In this age of shit, even irony is becoming banal and clever is worn out. People get tired of being tired. It’s a good time to know the truth.
300 years after publication, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels It remains one of the masterpieces of satire in world literature. Written as a travelogue and often treated as an adventurous fairy tale, it is disarmingly funny and hurtfully serious.
Each section follows a different voyage of Lemuel Gulliver, an English ship’s doctor who encounters strange and isolated societies such as Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the land of Houyhnhnms. Each destination offers a sharp critique of human nature, politics, and reason. Swift changes the scale so that greatness no longer depends on size, power, conquest, and empire.
Gulliver’s final journey is to the land of the Houyhnhnms, horse-like creatures of great intelligence, self-control, civility, and devotion to reason. A terrifying human-like creature called a Yahoo instills in Gulliver a hatred of the human form. But the Huynh’s calm rationality overshadows their fear. They flog and degrade Yahoo, discuss its destruction, and create a degraded situation in which Yahoo’s inferiority becomes clear. Gulliver is so awed by their orders that he completely loses his moral compass and sets off in a boat made partially of Yahoo skin. Something is terribly wrong.
Gulliver makes ordinary human life intolerable by mistaking the Houyhnhnms for perfect creatures. He cannot bear to see his family and feels that the only place he feels at home is in the stables. Swift’s social criticism is not an abstract hatred of humanity, but a humane indictment of a system that makes domination appear rational.
Many years later, I was relieved by the news and read Swift’s classic again. Affiliated with neither right nor left, liberal or conservative, Swift despised the self-proclaimed Progressive Party, the Whig Party. Gulliver holds up perfect rationality as the human ideal, and becomes disgusted when there is no one who can match it. He equates humanity with an ugly Yahoo. His belief in progress and reason turns into a hatred of humanity.
An Anglican clergyman who loved his people, Swift helped his readers understand the imitative habits of reason and the dangers of rationality without humility.
Today, Houyhnhnm may be Silicon Valley’s AI guru and self-styled apostle of rationality. The public has become accustomed to warnings about artificial intelligence, children’s digital addiction, and students’ outsourcing of jobs to machines. Whether we welcome, fear, or ignore AI, we are faced with the fact of massive growth in data centers and their demands on land, water, energy, and public life.
Within a few years, AI could do more than assist intelligence, at a cost equivalent to power plants, water rights, transmission lines, tax breaks, and land that was once used for other purposes. That might be close to that definition. In the process, we risk turning the rest of us into Yahoos. Yahoo is a role once reserved for “deplorables” and MAGA enthusiasts.
It’s easy to demonize AI and its celebrities, as if we’re not all complicit. The dream of improving humanity can also be the management of humanity. There is no need to arrive at the prison in chains. It may appear as efficiency, comfort, moral certainty, and the promise that everything will be arranged for our own benefit. We are told to adapt, optimize, move forward, catch up, as if grief means holding on to what was or not letting bygones be bygones.
“I want change, but I don’t want to be different.” Funny thing is, until life changes. Rejecting false comfort becomes a kind of refusal in itself, and cynicism becomes an alibi until “that sweet smoke melts into the air.”
“Surely some revelation is at hand.” A familiar line from W. B. Yeats’s 1919 poem “The Second Coming” captures the sense of a world in which “things are falling apart.” The poem ends with a question that leaves the era itself a mystery.
“And what a wild beast, the time has come at last.
Are you born leaning forward toward Bethlehem? ”
The beast is not AI. We don’t need to run away from machines or worship horses like Gulliver. We can use tools without giving in to them. We can seek knowledge without abandoning judgment, mourn without turning sadness into weakness, and resist the passion that would like to make everyone useful, to make every loss obsolete, and to turn every doubt into an achievement.
Who is Yahoo? Swift knew that a prince did not need a crown. They need servants, flattery, systems, and citizens with whom they can easily exchange judgments. Gulliver’s final downfall shows what happens when false rationality and repeated misperceptions hollow out human emotions. He can run away from humanity, worship horses, and shy away from his family, but still belongs to a world he despises. Ultimately, he cannot escape the Yahoos because he is part of the Yahoos.
Service means little if the prince asks for consent. Trials occur when conscience refuses to satisfy the powers that be.
Such a refusal may mean little in court. Weight may be the only thing that matters. Gulliver also had to go home.
notes and reading
caption: “I saw some sort of vehicle coming towards the house, pulled like a sleigh by four Yahoos.” – Part IV, Chapter II.
“That sweet smoke dissolves in the air.”From the poems of British novelist, biographer, literary journalist, and cultural critic AN Wilson. This poem will be published on his Substack on May 22, 2026.
Gulliver’s Travels: Cambridge Memorial Edition (May 14, 2026). “This book is widely read from cabinet meetings to nurseries.” – Alexander Pope.
The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver’s Travelsedited by Daniel Cooke and Nicholas Seeger (2023), especially the chapter on “Politics.” WB Yeats admired Swift’s “savage” mental strength and returned to his work many times. He saw Swift as a kind of mask, or anti-self. “I can’t get Swift out of my head. He’s always around the next corner.”
Swift as Priest and Satirist —Todd C. Parker (2009), a book that examines how Swift’s priestly vocation shaped his satirical rigor.
“Is AI pushing us towards a faceless parasocial world in 2026?”—Akhilesh Kulkarni Medium (December 25, 2025). Cambridge Dictionary has selected “parasocial” as the word of the year for 2025. The term has proliferated as people form unsolicited bonds with influencers, celebrities, podcasters, fictional characters, and now AI chatbots.
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Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
