Is AI evil? Does it promote ‘evil power’?

Written by Jobst Landgrebe on October 16, 2025. Posted in Current News

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The concept of evil today seems outdated, like a theological or metaphysical idea of the pre-Enlightenment era, which we overcame after Voltaire told us that there is neither a God nor a devil.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.

This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here ukcolumn.org

Header image: Good versus Evil by Gothic Storm

Editor’s note: it is interesting that several people quoted here say evil is always present in the world, and Martin Luther King said Satan is “the Lord of this world”. In northern Iraq, the Yazidees, once unfairly branded as devil-worshippers, believe it is Satan who is the real power in the world, and it is he who deals out good and evil, sickness and health.

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