Bruce Charlton's Notions

I have found a modified version of Rudolf Steiner's schema that evil can be distinguished in two forms - Ahrimanic and Luciferic - to be a valuable tool.

The Luciferic is (roughly) the impulsive, instinctive, self-gratifying, psychopathic kind of evil - as characterised by the frenzied violence and torture of unbridled war; or the greedy lustfulness that drives the sexual revolution. This tended to be the dominant form of evil in ancient times - and of course it still continues.

But that does not capture the modern form of evil - which may originate in this kind of 'id'-driven thirst for instant gratification; but which takes this and operationalises it in the form of definitions, laws, regulations, and bureaucracy - enforced by omni-surveillance and micro-control mechanisms. This is the Ahrimanic - a cold, rational, systematic form of evil.  

In other words, the distinctive and dominant form of evil of this time, of modern times, is totalitarian. The Ahrimanic is the totalitarian, bureaucratic, strategic...

It is the evil of a whole society organised in pursuit of evil that has been pre-defined as Good. It may be an evil without pleasure; evil as an industrial process - a crushing, icy evil. The modern sexual revolution is presided-over, guided, implemented - not by passion crazed Caligulas - but by stony-eyed officials.


The problem is that almost all the real and serious Christian denominations and churches (I mean the best churches - not those that are liberal, apostate, vaguely-Christianised-leftist organisations) still seem to regard evil as Luciferic; and respond to its threat (or try to respond) by doubling-down on the Ahrimanic aspects of Christianity.

For example, the sexual revolution is seen by Christians as primarily about the Luciferic - to be opposed by better organisation. Whereas the real problem is not the work of lust-crazed individuals seeking pleasure; but the Ahrimanic, incremental, planned strategy of a vast army of drab, cold-eyed, strategising bureaucrats; armed with United Nations mission statements, European Union laws, International consensus definitions, guidelines, terms-of-service, models of best practice etc etc.

All too often the Christian response to the sexual revolution has been along exactly the same lines as the totalitarian bureacrats. An increase in planning, systems, supervision; a greater number and precision of rules; tougher enforcement - and so forth.

This is to fight ice with more ice; to fight Sauron with the One Ring. Such a Christianity presents the individual with what looks like nothing more than a choice of rival bureaucracies - one powerful and growing, the other small and collapsing. A choice of two would-be totalitarian monitoring and control systems. Both alienate, both are evil in form.

One can either be crushed by secular materialism, or crushed by religious practices...


The answer to the dominant Ahrimanic evil cannot be merely a different version of the same. Nor can it be a version of old-fashioned Luciferism; which is, anyway, an impossibility...

The middle sixties saw a massive cultural upsurge in the Luciferic (turn-on, tune-in, drop out - let it all hang out etc.) and that would-be explosion of the id and the instinct, merely fuelled decades of ever-expanding and further-encroaching bureaucracy. Nowadays, the Luciferic 'liberation' serves merely as an excuse for ever-more Ahrimanic constraint.

If evil comes from some combination of the domination of the Genital urges (Luciferic), and the raionalism of the 'Left Brain' (Ahrimanic) - what is needed is the Heart. And that is something new, something untried - but something profoundly Christian.


What Christianity needs cannot be captured in any formula or rule (that is just more Ahrimanic stuff) - in a totalitarian age we cannot expect to protect Christianity, or even to be Christian, by adhering to any principle of truth, or any flow-diagram of validity.

Nor can we fall into the trap of regarding anything other than the systematic as Luciferic, hence evil. There is a third way - the way of Jesus - and that is the only Good way. 

We must acknowledge the individual person in relation with God to be the fundamental unit of truth, beauty and virtue. This has been said many times before - but never done. A religion of the heart must be rooted in persons, not abstractions; because only persons can love - yet love is objective, the primary basis of all creation, the heart of Christ's teaching.

What follows is a train of thought, of reasoning. It was stimulated by watching a fantasy TV program in which the hero fought demons, that is Luciferic evil embodied in actual personal beings that wanted to enslave, torture and murder. The fight was to contain or kill such beings.

It was difficult - for the hero; but the evil was locatable and understandable - the difficulty was in beating the demons.

Then I reflected that the evil we mostly encounter in this, our modern lives, is Ahrimanic - which means it is The System (the Matrix) - which is bureaucracy, which is impersonal, which is dispersed - behind every bureaucracy lies another. There are (it seems) "bureaucracies all-the-way-down"...


But then I realised: this is not so.

Ultimate metaphsyical reality is of beings and their relationships. The ultimate spiritual reality of modern evil is of actual Ahrimanic beings; that is persons, who have motivations and seek satisfactions in a way exactly analogous to the more familiar Luciferic demons. The Ahrimanic demons are motivated, living, conscious beings of a different kind, different nature; that is all.

So, ultimately The System, the bureaucracies are merely a mask, a disguise, a distraction from the reality of purposive evil pursuing its purposes.

What, then, can I actually do about all this? The answer became clear (or so it still seems).


I need to bear in mind - actively, deliberately - that nothing is dead, all is alive.  Consciousness is universal - motivation is everywhere.

The ultimate truth is that everything real is personal. There are no coincidences, no accidents - all has meaning - and there is no neutrality.


No neutrality means that the officials, the drones, the myrmidons, the petty agents of bureaucracy that we see all around (and our-selves very probably: aye, there's the rub!) are actually personal, purposive agents.

The minor implementors of The System - the slaves, serfs, servants - the clerks, managers, security guards, people who deliver... all of them (of us) are active participants in Ahrimanic evil - all have chosen to regard themselves as non-persons, all seek to avoid ultimate responsibility by sharing in the Ahrimanic assertion that 'nobody is to blame' - which means that in The System we are not persons - we are dead, lack consciosuness and purpose...

This is what must not be accepted - must be brought to conscious knowing, and refuted.


Primitive or psychotic paranoia - in which each person understands himself to be the centre of the universe, with life organised around-himself; is basically correct factually; but is wrong insofar as it is regarded as a passive situation - regarded as unavoidable. (The typical paranoid regards himself as a passive victim of external realities. He sees reality as outside himself.)

We are all and each actually at the centre of the universe; because we are co-creating that reality We are never passive (or, insofar as we are, then that is an evil choice: false, a pretence, a shirking of good, a service to evil).

We don't know everything here-and-now (of course!); but everything is potentially know-able - by each of us - in principle; and that 'in principle' makes All The Difference.

(About this Rudolf Steiner, in Truth and Knowledge and Philosophy of Freedom was profoundly and vitally correct).


How to fight demons? With 'magic' - obviously! But what kind of magic?

We know (from fantasy TV, movies and books) how magically to fight Luciferic demons... How then magically to fight the Ahrimanic demons that stand-behind The System; or rather hide behind The System? And use The System magically to make each of us Ahrimanic too. That is to make each of us choose to regard ourselves as material, non-personal, non-responsible - 'functional units' of that System.


The magic of fighting the Ahrimanic demons is knowing; and the effects of knowing. And victory is possible because the Ahrimanic beings assume their own passivity; that is their basic assumption, their metaphysical world picture.

When we are (or become) active and participating knowers; then They are defeated. But they do not realise how They have been defeated. Such is unknowable to Them.

The Ahrimanic magic is to induce people to regard the world passively, with detachment (as if meaning was out-there); to induce people passively to serve this machine, to deny their participation in the construction of this machine. 

Our magical challenge is therefore to see beyond the self-presentation of our world as dead, abstract, impersonal, mechanical, unconscious -- and to know the world as it really is.

The Ahrimanic magic is to make us believe the world is merely material; our counter-spell is to (our-selves) regard that world as also spiritual: more exactly the magic happens when we personally actually consciously experience the world as alive, of-beings; and embrace that experience as valid. 


This good magic will work when we know the servants of Ahriman (including our-selves) as deluded, self-suppressed, evil in avoidance of knowledge - hence respobsility for this vast structure of evil.

Good magic unmasks the beings behind the machine, unmasks the choices behind the obedience, unmasks the active promotion of evil behind the fear and despair.

A day at the office, a visit to the shops then becomes the front-line in the battlefield of spiritual warfare.

Our magic against Theirs.

I have recently blogged about the theme of Sorathic evil; which I adapted from some remarks of Rudolf Steiner - and which I first came across, summarized, in the work of Terry Boardman. 

Sorathic evil is here defined as a purely negative, short-termist and destructive kind of evil; ultimately motivated by resentment and hatred of God and all that is God's creation. 

