Rev. Kat Carroll
about an 8 minute read
If you've followed my writing for any length of time, you know how I recognize patterns in the news, and sometimes in how they relate to older stories, TV shows and movies. This one hit me hard after listening to an interview on YouTube:
This is an EXTINCTION-LEVEL Event & Palantir Just Got EXPOSED | CIA Whistleblower Sounds the Alarm
Ignore the sensationalism of the title and simply listen to the warning about this technology. It's quite compelling.
As an avid Tolkien fan since grade school (about 6 decades ago), I was enthralled by Tolkien's writing style and how images were fully formed in my head due to his descriptive writing ability. Moving forward, Peter Jackson created a monumental series of movies that gave life to Tolkien's vision on the big screen.
I could not help but note the similarity between the Palantir from Lord of the Rings, and the company, Palantir, that's now causing similar alarm. The parallel between Tolkien's seeing stone and the modern-day technology was striking—not just in name, but in its potential use and danger.
In The Lord of the Rings, the Palantír was an ancient Seeing Stone capable of revealing information from great distant places, hidden events, and the thoughts of those who gazed into it. It was a wondrous technology, created by the Elves for communication and wisdom.
Yet it came with a warning. They were not meant for use by just any person, only the wise and the rulers.
When young Hobbit, Pippin, looked into the stone, he believed he was merely observing it. Pippin was part of the Fellowship helping Frodo destroy the Ring of Power—and the Dark Lord wanted that ring badly.
To his surprise and fright, he soon learned that something was observing him and trying to extract information in a most painful way.
The Dark Lord Sauron immediately sought to discover who he was, what he knew, and where the One Ring could be found. Information was being extracted from him against his will. Had Gandalf not intervened, the encounter might have ended very differently.
Today, we carry our own Seeing Stones via cellular phones and computers.
They glow in our hands and sit upon our desks. Through them we can communicate instantly across the globe, witness events on the other side of the world, and access more knowledge than all the libraries of antiquity combined.
But there is another side to the exchange.
These devices and the systems behind them also observe us. We are learning now that it's about more than obtaining information to market products to us. There are lawsuits against them for the theft of your personal information.
They learn our habits, our preferences, our fears, our beliefs, and increasingly, our likely future behaviors. They create models of who we are, predict what we may do next, and shape what information we see. Some have raised concerns that predictive technologies could eventually influence decisions about individuals before a crime has even occurred. All of this taken without our knowledge or consent.
Like Tolkien's Palantír, modern technologies are not inherently evil. The danger lies in who controls them, how they are used, and whether those who gaze into them understand the exchange taking place.
Sauron could not make the Seeing Stone lie—He simply showed selective truths. That's rather similar to our legacy media.
He amplified fear, shaped perception, and guided others toward conclusions that served his purposes.
Sound familiar?
Perhaps Tolkien's greatest insight was not the existence of a magical stone, but the realization that any tool capable of extending human perception also carries the potential for surveillance, manipulation, and control.
The question before humanity is not whether we should abandon technology or fear every innovation.
The question is this:
Are we wise enough to use our Seeing Stones without becoming ensnared by them?
Because the lesson of the Palantír remains as relevant today as it was in Middle-earth:
Sometimes, when we look into the stone… the stone is looking back.
I invite you to listen to the conversation that sparked this article.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXNKLClcPl0&t=493s
Perhaps Tolkien's greatest warning was never about a magical stone that could see across great distances. It was about the temptation to surrender our discernment to powerful tools we do not fully understand.
The greatest danger was never the ability to see far away.
It was forgetting that the act of seeing could become a two-way mirror.
For sometimes, when we gaze into the Seeing Stone…
the Seeing Stone is also gazing into us.
What are your thoughts? Feel free to leave a remark in the comment section below.
Postscript
One final thought struck me after writing this article.
J.R.R. Tolkien completed the primary narrative of The Lord of the Rings in 1947–1948, with final revisions and typescript work concluding in October 1949. The work was then published by Allen & Unwin in three volumes between 1954 and 1955.
Nearly eighty years later, we find ourselves discussing technologies bearing the very same name as Tolkien's fictional Seeing Stone and debating many of the same questions his story raised:
Who controls the flow of information?
How much should any one power know about us?
And what are the consequences when our tools of communication also become tools of observation and behavior modification.
As humanity entered an age of unprecedented secrecy, surveillance, and intelligence gathering, one of the twentieth century's greatest myth-makers completed a cautionary tale about a stone that could see across the world and expose the minds of those who used it.
Perhaps the Professor was not predicting the future at all. Perhaps he simply understood something timeless about human nature—that our greatest creations can become our greatest temptations if wisdom and discernment fail to keep pace with our inventions.
And for those who enjoy wandering a little further down the rabbit hole, another curious thought comes to mind.
What if the Ring of Power was more than a piece of jewelry that rendered the wearer invisible in symbolic terms? What if it represented a "ring-shaped gateway" technology—a threshold between worlds that granted extraordinary abilities while exposing its bearer to forces beyond their understanding? 😉
Perhaps that is reading too much into the story.
Or perhaps myths have a way of preserving ideas that later generations rediscover through entirely different lenses.
Additional Sources
EPIC Settles ICE Lawsuit about Palantir and Profiling
What does Palantir actually do?
The viral manifesto of 'anti-woke' tech boss with NHS and defence contracts
The Mark of the Beast: AI, Digital ID & Cashless Control
http://dlvr.it/TTGWfT
