We flatter ourselves with the illusion that the world is pushed forward by love, by empathy, by the delicate hands of the charitable. We are wrong. History, that great butcher’s block, has never been moved by the good. The good administers, maintains, and consoles; it does not create. It is the evil, the transgressive, the demonic that has dragged humanity…kicking and screaming…out of the primeval slumber and into the nightmare of progress.
- Bear with me.. Start here… The Serpent’s Gift and the Curse of the Static
Consider the foundational epic of creation story: the Garden of Eden. It is a tale not of a fall from grace, but of a liberation through sin. Before the serpent’s intervention, Adam and Eve existed in a state of bovine perfection. They were immortal, naked, and mindless…gardeners of a static eternity. They did not know death, and therefore they did not know life; they did not know shame, and therefore had no interiority. It was a “good” existence, in the most sterile sense of the term: a perfect preservation of what already was, a homeostasis without a future. With me so far? Its ok to fall asleep or scroll to something a little simpler…. But if you stay, I will make it worth your read.
The serpent, that “subtlest of beasts,” is the first revolutionary, the first agent of history. His question “Did God really say?”….is the first philosophical inquiry, a crack in the authoritarian monolith of Paradise. The act of eating the forbidden fruit was not a descent into corruption, but an ascent into consciousness. (I am not pro evil or satanic, I am still a Christian so stay with me) With one transgression, humanity gained knowledge, mortality, shame, labour, and time itself. God’s punishment…expulsion into the horizontal world of struggle…is actually the birth of civilization. Without that original evil, we would be stillborn angels in a zoo. As Cioran might have noted, the true sin was not disobedience, but the desire for a state before sin. Goodness is the nostalgia for a non-existent Eden; evil is the courage to build a city outside its gates. We thank the first woman for this, and now you understand why women don’t take orders and rules well but men do. That’s a story for another day… Let’s keep going
- A bit about Emil Cioran…
Emil Cioran, the sage of despair, understood that creation is not an emanation of plenitude, but a byproduct of a wound. “We derive our vitality from our store of madness,” he wrote. That madness is precisely the rupture of the harmonious, the irruption of the negative. Goodness, by contrast, seeks to bandage the wound, to return the organism to a state of calm. But calm is the anteroom of nothingness. A perfectly good society, if such a nightmare were possible, would be a society without contradiction, and therefore without movement. It would be the eternal reign of the already-said, the already-done. That’s why heaven would suck.. ooh sorry I wasn’t meant to say this. But it’s apodictic heaven would be boring. (Again… I believe in God…)
Cioran’s aphorisms are full of a dark admiration for the productive power of vice. He observed that “only those who are capable of not being good are good for anything.” The saint, in his radical self-abnegation, may negate the world, but the conqueror, the heretic, the maniac….these figures inject the chaos necessary for epochs to change. Progress is not a gentle unfolding; it is, in Cioran’s words, “the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.” It is a violent rupture, an act of ingratitude and arrogance that the good, so careful not to offend, could never justify.
- The Hegelian Cunning of Greed and Wrath
Philosophy, when it has not been bleached by sentimentality, has always acknowledged this subterranean debt to evil. Hegel’s “cunning of reason” is a polite term for the historical function of human vice. In Hegel’s schema, world-historical individuals…the Caesars, …the Napoleons….are not motivated by altruism but by a passionate, all-consuming ambition. They trample on innocent flowers, they violate moral norms, and yet through their lawless passions, the World-Spirit marches forward. “Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion,” Hegel declares, and passion, in its raw state, is a selfish, blasphemous fire. It does not ask for permission. It burns down the old so that the new might have light.
Goodness, the realm of abstract moral duty, merely polishes the furniture in the house that passion built. Hegel’s dialectic itself is a machine that feeds on negation. Each thesis must be destroyed…an act of conceptual violence…by its antithesis. The drive toward the Absolute is not a friendly dialogue..no.. it is a systematic destruction of every static identity. The Devil, as Goethe’s Mephistopheles proclaims, is “a part of that force which, always willing evil, always works the good.” Without this negative principle, the dialectical motor seizes up, and the world falls into the deep sleep of a completed, and therefore dead, syllogism. Let me add something simpler… If the devil is bad and God is all powerful, why does the devil exist? Because God isn’t good or evil. He is. That’s why the devil doesn’t exist in the old testament. But that’s a different story for a different day.
- Transvaluation of Destruction
No one diagnosed the preservative, and therefore decadent, nature of conventional goodness more acutely than Nietzsche. His concept of “slave morality” is a eulogy for preservative values. Slave morality… the morality of the “good” as defined by the weak.. prizes pity, humility, and equality. These are not progressive virtues; they are the defensive strategies of a declining form of life, the means by which the suffering preserve themselves against the strong. Such goodness says “No” to life, to the will to power, to the chaotic, creative, destructive instinct that is the hallmark of all vitality.
The Übermensch, by contrast, must become a transgressor. To create new values, one must first destroy the old tablets. This destruction is, by the standards of the established “good,” an act of radical evil. Nietzsche explicitly equates the creator with the criminal. The artist, the philosopher of the future, the architect of the new….they must shatter the sanctioned illusions of the time. They must be impious. The good man, the “last man” who blinks and wants only comfort and the absence of risk, is the end of history. He preserves a museum of dead virtues. The evil man, in his overflowing strength, reopens the abyss and forces humanity to reinvent itself.