I envisage Sorathic evil as a kind of end-stage (end-times) phenomenon; and one we may observe following-on from the recent and current Ahrimanic evil that denies the reality of God, creation and the spiritual realm altogether; and attempts to impose a wholly materialistic and scientistic, Global Total System of surveillance and control. 

This Ahrimanic evil takes a long-term perspective, aiming to maximize quantitative human damnation - and in pursuit of this goal includes necessarily various elements that are good; such as the bureaucratic virtues of obedience, thoroughness and hard-work. 

Ahrimanic evil aims to create a system of value-inversions (virtue becomes vice, while sin is encouraged and rewarded; truth becomes hate-facts and fake-news, while lies are science... etc.). This System will (by such means as law, media propaganda and corporate regulations) subversively 'process' people into a social structure that is anti-God, anti-Christian, anti-Good.  

But as Ahrimanic evil has become dominant and pervasive, and gets closer to completion (as is happening rapidly at present) so the stage is set for Sorathic evil. 

It will begin to be 'noticed' that The System still relies upon good-motivations (e.g. residual habits of thinking and behaving inherited from tradition and Christianity; or innate common sense evaluations and survival instincts as a consequence of human biology). 

When these tacit and implicit Christian (or Pagan) virtues are pointed-out;  and the Ahrimanic will begin to lose faith in their compromises. 

As The System becomes more 'total', and as Good agents are disempowered and suppressed) inevitably Sorathic zeal begins to focus on those aspects of the The System itself, that conflict with the aims of evil. 

Extremist and impatient Sorathic agents will turn-upon the plodding 'moderates' of evil; aiming to purge them. Indeed, by this point the sincere Ahrimanic agents will be among the least-evil of those who wield power and influence.    

Until that point, short-termist immediate evil cannot prevail; because it cannot self-organize. After all, Sorathic agents will fight each other whenever immediate advantage is to be gained from it.

However, when Good has been substantially destroyed and replaced with an evil-orientated and evil-permeated System; then there will commence a kind of natural selection among agents of evil. 

Sorathic agents that are more short-termist (hence destructive) will begin to prevail over Ahrimanic agents who are trying to be long-termist by clinging-onto virtues like obedience and pragmatic long-termism.  

And Sorathic 'gratification' is, at this extreme, sheerly spiteful destructiveness. A Sorathically-motivated being will destroy even when this takes hard work, and even when it harms the Sorathic being. 

(For a Sorathic being; cutting off your nose to spite your face is normal operational procedure.) 

Against such reckless, frenzied, destructive hate; the sensible, practical, self-seeking Ahrimanic 'moderates' will be helpless. 

For this reason I do not think that there can be a specific being of Sorath. 

Instead Sorathic evil is a kind of mass effect, the product of many spiteful individuals operating in a situation of advanced-evil where good agents have been dispersed and stripped of power. Individualistic spite will prevail. 

There cannot be a Sorathic 'leader'. Any attempt to plan and lead Sorathic activity, would be self-contradictory! After all; planning and strategizing of evil is Ahrimanic rather than Sorathic! 

Maximizing immediate short-term destruction is intrinsically opposed to optimizing long-term Systemic evil They are goals that cannot simultaneously be pursued - one or the other must prevail. 

In conclusion, I do not think that Sorath is a specific being, but a type of evil: the most advanced and extreme type of evil - therefore, one that cannot thrive until the ground has been prepared for it, by the success of Ahrimanic evil and its expulsion of Good agents from public discourse and practice. 

And the ground has, very nearly, been exactly thus prepared; and the ascendency of the Sorathic has already begun. 

Rudolf Steiner's idea that evil has two faces and natures - the unconscious/ instinctive/ spiritual Luciferic, and the systematic/ bureaucratic/ materialistic Ahrimanic - is one that has lodged permanently in my mind (although I don't use the terms exactly as Steiner did).

Steiner foresaw that the Ahrimanic tendency was dominant and increasing in our age - and he was absolutely correct; including within the Anthroposophical Society which he founded. Indeed, the history of Steiner's movement is worth studying from the perspective of just how pervasive, how inevitable-seeming, the Ahrimanic tendency is in our age. here we have a movement studying, and officially opposing, the Ahrimanic tendency but using highly Ahrimanic methods!

Such is, however, almost universal in our time. Whenever any human and individual priority or problem is highlighted; the 'solution' is always to set-up institutional, bureaucratic mechanisms that are supposed to deal with it: task forces, surveys, committees, conferences, statistical reports, agenda-items, targets...

(The middle sixties is a clear example; because the 'sixties impulse' was Luciferic - but this dominated for only about one year - from the summer of 67 to the summer of 68; and everything radical/ leftist/ progressive we have seen since, has been ever-more-thoroughly Ahrimanic. Nowadays, the sparks of individualistic Luciferic instincts - especially sexual and transgressive - merely feed the Leviathan of bureaucracy.)  

These are all both tools and manifestations of Ahrimanic thinking; and implement and sustain that cold, rational, spirit-denying materialism. This is specifci totalitarianism. Then the individual Ahrimanic bureaucracies link-up to make the Single Totalitarian Bureaucracy, centrally controlled - and Ahriman is triumphant.

It matters not one whit if the 'ends' and objectives are spiritual, heartfelt, animistic - because the means by which they are approached ensures that spirit-denying materialism is the medium of discourse.

We see this everywhere, except in small family or friendship groupings; every institution is not just contaminated but corrupted and inverted by Ahrimanic thinking; and it is this which makes me ever more convinced that our future must be post-institutional - involving a return (but with a major spiritual distinction) to that world built on loving personal relationships rather than formal organisation.

However, first-time-round; this personal world was Luciferic - and therefore unconscious, instinctive, 'given', immersive, unindividual. It cannot be Luciferic again - even if some would wish for that; because history is linear and a developmental process.

So the future personal world will be conscious, self-aware, deliberately-chosen - therefore individually-based. 

This prospect ought to be welcomed; but even though it is not welcomed, and is indeed opposed vigorously (even/ especially among most Christians), it will very likely happen. It will happen because corrupt institutions cannot sustain the modern world, and the corruption runs so deep and has already done such damage that there is no possibility of institutional reform. There is grossly too-little of the true source from-which a reform might be initiated and sustained.

Our institutional corruption is terminal - the cancer of Ahrimanism has overwhelmed the host; and there is not enough healthy tissue remaining for the cancer to be cut-away. The cure will kill us - more exactly; if the cancer does not kill us first, the cure will kill the institutions.

To put it differently: cancer is dysfunctional, and will kill the host; yet the global organism is almost-all cancer tissue: so either way, there can be no cure. 

A world of seven billion people without formal institutions seems impossible - and presumably is impossible. And if the vast population cannot be sustained, then it will not be sustained.

So this will be something like the End Times - even when examined purely in a material sense; although I have no doubt that its ultimate causes are spiritual.    

The plan is, apparently, to have the entire world population pecked as a supposed way of addressing the 'problem' of the birdemic. 

(Or, at least, the global masses are to be pecked - since we have no way of knowing whether the rulers are included.) 

The peck-agenda is multi-faceted; and seems to bring together several of the main mechanisms of the Establishment agenda for omni-surveillance and micro-control - and thus looks-like a further step in making The System more comprehensive and intrusive. 

Thus far, the peck-plan is evil in an understandably Ahrimanic way. It is 'business-as-usual' for totalitarian bureaucrats with their God/spirit/soul-excluding agenda of mere-materialism. 

Yet against this interpretation is the striking fact that the peck itself is a 'black box' of various poorly-tested traditional pecks; plus massive and experimental treatments with (versions of) something new, genetically-invasive, all-but un-tested, and therefore extremely hazardous... Thus the peck-plan includes something that is Not a peck, by long-established definitions; but instead a conjectural attempt at genetic modification.

(Gene therapy has never safely and successfully been done in humans. Although in the early 1990s it was touted as the Next Big Thing In Medicine, it has been tried and failed many-fold times over the past three decades.) 

This 'universal' genetic-modification peck-strategy is reckless and hazardous at a scale never before seen in the history of the world. 

Therefore, it may, quite plausibly, over the longer term (multiple iterations of this type of 'peck' are planned) - and likely by several lethal mechanisms - lead to some kind of (deniable) giga-death scenario.

But how this type of giga-death would pan-out (who would be affected, and in what way; and the consequences) is not knowable; not even approximately knowable --- Not only because death at this scale has never been seen, but also because so little is known about this type of treatment and the problems it will cause. 

My point here is that if the peck-plan was straightforwardly Ahrimanic in its intent - that is, about surveillance and control; then the peck itself would have been made as harmless and low-risk as possible. 

Indeed, a placebo peck would probably be the best strategy - since a placebo would allow the apparatus of surveillance and control to be implemented without adding unpredictable risks. 

