Satan’s main strategy in the modern world is to convince men that he exists and that all human beings are primarily good and are bad for secondary reasons such as poverty or problems in brain-chemistry or…
Whatever. Satan is a useful fiction in the thoughts and discourse of even the most rational and least superstitious of men, though such usage has tended to encourage a literalistic belief in those overwhelmed by the complexities of evil in the empirical world—and those so overwhelmed have included even great thinkers in days before it was possible to come to rational understandings of those complexities; it is likely even the most rational of thinkers in the 21st century will be considered to be somewhat superstitious by the 23rd century or so.
So far as human evil is concerned, Satan is essentially what I have labeled as the `Left Invisible Hand’, left by a linguistic tradition—`sinister’ is the Latin word for left or left-handed, in simple terms. The term `Invisible Hand’ was coined (so far as I know) by Adam Smith—he certainly used the term as an important part of his moral and economic theories (he didn’t really separate those two theories and `pushed’ a Christian form of morality despite his lack of any faith beyond a vague Deism); the meaning behind that term overlaps greatly with modern studies in mathematics and physics of `self-organizing systems’. In the case of human societies, some of the rules for `self-organizing’ are the cultural beliefs of a particular society—including what we label as `moral beliefs’; other rules are those which can be drawn from mathematics under the constraints of the ways of actual behavior of our empirical reality and the abstract realms from which it is shaped—the only such realm currently well-understood is the fully deterministic realm of quantum wavefunctions.
Unbundling a bit from Adam Smith’s allusive ways of speaking: the Invisible Hand he saw working in Scottish Glasgow and English London was the result of public actors trying to live up to the expectations of particular forms of Christian morality. This effort by butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers might have been independent of any real belief in the resurrected Christ or His promises; for believers and non-believers alike, it was a perceived need to act in certain ways that others in Glasgow or London would trust them and do business with them. I’ve said this before and I’ve also pointed out that history indicates that, generally, powerful men fight each other, not the poor and powerless. I’ll provide links to only two of a number of articles where I’ve discussed the doings of gangsters who are considered members of our ruling elite—not much like the street criminals of our imagination in any way other than their lack of scruples:
In addition, I’ll provide a link to a new report by the independent and seemingly trustworthy journalist, Whitney Webb: Techno-Tyranny: How the US National Security State Is Using Coronavirus to Fulfill an Orwellian Vision. Ms Webb’s article is largely about a report by a government agency and obtained recently through a Freedom of Information Act request by Electronic Privacy Information Center.
The reader should be careful not to think this sort of analysis is a `plan’ for the future, but it is a rather strong indication of the actions, public or hidden, of men and women who are influential members of the ruling class of the once-Christian West. In fact, some of those who have done great harm to the once-Christian West and some of those currently doing great harm to the once-Christian West are well-meaning.
Some. What percentage of those have done or are doing this great harm are idiots useful to sociopaths in our midst or self-deluded fools? I don’t know and don’t wish to engage in speculation so far afield my main purposes. Yet, I’ll throw out a general comment, a judgment by a great political thinker who has delved into this general aspect of our problems to a far greater extent than I have or could have given my priorities in light of that old fact that there are only so many working hours in the life of any mortal man. In any case, in The Liberal Mind, Kenneth Minogue speaks of misguided political and social reformers in the line of modern liberal thought:
How many visionaries have unwittingly prepared a hell on earth because their gaze was stubbornly fixed on heaven? And when hell comes—well, there is always some ad hoc theory of sinister interests or Judas-like betrayal to extricate the theorist from his disaster. What his illusions have prevented him from understanding are the forces he in fact served; and good intentions are quite beside the point. Stupidity is a moral as well as an intellectual defect.
Ignorance or outright stupidity is often all that is needed for evil to prevail. Stupidity is often enough caused by willful ignorance or a simple disregard for the importance to spend time researching a topic and then thinking about.
I consider greater understandings, worldviews, to be the glue of the minds and hearts and minds of men who are parts of complex communities, and the wholes of such communities as St Paul more or less told us.