This post explores the darker structures of the natural world – slave-making ants, parasitic wasps, cuckoo brood parasites – and how they illuminate the moral and metaphysical tensions underlying human societies. Drawing on Guido Preparata’s latest book, it examines the parallels between eusocial insects and elite human hierarchies and how these comparisons challenge conventional ideas of an all-good God. By confronting the brutality built into nature, one is forced to grapple with the limits of moral expectation, the shadow of the privatio boni, and the possibility of a divine totality that encompasses both creation and destruction.

Welcome back. In this post I will be reviewing some unusual animal species in relation to Guido Preparata’s latest book, Toward a Eusocial Empire: A Guide to the Insect Management of Sex & Race in Tomorrow’s Dystopia (2026), because such species shine an interesting light on the nature of the god image which is at the basis of so much of my inquiries. This is a subsequent post to my 2024 post Humanity as a slave-making ant colony, where I took Preparata’s observation and explored it – but that was before he formalized his argument with his book, which I recommend.

For those who don’t know him, Guido is the author of Conjuring Hitler, which fundamentally changed how I perceived World War 1 and 2, discussed previously here, and he has discussed how the Catholic Church was skinsuited by the international establishment in the post-World War 2 era, discussed previously here, as well as covered other topics like gnosticism, elite motivations for 9/11 and the Afghanistan war, and tracing the lineage of intersectionality/postmodernism from Sade to Bataille to Foucault to the American academic world in his Ideology of Tyranny, which was elaborated on in his subsequent Reign of Discursive Terror and which I will cover in the future. Preparata was a Fulbright scholar and taught at the University of Washington, bio here, until he sustained an academic lynching for Conjuring Hitler – a lynching without basis, which occurred because his book undermined the shibboleths of the post-World War 2 moral order – and he is eminently qualified to discuss these topics.

In Eusocial Empire, Preparata argues that the upper elites – which he sees as the Anglo-American establishment with its crux as the British monarchy, while I see it as the international owners of the world central banks with its basis as the Rothschilds, Warburgs, Schiffs, etc. – are, intentionally or not, modeling their behavior after eusocial (meaning “of an animal species, especially an insect showing an advanced level of social organization, in which a single female or caste produces the offspring and nonreproductive individuals cooperate in caring for the young”) insect colonies – ants, bees, and termites. These insects have a small elite and a vast number of sterile workers, and of note is slave making ants where they raid competing nests, kill the queen and steal their workers, using them to expand their own hives.

The upper elites are pursuing a similar strategy: to collapse the birthrates of the masses and to render them sterile worker bots, while the upper elites themselves enjoy the benefits of the masses’ toiling. You can see how this vision has a rhythm to my arguments pertaining to ratcheting neoliberal feudalism (also here and here). Preparata argues that the elites pursue a dual sex and racial strategy: regarding sex, the elites push transgenderism, abortion, contraceptives (along with, I would say, collapsing marriage rates and spiking divorce rates, mining sexual relations with Me Too lawsuits), two working households unable to get ahead, etc., while pushing endless racial division as a divide and conquer strategy so the masses are too busy infighting to focus on upper elite theft.

It is a strong argument, and the parallels between humanity and insect colonies are numerous. While humanity may have begun as egalitarian hunter gatherers, from the start of the agricultural revolution 10,000+ years ago humanity has naturally produced parasitical social structures – what are kings if not parasites at the top of a hierarchical nest exploiting those beneath them? There has only been a small 200-300 year period at the advent of the industrial revolution which has given forth relative egalitarianism – a period that is now ending due to technological innovations, neo-Malthusian resource pressures, or otherwise.

The God Image

Preparata’s focus on these amoral or immoral insect colonies implicitly shines a light on the God image. What kind of God would create such creatures? With mankind – arguably separated from the animal kingdom by the spark of reason or the creative impulse which animals supposedly lack, an argument I have doubts about – the argument is that God gave us free will and the power to choose between good and evil, but what is the point of creating such devilish creatures?

The following are some other examples of such creatures. These were already troubling to observers in the nineteenth century and became particularly important for Charles Darwin when thinking through the implications of natural selection. Darwin’s own response is worth distinguishing from his theory: whatever one makes of natural selection as a mechanistic account of biological change, Darwin’s emotional confrontation with parasitic wasps produced something prior to and independent of his theoretical commitments – a raw metaphysical discomfort that no evolutionary explanation fully dissolves. The theory explains how such creatures came to exist; it does not answer why a creation structured this way should exist at all, nor does it quiet the intuition that something is cosmically wrong with a living host being consumed from within. It is Darwin as witness, not Darwin as theorist, that I am invoking here.

