The Illusion Wars Trilogy

The Illusion Wars Trilogy

The Diagnosis of Civilizational Failure in the Intelligence Age

While others celebrate AI as salvation, Steve Butler exposes the illusions tearing our world apart.

This trilogy doesn’t offer utopian speculation. It confronts the failures already visible in our collapsing institutions. Hierarchical organisations incapable of truth. Autonomous AI agents promising freedom but delivering fragility. A reality where information chaos corrodes democracy, markets, and science.

The Illusion Wars Trilogy shows why our institutions are failing:

• Volume 1: The Reality Paradox reveals the breakdown of shared truth itself—the collapse of verifiable reality under synthetic information.

• Volume 2: The Enterprise Myth documents how corporate hierarchies systematically destroy innovation, suppress dissent, and guarantee failure in the intelligence age.

• Volume 3: The AI Myth dismantles the fantasy of autonomous salvation, showing why intelligent autonomy isn’t intelligent at all—and why constitutional collaboration is the only alternative.

These are not abstract warnings. They are forensic analyses drawn from history, neuroscience, organisational science, and the live operation of Luminary AI—the world’s first constitutionally governed enterprise.

The evidence is overwhelming:

• Authority has replaced truth.

• Illusions have replaced governance.

• Drift, collapse, and pollution are destroying the institutions meant to preserve stability.

For executives: Learn why every hierarchical decision-making structure is already a liability.
For policymakers: See why information chaos, not just AI capability, is the true democratic threat.
For leaders: Understand why “intelligent autonomy” is the most dangerous myth of our time.

The Illusion Wars Trilogy provides the diagnosis. The Epistemic Imperative Trilogy provides the cure. Together, they form the survival manual for the intelligence age.