In our post-democratic and postmodern times, we see evil everywhere. What is evil? How does it relate to power? Is AI evil? Does AI promote evil power?
The concept of evil today seems outdated, like a theological or metaphysical idea of the pre-Enlightenment era, which we overcame after Voltaire told us that there is neither a God nor a devil. Yet many of us seem to have second thoughts since so much happening around us looks as if there was a collective will for evil and for the deterioration and killing of humans in the West through unnecessary impoverishment, declining education levels, decreasing public safety (consider Rotherham), and the accelerating reduction of individual freedoms. We also see legal killing of humans in the forms of easier and later abortion, euthanasia of the elderly, and the intentional flooding of entire countries with legal (nucleic acids-based immunisation) and illegal (opioids) lethal drugs. We also see wars of increasing intensity and scope, such as the US-led proxy war in Ukraine against Russia.
Furthermore, there is evidence of societal public evil which is not directly related to death and killing, but is more subtle. Consider the control and censorship of our language and thinking by political correctness and its more invasive form, wokeness, which we witness in schools, universities, and other educational institutions, but also in the so-called social media via online censorship aiming to suppress our common sense and our traditional, valid, and vital social norms. Also consider the ubiquitous presence of very harmful propaganda in legacy media (both private and public; think of the BBC), such as promoting nucleic acids-based immunisation schemes without prophylactic benefit that cause substantial harm. Think about frightening citizens via the anti-scientific narrative of the ‘climate crisis’, which is obviously false (though there is mild, and to a large extent, natural climate change). Instead, it is promoted with the goal of achieving total control via centralised and universal electrification. Furthermore, think of the public cover-up of child abuse, which UK Column has been reporting about for many years, the erosion of the natural roles of men and women, and the praise for paraphilias and personality disorders of sexual orientation as somehow better and more interesting than natural forms of sexuality.
These are patterns we have not seen in the West after World War II, but which have globally prevailed since then in the numerous conflicts of the Cold War and the hegemonic wars conducted by the US from 1991 onwards and — to a lesser extent — by Russia since 2008. Both powers have been clashing again after Russia decided to reject Western domination (since 1999 when Putin came into power) and recovered from the fall of the USSR: Georgia in 2008, Syria since 2012, Ukraine since 2014, and now in Iran. The main difference for Western citizens compared to the 1980s or 1990s is that now, the symptoms of anti-human rule have become visible in the countries of the West themselves. In other words, evil was always present in the world, but it was less visible in the West after World War II than it is now.
Given this situation, we want to understand (again) what evil is, how it relates to power (is power always evil?), and how AI can intensify power.
What Is Evil?
Evil is an anti-value, while good is the highest ethical value. An individual’s moral values, how he feels them, and how he chooses the way in which they contribute to his acts determine his behaviour. Humans have the ability to use both good and evil as values determining their behaviour. For example, a rapist who kills his victim during or after the rape is guided in his behaviour by the anti-value of evil. Someone who might come to the rescue of a woman while she is being raped is guided by the value of good. Both the value and its anti-value are part of the human value act possibilities, and specific to man, since animals are not capable of acting based on values; a hungry lion must kill its prey, while we are never forced to kill another human being and can also restrain from killing animals if we wish.
Two aspects of evil matter to us in the context of this text. Firstly, can one act out of pure evil, solely to harm another, or are evil acts always the consequence of wanting to obtain something by all means as proposed by some philosophers? Secondly, what is the difference between sin, a condition common to all humans, and evil, which is obviously a rare trait?
Most evil deeds are based on the will to obtain something by all means, such as by lying, stealing, betraying, and murder, such as to pay for the next dose of fentanyl, or to obtain a heritage, as parodied in the great film Kind Hearts and Coronets. But there is also a devotion to evil, maleficence, in which an evil person does evil deeds solely for the pleasure of harming others. Schopenhauer calls this malignity and defines it as: Omnes, quantum potes, laede (hurt everyone whenever you can).
