When Reason Becomes a god: The Zizian Tragedy

With a Subtitle: What a violent rationalist movement reveals about the human heart without God.

A brief Excerpt: The Zizians chased pure logic and ended in bloodshed. Their story is a sobering picture of what happens when reason becomes the highest authority and God is left out.

The Author is: Jeff Hilles

When the Mind Becomes the Measure of All Things

Maybe you’ve never heard of the Zizians. A few years ago, most people hadn’t. Then came the headlines: a string of violent deaths across the country, a border patrol agent killed in a Vermont shootout, a landlord stabbed, a member’s own parents shot in their Pennsylvania home. At the center sat a loose network of young, gifted computer scientists who had gathered around the writings of a blogger known as Ziz.

They don’t call themselves a cult. They’d probably bristle at the word religion too. But look closely and you’ll see something that should sober every one of us.

Who Were the Zizians?

Here’s the part that’s easy to miss. These weren’t drifters or the desperate. As PBS NewsHour has reported, most were young, highly intelligent computer scientists in their twenties and thirties, many of them transgender, who met online and bonded over radical ideas about veganism, gender identity, and artificial intelligence. They came out of a Silicon Valley subculture called rationalism — a movement obsessed with logic, decision theory, and the long-term dangers of AI.

The name traces back to one person. Jack “Ziz” LaSota, an Alaskan-born programmer who began blogging elaborate theories about technology, the human mind, and morality. She (transgender) gathered a small circle of followers. And somewhere along the way, the careful pursuit of reason curdled into something absolute. Outsiders were corrupt. Followers were the only ones who truly saw. Pure logic, they decided, obligated them to act — whatever the cost.

That last conviction is where it turned deadly.

The Oldest Lie, Wearing New Clothes

Scripture saw this coming a long time ago. “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death” (Proverbs 14:12). Not a way that seems obviously evil. A way that seems right. The Zizians weren’t chasing wickedness. They thought they were being good, and it led exactly where the proverb warned.

This is the original temptation, isn’t it? The serpent’s pitch in the garden was never “become evil.” It was “you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). Be your own authority. Decide for yourself what counts as righteous. Rationalism with God left out doesn’t escape that trap. It runs straight into it.

Paul named the pattern plainly: people who, “claiming to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:22). The mind is a magnificent gift. But a gift is not a foundation. When the creature’s reasoning becomes the final court of appeal, it builds an idol — and idols always demand sacrifices.

What Happened to Them

So where did they all go? In a sense, the movement consumed itself.

By the end of 2022, several adherents and people close to them were dead. A member was killed during an attack on a California landlord. That same landlord was later stabbed to death. The parents of one member were shot in their Pennsylvania home. Then, in January 2025, came the Vermont highway shootout that killed Border Patrol agent David Maland along with another member of the group.

LaSota herself had faked her own death and vanished back in 2022. The disappearance didn’t last. Weeks after the Vermont shooting, police found LaSota and two others living in box trucks on a rural Maryland property and arrested them. As of early 2026, seven Zizians are jailed across three states, all awaiting trial, with one member facing a possible death penalty. The group that prized total clarity now exists mostly as court dockets and archived blog posts.

What Anchors Us When We Won’t Anchor in Him

So what keeps any of us off the same cliff? Not raw intelligence. The Zizians had plenty. The difference is the starting point.

Christian faith doesn’t reject reason. It seats reason under something higher. We don’t manufacture truth through airtight logic; we receive it as a Person. Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). Truth has a face. It bled for us rather than demanding our blood. A heart anchored in Christ can be certain without becoming cruel, because its certainty rests in His mercy, not in its own flawless thinking.

A Tragedy, and a Warning

I don’t write this to mock anyone. The Zizian story is a tragedy, full of real victims and real, wasted brilliance. But it’s also a mirror. Strip God from the picture, crown human reason king, and the smartest people in the room can march, step by logical step, into the dark.

Pray for clarity. Pray for humility. And hold your own reasoning loosely enough that God can correct it.