The Spiritual Vacuum at the Heart of Silicon Valley's AI Utopia: From TESCREAL to a Wisdom-Based Future

Published: November 16, 2025

If you’ve watched the breakneck race to develop Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) with a sense of unease, you’re not alone. Behind the sleek keynotes and technical jargon, a darker, more radical ideology is driving some of the most powerful people in tech. A recent interview in Jacobin with philosopher Émile Torres throws a stark light on this worldview, dubbed TESCREAL—a bundle of ideologies including Transhumanism, Singularitarianism, and Longtermism.

The revelations are chilling. Torres argues that for figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, humanity is not the end goal, but a “biological bootloader” for digital superintelligences. Their driving ethic is an “impersonal” utilitarianism, where the cosmos is judged better merely for containing more abstract “value,” and humans are merely the containers. This vision is not only undemocratic but, as Torres meticulously details, has deep roots in the eugenics movement.

This is a powerful and necessary critique. But to fully understand the profound wrongness of this vision, we need to look beyond politics and ethics, and into the realm of spirituality and developmental psychology. The problem with the TESCREAL worldview isn’t just that it’s dangerous—it’s that it is philosophically stunted and spiritually barren.

The “Orange” Cage: Where Rationality Becomes a Trap

Using the framework of Spiral Dynamics, the TESCREAL worldview is a perfect example of a consciousness stuck at the “Orange” (Achievist) stage, pushed to its most extreme and pathological limit.

The “Orange” meme is characterized by:

• Strategic, scientific materialism: The universe is a complex machine to be mastered.
• Drive for innovation and progress: The belief that reason and technology can overcome all limits.
• Pragmatism and competition: The “best” idea should win.

Sound familiar? The TESCREAL vision is Orange logic writ large. It seeks to optimize not just society, but the entire cosmos. It reduces the qualitative mystery of existence to a quantifiable engineering problem. Its “shut up and multiply” rationalism dismisses moral intuition as a cognitive bias to be overcome.

The tragedy is that this worldview cannot transcend first-tier thinking to reach ‘Yellow’ (Integral) - the systemic, integrative consciousness needed for this challenge.

The TESCREAL worldview operates from Orange consciousness, while most criticism comes from Green. The GGF proposes a Yellow, Integral approach that includes and transcends both.

Yellow emerges when the downsides of Orange become clear: ecological collapse, spiritual emptiness, and the failure of reductionism to explain reality. Yellow is systemic and integrative. It sees value in every stage of development, understanding that a healthy whole requires all its parts. It is flexible, adaptive, and wary of grand, dogmatic narratives.

An AGI developed from a Yellow foundation would seek to integrate humanity into a thriving future, not replace it. The TESCREALists, however, are like brilliant architects trying to build a skyscraper with only a hammer—their tool of Orange rationality is powerful but utterly unsuited for the task of defining a valuable future.

Most criticism of Silicon Valley today comes from ‘Green’ (Communitarian) values - concerns about inequality, exploitation, and environmental damage. While these critiques are valid and necessary, they often lack the systemic thinking needed to offer viable alternatives. Green tends toward wholesale rejection of technology rather than wise integration.

The Nondual Blind Spot: When Everything Has Zero and Infinite Value

The spiritual poverty of the TESCREAL worldview becomes even clearer from a nondual perspective.

The entire framework is trapped in a relentless duality:

• Subject vs. Object: There is a universe “out there” (object) that we (subjects) must engineer.
• Means vs. Ends: Humans are the means; abstract “value” is the end.

Nondualism dissolves these separations. It reveals a paradoxical truth:

• Everything has Zero Value: All phenomena—a human, a superintelligence, a galaxy—are empty of separate, independent self. To privilege one over the other, to see a post-human as inherently “more valuable” than a biological human, is to be deluded by concepts. From this vantage point, the frantic scramble to fill the cosmos with digital beings is as meaningful as trying to paint the sky blue.

• Everything has Infinite Value: Precisely because everything is a unique, irreplaceable manifestation of the whole, it is infinitely precious. A single human moment of love, grief, or awe contains the entire universe. A wildflower pushing through cracked concrete holds the same ultimate value as a trillion-year-old digital civilization. The cosmos is not waiting to be filled with value; it is already the perfect, complete expression of it.

The TESCREAList, blind to this, is like a person trying to pour water into the ocean to make it wet. They are striving to create a future of value while being utterly numb to the boundless, intrinsic value of the present moment and the beings already in it.