Regarding the second question, Christian theology teaches that we are all sinners, and that sin is part of human existence since the original sin. Since we are all sinners, why aren’t we all evil? This is because sinning and evil are not the same. The Christian sinner is aware that his acts are transgressing the commandments of God, and feels repentance for this. Though the modern secular sinner will not relate to God to pray for forgiveness, he will still have a bad conscience (an important component of our ability to relate to God) upon acting against social norms and will often try to mend the damage he has done. The evil sinner, on the other hand, indulges in his evil deeds. A malignant person is egosyntonic (in self-approval) with his evil behaviour, in harmony with the evil deeds he performs and perceiving them as consistent with his ideal self-image. But such a person is totally lonely and devoid of the company of men and God. We can imagine Napoleon or Hitler as utterly lonely, for example.
There is another aspect to evil: the spiritual aspect. Since Kant wrote Dreams of a Spirit-Seer against the spiritualist Emmanuel Swedenborg in 1776, spiritualist views have become an esoteric topic outside our science-backed cultural discourse. Nevertheless, the traditional pre-Enlightenment view of evil includes possession by evil spirits which act autonomously but obey Satan, the master of evil, who dominates the material world (Martin Luther wrote that Satan is “the Lord of this world”). The idea is that evil men are corrupted by evil spirits who dominate their minds and souls, and that, overall, evil is the dominating force of our existence on Earth. Since our scientific worldview cannot explain evil at all because we cannot enumerate and model the causal relationships between molecules in our minds which ultimately cause the mental phenomenon of evil, it is at least culturally plausible to explain evil using spiritualist patterns. In other words, both the esoteric view of evil as a spiritual force and the scientific view of the mind are speculative when it comes to understanding evil. From the traditional theological perspective, evil is a spiritual phenomenon from which we can be freed by holy sacraments, prayer, and obedience to God.
What Is Power?
Hobbes defined ‘power’ as the ability to cause future events: “The power of a man, to take it universally, is his present means; to obtain some future apparent good”. For Hobbes, the totality of power is identical with the notion of the possibilities to act. Power brings about a differentiation of realising such possibilities, for what is fundamentally possible for everyone cannot be possible for everyone at the same time. Therefore, resources used to cause future events are limited, which leads to a conflict for limited resources. The conflict over resource usage is the fundamental character of politics.
Power in communities and societies, however, is a necessity, since in the absence of power, conflicts around resource usage become violent. Power, therefore, becomes an institutionalised collective behaviour which leads to an unequal allocation of resources in a community or society. Disregarding communities which are only relevant during the pre-historical existence for the overall organisation of social life, all societies have power structures in which the superior (in the power-relevant sense) members of society hold the power. But not all power is evil. Power can be legitimate. It only becomes evil when it is illegitimate over a longer period of time; when its illegitimacy becomes established as a pattern. What are the sources of potentially legitimate power, and when is it legitimate?
There are two potentially legitimate sources and types of power, respectively. In Western culture, election and inheritance are the sources, and republicanism and feudalism are the types, according to Guglielmo Ferrero, an eminent theoretician of power who published his work Power in 1942. We can have all possible combinations. For example, election and republicanism are combined in Swiss democracy, election and feudalism were present in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, inheritance and republican order were present in the UK (the House of Lords before the 1999 reform), and inheritance and feudalism combined were found in European feudal and absolutist states. But in Western culture, only these four principles of power can lead to legitimate rule; all others, such as theocracy, autocracy, tyranny, oligarchy, mob rule, or military rule, are illegitimate by their very nature. In the East, such as in China, Russia (which is semi-Western but not with regard to the way political power is organised), and the Islamic world, this is different, but out of scope here.
We have legitimate power when the rulers are seen by the majority of the relevant part of the population as justified in their political decisions and acts. The relevant part of the population is what George Orwell called the ‘Outer Party’, which I call the executive class (or Trägerschicht, which translates to ‘carrier class’, in German). It consists of small to large political, military, economic, and cultural leaders, and includes everyone from a parish council official, a lieutenant of the British Army, a GP, and a schoolteacher to the Prime Minister, the Chief of Defence Staff, the CEO of Unilever, and the Director-General of the BBC. The executive class has a proportion of roughly 12-15 percent of the population. These people maintain and shape the institutions of power according to the political will formation of the society. As Orwell clearly saw, this class is decisive for the legitimacy of rule since when it rebels against political will formation, systems of rule fall apart. This happened, for example, in 1776, when the UK lost its most important colony due to utter mismanagement and abuse of the settlers. On the other hand, the lower 85 percent of the population, called ‘proles’ by Orwell, do not matter at all. When they rebel without the support of the executive class, their rebellion is simply crushed, which has happened over and over again in the course of history. This is why in Orwell’s fiction, the proles are left alone by the state, while all the intense control and supervision measures are directed towards the Outer Party, which really matters for upholding power.