But there is No Way that a genetic 'peck' with unknown and potentially massive hazards would have been allowed by genuinely-Ahrimanic leaders - let alone encouraged and enforced on a mass scale. 

This is one of the reasons I have come to believe that the Ahrimanic powers have already lost control of the revolution they initiated with the global coup of early 2020; and that there has already been a takeover by the Sorathic spirit. 

Takeover by the Sorathic spirit his happens spontaneously, because evil is corrupting - evil feeds upon itself, gets worse over time (as often seen in the greatest sinners of history; who usually started out not-so-bad). 

Thus when Ahrimanic evil successfully established a system of world governance in 2020 - it thereby opened the possibility of a more direct and short-termist form of 'negative evil'. 

This evil operates on individual, not at a System-level. The bureaucrats of Ahrimanic evil are typically seething with personal resentments (based on sex, sexuality, class, race, etc.). These personal agendas conflict with the effective operations of The System; and personal motivations need to be suppressed and over-ridden for The System to operate.  

Yet, because the System has such one-sided world dominance; evil-motivated individuals (whether demons, world rulers, national politicians, managers and officials, or low level operatives) are continually tempted towards abandoning the long-term objectives of strengthening and extending The System; and instead engaging in sheerly spiteful immediate acts of vengeance and destruction, directed against those they hate and resent.  

This short-term, selfish subversion is the temptation everywhere in The System; and it becomes easier to indulge and harder to control the larger and more dominant the System becomes. 

Also, Sorathic spite is so extreme a motivation; that those in its grip will even sacrifice their own well-being, and even their own lives, in order to torment and harm those individual, institutions or groups that they most resent. 

This means that normal methods of controlling individuals (through incentives and punishments) become ineffective when someone is consumed by destructive spite. 

And it is Sorathic spite that I perceive behind the genetic-peck. The Ahrimanic plan of the currently-named Great Reset is already collapsing under the subversive effects of Sorathic spite. This, indeed, may be the reason why it was decided at last explicitly to inform the general public about the details of the Great Reset.

This Establishment Plan has been known in outline and implicitly by those with insight for many decades, going back into the early 20th century when it was described by several authors including outsiders like Rudolf Steiner, Hilaire Belloc and CS Lewis; and insiders such as HG Wells, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. 

But now, just as it has achieved its greatest success; the Ahrimanic Plan is under threat from within, by the subversions of many and dispersed Establishment functionaries and demonic overlords... 

So the Ahrimanic elites are (desperately!) trying to recruit support from the masses - at present by dishonestly pretending that the internal Sorathic threats are actually external threats from wholly imaginary power-groups of Christians, white sooper reamitists and the like. 

Obviously, this is counter-productive to the Ahrimanic agenda because it will encourage the Sorathic tendencies in the managerial and functionary class by rationalizing acts of vengeance and spite against the hated victim class of white, native, straight, men. 

And once the Sorathic stage of evil has been reached - there is no going back, because those in the grip do not want to go back. That's why these are the End Times. 

I have recently written about Sorathic evil - the purest, most negative and destructive form of evil; as being the direction in which the world is going, here-and-now. 

But, Sorathic evil may be hard to understand. We are used to explaining evil actions in terms of fulfilling personal desires - whether the 'Luciferic' desires of immediate gratification by lust or cruelty, or the longer-term 'Ahrimanic' desires of power and control. 

It seems hard to imagine why 'mere destruction' would motivate someone when they might instead fulfil their desires? 

 

Well, it does happen. Perhaps if we introspect honestly, we can recognise the Sorathic within ourselves, as at least a momentary impulse?

An example are those resentment-fuelled spite-fantasies directed against people that we hate, or even who merely annoy us in some way that gets under our skin. For instance; day-dreaming the wish that somebody we have come to regard as smug, entitled, arrogant, privileged - will suffer massive public humiliation, fatal illness, or agonizing violence. Or somebody who 'thinks they are beautiful' and you 'wish' they would suffer a disfiguring accident that would make them hideous. Or when the idea flashes into mind that maybe I should kill myself and leave an accusatory suicide note; so that he/she/they will suffer lifelong agonies of guilt ("That will show them!").

If you can recognise any or all of these scenarios, then that is an example of the Sorathic evil in you. What identifies them as Sorathic is that the primary satisfaction is in the misfortune of others, rather in gratification of oneself. 

Indeed, someone in the grip of Sorathic evil might plot and scheme, expend time, money and resources - and maybe even take risks to his own health and safety - in order to inflict harm on others. 

Cutting off your nose to spite your face is the proverbial expression of Sorathic evil - although this makes a paradoxical quip out of what is truly the worst kind of evil; and such mockery misses that this 'nose-cutting' is exactly the kind of thing that people will do, when in the grip of Sorath. 

Saruman, in the Lord of the Rings, begins the story as in the grip of typically Ahrimanic evil. Saruman is a very 'modern' figure in the world of Middle Earth; an industrialist with a mind of 'metal and wheels', who even talks in slippery, euphemistic, manipulative management-speak. He works by surveillance (the palantir) and seeks control; even going to the trouble of creating the race of Uruk-Hai; a more obedient and loyal kind of orc-Man, who will stick to orders.  

But evil is a downward path - unless there is repentance: and that path has a slippery slope. 

Ahrimanic evil (while it lasts) retains some Good - insofar as order is better than chaos - and requires virtues such as prudence, hard work, loyalty, obedience...

When Saruman is defeated, he has a chance for repentance; but rejects it. Stripped of power, he refuses to recognise any wrongdoing. 

In particular (and this is amplified in the posthumously-published notes of Unfinished Tales) Saruman is spitefully-motivated against Gandalf. By the end of Lord of the Rings, Saruman has come to exemplify Sorathic evil - since he lives in order to hurt Gandalf, and - by proxy - the hobbits who Gandalf loved and cared for. 

The Scouring of the Shire is a representation of how the brief interlude of Ahrimanic evil administered by Lotho Sackville Baggins, gives way to a frenzy of destructive Sorathic evil when Saruman arrives. 

At first under Lotho - trees were felled to fuel furnaces; later under Saruman ('Sharkey') trees were felled because this would make the hobbits miserable. At first the rivers were carelessly polluted by the outflow of productive industrial processes, but later they were polluted because it would render them hideous... 

Evil as a means to an end, as a by-product; was replaced as evil for its own sake.

 

In his final speech, Saruman reaches the end-point of Sorathic evil when he deliberately courts death by stabbing Frodo in front of the army of hobbits. 

Having reached a point where he cannot destroy the Shire, Saruman tries to saddle the hobbits with a legacy of guilt and regret for having vengefully committed 'deicide' ('god-murder'; in that Saruman is a minor god; a maia or angel).  

But Frodo is protected by his mithril mail, and pardons Saruman - thwarting even his intended indirect 'suicide by cop' and inflicting a further wound of obligation upon the wizard. Yet this act of mercy only increases Saruman's resentment. 

The end-stage of Sorathic evil is despair, and the only perceived 'solution' is suicide. 

Thus Saruman (semi-deliberately) goads Wormtongue into killing Saruman; and thus the wizard 'finally' achieves his own death by that means.

 

Looking at Saruman's descent into Sorathic evil, it is striking how very small, how petty the wizard has become compared with the proud, powerful, 'wise' administrator of the grandiose, world-dominating schemes of his Ahrimanic phase - just a few months earlier. 

And indeed, Sorathic evil can only tend towards being small and petty, because it becomes less-and-less capable of the deferred gratification needed for making and sticking-with complex, long-term plans and manipulations. 

From this we can see that evil cannot go straight to the Sorathic extremity - without rendering itself ineffectual.  Lucifer and Ahriman are needed in the earlier stages to break-open the Good and allow the Sorath in*. 

 

Thus Luciferic and Ahrimanic evils alternate until they have created a situation of vulnerability where Sorathic destruction can take-over. 

On the other hand, the descent from Ahrimanic into Sorathic evil may be very rapid indeed - some historical examples suggest that it may happen in just day, or even hours - so that great tyrants may die suicidally while wishing the like destruction on everybody and everything else ('after me the deluge' - as a desired outcome). 

At the societal level, we reached the threshold of Sorathic evil within only months of the triumph of Ahriman...

 

In the West, we had the Luciferic promises of the 1960s - of a world of unrestrained hedonism; leading incrementally, decade by decade, to the Ahrimanic global prison of 2020 with promises of a world of omni-surveillance and totalalitarian-control (a system, apparently, pioneered in China to be rolled-out everywhere else). 

