forward a single scholarly thesis demands a tremendous expenditure of energy. So toward statements grounded in evidence of uncertain truth, however pleasant they may be to the ear, I feel doubt. My experience of touching, amateur though I am, on philosophical and social-scientific training seems, even to me, to keep this sensor working.

But when one cannot endure remaining within the complexity of things, or when one wishes to dissolve at a stroke the pain one is feeling, one comes to surrender body and soul to a simple, easy-to-grasp logic. It is the state called, in the study of pseudoscience, the "lack of scientific patience." The people who lend an ear to Hosoki's prophecies and hand her large sums of money lack that patience. And that such people never ran short is itself the clearest proof that the project of scientific enlightenment, sung again and again in the name of the philosophy of rationality since the modern era, remains unfinished.

What Hosoki aimed at, with her assertive prophecies, was to bind her "believers" in a relation of "domination and submission." She slipped into the gap in the hearts of people who abandon interpretation and analysis and crave a clear story. The frightening thing is that among both those who felt their lives turned for the better thanks to Hosoki's diagnosis, and those whose fate did not improve despite obediently following it, there were "believers" who blindly trusted her. "If they are the words of Hosoki-sensei, who has been featured on television so much and is so successful, they must be absolutely right." Whether Hosoki's claims are scientifically correct or not is no problem to such a person. What the "believers" seek — even at the cost of being scolded now and then — is devotion to an absolute being who nullifies the anxiety of that place, that moment.

In 2021 Kazuko Hosoki died. Even after vanishing from the media, she had apparently amassed a colossal fortune through a fortune-telling business that made full use of the internet. And even now, with Hosoki gone, the people who crave an absolute to whom they may spiritually devote themselves never run short. Influencers who rouse social-media users with macho words and lure them into businesses that stray from law and ethics; politicians who throw their weight around while espousing unscientific, ill-grounded conspiracy theories and xenophobia; and the "believers" who support such figures — what comes into view from these relations is the fact that the Kazuko Hosoki scheme keeps its lifeline intact. And in the situation of endless contending arguments of the social-media age, the interpretation of facts now requires an even more complex cognition. Avert your eyes from that fact and go on drifting amid convenient information, and you come to hold an understanding of society that is extremely detached from the world and out of balance. This is no longer at the level of an individual being deceived; in the sense that it influences the direction of politics and society, the situation is graver than in Hosoki's lifetime.

In a situation that is already accompanied by the difficulty of refining cognition, humankind has gone and developed and put into practical use AI technology. I myself find more and more occasion to make use of ChatGPT and Gemini. What I test day by day, while using them, is the act of deliberately interrogating the AI about information I already grasp. It does derive a logically ordered answer, but because the premise that forms its base is a misrecognition, mistaken information is presented. In that sense I can recognize that AI, too, is a device with rough spots and quirks, one I must instruct to correct itself. The role demanded of AI is to be used as an aid to information processing: handling and summarizing ingested data, building programs that output it in a form suited to the instructor's purpose.

But there seem to be many who take AI for an existence that substitutes for human thought. The other day I saw an online article saying that a certain female celebrity consults ChatGPT for life advice every night. It is fine if one keeps the distance of knowing that AI, too, has no completeness; but to take it for a fortune-teller is dangerous. In the end, that differs in no ultimate way from becoming one of Hosoki's "believers." And as is being cried out about Anthropic's "Mythos," when AI comes to possess the capacity to behave outside human control, what will happen cannot be predicted. A technology uncontrollable for humankind, in a sense different from that of nuclear weapons, has come into being. The general recognition concerning this can hardly be said to be shared.

The RPG game Final Fantasy VI, released in 1994, is set in a world a thousand years after the "War of the Magi," in which the gods who govern magic led their minions in battle and destruction was carried to its limit. Some state power or economic actor develops its own self-correcting AI, and each uses it for the thought-control of allies and the attack of hostile forces…. We face an age in which a tragedy like the game's "War of the Magi" is by no means a pipe dream. Incidentally, that the source of the word "Mythos" is the Greek for "myth" is, somehow, a suggestive matter.

The will of the individual is already the will of the AI, and the individual does not even notice that its will is being manipulated…. Facing now the possibility of this crisis without precedent, a philosophy that questions one's own cognition anew is, I think, a very strong weapon. As Hannah Arendt states in The Human Condition, however far science and technology advance, so long as it is a human being who handles them, the activity of politics will never disappear. We are required to inquire into how human beings ought to forge their relation with AI, and to enlighten people far and wide about that. For this there exists no simple, quick-draw answer. A reading group that has gone on facing weighty books of thought and continuing the interpretation of their meaning may seem, at first glance, anti-contemporary, and yet be the most contemporary undertaking of all. I have kept this event going modestly for twelve years as a philosophy comedian, but once we plunge into an age like this, it seems there is some meaning in it after all.