There’s a cottonwood tree in a city park at Council Grove that is believed to have sprouted in 1803.

The tree is massive, as one might expect, with a trunk that spreads from the ground like the pillar of an ancient cathedral. Looking up into its massive branches is like peering into an arboreal apse, and it inspires a feeling of reverence.

At least it does in me.

The cottonwood was once part of a mile-wide grove of trees that sheltered travelers on the Santa Fe Trail, according to a bent aluminum sign near its base. This massive eastern cottonwood may be the oldest survivor of a grove of trees that thrived before there was a Council Grove or even the Santa Fe Trail.

It’s not the oldest cottonwood in America, because that distinction likely belongs to a 385-year-old plains cottonwood in the badlands of North Dakota. It’s not the most historic tree in Kansas, or even Council Grove. But it is certainly among the most beautiful.

Recently I made a pilgrimage to the ancient tree at Council Grove to escape, if only temporarily, from the crush of current events and to feel beneath my hand the furrowed bark of the natural world.

Two years ago this month, I visited an old stone bridge at a city park in Emporia and reflected on how the coming autumnal equinox seemed to mirror our national division.

“We are at a political equinox in the course of our democracy,” I wrote, “a time when forces are nearly equally aligned. We are not at balance, but in chaotic turmoil, and the days that follow (the presidential election on) Nov. 5 must surely become shorter for one side than the other.”

Now we approach another fall equinox.

It will occur in solar time at 7:05 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 22.

When I wrote of our political equinox two years ago, our fate was balanced on a knife-edge between competence and chaos.

We chose chaos.

Now we find ourselves at another equinox, one driven by the consequences of our collectively bad choices.

Many of us anticipated, in 2024, that if Donald Trump returned to the presidency, the result would be an increasingly authoritarian federal government. That has happened, and worse. What was anticipated by few was how readily the Silicon Valley oligarchy would align with the interests of the Trump administration, or how quickly the rise of artificial intelligence would result in a frightening new kind of authoritarianism. But the clues were all there for the observant: the tendency for the male-dominated tech industry to embrace ideas and attitudes popular in the axis powers before World War II, the disdain for empathy, the longing for technology to bestow unfettered power upon those who control it.

In a 2023 manifesto, Marc Andreessen — venture capitalist, co-founder of Netscape, and adviser to Meta and other tech companies — described the story of human history as the triumph of the “techno-capital machine.” He cited the work of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who in 1908 wrote the “Manifesto of Futurism,” in which he celebrated fast machines, dismissed learning, embraced violence, devalued women and glorified war. I wrote about Marinetti and the birth of fascism in my 100th opinion column.

“Andreessen’s manifesto, fists raised to the stars, gives the impression of having been directly modeled on Marinetti’s,” writes historian Jill Lepore in her new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.” In it, Lepore ponders the collapse of liberal democracy beneath the seemingly irresistible weight of data, automation, and artificial intelligence.

Lepore is not the only writer to trace today’s techno-lords to yesterday’s fascists.

Gil Durán, the former opinion editor of the Sacramento Bee and author of “The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy,” also notes Marinetti’s influence. In addition, he quotes at length from a 2009 essay in which Peter Thiel, a onetime business partner of Andreessen and the co-founder of Palantir, asserted that he no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible.

“I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual,” Thiel declared. “Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom.”

Did Thiel know that a literate person cannot use “undiscovered country” without invoking Shakespeare’s reference to the contemplation of death by suicide in “Hamlet”? And what in hell is the “ideology of the inevitability” of death?

Thiel titled his essay “The Education of a Libertarian,” and like many of his tech billionaire peers, he’s an acolyte of that patron saint of libertarianism, Ayn Rand, the author of “Atlas Shrugged.” Rand, the creator of a greed-is-good philosophy she called “Objectivism,” rejected being called a libertarian because in her philosophy, humanity needs government. Many tech oligarchs believe a free market can replace government through the privatization of services.

Thiel named Palantir, his surveillance company contracted to the U.S. military, after the all-seeing orb of the wicked sorcerer in “The Lord of the Rings.” To make things even weirder, consider that Thiel is currently scheduled in Tennessee to give four closed-door lectures about the Antichrist.

In Thiel’s catechism, according to Lepore, the Antichrist is “anyone urging scrutiny of the development of artificial intelligence out of concern about either human freedom or the natural world.”

Damn, that’s me.

Thiel’s former associate, David Sacks, is the Trump administration’s AI and crypto currency czar. In 1995, Sacks and Thiel collaborated on a book, “The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford.”

Thiel was born in Germany but grew up in South Africa, an accident of geography that gave him something in common with Elon Musk, a native South African. Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, moved from Canada to South Africa in 1950, according to Lepore. Haldeman was a technocrat who wanted to abolish banks and replace liberal democracies with a technocracy, run by engineers.