Yet, such was the triumph of evil and the feebleness of spiritual opposition in this atheist, materialist, leftist-corrupted world; that as the year reached its second half there was already evidence of merely, pettily destructive Sorathic frenzy - with violent riots, destruction, arson, terror, rape and murder; being not just officially funded, organised and defended; but publicly-advocated and approved. 

At a micro-level the brief "all in it together" spring solidarity of March-May devolved into the masked mutual hostility and informer-culture of the summer onwards. 

This happened even though such a spread of chaos erodes the very basis and capability of the global coup and its carefully-constructed Ahrimanic System!

 

The Sorathic spirit can also be seen in the apparent-gratuitousness of using surveillance and control technologies and enforcement for crushing society, church, education, sports, theatres, music, cinema, museums, singing and dancing - and finally Christmas.

In a single year has been wrought a truly colossal destruction of Culture. 

A genuinely Ahrimanic spirit would be subverting and using Culture to monitor, manipulate and control the population... Ahriman would exploit Culture to 'keep people happy' (in a bread and circuses fashion) while explicitly and covertly feeding them pro-System propaganda. 

But the Sorathic spirit of resentment and spitefulness is ever-increasingly getting the upper hand, and engaging in dysfunctional destruction for its own sake. The Sorathic spirit is destroying the Ahrimanic apparatus in all its aspects (including police and military functionality) - destroying, but not replacing. 

 

Because the world is so advanced in evil; such a Sorathic destruction of The System is not any kind of liberation, but a progression of evil delivering the world into chaos: a world of end-stage Sarumans, pursuing personal, petty grudges spiralling downwards into the finality of despair and suicide.  

(And a despairing, or spitefully-motivated, suicide is - surely? - a choice for damnation.) 

So, although the Luciferic, Ahrimanic and Sorathic types of evil fight each other, this conflict is not a negation - but the advance of evil; because evils don't cancel, they synergise. 

 

We cannot defeat Ahriman with Sorath, one cannot be played-off against the other - but only with God. 

If The Ahrimanic System is destroyed by Sorath, then we would be in far worse spiritual situation than if The System remained. 

Yet such a Sorathic collapse looks like a distinct probability for 2021...

 

If we want to resist Sorath spiritually - in our-selves, in our societies; this can only be achieved from a base in The Good. 

If we want Good (i.e. Godly) outcomes; the negative can only be defeated by the positive. 

The only true enemy of Sorath is Jesus Christ.

*I got this phrase from Ama Boden. Thanks!

If we use Ahrimanic as a shorthand term for that kind of bureaucratic, abstract materialism that has grown (over the past couple of hundred years) to dominate The West and The World - and acknowledge that this is an intrinsically evil mode of thinking; then we can begin to see how deeply this has invaded our lives. ...How Ahrimanic habits have become so ingrained that we reach for them even as we try to combat them.

This began with the man who invented this (broad) usage of Ahrimanic: Rudolf Steiner. Having described the terrible consequences to be expected for Man if he continued down the Ahrimanic path; Steiner himself created an Ahrimanic system of spiritual development! - with checklists, methods, training. He made an international, hierarchical bureaucracy to guard and administer his legacy. He preached individualistic Heart Thinking and intuition; but constructed an enormous quasi-factual archive of materialistic information on history and prehistory, the structure of the universe, spiritual techniques, politics and society, education, medicine, agriculture...

The form of the message refuted its content.


The pattern is common, almost universal - especially as the world converges into a single mega-bureaucracy; and clearly most of us find it very difficult to avoid falling into the Ahrimanic trap.

Consider Romantic Christianity. Our first, habitual, response on learning about the fact that it is necessary for each individual person to practise intuitive discernment, to live from his true (divine) self etc - is to ask for a canonical reading list, a course of study, a directory of approved authorities, an organisation to join, a set of bullet points about what to do.

Such advice can only be general - hence the form must work-against the content...

Even on a daily basis; (unless we catch our-selves first) too often we pay primary attention and expend great energy on looking for external guidance and structure - a curriculum to follow; and simply forget to attend to our actually-present intuitions of the heart.


At the bottom line, if we each are individuals (from eternity), and each are experiencing a bespoke (tailored to the individual) mortal life (that God is creating for our benefit, for us to learn-from); then our case is unique, and generic advice can never take us very far, especially not in a positive direction.

(We can reliably be told some generic things Not to do - to avoid; but almost never what we personally ought to be doing, here-and-now.)


I think the Ahrimanic problem arises from our tendency to put-off, to procrastinate, to plan instead of do.

Yet we will never be closer to God than we are Now. The Only time to begin to live from our Heart Thinking is Now. The lessons of mortal life that we need to learn (for our own eternal Good) are all around us - Now.

If this Intuition-Now perspective can perhaps become a counter-habit; maybe we can (starting Now!) begin to roll-back those pervasive Ahrimanic reflexes that have been socially-inculcated, and which work towards our eternal detriment.

My idea here is that the Ahrimanic impulse - which is evil in its cold, rational, systematic manifestation - has over the past couple of centuries consumed the more traditional Luciferic ('devilish') evil of short-termist personal lust, pleasure and torment. And is now being-consumed, in his turn, by 'Sorath'. 

The archetypal Ahrimanic evil is epitomised by a manipulative bureaucrat who presides over a state or corporate PSYOPS/prison/death machine; while Luciferic evil would be characterised by proximate evil: for example those who personally beat, rape and torture helpless prisoners.  

The final turning-point of the Ahrimanic consumption of Lucifer was when the Luciferic revival of the 1960s ('sex & drugs & rock-n-roll') was captured by the state bureaucracy - leading to a pervasive and intrusive system of monitoring and control for political correctness. 

Modern leaders are primarily Ahrimanic - and often anonymous/ hidden/ personally-timid; while old-style leaders were often Luciferic gangsters and pirates who cultivated a reputation for recklessness and the enjoyment of inflicting cruelty.  Luciferic evil now operates at a low-level in The System - among the mooks, minions and henchmen; while the ruling architects of evil have an Ahrimanic nature.

The Luciferic values were condensed and operationalised into systemic and materialist form; their spontaneity and pleasure were drained-away. 'Free Love' and open-ended promiscuity became compulsory sensitivity-training, and the threat of harrasment prosecutions. Spontaneity ("Turn-on, Tune-in, Drop-out") was incrementaly transformed into a world of proliferating committees, laws, guidelines and procedures; checklists, forms and feedback... 

 

But from about 2000; there was a further move towards the purest, most absolutely negative form of evil - which could be named Sorathic (adapting this from Rudolf Steiner's identification of Sorath as the most extremely evil of beings). 

Sorthic evil is neither about pleasure nor about control; it tends towards the purely destructive.

If Luciferic evil is motivated by short-teremist pleasure; while Ahrimanic evil is motivated by God-denial, spiritual blindness and reductionism towards a meaningless world of mechanical procedures; then the Sorathic impulse is driven by negative impulses - primarily fear, resentment and hatred.

Sorathic evil will therefore tend to destroy both the lustful pleasures of Lucuferic evil, and the complex functional bureaucracies of Ahrimanic evil. 

This is the Sorathic world we inhabit in 2020. 

A world in which the Luciferic lusts of sex/ drugs and the rock-and-roll lifestyle are forbidden and punished; and also a world in which the global system is being disabled and destroyed - even as its Ahrimanic architects have successfully accomplished a silent global coup, and are trying to perfect it into the grandiose schemes of The Great Reset/ Agenda 2030. 

In 2020 we observe all modern institutions, corporations and every kind of bureaucracy as rapidly declining in efficiency and effectiveness - under pressure from an ever-increasing culture of fear, victimology, entitlement and resentment. 

Sorath divides Mankind into more-and-more, smaller-and-smaller, self-identified victim groups; each resentful-of and pitted-against each other. The aim is eventually for each person to feel alone, consumed by feelings of thwarted entitlement, and hatred of the world; and living in permanent fear of a whole world of other people, each of whom resents and hates the solo-victim just as he hates them. 

And then - eventually - Sorath's intent is that everyone, without exception, should die in fear and despair.

 

Thus we see that Sorath takes Luciferic and Ahrimanic and pits the one against the other, to weaken and destroy both. Whatever gives pleasure is thwarted. Whatever has been created, and is complex or functional, is reduced to chaos. 

Chaos is indeed the key term. Ultimately, Sorath is driven by resentment directed against God and all of His works; and resentment of Man as a loving creating-being and all of his works. Sorath wants to reduce creation back to a primal state of chaos. 

And then - when all else has been destroyed - to destroy himself as a act of spite against the God who created him. 

Such is Sorath's fantasy. 

