So, You've Got a Satan Problem. Now What?

There's a book that needs writing.

Photo by Alessio Zaccaria on Unsplash

Mark Bisone has started up a Substack, and has written quite an essay, possibly an essaaaaaay, on emergent egregors, devils, gods etc.

The Devil Incarnate (Part 1)

I am glad to see so many people tackling this issue, as I do think there is something important in the notion that emergent beings exist. As I wrote about yesterday with regards to ants and colonies, cells and humans and society, the actual being exists on many levels of living things, and each level can’t really grok the levels above and below, yet coordination and action happens at each level in a way dependent on the others, both as input and output.

I started writing a response to one of Mark’s points, and it got long, so I am moving it here. First, a chunk of Mark’s essay that I am specifically addressing:

In his brief section describing the potential motivation of “evil itself”, Dr. Rogers asked what I thought was a pair of extremely pertinent questions (emphasis mine):

Evangelical Christians (and a wide range of other people in my replies) often argue that what we are dealing with is evil itself, Satan, etc. Gain-of-function research and everything that has followed is certainly evil. But I cannot do much with this theory of the case. Can we see Satan? No? Satan operates through others? Via demonic possession or just ordinary sin? More importantly I don’t know how to organize to fight back against this. I imagine prayer helps. But prayer + the Red Army + the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, & Marines + the British Air Force + the Dutch, French, and Jewish Resistance is what it took to defeat the Nazis. And there is a certain sense in which this theory of the case undermines God — can God not already see what’s going on? Why does it take extra special pleas to rouse this fella? It’s a rather unflattering view of the all-powerful. I believe that spirit will indeed be essential in overthrowing the regime, but at this point I need to focus on understanding the human actors and structures in order to develop a plan for revolution. If “Evil itself” is your theory of the case and I’ve misrepresented it here (as I’m sure I have), please explain this idea further in the comments.

I think Dr. Rogers’ questions are sincere. He appears to be a serious man and, after all, these two questions together comprise a timeless metaphysical dilemma.

I think the first question can be reformulated this way:

If I can’t kill Satan with a carpet bombing campaign or precision drone strike, then the bastard simply does not exist.

This notion addresses a thorny tactical problem; if our enemy includes no command-and-control assets that can captured, killed or otherwise rendered harmless, then it’s possible we won’t ever be fighting a winnable war.

The second question addresses a different kind of problem, one that I believe to be the ultimate moral, philosophical and spiritual question:

If God is such a loving dad, why doesn’t he come down to the schoolyard and kick my bully in the teeth?

Everyone has his own theory about that, myself included. But I’ll set this question aside for now. It’s the first question that interests me more at the moment, because it has become brutally obvious that we are in a state of war, aspects of which escape our mechanistic-materialistic-reductionist language model. This is a problem, because it is that precise model which has granted the edge in war, at least since the first industrial age. And in war, it’s not enough to merely identify the enemy, but to understand his goals and relay them in some kind of mutually understood tongue. Only then may we begin to predict his movements, and plan our defenses and counterattacks accordingly.

My response (tweaked a bit to make sense, and with a lot added to the end):

I do think [Mark] might be being a bit unfair to Dr. Rogers, however, when he rephrases Dr. Rogers’ question as "If I can’t kill Satan with a carpet bombing campaign or precision drone strike, then the bastard simply does not exist." I read his actual question¹ as closer to "If the ultimate source is Satan, how must I change my behavior to account for this fact? Can I change my behavior to better account for this fact?"

This is a very serious question.

If one answers "Well, since Satan is beyond our comprehension and ability to directly affect, the best we can do is update our expectations about how much coordination there is behind the scenes of those who seem evil," that is a pretty reasonable answer. Off the cuff, if true, it suggests that I should be more careful about expecting evil schemes to fall apart due to coordination problems. If Satan is real the prisoners' dilemma might be more easily solvable for bad actors than we like. On the other hand, it doesn't really suggest any other changes in strategy or tactics to me, although perhaps more urgency might be in order.

