Yeah, I would agree. NGE is like a reverse Garden of Eden story, where the Adam and Eve escape from society to some kind of idealistic paradise because they were the ones chosen by humans who essentially had created a modern day reverse Tower of Babel to become gods (remember Tokyo-3 is underground skyscrapers that can pop above ground?), and created their own fake plagues in the form of the Angels as justification to create the EVAs, which were merely a cover story to fight their fake plagues, but which were actually necessary to trigger the Human Instrumentality Project, so that they could become gods for real.

NGE is an allegory for our present, with something like 9/11 truther government coverup false flag attack paranoia, in the form of the one kid who always has a VHS camcorder, who is kind of a stand in for a conspiracy theorist who is accidentally correct, combined with Christian apocalyptic eschatology, combined with Japanese fears about being the only non-nuclear armed modern democracy in some hypothetical future, and some mecha fights and waifus. It’s us, the little people versus industrial gods.

Gendo was a true believer, he just became jealous of his own son because Shinji was able to pilot the EVAs, and thus was forced to confront his own poor treatment of Shinji. Once Gendo realized that S.E.E.L.E. (the U.N. group formed to fight the Angels) may not know what they’re doing, before they can trigger Instrumentality with themselves via the synthetic Angels, Gendo triggers Instrumentality with Shinji and Asuka. So in that way, I would say that Gendo was lying because he wanted to trigger Instrumentality himself so he could bring back his dead wife, but had to settle for indoctrinating his son to do it by proxy.

Gendo was lying, but not about the fact that the Human Instrumentality Project does what it says on the tin, but about how many eggs he had to break to make that omelet. Rather than trust Instrumentality and thus the literal future of humanity to literal faceless bureaucrats, Gendo put his son on the throne and told him to kill their false gods and become one himself, and trusted that love would conquer all in the end. Gendo lied to Shinji so that he could tell him a deeper truth that he could never say aloud in words, especially after the loss of his wife, that he loved his son, and he did that by allowing Shinji to create a world without pain, whatever that meant to him. Gendo was a flawed man and a genius who was duped to become a useful idiot for the deep state, a true believer of his own bullshit, but he loved his son in his extremely stereotypically warped Japanese way, and because his son was able to accept that love and learn to love himself, Shinji was able to love the world and his place in it, and thus achieved enlightenment via his realization that heaven was on earth all along.

“God’s in his heaven, all is right with the world,” indeed.

If anything, AI is part of what might one day become our own Human Instrumentality Project, but in and of itself, I don’t think it’s enough. AIs aren’t yet effectively embodied.

I think Final Fantasy VII would be a better story/setting to explore for ideas related to AI. Sephiroth is a “perfect” synthetic human, and he basically turns himself into a paperclip maximizer that runs on mako energy by co-opting Shinra Corp via a literal hostile takeover of the parent company of the lab that created him.