Note: JRR Tolkien depicted Sorath in his Silmarillion legendarium under the name of Morgoth. 

 

This world is ruled - whether literally or symbolically - by Ahrimanic demons, those they possess, and their obedient servants. These have created an evil-directed, unitary global System of always-increasing omni-surveillance and micro-control. 

The masses are now slaves to this System - and everyone (slaves and slave-masters alike - albeit not the demonic spirits themselves) depends on the evil System to keep them alive. 

So, if not, then what? If not The System - what? 

The most visible and outspoken opposition to The System are Sorathic in motivation. They hate the System, they hate those who run the system and who colluded with its construction. They want to smash the System; immiserate, humiliate and kill those responsible for it. 

So The System is slavery - and to live entirely at the mercy of the Global Establishment; who are known to be evil in motivation, nature and methods. That is one choice. 

Or there is freedom...

The Sorathic constitute most of the 'freedom' fighters of today; both on the 'anarchic' Left, and on the 'secular Right' - and their appeal comes from the fact that the major constraint on human freedom is indeed The System. 

The rationale is that anyone who supports The System is on the side of the Ahrimanic demons; and so they call upon people to attack, sabotage and 'fight' The System, and all those who serve it.

Think of the organization Amazon. One of the wealthiest and most powerful corporations in the world; whose rulers are a part of the Global Establishment; who are among the architects and administrators of Ahrimanic evil... 

Yet an organization upon-whom hundreds of millions of people depend, day-by-day, to stay alive. 

If we support Amazon - we support Ahrimanic evil. Yet if we aim to destroy Amazon, we will be working to initiate a sin-driven social maelstrom which would suck to destruction much of the world. 

This is the choice as presented to the masses. Support the Ahrimanic evil of slavery; or become a Sorathic 'freedom fighter' working to pull-down and explode The System - leading to a world of rapid mega-death. 

Sorathic-freedom is a fast-track to chaos - and chaos is the opposite of God's creation. 

And (in a world of seven-plus billions) chaos is a world of accelerating-spiraling down into starvation, mutual lethal violence; and mass (real) plagues, poisoning, and untreated trauma and disease - on a scale vastly greater (a thousand-fold greater) than anything ever seen in world history.  

Sorathic destruction presents itself as freedom from the prospect of being incrementally dehumanized and spiritually-crushed by escalating Ahrimanic slavery. But that freedom is rooted in sin. 

Sorathic freedom is motivated by psychopathic (love-less) loathing, fear, resentment, and despair.

If the Ahrimanic System is smashed by Sorathic destructiveness; the world will have exchanged Satan for another and worse demon - the demon of wholesale destruction of everything that is true, beautiful or virtuous: of everything that is divine creation. 

So a Christian who is motivated by Love of God; can neither sustain The System, nor aim to destroy The System - can embrace neither 'law-and-order' nor 'freedom-and-chaos'. Can neither approve nor aim-to-destroy Amazon or any equivalent institution. 

Both motivations are types of evil; and indeed Sorathic destructive-chaos is a purer form of evil than Ahrimanic slavery. 

The dilemma, this double-bind (by which all choices are evil) is real; but it exists only at the level of This World, this Mortal Life. 

Such is the nature of these testing times.  Evil can be transcended - but only by making resurrected life eternal our priority; and by living in that light. 

We must live day by day, and make our life choices, primarily in light of eternity and Heaven... And therefore Not by trying to maximize this-worldly health, happiness and well-being.

What eventuates in this earthly mortal life is neither known, nor knowable; because secondary to our spiritual decisions.  

All worldly-motivated paths lead to Hell - sooner or later, by one route or another. 

If we take the three types of evil - Luciferic, Ahrimanic and Sorathic  (lustful-tormenting, systemic-bureaucratic, and negative-destructive) - we can see that this ordering is reflected in several ways, which are related. 

First it describes the ordering of dominance in history, secondly the degree of evil-ness, and thirdly it reflects the societal hierarchy of The Masses, The Establishment, and The Satanic powers. 

By societal hierarchy I mean that Luciferic evil dominates the Masses - who are evil in impulsive, short-termist ways; Ahrimanic evil is typical of the Global Establishment and its managerial-class servants - who regard Men as merely human resources towards abstract goals; and the Sorathic evil of negation, value-inversion and destruction of The Good is characteristic of the demonic overlords.

 

This leads to considerable mutual incomprehension looking upwards. 

The evil Masses simply cannot recognise the evilness of the Establishment-managerial class; they cannot comprehend that the Establishement's vast and comprehensive agendas, plans, schemes are a kind of evil. 

The Masses cannot see this as evil because it is so abstract, so impersonal. Ahrimanic evil has very little 'fun'; it is dull drudgery - meetings, tick-boxes and flow charts. 

 

And when the Global Establishment look upwards to their demonic overlords; they too fail to see that demonic evil is of a very different nature from the complex Ahrimanic, international, bureaucratic systems that are so laboriously, so tediously, being constructed at present. 

The abstract system-builders do not recognise that the demons are sabotaging cherished Ahrimanic goals of a transhumanist technocratic society of total surveillance and micro-control; by, on the one hand, encouraging Luciferic destructiveness among the Masses (riots, arson, beatings, murder); while on the other hand degrading efficiency and capability faster than the systems can be built. 

The cause of this Ahrimanic misunderstanding is always-increasing dishonesty. 

 

Ahrimanic systems depend on real information, and real information depends on honesty. Yet the Ahrimanic Establishment class are continually selecting, hyping, spinning and (where deniable) fabricating the 'data' upon which their own power depends. 

Claims increasingly outstrip attainment - decline is re-analysed into growth, failure is redefined as success. 

Thus the Establishment always overestimate the degree to which their plans are succeeding. 

 

Put bluntly, the Establishment do not know what is happening; they do not know because nobody in their systems is seeking the truth or speaking with honesty. 

Consequently, the Establishment suppose they have done well in 2020! 

They know they are richer; They believe they are more powerful; and They are confident that everything is going pretty-much according to plan - and infer that Their prospects are bright...

But such evaluations are based upon a tissue of falsehoods. 

 

They do not know - consequently they do not realise that they are in truth (and very obviously, to anyoneone outside of the System's deceptions) elaborately rubbing their hands and cackling with glee at fouling their own nests!

The Establishment suppose they are creating a global totalitarian society of law and order with Themselves at the top and outside, pulling the strings and collecting the rents. 

In fact, they have created (and are actively worsening) global spiritual chaos, collapse of morale and motivation, and a conflagration of fear and despair; which will surely accelerate, spread and consume the Establishment uncontrollably; like a wild-fire.   

 

They began by lying to the Masses while sharing reality with each other in secret 'elite' meetings and conspiracies; but this Ahrimanic 'Iron Cage' very swiftly evolved to a pseudo-system of universal and mutual propaganda and manipulation, in which the Establishment were themselves enmeshed. 

Now, everybody is lying to everybody else, 24/7. 

And then - the biggest lie - making confident assertions about what is going-on and what will happen. 

(And then lying about that.)

 

The only real winners of 2020 are the Sorathic demons whose agenda is merely negative, destructive, and aimed-at universal human self-damnation. 

The demons despise all humans, but especially those arrogant and foolish Men who believe they have outwitted, and are controlling, the demons. 

Fairy stories and legends are full of warnings against dealing with demons; but the Establishment made the Faustian bargain nonetheless. 

They invited evil into their hearts (which is the only way it can enter); made a 'bargain' with the Father of Lies, were (apparently) 'rewarded' by power and gratification in the short term; but in truth they were actually selling their souls literally, surrendering their wills - and this (sooner or later) becomes de facto irrevocable.

 

This is a spiritual war, and the stakes are salvation and damnation. 

There used to be several 'sides' in the spiritual war, but in 2020 the middle ground has all-but gone: there are only two sides. 

One side asks that we consciously choose to acknowledge God our Father and the Creator as Lord, if we wish to follow Jesus Christ to our 'reward' of resurrected eternal life in Heaven. 

That is one choice.

 

The other side offers some (more-or-less brief) up-front gratification in mortal life, as reward for being invited-into the heart. And for which it enforces a payment which is always the same, and is always exacted sooner than expected: enslavement, fear, resentment, despair and eternal misery. 

That is the other choice.  

Two choices only: either to have the next world as our chosen priority; or this world - but not both. 

(Note: Here I am using a typology of evil: Luciferic, Ahrimanic, and Sorathic - which I have adapted and transformed from their origin in the works of Rudolf Steiner.) 

*

In the past, the dominant sins were probably the triad of Anger, Lust and Pride. These, at any rate, seem to be the dominant characteristics of great sinners of history - right up into the middle twentieth century. 