Who directs the executive class? Where is the political will constituted? It depends on the system of rule. In more than 99.9 percent of the time humans have lived in historical existence (since 5,000 years ago, when the first towns and city-states evolved), a tiny group of leaders formed the political will, with only one per 1,000 of the population. This was evident in ancient kingdoms in the court (high nobility), in the post-republican Roman Empire’s emperor and his close environment, in feudalism, in nobility, and in absolutism with the court again, but with a much more intense bureaucracy than the ancient kingdoms had at their disposition.
During the few short democratic or republican periods of historical existence, the entire executive class, and even the working class (to some extent) participated in political will formation, especially from the 1950s to the 1980s. In the West, this period of participation ended after a phase of decline since the 1990s, and we now live in a post-republic like the Romans after Caesar, beginning with Octavian Caesar Augustus. But although participation in political will formation is, historically, the total exception, ruling can be legitimate without participation from the executive class. In other words, ‘no taxation without participation’, the slogan of 1688, is not universally true. It was true at the time because the power of the executive class, the lower nobility and the bourgeoisie, was increasing to an extent that allowed them to demand participation. Participation of the executive class, let alone the layer below it, is the absolute historical exception and not the rule. Because we are so deeply embedded in the political metaphysics of the Enlightenment and its ideas of participation, and many of us experienced it as a real phenomenon to some extent, we believe it is the norm. But it is not.
But how is political legitimacy achieved under such circumstances? In feudalism and absolutism, the privileges of the high nobility were clearly visible to the entire population. Yet they were accepted. Why so? All rulers have privileges independently of the source or type of power. Traditionally, their privileges were accepted because aristocratic rule has the potential to create order, outer and inner safety, and a reliable food supply. Since the late Middle Ages, the expectations of the executive class to accept aristocratic rule became more demanding: rule was thought to have basic legitimacy if it guarantees not only safety and supplies, but also property, natural law, and some form of freedom for its members. From the 17th to the 19th centuries, legitimacy expectations were, in addition to these characteristics, enhanced by the demand for political participation and full individual freedom. These legitimacy-related expectations have remained the basic assumption of the executive class until today, and they struggle to bring these expectations in accord with what they experience in reality. These expectations are thus tied to the political metaphysics of the bourgeoisie. This is also the reason why during the 19th century, the public display of privileges of the nobility slowly became unfashionable, and the high nobility, which had consolidated its power over Europe after 1815 with the Holy Alliance, moved from pompous court attire to the uniform for the prince and a more bourgeois female fashion for the princess. The rising new oligarchy, on the other hand, still lived out a lavish pomp; for example, at the funeral of Jakob Rothschild (who called himself James later and was ennobled) in Paris in 1868, which was a gigantic event on the Champs-Élysées. Today’s oligarchy would never engage in such a display of power and wealth. Our trillionaires, the oligarchic rulers who control all the strategic property assets of our societies, are invisible, and our billionaires, broadly comparable in what they do to the role of the former lower nobility, wear t-shirts and jeans when they speak in public. Their centralised power is mediated via several key mechanisms:
- Centralised property of strategic assets — a few hundred families now own a dominating share of the strategic assets of the Western countries, which allows them to dominate the economy. The economic power is transmitted into our societies via their dominating shares in big investment firms led by the executive class such as BlackRock and Vanguard, the privately owned FED, or public investment funds (such as the Government Pension Fund of Norway) which they control indirectly.
- Political power — the oligarchic families influence political decision-making directly by funding the electoral campaigns of politicians and elected magistrates (such as district attorneys and judges in the US) via institutions they directly control or indirectly guide via cultural power.
- Cultural power — via owning and dominating shares of classical and new media, NGOs or institutions which they directly or indirectly fund (such as the WEF, WHO, G30, C40, and the Bilderberg Group), as well as via running Foundations and controlling universities, oligarchic families massively influence public opinion and put pressure on politicians and magistrates.
