Evil did not arrive with a plan. It arrived pre-installed as the natural orientation of relationally networked, combinatorial complexity at scale, sliding toward low-energy states and the familiar attractors of corruption, populism, and conflict. There are puppet-masters and greedy, demonic characters involved, certainly, but even they are mostly riding that prebuilt wave. They do not invent the tyranny so much as surf it. Other human beings become simply instrumentalised, harvested as inputs, processed as abstractions. High-volume systems do not care whether the hand on the lever is competent, only that it keeps pulling. They are built like slot machines: reward follows repetition, not understanding. Scale forgives stupidity. The machinery was already humming. The throne was gold-gilt and upholstered long before any fool collapsed into it.
What passes for agency is mostly latency resolving itself. Judgment queues. Ethics buffer. Under load, attention can no longer carry meaning, only value. Wickedness here is not exceptional. It is as structurally inevitable as gullibility, insecurity, and manipulation once systems are tuned for speed, amplification, and reward. Pressure accumulates across the field until release becomes unavoidable, and that release is then narrated as intent. Choices arrive pre-shaped by incentives, fear, and signal dominance, then get attributed to whoever happens to be nearest the controls when the system discharges. We call that leadership, because naming it otherwise would require admitting how little control anyone had.
So the question hangs there without embarrassment. Are these familiar horrors anything more than recurring historical phases, rhythmic modulations of the communicative field itself. The costumes change, the slogans rotate, the gods get resized and redeployed, but the pattern keeps finding its way back. A tight, anxious divinity hauled out like a liability waiver, invoked as indemnity for a cash grab. God not as mystery or restraint, but as cover. Faith reduced to a brand asset, belief repurposed as moral laundering for appetite. History does not select for wisdom in these moments. It selects for fit. Underneath it all sits the quieter failure. We do not understand ourselves well enough to recognise what we are doing while we are doing it. Human beings maintain their own confusion with remarkable consistency, then act shocked when it grows teeth and demands a crown.
Daedelus Kite 