Journeeman.

“The courage to affirm oneself must include the courage to affirm one’s own demonic depth… because the demonic was not considered unambiguously negative but was thought to be part of the creative power of being.” — Paul Tillich

It is easy to be blind to our own human nature, to consider ourselves “good” or “just” without seeing ourselves as we truly are. Within each of us lies the capacity to perform terrible atrocities, or even to act poorly in everyday life, as we assert our will over others. Because we are unaware of the depth of this capacity, we often leave it too late to curb its effects — and before we know it, we cause harm to those around us.

This is no less true of the groups we align ourselves with. We come to see them as an extension of our own being: a reflection of our goodness and identity. Viewing ourselves through the biased light of mutual affirmation, we can easily dismiss those who differ as “evil” — not because of clear evidence or careful understanding, but simply because of the gravity of the group itself, pulling us toward its version of the “true” way of seeing the world.

For me, this is a very real part of my own story — one that led to prison. After seven years of deep torment and personal struggle, the only way I can make sense of that journey is to see it as a narrative that got out of control. Imagine a cluster of incorrect assumptions, mixed with a few carefully constructed versions of “truth” that people bought into — and before long, those narratives became like a pack of wild animals, no longer controllable, ready to consume anything that stood in their way.

This is exactly the reality that thinkers across centuries have tried to describe. Paul Tillich, in his profound work The Courage to Be, explains how later Romanticism marked a significant break from the older ideals of harmony that had dominated from the Renaissance onwards. Instead of seeing a naturally ordered and harmonious universe, this period began to confront and discover the dark, conflicting, and often chaotic forces within the human soul.

This confrontation led to what can be described as a form of “demonic realism.” Tillich highlights that this was not necessarily about a personal, external being in the traditional sense, but rather a recognition of profound psychological and existential realities. For Tillich and the thinkers he engaged with, this “demonic” aspect represented a fundamental existential predicament — a structural element of existence itself — one that could act both as a catalyst for profound creativity and as a source of despair and destruction.

He emphasized that this “demonic” was not inherently evil in itself, but a necessary, albeit dangerous, dimension of being. It was the raw, untamed energy that, when confronted courageously, could fuel artistic expression, deep self‑understanding, and a more authentic engagement with life. However, Tillich also warned of its perilous side: the tendency for these forces, or the structures they represent, to become impersonal and dominating. When we fail to confront them courageously, they exert a gravitational pull, dictating our sense of belonging and shaping who we become according to their worldview — often leading us away from authentic humanity and toward the destructive potential we see in our own lives.

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The Demonic: More Than Shadow, Less Than Independent Evil

To understand the forces at work in ourselves, our groups, and our societies, we need to move beyond two common but inadequate views: seeing evil only as an individual personal fault, or treating it as a separate, equal, supernatural power locked in cosmic dualism. A remarkable consensus emerges across three major thinkers — N.T. Wright, Karl Barth, and Paul Tillich — that evil is real, active, and destructive, yet not a positive, created “thing” in itself.

N.T. Wright: Powers, Principalities, and the Accuser

N.T. Wright describes these forces as Powers and Principalities: they include both visible systems — governments, economies, ideologies, institutions — and invisible, transpersonal dynamics that shape how we think and act. At work within them is the figure of “the Satan,” understood not as a rival god, but as the Accuser. Wright states:

“The biblical picture of Satan is thus of a non‑human and non‑divine quasi‑personal force which seems bent on attacking and destroying creation in general and humankind in particular, and above all on thwarting God’s project of remaking (or restoring) the world and human beings in and through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.”

— Evil and the Justice of God

He further clarifies the meaning of this term:

“I use the term ‘sub‑personal’ or ‘quasi‑personal’ as a way of refusing to accord the Satan the full dignity of personhood while recognizing that the concentration of activity — its subtle schemes and devices — can and does strike us as very much like that which we associate with personhood.”

— Evil and the Justice of God

For Wright, these powers and this adversarial force actively turn against our true humanity: their purpose is to dehumanize us, drawing us away from the good, flourishing life God intends and into chaos, division, and destruction. They do not rule by force alone, but by convincing us to serve their logic as if it were truth itself.