1. Slave-making ants. As mentioned, certain ant species raid neighboring colonies, seize larvae, and carry them back to their own nests. The captured ants emerge and spend their lives working for the conquering colony – gathering food, caring for brood, and maintaining the nest. Some slave-making species become so dependent on this practice that they cannot survive without enslaving other ants to perform basic labor.Queen and brood of the social parasite Polyergus lucidus with Formica archboldi workers
2. The ichneumon wasp. Darwin famously singled out parasitic wasps in the family Ichneumonidae. The female injects her eggs into a living caterpillar or other host. The larvae hatch inside the host’s body and slowly consume it from within, deliberately avoiding vital organs until late in development so that the host remains alive as long as possible.Hymenoptera – Ichneumonidae
3. Parasitic wasps more generally. Across many wasp families, similar strategies appear. Eggs are laid inside or on other insects; the emerging larvae eat their host alive. Sometimes the parasite even manipulates the host’s behavior, turning it into a living bodyguard or food source for the developing young.Megarhyssa macrurus (Ichneumonidae), a parasitoid, ovipositing into its host through the wood of a tree.
4. Brood parasites like the cuckoo. The common cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests of other birds. When the cuckoo chick hatches, it instinctively pushes the host’s eggs or chicks out of the nest, ensuring that the foster parents devote all their energy to feeding the intruder. The adoptive parents raise the parasite while their own offspring die. The pejorative term cuckold or cuck, used to reference men raising the offspring of other men, comes from the cuckoo.A shiny cowbird chick (left) being fed by a rufous-collared sparrow
5. Hyena scavenging and predation. Spotted hyenas often begin eating prey before it has fully died. Their social structure is rigidly hierarchical, dominated by powerful matriarchal lineages, and competition within clans can be brutal.
6. Chimpanzee warfare. Long-term observations of wild chimpanzees reveal coordinated raids between neighboring groups. Patrols cross territorial boundaries, isolate individuals, and kill them, sometimes gradually dismantling rival groups through repeated attacks. Victorious groups may absorb the territory of the defeated one.
7. Cat parasitism (Toxoplasma). The parasite Toxoplasma gondii infects rodents and alters their behavior, reducing their fear of cats. This manipulation makes the rodents more likely to be eaten, allowing the parasite to reproduce inside the cat’s digestive system.
8. Cordyceps fungi. Certain fungi infect insects and gradually take control of their nervous systems. The infected insect climbs to a high location, clamps down, and dies as the fungus erupts from its body and releases spores to infect others.

Taken individually each of these strategies can be explained biologically, that they are simply evolutionary solutions to survival and reproduction. Natural selection favors whatever works, but collectively they raise a deeper philosophical question about what kind of God would create these creatures. Darwin himself was disturbed by the example of parasitic wasps. In a well-known letter he wrote that he could not persuade himself that a beneficent and omnipotent creator would deliberately design such creatures whose life cycles require the slow internal consumption of living hosts. The problem, in other words, is not merely scientific but metaphysical. If the living world contains systems built around predation, parasitism, manipulation, and slavery, then the traditional image of an all-good designer crafting a harmonious creation becomes difficult to reconcile with observation. Darwin’s theory of natural selection provided a way around the dilemma: these structures need not reflect intentional moral design at all, but rather the cumulative outcome of blind evolutionary pressures. But the darker aspects of animal behavior destabilize a certain theological picture of the world – if life repeatedly produces such systems on its own, the problem is no longer simply the moral failure of particular creatures, it is the structure of creation itself.

This argument helps to collapse the nature of an all-good privatio boni God which almost everyone in the West explicitly or implicitly accepts. An alternative is to discard God altogether toward atheism, but even there the privatio boni lurks as an implicit assumption (see Richard Dawkins as an example who retains underlying Christian metaphysics even in his atheism). Other possibilities such as soul-making theodicy, Process theology, or Open Theism have their own problems.1 The other alternative is perhaps more horrifying than everything else discussed above: the notion of God as totality, as Abraxas, the unity of all good and all evil, light and darkness, Christ and the anti-Christ/Satan, where we exist on this plane between infinite and competing forces, crucified individually between the opposites as all living creatures are, discussed previously here. These creatures aren’t an embarrassment to the Abraxian framework, they’re evidence for it. Creation that includes built-in horror is exactly what a totality-God would produce. To me, Preparata’s argument about the similarities between humanity and insect colonies merely highlights, yet again, the nature of the God image, and how the evidence we see on this plane points to a God beyond the moral binaries that we use to avoid the horrors of the void.

With all this said, I highly recommend Guido’s book and supporting his efforts which you can buy here, and his website is here.

Thanks for reading.

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1 While often proposed as mediating positions, these frameworks falter under the weight of lived reality. Soul-Making theodicy, which posits suffering as necessary for moral development, collapses when confronted with the death of children or innocents who never possess the agency to “make” a soul. Meanwhile, Process Theology and Open Theism attempt to preserve divine goodness by limiting God’s omnipotence or omniscience, but in doing so, they inadvertently dismantle the privatio boni architecture undergirding Western morality: without a sovereign, all-knowing guarantor of final justice, the cosmic coherence of heaven, hell, and moral accountability dissolves. Thus, rather than resolving the tension, these models either ignore the phenomenology of innocent suffering or undermine the very metaphysical foundations they seek to save.