Everything’s haunted now
“The ghost in the machine” used to refer to humanity’s ineradicable tendency towards self-destruction. Arthur Koestler’s 1967 book of that name argues that our brains evolved very rapidly to make us the intelligent, talking creatures we are, but the new gray matter is built upon the original reptilian brain stem that we all still have, and which is capable of overpowering all our fine reasoning skills and propelling us towards catastrophic actions like nuclear war.