Karl Barth: Evil as “Nothingness” (das Nichtige)

Karl Barth offers a deeper ontological account, framing evil as “Nothingness” — das Nichtige — a reality of negation rather than creation. In God and Nothingness, he writes:

“There is opposition and resistance… to which God denies the benefit of His preservation, concurrence, and rule, of His fatherly lordship, and which is self‑opposed to being preserved, accompanied and ruled in any sense, fatherly or otherwise… This stubborn element and alien force may be provisionally defined as Nothingness.”

For Barth, Nothingness is entirely distinct from the good creation God sustains. It has no positive existence of its own; it is parasitic, a void that can only twist, pervert, and destroy what God has made. It remains “alien” to the order of being, yet it exerts a very real, destructive pull.

Paul Tillich: The Demonic as the Finite Claiming the Infinite

Paul Tillich clarifies this distortion even further, giving us language that links the personal, social, and religious dimensions. In his Systematic Theology, he writes:

“The demonic does not resist self‑transcendence as does the profane, but it distorts self‑transcendence by identifying a particular bearer of holiness with the holy itself. The claim of something finite to infinity or to divine greatness is the characteristic of the demonic.”

He continues:

“Demonization of the holy occurs in all religions day by day. The demonic appears whenever one claims divinity for the self. The main characteristic of the state of the tragic is blindness; the main trait of the state of the demonic is being split.”

For Tillich, this is not about external monsters. It happens whenever a nation, ideology, group, narrative, or personal desire — something limited and finite — demands absolute loyalty, presents itself as the only truth, or treats its own perspective as beyond question. When the finite pretends to be infinite, it stops serving life and begins to consume everything that does not conform to it. It becomes that gravitational force of belonging we noted earlier: something that feels larger than ourselves, pulling us into its logic and distorting our sense of what is true and good.

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The Fuel: Fear of Isolation and the Collective Pull

Building on this theological understanding of the demonic as a distortion of finite realities, we now turn to how these forces manifest in our personal lives and social dynamics. A central insight — one I have come to see as a significant, though not the sole, energy source of these powers — is the profound human fear of being cast out. This fear often drives us toward collective identities, sometimes at the expense of our authentic selves and our relationship with God.

Part of my own definition of evil, then, lies in this powerful pull toward external identities — the identity of “the other” or “the crowd” — rather than maintaining our true identity in God. It is a movement away from standing authentically before the divine and toward losing oneself in the collective. This is where we see a corruption of what we ought to be, a departure from the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Consider Psalm 4:4: “Be angry, and do not sin; ponder in your hearts on your beds, and be silent.” This speaks to taking personal responsibility, to confronting our own issues internally. Yet, as we see in Matthew 7:3–5, we often bypass this inner work. Instead of dealing with our own flaws, we prefer to cast judgment upon others, as if all fault lies outside ourselves:

“Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take out the speck from your eye,’ when there is a log in your own eye? You hypocrite! First, take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

This tendency to project our internal struggles outward, to find comfort and identity in the crowd’s judgment rather than in authentic self‑reflection and divine standing, becomes a powerful mechanism for evil. It is the way the finite — our desire for belonging, our fear of judgment — can claim an absolute status, corrupting our capacity to live toward the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Paul Tillich, in The Courage to Be, illuminates this dynamic through his discussion of existential anxiety. He notes that when faced with the anxiety of fate, death, guilt, and condemnation, individuals may be tempted to surrender their selfhood into a collective identity — a way of escaping the burden of individual responsibility and the terror of finitude. This is not a genuine community, but rather the loss of self within a group. Tillich contrasts this with the courageous affirmation of the individual self — one that can participate fully in community without being dissolved by it. The danger lies in treating the group as an absolute, seeking from it a security and meaning it can never truly give.

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The Defining Confrontation: Jesus and the Powers

Having explored the nature of the demonic forces that distort reality and exploit our fears, we now turn to the pivotal moment where these powers are directly confronted: Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. This encounter is not merely a personal trial for Jesus, but a defining moment for humanity and God’s redemptive purpose.