- The Bloody Foundation of the Sacred and the City
Religion itself, despite its protestations, is founded on this dark insight. The most sacred acts are often the most transgressive. Cain, the first murderer, is also the founder of the first city. Urban civilization, the very matrix of historical progress, is born from a fratricide. The good Abel, the compliant shepherd, leaves behind nothing but a pleasing sacrifice and a corpse. Cain, cursed and marked, becomes the builder. He is the prototype of every founder whose hands are stained.
The Crucifixion, the central event of Christianity, is the most sublime example of evil as the engine of the sacred. The most monstrous act of deicide, the judicial murder of an innocent, is precisely the event that shatters the old covenant and inaugurates the new epoch of grace. The text itself whispers the secret…. O felix culpa..O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, that merited so great a Redeemer. The Church fathers knew, in their darkest theology, that evil was not a sterile detour but the very material of the divine plan. Without the Fall, no Incarnation; without Judas, no salvation; without the catastrophic destruction of the Temple, no universal faith. The good would have kept Jesus alive, local, and comfortably human. Evil universalized him into a God.
- The Fires of Prometheus: The Demonic Engine of Technology
Nowhere is this grisly fecundity more visible than in the technological sinews of the modern world. The tools that define our age, that have remade human existence, were not born from the placid womb of philanthropic curiosity. They were forged in the urgent, amoral heat of destruction…the purest expression of what the comfortable call evil. Peace, left to its own devices, tinkers. War, that great accelerator, invents.
Consider the atom. The nuclear energy that today illuminates a billion homes and powers life-saving medical isotopes is the direct progeny of the Manhattan Project….a frantic, amoral race to fashion a weapon of absolute civilian annihilation. The reactor is a tamed bomb, its peaceful operation a half-hearted redemption after the incinerating flash over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Without the desire to win a global war through apocalyptic terror, the immense leap into the atomic age would have been delayed by decades, if it ever occurred at all. The good, in its humane carefulness, would still be conducting cautious laboratory experiments; evil, in its hell-bent resoluteness, unlocked the core of the sun.
Look at your phone, Google maps and that Chinese version. The Global Positioning System, which now guides your Uber driver, a lost road tripper, and a food delivery guy with indifferent precision, was conceived as a weapon of war. Its constellation of satellites was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Defense to guide intercontinental ballistic missiles, to coordinate battalions, to drop smart bombs onto their targets with an accuracy no saintly endeavor ever demanded. The technology that keeps global finance synchronized and prevents plane crashes is an overflow of the dark art of killing from above.
The same genealogy holds for the jet engine. The turbine that now shrinks the globe, reuniting families and ferrying tourists, was perfected in the desperate crucible of World War II. The Messerschmitt Me 262 and the Gloster Meteor were not built to bring people together; they were built to annihilate bomber formations, to outrun and obliterate the enemy. The peaceful, mile-high commerce that defines globalism is a parasitic afterthought on a weapon. The engine that democratized flight first screamed its birth cry over a battlefield.
And then there is the rocket. The first great rockets were the V-2s, built in Nazi Germany by slave labor to terrorize London….a pure act of technological evilness. After the war, those same rockets, those same minds, were looted by the victors and became the foundation of the space program. The Space Race, that romanticized zenith of human aspiration, had almost nothing to do with science. It was the Cold War’s most sublime piece of theater, a proxy battle to demonstrate who could deliver a warhead to any point on the planet. The Soviet Union and the United States poured unimaginable wealth and genius into rocketry not to touch the stars, but to project the ultimate threat: annihilation from orbit. The moon landing was a flag-planting in a graveyard of missiles. The good would have looked at the cosmos and composed a poem; evil built the ladder to step on its face.
Here, technology recapitulates the theology of the felix culpa. Without the necessary sin of total war and existential paranoia, there would be no satellite internet, no CAT scan, no GPS, no jet-age. Progress is not the child of universal brotherhood, but of Cain the builder, raising his first city walls against the fear of retaliation, using blood as mortar.
- Antiphon of Good
Look around, then, with unblinkered eyes. The nuclear grid that powers the west civilizational memory was fathered by the incinerating flash of the bomb. Kenya doesn’t need it but it’s good to know it’s an option….The satellite signals that now guide our most trivial errands were first beamed to aim intercontinental missiles. The jet engine that has dissolved vast distances was forged to give fighters a killing speed. The rockets that carried a fragile “We come in peace” placard to the lunar dust were refined from the V-2’s arc of screaming terror. The internet, that ethereal agora, gestated in the military’s need for a survivable communication net after a nuclear exchange.
Goodness, left to its own devices, would create a well-managed, uniformly fed, and profoundly stagnant anthill. It can distribute bread, but it cannot invent the oven. It can heal the individual, but it dare not imagine the transvaluation that might heal the epoch. Every tool of modern emancipation was forged in the furnace of war, ambition, and the sublime discontent that the good, with its gentle and paralyzing pity, can never muster.
We must learn to honor what we publicly curse. The demonic is the tax we pay for not being plants. Cioran, utterly disabused, mused that we would have been better off not being born, yet he spent his life writing, an act of supreme contradiction and creation born from the ultimate negative. He knew that “the fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live…moreover, the only one.” In the same spirit, we must recognize that evil is the reason we have a history, the necessary puncture wound in the womb of being from which everything new, terrible, and magnificent is born. The good dreams of a world without change, a preserved garden, a silent, smiling perfection. Evil is the voice in the garden that whispers: Wake up. There is so much to ruin, and in ruining, to begin.
I will be back…