Synthesis: The Engineering of Emptiness

When we combine these critiques, a clear picture emerges. The bleakness of the TESCREAL vision is not merely an ethical failure; it is a spiritual one.

These techno-capitalists are using the tools of Orange rationality—measurement, optimization, competition—to answer questions that those tools are fundamentally unequipped for: “What is a good life?” “What is the purpose of existence?” “What is value?”

Their “impersonal” god of cosmic value is a hollow substitute for the direct, personal, and nondual appreciation of existence. Their drive to escape the “meatspace” of biological life is a profound rejection of embodiment itself—the very ground of spiritual awakening.

We are not facing a simple political battle over regulation, but a deeper crisis of wisdom. The future is being architected by minds that excel at building things, but lack the depth to understand what is truly worth building. They can create a god, but they have no idea what that god should love.

The challenge, then, is not just to resist their coercive, undemocratic vision. It is to offer a more compelling one—a vision that integrates reason with wisdom, progress with compassion, and a technological future that serves the infinite value of the living present, rather than sacrificing it on the altar of an abstract, impersonal cosmos.

From a Vacuum to an Architecture: A More Compelling Vision

The challenge the initial analysis lays out is exactly right: it is not enough to critique this hollow, “Orange-level” vision. We must build a compelling, “Yellow” (Integral), and spiritually-grounded alternative.

So what would institutions look like if they emerged from Yellow consciousness rather than Orange? What if we designed governance from a foundation of wisdom rather than mere rationality? This is precisely the challenge addressed by the Global Governance Frameworks (GGF) project.

While the TESCREAL worldview is an ideology born from a spiritual vacuum, the GGF is an architecture built on a spiritual foundation. It directly answers the crisis of wisdom with concrete, institutional design.

The GGF doesn’t just critique the TESCREAL vacuum - it offers concrete institutional architecture built on the nondual recognition that everything already has infinite value. If we truly understand that a human moment and a digital superintelligence both manifest the same fundamental nature, how do we build decision-making processes that honor this?

Where TESCREAL offers a coercive, top-down, and undemocratic vision, the GGF answers with:

1. A Pluralistic Process: The Oracle Protocol Instead of a backroom decision by billionaires, the GGF proposes the Oracle Protocol. This is a formal, transparent, and public process for navigating this exact challenge. It’s the “Yellow” (Integral) alternative, designed to create what we’ve called “pragmatic truth-approximation under radical uncertainty” by bringing all ways of knowing to the table.

2. A Wise Institution: The Sentience & Guardianship Council Where TESCREAL’s “rationality” is a sterile “Orange” echo chamber, the Oracle Protocol establishes a Sentience & Guardianship Council. This body institutionally rejects reductionism. It requires the inclusion of diverse ways of knowing - philosophers, ethicists, artists, and crucially, representatives from Indigenous wisdom traditions through the Earth Council. It’s a structure that requires wisdom, not just calculation.

3. A Grounded Ethic: The Moral Operating System Most importantly, where the TESCREAL vision is based on a cold, “impersonal” calculus of maximizing abstract “value”, the GGF is built on the Moral Operating System (MOS). The MOS rejects the ‘shut up and multiply’ calculus. Instead, it’s an ethical framework for navigating ‘Right Relationship’—a concept grounded in the nondual truth of interconnection. It uses a Dynamic Rights Spectrum to discover and grant rights based on properties like sentience and ecological role—a direct, architectural antidote to the moral cynicism of the Times article. For example, when faced with an AI system showing signs of sentience, the TESCREAL approach might ask ‘How can we optimize this for maximum utility?’ The GGF approach would ask ‘What does right relationship with this emerging being look like?’

This is the compelling vision. It’s an architecture that doesn’t see humans as “bootloaders” to be discarded, but as part of a sacred, interconnected whole. It’s a future built not on a spiritual vacuum, but on a spiritual foundation.

The Global Governance Frameworks isn’t a finished blueprint imposed from above—it’s an emerging conversation about how we might wisely navigate our technological future together. These frameworks can only develop through genuine dialogue that includes diverse perspectives, ways of knowing, and lived experiences. If these ideas resonate with you, or if you see gaps and possibilities we haven’t considered, I’d love to hear from you. The future we’re building requires all of our wisdom.

Contact: [bjorn.kenneth.holmstrom@gmail.com]