Demons and Delusions
Years ago, I was a medical editor, working evenings with fellow freelancers at a pharma ad agency. One drug, a powerful antibiotic, was presented with photos of gaping wounds filled with pus. My colleagues and I were repelled by these gruesome images. Then an agency staffer told us the pics were of latex mock-ups. It was a lesson in how easy it is to be fooled. The shock effect disappeared once we knew what the pics were (though I wonder what our reactions would’ve been if we’d subsequently gotten word they’re real after all).
Keeping a skeptical eye on what you see, especially with the advent of deepfakes, makes sense, but it can also become pathological. Jewish friends of mine in Australia knew several people who were killed or wounded in the Bondi Beach shooting, not surprising as many in Sydney’s Jewish community were present at the targeted Chanukah celebration. My friends, though, then happened to look at an unrelated Facebook group they’re in, on environmental issues, and found people there claiming the massacre was a Jewish hoax.
One suspects those anti-Semitic environmentalists are left-wing, but perceptions that ancient hatreds are concentrated in any one segment of the ideological spectrum are dangerous illusions. Anti-Semitism on the American right has been growing for a decade, with the Charlottesville marchers’ chant “Jews will not replace us” an unsubtle early clue, but it’s only lately—once the Heritage Foundation started melting down after its leader defended Tucker Carlson’s fawning over Nick Fuentes—that right-wing American and Israeli Jews have broadly recognized there’s a problem. Perhaps they’ll also come around to realizing that expansions of government power they’ve celebrated, to punish universities and deport activists, can be used against pro-Israel voices no less than anti-Israel ones.
I read a fascinating Substack discourse on evil, titled “Why You Are Probably Working for the Devil.” I came to it via a post by Liv Boeree, science communicator and ex–poker pro whose analysis of destructive incentives personified by the demon Moloch I’d written on previously; I read the new essay thinking Boeree had written it, only belatedly realizing its author has the moniker Octopusyarn. There are, in Octopusyarn’s taxonomy of malevolence, “three devils, each one the shadow of a good pushed past its breaking point.”
These are: Lucifer, Satan and Beelzebub. Lucifer purports to liberate; he “whispers into the ears of every techno-utopian and transhumanist. His priests speak of ‘frictionless’ experiences, of problems ‘solved at scale.’” It was an adjustment for me to think of Lucifer in these terms, as I’d been watching the Netflix show Lucifer, in which the title character is misunderstood and, in large part, sympathetic. Satan, according to Octopusyarn, “disguises himself as a protector from chaos and promises to purify what’s unnatural. He wants to preserve cosmic order by eliminating whatever threatens it: the degenerate, the immigrant, the deviant. Satan prosecutes whoever fails to conform.” Beelzebub is the “buzzing haze of small hungers, none significant enough to resist, all of them together enough to strip a carcass clean.” Beelzebub atomizes society into listless individuals.
“The devils swap masks,” writes Octopusyarn, arguing these evil tendencies stealthily reinforce each other. Tech rationalists see “Satanic restriction everywhere,” from FDA regulations to limits of the human lifespan, and try to disrupt it but are “so locked onto the Luciferian good (intelligence, optimization, scale)” that they fail to see “the Beelzebubian rot setting in.” Traditionalists demand law, order and surveillance, erecting “Satan’s walls” to stave off Beelzebub’s decay, not realizing they’ve “laid the fiber-optic cables for Lucifer’s panopticon.” The Beelzebubians dislike technocracy and authoritarianism, but their tendency toward distraction and indifference to norms set the stage for further tyranny.
That analysis offers some insight into events of this year, in which the U.S. government perpetrated palpably evil acts, such as sudden terminations of lifesaving aid, and deportations to a torture prison, while maintaining for a time substantial public support and a coalition of traditionalists and technophiles. As 2025 ends, that support and coalition are deteriorating, but the demons unleashed have much damage left to do.