But as Western society became more industrialised, specialised, coordinated and impersonally-systemic; the dominant nature of evil became Ahrimanic. 

The most prominent triad of sins became Fear, Resentment and Despair. 

 

Fear, Resentment* and Despair is the dominant mood of the world in 2020 - these are the modern, 'bureaucratic sins'. 

The self-seeking, self-aggrandising evil of the mid-twentieth century (as exemplified by the atheist-socialist dictators such as Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot etc.) is not much in evidence in the West. Of course, Luciferic evil is still present; but these sins require greater courage and motivation than are possessed by the masses - or indeed the rulers - in 2020. 

Luciferic sin is weaker and less common than in the past; because it requires high motivation which is fuelled by the virtue of courage. 

Great Luciferic sin entails a positive, active, for-the-self mind-set. However; courage, hence motivation, has been incrementally eroded by the passage of several generations of de facto atheism. Hence the rise in Ahrimanic sin; which is much more passive, negating, and directed against-others. 

Beyond the Ahrimanic lies the Sorathic, which is even more fully negative in its motivations. I think this happens, because the Ahrimanic sins erode their own basis. 

A bureaucratic world tends towards a state of passive, unconscious, materialism. The Ahrimanic impulse begins with a denial of the aliveness of the mineral world, extends through denial of consciousness to plants, then animals, and eventually - as for the past decades, creates a world where aliveness, and consciousness is denied even to Men. 

This materialism (positivism, scientism) is the basis of modern bureaucracy; which terms Men 'human resources', and generates policy on the basis of numbers and statistics. The individual Man counts only as an integer. 

 

When this world view of negation of the Self, penetrates the soul and has been internalised; we get the Sorathic form of evil. 

...Evil as the negation of The Good - any good. 

So, evil loses any positive goal and becomes directed-against Truth, Beauty and Virtue; against life and consciousness, against the natural and spontaneous, against Beings and their relationships. 

Sorathic evil's only 'satisfaction' (because it has become incapable of 'pleasure') is in this destruction of anything that is of-God; anything created, anything capable of creation.

 

An example? Well, a very obvious instance of Sorathic evil in 2020 is the imposition of that demonic-triad of lockdown, social-distancing, and masking. Leading, as they must do, to the permanent annihilation of human society - and the construction of a world of universal solitary-confinement.

Obviously the mainstream, birdemic-related, excuses for annihilating human society and culture are lies. But - much more significantly - even the architects of the Great Reset cannot make a coherent argument why societal destruction is necessary!

They do it, but They can't explain it.

 

Their attempted justification of universal isolation relates to the need (and benefits) of automation, robots and artificial intelligence systems; but this is a non sequitur. The 'need' for one, does Not imply the destruction of the other.

What we are therefore seeing here is a very pure form of Sorathic negation. Even the Global Establishment themselves, the people who are imposing societal destruction on the world, do not understand why they are doing this work of societal destruction. 

They insist upon its necessity; but they cannot coherently explain it!

 

The reason is that the 'need' for societal destruction cannot be explained in materialistic terms - which are the only terms possible in public discourse; and among those who deny the reality of God and creation. 

The true reason for societal destruction is that human society is Good and therefore needs to be destroyed. Society between Men is indeed one of the great and essential Goods of this mortal world; as Men at all times, everywhere, have acknowledged and acted-upon - quite naturally and spontaneously. 

The idea that this can and should be dispensed with is monstrous, outrageous and ridiculous... for anyone who is Not deep into the servitude of Satan. But then, that is precisely what we are dealing-with. 

 

Therefore human society is an obvious, and essential, target for Sorathic evil; not because it is 'useful' to destroy human community, not because its destruction will enhance the lives of the Global Establishment - but exactly because human society is Good, and a Great Good; and because destroying it will induce suffering and (in this atheistic world) despair on a scale unprecedented. 

 

(And despair is a sin, because it is a rejection of God: a failure to trust in God, and a refusal of Jesus's gift of eternal life in Heaven. Despair - that is, as an existential decision, not a mere emotion - is therefore the choice of damnation.) 

 

In this burgeoning world of Sorathic evil, we need to stop looking for the 'advantage' in evil. Need to stop trying to 'explain evil' in terms of it (for example) making more money for Them, or giving Them more power...

From now, evil needs gain no advantage by its action: evil thrives purely on the destruction of whatever is Good. 

Evil has therefore ceased to be a triad, and has become a unity - the unity of negation; the unity of simple destruction of Good.

This is Sorathic evil. 

* Resentment can be understood as primarily directed against others. Spitefulness is another term for this. A person motivated by spite will put his greatest efforts into causing harm to others, rather than promoting himself. He will even harm himself in his zeal to harm others. The 'positive' face of resentment is the burgeoning phenomenon of 'entitlement'; which, again, has a strong flavour that 'my' privilege is best expressed in terms of the intrusive inconvenience, anger and misery it causes to others.

 

Note added: 

There are implications in the above understanding for Christians; because Luciferic evil was usually opposed by trying to build church-administered systems to 'tame' Anger, Lust and Pride - by encouraging/ insisting-upon obedience to church rules. 

However, this strategy of taming by obedience (as we have seen) played-into the reinforcement of the Ahrimanic sins. And church-Christianity has dis-couraged, and de-motivated itself. Thus all the churches have (more, or less) become part of the global, atheistic bureaucratic System of Ahrimanic evil. In 2020, the mainstream churches have actively embraced their all-but annihilation by birdemic rules.

Ahrimanic evil was opposed by 'counter-cultural', anti-System, individualistic ideas - which, when not 'Romantic' Christian - often fell back into Luciferic evils (especially lust). And it is tempting, nowadays, to suppose that evil can be attacked by resisting and destroying the Global Bureaucratic System ('The Matrix'). But, if I am correct that this Ahrimanic System is already being superseded and consumed by negative, Sorathic evil; then the current, world dominating evil cannot be resisted by any form of destruction. 

In sum; if we aimed primarily to destroy The System, we would only reinforce the emerging Sorathic spirit of destruction. 

What then? Resistance to Sorathic evil is as simple as the evil it opposes; in that it is to pursue the positive virtues most characteristic of God - which are love and creation (which are one: creation being a superabundance of love); that is, to pursue loving and creating.

('Loving' in the sense of love in the best marriages and families; 'creating' in the broadest sense of thinking and acting from our real, divine self - we are children of God; which is always original and generative.)

And, resistance to Sorathic evil must be individual, or based upon personal, loving 'familial' relationships; because of the danger of Ahrimanic ('Systemic') evil, standing behind the Sorathic.  

So, our course seems clear and simple, as well as difficult and hazardous; which is for each individual to resist Sorathic destruction by creation; to resist Sorathic negation by love. And to ensure that these values and behaviours of creation and love come from within-us: that is, come from God-within-us. 

And not to wait for a lead from any church, institution or other-person - nor to look behind to see if anyone is following us. We must do what needs to be done our-selves, starting now.

 

Modern demonic possession is qualitatively different from that of the past. For a start it is a mass phenomenon, and enormously more common than in any previous era. And secondly possession nowadays is much less personal, far more abstract, then before...

So much so; that "Ahrimanic-demonic possession" is taken-for-granted as the attribute of a good employee, an obedient citizen; a nice and decent person with all the right opinions. 

Traditional demonic possession was an individual phenomenon. In return for greater power and/or lustful pleasure; the host sets aside his own ego and allows a demonic spirit to inhabit the space. 

In terms of responsibility; an individual refuses to take responsibility for his own choices - and hands-over his will to the demon. 

The consequence is that proud, often brave; spectacularly selfish, violent, sadistic and individualistic evil of the past; which I have termed Luciferic. 

Mass modern evil is very different; and anything-but spectacular: it is the grey evil of grey Men. 

Modern evil is detached, impersonal, cold, grey - bureaucratic. This is Ahrimanic evil. Instead of being short-termist and self-indulgent; Ahrimanic evil is characterized by pathological pseudo-altruism, self-hatred, and a suicidal despair.  

Ahrimanic possession is driven by a self that refuses to be a self; an 'ego' that refuses to take responsibility for its own freedom; and instead hands-over ultimate authority to 'the system' - that is to an abstract 'group mind' which functions by impersonal procedures and processes (such as committees and votes). 

In different words; the individual-ego submits to a group-ego*; and the negated individual passively-absorbs values from the group-ego. 

Or; Ahrimanic possession is a consequence of deliberate surrender of Being, a result of regarding oneself as an acted-upon thing, rather than an intrinsically free Being. 