This illegitimate form of control is not well visible, but obviously identifiable by the way in which our societies operate today.
In what way is the oligarchy we live under today seen as legitimate by the executive class? Like the Romans under Octavian Augustus, its members are giving up political participation for economic rewards and immaterial reputation gains (being members of the right clubs, being invited to the important parties, having a positive Wikipedia entry, etc.).
But we have to consider that in the first three centuries AD of the Roman Empire, the executive class did not have to give up their rights and personal freedoms in any way. The Empire was ruled under law, as can be seen, for example, from Paul, who was regularly freed from prison when he pleaded that he was a Roman citizen. This is not true in our post-democratic society. The majority of our executive class have not realised yet what the erosion of natural law that we saw in Covid means for them, and that is aggravating; they are very much focused on material and personal values like hedonism and materialism). Most of them believe that we still live in the democratic post-WWII system, and that some restrictions on natural law and personal freedoms are warranted by pseudo-catastrophes (such as Covid and the ‘climate crisis’) that they see as real threats, whether these are manmade or not.
What Is Evil Power?
Given all this, what is evil power? Evil power is a form of rule that is illegitimate because its political will formation is directed against well-being and life itself. Evil rulers indulge in depriving their subjects of their rights, oppressing and systematically killing them. They do this for pure lust for power, and also because they love death and destruction. Classical examples are Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot. Today’s West is overall far from these atrocious historical examples, but Israel’s policy against the Palestinians is certainly a form of evil rule, and the COVID era was a period of evil rule in the entire West, albeit a mild one compared to the above examples. The systematic reduction of citizens’ freedoms and rights that we see under the EU’s Digital Service Act, the UK’s Online Safety Act, and the update to the International Health Regulations, which threatens national sovereignty in the case of another viral pandemic being declared. Evil rule usually extends over a longer period, and is not a temporary form of repression, as we find it in a state of emergency, as upon a natural catastrophe or during a defensive war. Tyrannies, however, are always evil forms of rule and are usually short-lived.
Can AI Boost Power?
Now what about AI? How can it boost power or evil power? AI, to begin with, is a form of applied mathematics. We have shown in great detail that AI will never become conscious, intelligent, or wilful. Therefore, AI cannot be good or evil; like any other tool, it cannot be classified in this way. The human users of tools have good or evil intentions, not the tools themselves. But AI is a powerful tool, and it can increase all four types of power described by the sociologist H. Popitz: Power of action, instrumental power, authoritative power, and data-setting power.
Power of action is power through violence. Since AI can be built into weapon systems, it can increase power of action, especially in the domains of reconnaissance, defensive weapons, and electronic warfare, where it is now used extensively on all modern warfare theatres such as Ukraine or recently (and briefly) in the conflict between Iran and Israel.
It is also to some extent used for kinetic offensive weapons, though this is much harder, and for complicated reasons, we will not see killer robots as pictured in Star Wars or in the Terminator series. The main reason is that fully autonomous offensive systems would have to be able to realise a destructive goal set by their engineers using automated planning, inference, and decision-making. None of these capabilities is currently available to AI systems. As a basic capability, they would need active sensorimotor perception. This is a capability of all predators which we do not understand, cannot model mathematically, and therefore cannot engineer. For this and other reasons given in the monograph quoted above, I do not think that full robotic autonomy in open world settings is technically achievable.
Instrumental power is the power that comes from institutional provision of rewards and punishments (‘carrots and sticks’). With digitisation and AI, such power can be semi-automated and established in the digital domain of our life, which now permeates almost every aspect of it. As a foundation, we now have digital devices that can monitor the identity of the user, for example, solely based on the way a person physically interferes with a WLAN Wi-Fi signal. But, also, every movement and every online activity can be tracked, stored, and analysed. These analyses cannot be fully automated, since perfect classification of content for censorship or other control purposes is not Turing-computable. Nevertheless, algorithms can pre-filter content, and humans classified as targets of repression can be denied access to services directly, either with an announcement, or indirectly without them even knowing it. In any case, this is based on their behaviour measured by digital devices and evaluated by a hybrid of man and machine. What we have here is a modern realisation of Bentham's panopticon. As an example of the first, announcement-based method, the phone-based QR codes proved that an individual had been immunised with nucleic acids which were used to grant and restrict access to travelling, gastronomy usage, and shopping during the Covid period. An example of the second, tacit approach is the restriction of search results or active and passive online visibility depending on the individual’s queries or other forms of online behaviour. The intensity of this form of power can be increased anytime, as evidenced by the Online Safety Act, which sets a general framework for online presence depending on compliance with the official version of how we must see the world and how we are not allowed to view or discuss reality.
