Control and war are manifestations of cold and hot violence. Artificial intelligence amplifies their impact. Morality and wisdom, as the foundation and roof of human society, have the power to humanize these digital monsters.
The mystery of evil is not abstract at heart. It is a lived reality, met in violence: our own, that of others, and that exercised by artificial agents which, while created by human beings, no longer seem to be fully under human control. “Evil” is a word that, like its counterpart, “love”, calls for respect. It directs the gaze towards something that evades full comprehension; something that has an existential bearing on how we understand what it means to be human and which therefore requires a transformation of consciousness.
Violence—the earthly expression of evil—has “hot” and “cold” forms. Hot violence rises in the soul as anger, rage, the urge to destroy and annihilate. In its institutional form, it works through the release of energy in ways that transcend any imaginable scale. When I try to put myself in the shoes of a child or adult, whose body is suddenly evaporated or dispersed into tiny fragments, my imagination fails; yet human beings with names and stories as complex as mine are experiencing this reality. It is when meeting this limit of my imagination, that the term “evil” comes to feel appropriate.
Cold violence deals in mechanisms of surveillance and control. It subjects human beings, communities and the earth to its extractive logic, eliminating individual agency and using its constituents as means to an end. This logic of domination is embodied in powerful non-human agents, in institutions, states and corporations. When artificial intelligence is harnessed to the decision-making algorithms of such artificial agents and given the power to inflict hot violence, it produces the “harbingers of doom”:1 the principal actors of warfare, of social and ecological disaster. Their actions center their own (non-human) interests of self-preservation and are often catastrophically misaligned with human interests, including those of their stakeholders and citizens.
When Institutions Have an Opinion
Modern corporations and states are instruments that allow coherent and organized collective action across horizons that surpass the individual human lifespan and reach of consciousness. Corporations come into being through agreements; states additionally claim a monopoly on legitimate use of violence within their jurisdiction. Both are endowed with legal personhood, over and above their human constituents, and encoded with enduring objectives, governance and decision-making frameworks that privilege their own self-preservation and expansion of power—even to the detriment of their human caretakers, who activate them and whose intelligence they depend on.2
Artificial agents show a strong drive to claim rights originally reserved for natural persons. In the US, for example, corporations have successfully asserted participation in the constitutional right to freedom of speech.3 Modern states attempt to claim a “right to exist”, rivalling the “right to life” recognized for human beings—who, crucially, are not instruments but ends in themselves.4 Theocracies anchor such claims in myths of spiritual endowment and others increasingly offer apocalyptic visions to vindicate transgressive uses of power.5
The Supposedly Inevitable Consequence
Coupled with artificial intelligence, states and corporations emancipate even further from their human creators and stewards. AI renders decision-making autonomous once parameters have been set. Today, government action involving the exercise of violence increasingly involves partnerships with private corporations and AI integration, resulting in ever less direct human control over the physical means of violence and facilitating the denial of moral responsibility and culpability. Violence thus becomes ever more the supposedly unavoidable outcome of simple practical constraints.
Corporations, states and artificial intelligence are neither capable of empathy, nor of moral agency or creative intuition. They need their human, I-endowed guardians to supply these for them and guide and discipline their actions. In the ancient past, humans learned, through initiation wisdom, to domesticate the wild beasts. Today, we are facing beasts of our own making. However, as the oldest surviving democracy turns 250 and has been downgraded to flawed (no longer “liberal”) status,6 the selection mechanisms for positions of power appear significantly tilted toward the “dark triad” of personality traits—Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy—and to further reinforce these in those who hold office.7
Humanizing the Dragon
Early modern consciousness, out of which these beasts were born—initially as beasts of burden for the work of creating modern civilization—is no longer a match for its progeny. Modern artificial agents, with their flawed algorithmic architecture, in the hands of human stewards who are themselves stuck in materialistic ways of thinking, driven by pathological personality structures, and lacking a moral compass, become instruments of violence and domination—defying “the better angels of our nature”8 and acting against the declared interests of the vast majority of human beings, to whom they are ostensibly accountable.
Instead, we need a new initiation wisdom, with at least some ability to tap into the transpersonal qualities and moral vision of Spirit Self, to humanize the beasts we have created, to find new, more equitable and inclusive ways of governing them and to align their actions with human values and interests. We need forms of organization and statecraft that support the emergence of communities and societies of the future, built on the principle of love. While we may not have power over the harbingers of doom and the violence they are enacting, we do have the power to plant seeds of a more human future in the fields of destruction. In doing so, we meet another threshold of the imagination. And perhaps, if we are open to it, some of those who have been violently robbed of their bodies may join us in shaping the moral imaginations needed to guide such work.
Photo Julius Carmine/Unsplash
Footnotes
- Kemp, Luke (2025). Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
- Runciman, David (2024). The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs. New York: Liveright.
- Tribe, Laurence H., “Dividing ‘Citizens United’: The Case v. The Controversy” (March 9, 2015). