Three Strata of Evil

 A recent Vox Day post led me to this article from Contemplations on the Tree of Woe entitled "The Strategy of Evil." The author intends his article to be an analysis of evil, such as the military might make an analysis of an opposing force (OPFOR). An excerpt:

Professor Bruce Charlton, on his blog Charlton Teaching, has written extensively about the nature of evil. According to Charlton, there are three types of evil. Luciferic, Ahrimanic, and Sorathic. As he explains,

This ordering is reflected in several ways, which are related. 

First it describes the ordering of dominance in history, secondly the degree of evil-ness, and thirdly it reflects the societal hierarchy of The Masses, The Establishment, and The Satanic powers. 

By societal hierarchy I mean that Luciferic evil dominates the Masses - who are evil in impulsive, short-termist ways; Ahrimanic evil is typical of the Global Establishment and its managerial-class servants - who regard Men as merely human resources towards abstract goals; and the Sorathic evil of negation, value-inversion and destruction of The Good is characteristic of the demonic overlords.

    The author explains that Luciferic evil "represents the first stage of evil, in its anti-authoritarian, individualist, and rebellious aspect which seeks to overthrow cosmos (natural order) to maximize freedom of action." He adds that, according to Charlton:

The Luciferic is (roughly) the impulsive, instinctive, self-gratifying, psychopathic kind of evil - as characterised by the frenzied violence and torture of unbridled war; or the greedy lustfulness that drives the sexual revolution… The 'sixties impulse' was Luciferic.

Examples of this, representing differing ways of maximizing freedom of action and giving in to lust, are the "sex, drugs, and rock and roll" mentality on one extreme, and serial killers and terrorists on the other. Often the two combine: for instance, the leaders of the Weather Underground combined both "free love" and terrorism/murder.

    Next up is Ahrimanic evil, "named for Ahriman, the Zoroastrian adversary of Ahura Mazda." Per Charlton:

    Ahrimanic evil aims to create a system of value-inversions (virtue becomes vice, while sin is encouraged and rewarded; truth becomes hate-facts and fake-news, while lies are science... etc.). This System will (by such means as law, media propaganda and corporate regulations) subversively 'process' people into a social structure that is anti-God, anti-Christian, anti-Good.  

    The Ahrimanic evil is more modern; it is the despair-inducing, soul-destroying, utterly-demotivating Iron Cage of totalitarian bureaucracy - where all is a single system and all Men are merely cogs to serve it. This is the evil of late Soviet communism, of The Borg, of the overpromoted-middle-manager, Head Girl Type (e.g. the-3-Ms - Merkel, May, Macron) that increasingly runs large organizations, corporations and Western nations.

 Another author citied in the article, Tychonievich, describes Ahrimanic evil thusly:

If Lucifer seeks pleasure, Ahriman seeks control. Note that this is not necessarily the same thing as seeking power. Those who serve Ahriman may seek to be in control themselves, but more often their goal may simply be that everything be under control. Hierarchy is of Ahriman, because even those who are far from the top have no objection to it. Even an Ahrimanist who has the ability to control things personally will generally defer these personal decisions to a system or algorithm, personal responsibility being unpleasantly risky. A near-perfect example of Ahrimanic man is the 2020s birdemicist, happy to submit to house arrest, universal surveillance and censorship, and forced medical procedures -- rather than take a chance of catching the flu. "Non serviam" is Lucifer's motto, not Ahriman's; if Ahrimanism were condensed into a two-word motto, it would be, "Safety first" -- or, if more than two words are needed, "None are safe until all are safe.["]

That is, "[h]aving allowed Luciferic evil to 'clear the field' of the physiocratic or cosmic order based on beauty, goodness, and truth, Ahrimanic evil proceeds to implement the Black Iron Prison of our contemporary consensus, a system of control over our thoughts and actions."

    I think this is what Hannah Arendt spoke of when she used the term "banality of evil" when reporting on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann. As an Aeon article explains:

    Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘commit[ted] crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong’.