Mass modern Ahrimanic demonic possession (which is so common as to be statistically-normal in the West: it is indeed the New Normal) can therefore be conceptualized as a form of group-possession.

Ahrimanic possession is when the group-ego is colonized by demons - and the individual ego merely submits to that group ego. 

So, mass modern demonic influence is at one remove and indirect; its motives abstract and procedural; which is probably why the vast and pervasive extent of modern demonic possession is so seldom recognized, so easily denied.

* For more on the group ego, see this post.

Things began with chaos, among-which were Beings. Beings are self-sustaining - from Beings come the energies that shape chaos into creation. 

As soon as creation had begun, there was entropy - which is the tendency for the created to revert back to chaos. 

In this current stage of creation (which we also inhabit) creation must always be-overcoming entropy; by the self-sustaining energies of Beings. 

The reversion of creation to entropy releases 'energy'.

Therefore evil Beings, those who hate God and creation, encourage the reversion of creation to chaos. They do this partly in order to destroy creation, and partly to use the released 'energy' for their own purposes. 

Luciferic-evil Beings reduce creation intending to feed-upon the released energies. 

Luciferic evil is thus parasitic in nature - a Luciferically evil Being will feed-upon the energies of creation, as he destroys it.

 

Ahrimanic-evil Beings destroy creation by opposing chaos with 'order'. 

Creation becomes confined within The Global Bureaucracy, The System, The Matrix: the Black Iron Prison (BIP). 

Dynamic self-sustaining creation is held in stasis - thus the energies of creative life are squeezed out from the imprisoned Beings. 

After taking a tithe for vampiric (Luciferic) self-reward; these energies are used to maintain, extend and reinforce the prison: to extend the BIP globally, to include all Men; and to eliminate all perception and awareness of any-thing at all beyond the prison.

(Actually not all Men; because Ahrimanic evil entails a sharp distinction between prison inmates and warders; between the Beings who are-processed and the Beings who-do-the-processing - between Us and Them.) 

The death-factory is constructed and fueled by the energies released from its destruction of life. Ahrimanic evil is thus an entropy-factory, a processing plant; it takes living creation and reduces it to dead matter: creation to chaos. 

Ultimately, Ahrimanic evil turns creation against itself; uses life to crush life. 

Sorathic Beings are saboteurs - they were supposed to be warders sustaining the BIP, but they have begun smashing the buildings, wrecking the machines, and torturing the inmates. 

Sorathaic Beings are defectors from the Ahrimanic plan - because they have come to regard the Ahriminic factory as too slow, too dull, too unrewarding, too conjectural in effect. They want to destroy creation Now, directly, indiscriminately. 

Sorathic Beings perceive the contradiction of creating a Black Iron Prison as a means to destroy creation - when the base motivation of evil is to destroy all of creation (including BIPs). Pure evil cannot postpone universal destruction when it can be started already. 

Thus, Sorathic Beings will burn the death factory, along with its inmates and the warders; will return every-thing to chaos without attempting to harness or use the energies for any purpose. 

The motivation is not pleasure (like the Luciferics), nor mass effectiveness (like the Ahrimanic) - but a spite-driven, burning-zeal for pure destruction of all - here and now. 

Sorathic evil is born of a distrust of complex, long-term plans and schemes, a revulsion against the hypocrisy and pretense of the Ahrimanic strategy; which poses as 'good' and continues to create, albeit justified in order to destroy.

Sorathic evil emerges and waxes when the Ahrimanic scheme is nearing completion - when it comes to be believed that There is Only the BIP - there is only a whole world of evil, inescapable, with no alternative. 

Then evil has only evil as a target - so the greater evil turns-against and consumes the lesser.

 

One of Rudolf Steiner's most valuable insights was that evil has an older Luciferic and a more modern Ahrimanic form.

Luciferic evil is instinctive, short termist, selfish and psychopathic - for example the lust which desires other people merely for sexual exploitation, or the sadism that desires torture, or the power that desires to humiliate and crush. This is the evil of Caligula or Nero, of Ghengis Khan, of the post-war African dictators such as Charles Taylor.

The Ahrimanic evil is more modern; it is the despair-inducing, soul-destroying, utterly-demotivating Iron Cage of totalitarian bureaucracy - where all is a single system and all Men are merely cogs to serve it. This is the evil of late Soviet communism, of The Borg, of the overpromoted-middle-manager, Head Girl Type (e.g. the-3-Ms - Merkel, May, Macron) that increasingly runs large organisations, corporations and Western nations.

These evils synergise - especially when Luciferic liberation - such as the middle sixties style sexual revolution feeds the vast arrays of spies, informers, officials, inquisitors and controllers that is the realm of modern sexuality - enforcing their inverted value system with bribes, threats and coercion.

The modern era emerged from what Steiner termed the era of the 'Intellectual Soul' - and example of which is the medieval world of Western Europe, with its institutions of religion, law, education and the like. These institutions were simple bureaucracies but with a 'light touch, and considerable space for individualism, eccentricity and indeed selfish psychopathy...

But when Christianity receded then was excluded, these institutions became compromises which pleased neither the Luciferic libertarians, nor the totalitarian Ahrimanic powers. 

Think of the education system of the the first half of the twentieth century. It was regulated and hierarchical, it had rules and certificates and exclusion - but the period of education was relatively short, and there was space for considerable personal judgement and large variation in philosophy and practice between institutions.

Schools and colleges were regarded as suffocatingly oppressive and controlling by the little Lucifers of the sixties counter-culture. This began the destruction.

And then the Ahrimanic systemisers found more and more evidence of their bureaucratic incompleteness. Human judgement meant the possibility of individual corruption, variations meant that some institutions must be deficient or wrong. The pressure was irresistible to bring all institutions under a single 'true' ideology and to close off all loopholes, fill all the gaps in the systems...

Same applies to churches. They became a compromise that satisfied nobody. On the one hand they were institutions of patriarchal dictatorship; on the other hand they were economically and economically 'unaccountable' - what was going on in them? Nobody knew. Who controlled what they did, lost of mostly unidentified people, What were the details of their operations? Unrecorded...

The response was a massive programme of incremental monitoring and control of every aspect of decision-making - and the integration of this with the national (eventually multi-national) System.

There is no functional coherence to this pincer movement of institutional destruction - the only coherence is destruction. There is not coherence or direction to the end result of this crude mixture of psychopathic irresponsibility and totalitarian control - except the evil ethic of value-inversion.

But the end result is that nobody supports the actual compromise of any existing institution - always they want more Luciferic license, and/or more Ahrimanic 'accountability'.

Hence, all institutions, of every kind, have-been or are-being destroyed... With no end in sight, and no end possible even in principle - since in our secular, hedonic-despairing, God-eliminated society there is no higher value that might be able to transcend the destructive paradox.

At the end of his life, Rudolf Steiner dictated a summary of the key ideas that he wished emphasise. These were not finished, but the very last things he wrote about - in a posthumously published book entitled Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts (Collected Works number 26) were some of his most insightful and prophectic statements - although difficult to understand without some background knowledge. 

These have been made much clearer by a 2020 book from Jeremy Naydler The struggle for a human future, which I recommend reading.  

The following blog post, written earlier today, is my current understanding of what Steiner is implying, but did ot live long enough to formulate and state explicitly.

Anyway, here is an edited excerpt from these final words, which can be seen in full here.

 

By far the greater part of that which works in modern civilisation through technical Science and Industry — wherein the life of man is so intensely interwoven — is not Nature at all, but Sub-Nature. 

It is a world which emancipates itself from Nature — emancipates itself in a downward direction. 

 

Entering the purely earthly element, Man strikes upon the Ahrimanic realm. With his own being he must now acquire a right relation to the Ahrimanic. 

But in the age of Technical Science hitherto, the possibility of finding a true relationship to the Ahrimanic civilisation has escaped man. He must find the strength, the inner force of knowledge, in order not to be overcome by Ahriman in this technical civilisation. 

 

He must understand Sub-Nature for what it really is. This he can only do if he rises, in spiritual knowledge, at least as far into extra-earthly Super-Nature as he has descended, in technical Sciences, into Sub-Nature. 

The age requires a knowledge transcending Nature, because in its inner life it must come to grips with a life-content which has sunk far beneath Nature — a life-content whose influence is perilous. 

 

Needless to say, there can be no question here of advocating a return to earlier states of civilisation. The point is that man shall find the way to bring the conditions of modern civilisation into their true relationship-to himself and to the Cosmos. 

There are very few as yet who even feel the greatness of the spiritual tasks approaching man in this direction. 