During his fast, Jesus faced direct temptation from demonic forces, represented in the figure of Satan. The core of these temptations was an attempt to strip Jesus of his divine identity and his unique relationship with his Father. The aim was to reduce his mission and his very being to a compromised, diminished form of human existence — focused on mere appetite, worldly power, and superficial recognition.

The tempter sought to draw Jesus into three reductions:

• Reduced existence through appetite: Turning stones to bread to satisfy physical hunger, bypassing reliance on God’s provision.
• Reduced power through worldly authority: Offering dominion over all kingdoms in exchange for allegiance — a shortcut to power that would have betrayed his divine mission.
• Reduced identity through spectacular recognition: Demanding a sign from the temple to prove his identity, seeking validation through human spectacle rather than divine truth.

In each case, the temptation was to compromise his authentic identity and mission, to accept a finite, distorted version of power and purpose. Jesus’ response was to stand firm in his identity as the Son and in his Father’s will. He refused to be swayed by immediate needs, worldly authority, or human approval. By resisting these temptations, Jesus demonstrated the ultimate confrontation with the demonic: he refused to be reduced to mere appetite, desire, or compromised power. Remaining true to his calling, he undermined the very foundations of the forces that seek to dehumanize and diminish us.

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The Counterpower: Standing as the Authentic Individual Before God and Rejecting Nothingness

We must ground our understanding in realism, acknowledging that escaping the pervasive influence of collective evil — which shapes cultures and pits groups against one another — is no simple matter of idealism. There are indeed times when the rule of law, justice, and even forceful means become necessary to counteract civil unrest and social danger. In our current age, the proliferation of echo chambers and the commercialization of group identities fuel antagonism, where narratives of victimhood or tyranny lead to disharmony and violence against the “other.” This absolutizing of finite perspectives — whether by majority or minority — corrupts our pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

From another angle, I believe the most effective way to address the issues within society is to deal first and foremost with the darkness within our own soul. This means confronting our willingness to surrender judgment and understanding to the collective pull of the crowd. The hard work of digging into an issue and reaching conclusions based on both data and insight cannot be underestimated. Choosing to give up the need to have an opinion on “everything,” and focusing instead on what is immediate and realistic, can reduce inner anxiety and allow for more harmonious living in the present. It also helps to remember that the media’s primary business is to sell attention, so we must avoid being swept up in the hype and loudness of news cycles and influencers.

The demonic within us can act like an uncontrolled beast, hijacking our conscious minds, our reason, our logic, and our desire for good relationships with others. It can twist good into evil, beauty into ugliness, and truth into competing narratives that breed disharmony — not only on a collective level, but even more profoundly within the individual. This internal confrontation — the courage to look within, acknowledge our own potential for evil, and make resolving it our priority — is the true counterpower. It is the act of standing authentically before God, rejecting the void of Nothingness and the false safety of group conformity, and choosing instead the freedom that comes from genuine self‑awareness and connection to the divine.

Furthermore, our age presents a unique challenge through the collectivization of ideologies and their influence on our social structures. Institutions — from law enforcement and the justice system to social services and private enterprise — can be swayed by these currents, often at the cost of healthy individual and societal development. A pervasive fear has taken hold: the fear of being labeled “extreme,” cast as part of a “collective menace,” or subjected to trolling and reputational ruin simply for standing for what one believes is good, true, and beautiful. This fear leads to a softening of resolve and a mishandling of critical issues, as individuals and institutions hesitate to act authentically for fear of reprisal.

So we see: the age of collectivism, amplified by technology and echo chambers, allows intolerance and the erosion of freedom. Governments and institutions struggle to manage the “evil” that emerges from within the crowd, even as wisdom and insight are lost.

Yet the only lasting solution does not lie solely in more laws or stronger controls — vital as these may be at times. It lies in the same courage demonstrated by Jesus in the wilderness: refusing to be reduced to appetite, power, or public approval, and instead holding fast to one’s true identity and purpose. As Tillich reminds us, the courage to be is not found in hiding within the crowd to escape anxiety, but in standing firm even when we stand alone.

This is the counterpower: to reject the Nothingness of lost identity and collective blame, and to choose the freedom of standing authentically before God. In doing so, we do not ignore the world as it is — we bring to it the only light that can truly overcome the darkness, both within ourselves and in the wider community.