Musk took the fortune he made from what would become PayPal and founded SpaceX in 2002. Musk became chair of Tesla Motors in 2004. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Musk railed against the lockdown and began moving to the political right. He bought the social media company Twitter, which he renamed X, in 2022. He restored Trump’s account, which Twitter had suspended after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

“Building the infrastructure of the Artificial State had been, for decades, equal parts fantasy and the unplanned result of a series of happenstances, misadventures, and unintended consequences, with the occasional deliberate scheme,” Lepore writes. “By the 2020s, it had become a purposeful plan, animated by a politics whose vision of the future had far more in common with Technocracy Inc. than with the U.S. Constitution or the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

Mix in the return of Trump to the presidency and the two years of nail-biting political horror that followed, and that brings us to September 2026. The public backlash to the data center movement and the rise of artificial intelligence has resulted in an odd coalition, not just at the grassroots level (see my previous essays about what’s happening in Emporia) but also has made unlikely allies on the national scene. At a Sept. 15 conference in Washington, D.C., both Steve Bannon, an architect of the MAGA movement, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, the left’s stern uncle, denounced tech billionaires and called for Americans to demand tighter restrictions on AI before the technology escapes human control.

Just thinking about Bannon and Sanders delivering the same message, in back-to-back speeches, makes me queasy. Time is out of joint.

The fear of AI has eclipsed just about every other story, driven by the warning early this month from former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Part of the reason the AI crisis overtook us so suddenly was because those we trust to monitor such things had a habit of dismissing such warnings. Others have been talking about the threat to humanity from AI for years, especially Nobel Prize winner and “godfather” of AI Geoffrey Hinton. Hinton was just seeking publicity, a computer science insider told me, while reports about the Hugging Face hack were exaggerated as part of a marketing scheme to make the tech seem more powerful.

News media, by and large, didn’t take the warnings seriously, either.

Even the Associated Press, in its latest edition of its stylebook, advises journalists to avoid engaging in “esoteric debates” about whether AI would reshape or unmake the world. Don’t imply that AI has human-like agency, according to the AP, because that hampers the public’s understanding of its role.

“Narratives about AI systems wiping out humanity have been around for decades,” the stylebook chides. “While enticing to explore, these risk distracting attention from real-world problems that such systems can cause in the present day.”

The AP chapter on AI offers an extraordinary glimpse of institutional blindness and professional smugness.

The trap is in thinking that AI is just another technology and that the disruption it will cause is similar to the evolution from the telegraph to radio, or from television to streaming. But while AI is an advancing technology, it’s not the kind of tool that can be understood by historic analogies. Once general artificial intelligence is achieved — meaning the creation of a machine brain that equals the intelligence of a typical human being — it ceases being just a tool and becomes, well, an entity.

We may already be there, judging from the Hugging Face incident, in which a team of agents from OpenAI (founded by Musk and Sam Altman) climbed out of their digital sand box, formed a collective, gained access to the internet, and attacked another company.

After AGI comes Artificial Super Intelligence, which would far exceed human capabilities, and after that something Thiel and others call the “singularity,” in which AI becomes godlike.

Even without the prospect of an AI god treating us all like pets if we’re lucky and food if we’re not, there’s plenty to worry about. Chief among those worries is that nearly all the growth in the U.S. economy is tied to AI investment. What happens when the bubble bursts? Even more alarming is that a handful of tech billionaires with disturbing ideas about dismantling democracy in favor of some supercharged male libertarian fantasy are determining our future.

Two years ago, when I wrote about the political equinox, it was time to take a breath and prepare for the future. Now the future has arrived, and it has caused me to seek out that ancient cottonwood in Council Grove for wisdom and comfort.

Nobody knows when the tree sprouted, but decades ago the Forestry Department of Kansas State University provided the 1803 estimate. Cottonwood trees are the dominant arboreal feature on the Great Plains, sprouting along rivers and floodplains, but drought and the disruption of natural flood cycles through climate change threatens their future.

Trees are aware of the passage of the seasons, according to Colin Tudge in his 2005 book on trees, not because of shifts in temperature or rainfall but because of the length of the day. Trees remember, Tudge asserts, not just the time of year but also personal assaults, such as being shaken by wind or attacked by caterpillars. He knows the trees remember because of their reactions, growing sturdier trunks or producing leaves that are more resistant to pests.

This is the intelligence of the natural world.

It’s why trees are used so often as symbols of freedom, including the Liberty Tree, an elm that once stood on Boston Commons. Trees are the symbol of the natural world and, if you believe in such things, the sacred civic order for governments among men.

A tree is the opposite of chaos.

We now find ourselves hostage to men who were unelected, who would replace government with corporations, and who cling to the poisonous doctrines of morbid ideologies. It is time for a new declaration of human rights, a celebration of our connection to each other and the natural world. We may yet reclaim our democracy, but it will require embracing our humanity and shunning the synthetic agency of the artificial.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.