Authoritative power is power that is based on the individuals’ socialisation: their internalisation of social norms. It is the deepest form of power since it generates collective voluntary compliance. Examples are the belief in the divine legitimacy of feudal rule, and the principle of representation as a source of the legitimacy of democratic rule. Authoritative power is based on the conscience of the individuals. Disobeying power becomes an immoral act. Max Weber called it the “iron cage of servitude”. AI and digitisation are only of marginal importance for this type of power, since it is mostly based on the education and cultural systems. Both use digitisation and AI, but the contents are of course not created by machines (one cannot speak of machine-generated content in the full sense when looking at the output of LLM). Nevertheless, digitisation and AI massively broaden the reach of authoritative power, since in an age of the ‘always online’, the reach of digital content covers almost the entire population of the Northern Hemisphere.
Data-setting power is power that is based on public infrastructure; for example, the road network, the waterways, the distribution of electricity and water, and access to other public goods. This is a very intense form of power, since infrastructure is used over centuries. In France, for example, the road and railway systems reflect the centralist vision of the country with Paris as the centre of political will formation, and the rest of the country seen as ‘province’. In the age of the internet, data-setting power can also be applied to this public good, and it overlaps with instrumental power. But some measures can be clearly classified as data-setting, such as the ban of Russian media from the EU’s internet, and the complete ban of entire internet content categories in authoritarian regimes, such as in the Gulf States, Russia, and China. The more digital devices we use, and make digitisation more a part of our lives, the more intense data-setting power via AI will become. Those who control the internet can determine the perception of its users and shape their thinking via hiding parts of reality, creating pseudo-realities (Covid and the climate crisis come to mind), and constantly drenching and soaking the public in endless propaganda (e.g. the Ukraine war and Russophobia). Once the phone, the car, and potentially the human body (via implants) are connected to the internet, data-setting power can be applied in a very broad and also flexible way, which is when it then merges with instrumental power.
Overall, the usage of AI to enhance power leads to less natural rights, less freedom, and less representation, in combination with more control. The designers of this brave new world, the leaders of our executive class, aim for a virtual panopticon in the sense of Bentham with total control over perception, movement, and the human body itself. Considering that we are ruled by an oligarchy consisting of a few hundred families and a few thousand highly interconnected leaders of the executive class who are in spontaneous but also planned coordination with our rulers, we have a new historical situation, since the means of control this class has to its disposition is unmatched in scope and reach by everything we have experienced so far.
How can AI reinforce and strengthen evil from a spiritual perspective? It cannot. Evil spirits cannot move matter or make usage of the electricity which drives our digital machines. Evil spirits are a way for us to explain how evil corrupts the human mind and soul. There is no way for incarnated, personified evil to interact with matter. Rather — and this has been a mainstream theological view since before the Enlightenment — evil spirits corrupt the minds of humans. They then can use matter to enact evil. This is the way evil is realised on Earth.
No matter how evil power is reinforced by digitisation and AI, humans will find ways to circumvent this, but it will need their determination, cleverness, and devotion. How can we overcome evil? From a theological perspective, evil cannot be overcome by one's own will, since evil is so enticing and convincing, and easily resonates with our fundamental nature as sinners. The evangelist Matthew described the devil as being so persuasive that anyone but Christ would have fallen for his promises. This is the reason why so many humans habituate themselves to addictive drugs, prostitutes, pornography, child abuse, and other minor and major vices and evil deeds, and this is why almost all rulers abuse their power. We are created in a way that makes us too weak to overcome evil by ourselves; we need God's help. To obtain this support, the evangelists tell us, we need to turn to Christ, the master of life, the opposite of evil, the highest good, and the promise of salvation. Without faith, we are lost to evil in the form of materialism, hedonism, nihilism, serfdom, and submission.