If one answers "Satan is to man as a particularly nasty colony of fire ants is to a carpenter ant" that suggests something very different. Possibly it suggests "You are proper fucked, mate." Then again it might suggest that if you can convince enough of your colony to take action you could eradicate the fire ants and thus the problem. Maybe you can carpet bomb Satan, or at least remove enough of his cells to make him not be a problem for a bit.

Note that the although the source of the problem, Satan, is the same in both cases, the behavior changes it encourages swing from “Be a little more on guard” to “Kill a whole lotta people.” If it sounds like I am being flippant, note that the correct behavior for dealing with WWII was, in fact, to kill a whole lot of people². In a targeted manner, minimizing total casualties as much as possible of course, but still, it required a lot of killing.

If that is what is required with regards to the current US issues and other global trends, well… I’d like to be sure before I jump in with both feet.

This gets back to why these conversations about the nature of problems, the understanding of different levels of being and how they interact, are so important. Naming something makes us feel as though we understand it, but really we just know how to refer to it. We have to actually understand the nature of the phenomenon, or failing that, understand that we can’t understand it and try to understand how we can mitigate the problems through things we can understand and control.

If we can’t stop Satan directly, the question becomes “How do we stop people who serve Satan?” which, one must admit, looks a lot like the question “How do we stop people who are doing really bad things?” Satan, as it turns out, is not really critical to the task at hand. If people don’t wear “Hail Satan! Go Team Fallen!” bling, the problem of identifying who serves Satan, intentionally or not, looks a lot like the problem of identifying who are people doing really bad things. Particularly if people are serving unintentionally.

Put another way, imagine the human immune system. It probably doesn’t really grasp the idea of bacteria and viruses, or even cancer. It almost certainly doesn’t understand the concept of “spoiled food”, or even the idea of ‘Doctor Hammer’. Abstract thought isn’t really the strong suit of individual cells, so far as we can tell. Yet somehow the system works really well to keep out invaders and keep me healthy³. It even manages to make whole classes of food that I once got sick eating a spoiled example of repugnant to me to avoid that problem in the future. At the same time, it is pretty chill about the thousands of other bacteria and fungi that call our bodies home, working with us to function better than we could alone⁴. Sometimes it screws up, but for the most part for most people it all works.

It does all that without having to know what is going on at the Doctor Hammer level of goals and intentions, but instead by following relatively simple and standard rules and procedures.

All that to say: there might be less value in attempting to identify the name of our impossible to fully comprehend and comprehensively defeat enemies, and more value in identifying rules of thumb that we can actually adopt into our strategies to hold them off and secure ourselves against them. I think it is very important that we recognize real existence of the emergent social being, the body politic, the spirit of the polis, whatever one calls it, and the cancers and parasitic beings that can develop within it. At the same time, it is important to understand that we can’t understand them fully, can’t control and direct them the way we would a car, but that we can influence them by our group behaviors. We can change the signals, the incentives, the individual level behaviors we accept, punish or encourage as a group, and thus change the emergent behavior of the systemic spirit.

Asking what we can do to get there is important.

It is worth recalling C.S. Lewis’ “That Hideous Strength”, especially part three of my three part review of it. One of the problems I have with the ending is that the human characters don’t really have a lot to do with the defeat of the enemy. In short, it takes a lot of angelic magic to come down and smash the evil organization put together by the fallen angel(s), who themselves are never confronted. The humans just try and stay out of the way, and one even comments that he isn’t happy that they are just sitting on their hands.

So, if our current problem is fallen angels again, does that imply we need to just sit tight, grow some vegetables and wait for angels to come to our rescue? If God helps those who help themselves, what do we do to help the situation? Those seem like reasonable questions to ask.

So we have a Satan problem. Now what?

1. As quoted by Mark. I haven’t had time to read the original article yet, so I am taking it for granted that this is a reasonable outtake.

2. Arguable, perhaps, but I think most would agree that winning the war and stopping/killing Hitler and Japan, not to mention Italy, was a necessary move. Personally I agree with Patton that we probably should have started fighting Russia afterwards and pushed them back to Moscow, but that’s a whole other question.

3. Sure, it gets a little crazy sometimes and afflicts me with allergies, but I suppose I can forgive that.

4. I don’t know if there are viruses that are symbiotic with humans… that might be an important point.