Electricity, for instance, celebrated since its discovery as the very soul of Nature's existence, must be recognised in its true character — in its peculiar power of leading down from Nature to Sub Nature. 

Only man himself must beware lest he slide downward with it. 

 

In the age when there was not yet a technical industry independent of true Nature, man found the Spirit within his view of Nature. 

But the technical processes, emancipating themselves from Nature, caused him to stare more and more fixedly at the mechanical-material, which now became for him the really scientific realm. 

In this mechanical-material domain, all the Divine-Spiritual Being connected with the origin of human evolution, is completely absent. The purely Ahrimanic dominates this sphere. 

 

In the Science of the Spirit, we now create another sphere in which there is no Ahrimanic element. It is just by receiving in Knowledge this spirituality to which the Ahrimanic powers have no access, that man is strengthened to confront Ahriman within the world. 

(For once!) I seem to have been correct in my prediction that the current Arrakis war is being exploited (and, very likely has been set-up) as a way of re-asserting globalist totalitarian bureaucratic control, especially via their long-favoured tool of the United Nations. 

In the early and middle 20th century; there seems to have been a powerful group of leftist intellectuals and power-seekers who were genuinely Ahrimanic - that is, they were idealists about the idea of a world government running a total System which would provide everybody with a decent standard of living, law and order and peace. 

I was very familiar with this ideology via George Bernard Shaw, who was an active leader of the Fabian Society; devoted to this incremental, democratic type of socialism. It was all about organization and control - a descendent of Weber's 'rational bureaucracy'; in which clear, explicit, coherent rules took the place of individual judgment, laissez faire, irrational superstition (such as religions), and tradition. 

Humans themselves were also to be 'improved' by The System; especially by universal education and eugenics; and by the provision of arts, crafts; and a clean, healthy, attractive, managed environment. 

And this, of course, is a genuinely Ahrimanic materialism; in which humans are conceptualized as cogs or units in a System; and the 'good' of the System is pursued by-means-of the people. Humans are means to a systemic end. 

In the end (as with modern Transhumanism) humans were to be eliminated and replaced by something 'better'. 

In terms of Dungeons and Dragons - this had the alignment of Lawful Evil - its goals were evil (by Christian standards: because against God and divine creation); but the methods to attain The System, and the running of The System itself, were intended to be wholly coherent, ordered, lawful... 

Indeed, most scientists and many other intellectuals were attracted to Fabian-type socialism - with rule in the hands of rational managers, experts, scientists, statisticians etc. (people such as themselves) -  precisely because it seemed by far the most rational and coherent socio-political possibility than rule by an hereditary aristocracy, and money-grubbing merchants and manufacturers... 

My point is that - for a while - this kind of managerial society was (although evil in intent) substantially sincere, rigorous and honest movement. There was some genuine (albeit abstract) altruism, and self-sacrifice, among the advocates. 

And the 'world government' (or 'governance') rhetoric of 2020-1 that we associate with the United Nations/ WHO and the Great Reset is very similar to this old Fabianism. 

But the reality is extremely different. The new Systemic ideal is a fake; and disguises its opposite. Lawful evil has actually been replaced by 'Chaotic Evil' - but without dropping its old 'Lawful' forms. 

For a start it is dishonest - from top to bottom; from the Big Strategic Lies to the dozens of dishonesties (selection, distortion, suppression, exaggeration, non sequitur etc.) that are the minute-by-minute staple diet of all modern organizations in their inner (as well as outer) working.

Secondly it does not even try to be rational, coherent and efficient. 

Thirdly, we are still ruled by the same gang of aristocrats and merchants (often their direct genetic descendants) as for the past several hundred years. And the managers, experts, scientists, statisticians - plus the new class of mega-mass media moguls - are merely bought-and-controlled toadies and lickspittles of this ultra-rich, ultra-powerful, ultra-influential elite. 

Consequently; The System (here and now) is irrational, incoherent, inefficient and increasingly ineffective. 

All the major 'reforms' make these System flaws worse.

And those in-charge Know It.  

In sum - we still have a façade of the same Fabian Socialist Ahrimanic System that was standard in the middle 20th century. It is still the rationale for everything. But nobody now really believes it - we are ruled by nihilists and cynics; by selfish, cynical and strategically destructive individuals. 

(Scratch a 'believer' in modern Leftism, and you will find an employee.)

The old leftist ideals are now just disposable, temporary excuses. Socialism/ Communism plus a bunch of more recent excuses manufactured from feminism, antiracism, sexual revolution, environmentalism and now the pseudo-healthism of the birdemic. 

What we actually have Now - is the remnant of an Ahrimanic System, which is being actively and purposively dismantled by Sorathically-motivated individuals (and the demons behind them) for their own pleasure and profit. 

But mass consent for destruction continues to be manufactured on an ad hoc basis, using 'random', rotating, expedient elements of the old Fabian, Ahrimanic rationale - because because, after all, something must be used to justify the destruction. 

It has become obvious that - so corrupt is the mass population, so lacking in discernment, so lacking in courage and goodness - almost any half-boiled, excuse (no matter how ridiculous, how illogical, how sheerly non-sensical) will be accepted by most of the masses (and the bureaucrats and media drones) as a 'reason' for pursuing system-destruction. 

And this farrago of drivel can later be discarded and something else - almost anything - put in its place. Or it can, at any time, be revived to justify more of the same. Or not... 

Anything goes, in practice. Most people will believe, forget, ignore, or remember anything - to order; so long as a thin top-dressing of Ahrimanic leftism is first applied...

The world, national and major institutional leadership are by-now almost purely selfish and short-termist; are - in truth - almost-wholly-sinfully motivated by pride, resentment, fear, lust and/or despair; but they cynically mask this with the façade of fake Leftism gleaned from communists, socialists, and other radicals of the 20th century. 

The Global Establishment and their servants are (before our very eyes, on a daily basis) purposively dismantling The System for their own profit, pleasure - or mere survival, for a while longer - while tossing-out bits-and-pieces of jumbled, garbled, nonsensical leftism to the masses, under the weary pretense of 'building a better world'. 

The alliance of evil is itself a mere expedient; holding-together loosely for the temporary purpose of looting and sacking the Global System. 

There is constant infighting among them, of course; and this will increase, in a race to the bottom. 

Meanwhile the masses look-on with blank expressions of unthinking stupidity; while their rulers are smashing and stealing The System upon which the lives of seven billion people depend under the tired guise of 'saving the planet', or 'promoting justice and equity', or whatever...

And squabbling over the spoils, under the guise of 'fair redistribution'...

Until the whole thing inevitably comes crashing-down. 

(When exactly? Who knows. But once it starts; it will surely accelerate rapidly and uncontrollably; as failure of the crippled System here causes failures there and there; and so on and so forth.)

If you do not already understand the distinctively 'Ahrimanic' nature of modern evil; then I think it would be time well spent for you to look-into this.


One quick and enjoyable way - which I wrote about a couple of years ago - is to study Screwtape Proposes a Toast (1959) by CS Lewis (PDF version here) - and indeed the character of Screwtape as contrasted with his nephew Wormwood in The Screwtape Letters (PDF here).


Throughout the Letters Screwtape is recurrently trying to reign-in Wormwood's naive, short-termist and (for Wormwood) personally-gratifying evil of tormenting, frightening and playing-nasty-tricks-on his 'patient'; but losing sight of the fact that the ultimate (and proper) goal of demons is damned dead souls, not miserable living humans.

By this analysis: Wormwood's is the old-style 'Luciferic' evil; Screwtape represents the modern, totalitarian, bureaucratic, soft-sell, incremental Ahrimanic evil - much less spectacular and obvious; but in the end much more powerfully damning for exactly those reasons.


In Proposes a Toast, Screwtape comments:

The quality [of Ahrimanically-damned souls] may be wretched; but we never had souls (of a sort) in more abundance....

We are tempted to say that such souls — or such residual puddles of what once was soul — are hardly worth damning. Yes, but the Enemy (for whatever inscrutable and perverse reason) thought them worth trying to save. Believe me, He did. 

You youngsters who have not yet been on active duty have no idea with what labour, with what delicate skill, each of these miserable creatures was finally captured.The difficulty lay in their very smallness and flabbiness. 

Here were vermin so muddled in mind, so passively responsive to environment, that it was very hard to raise them to that level of clarity and deliberateness at which mortal sin becomes possible. 

To raise them just enough; but not that fatal millimetre of “too much.” For then, of course, all would possibly have been lost. They might have seen; they might have repented.


That is exactly the nature of modern Ahrimanic evil - it is pathetic in its passivity of evil-ness (it is evil minus the courage and motivation of great villains of the past); but there is such a lot of it!