    Arendt dubbed these collective characteristics of Eichmann ‘the banality of evil’: he was not inherently evil, but merely shallow and clueless, a ‘joiner’, in the words of one contemporary interpreter of Arendt’s thesis: he was a man who drifted into the Nazi Party, in search of purpose and direction, not out of deep ideological belief. ...

The same is often true of DEI officers at universities or large corporations, the health officials that proscribed the lockdowns and the law enforcement that enforced the lockdowns, the countless Karens that fill out the ranks of liberal causes, and the many "new world order" types.  

    Finally we have the big daddy of evil: Sorathic evil, named "for Sorath, who Rudolf Steiner described as 'the sun-demon of Revelations, whose number is 666.'"

Charlton explains Sorathic evil as:

…. the purest, most absolutely negative form of evil.

If Luciferic evil is motivated by short-termist pleasure; while Ahrimanic evil is motivated by God-denial, spiritual blindness and reductionism towards a meaningless world of mechanical procedures; then the Sorathic impulse is driven by negative impulses - primarily fear, resentment and hatred.

Sorathic evil will therefore tend to destroy both the lustful pleasures of Luciferic evil, and the complex functional bureaucracies of Ahrimanic evil…. 

Tychonievich describes Sorath like this:

By Sorath I mean the principle of evil at its purest, the devil of all devils, Goethe's "spirit that negates." God is the love-motivated Creator, and Sorath is the hate-motivated anti-Creator, who opposes all creation -- who thinks it "better nothing would begin" and that all that has begun "deserves to perish wretchedly."

Sorath's ultimate goal is that nothing at all exist, including Sorath himself.

The article continues:

    For, according to Charlton, the world we inhabit is actually already Sorathic:

    A world in which the Luciferic lusts of sex/ drugs and the rock-and-roll lifestyle are forbidden and punished; and also a world in which the global system is being disabled and destroyed - even as its Ahrimanic architects have successfully accomplished a silent global coup, and are trying to perfect it into the grandiose schemes of The Great Reset/ Agenda 2030. 

    In 2020 we observe all modern institutions, corporations and every kind of bureaucracy as rapidly declining in efficiency and effectiveness - under pressure from an ever-increasing culture of fear, victimology, entitlement and resentment. 

    Sorath divides Mankind into more-and-more, smaller-and-smaller, self-identified victim groups; each resentful-of and pitted-against each other. The aim is eventually for each person to feel alone, consumed by feelings of thwarted entitlement, and hatred of the world; and living in permanent fear of a whole world of other people, each of whom resents and hates the solo-victim just as he hates them. 

    And then - eventually - Sorath's intent is that everyone, without exception, should die in fear and despair.

It may be difficult to distinguish the Sorathic evil from the other types of evil. For instance, is the person that supports open borders doing so because she wants access to exotic men, because its the "right" thing to do as she has been told by civil or religious authorities, or because she wants to see the destruction of the "white, male patriarchy" and Western Civilization.  

     Funny enough, someone at one level of evil simply cannot comprehend a type of evil above it. The article explains:

    The evil Masses simply cannot recognize the evilness of the Establishment-managerial class; they cannot comprehend that the Establishment's vast and comprehensive agendas, plans, schemes are a kind of evil. 

    The Masses cannot see this as evil because it is so abstract, so impersonal. Ahrimanic evil has very little 'fun'; it is dull drudgery - meetings, tick-boxes and flow charts. 

    And when the Global Establishment look upwards to their demonic overlords; they too fail to see that demonic evil is of a very different nature from the complex Ahrimanic, international, bureaucratic systems that are so laboriously, so tediously, being constructed at present. 

It presents a different way of viewing the different types of evil. Try applying this tripartite analysis to the different news article or reports you might come across, as I've been trying to do, it will some additional insight into how the world works.

• More: "Luciferic, Ahrimanic and Sorathic evil reflect the societal hierarchy"--Bruce Charlton.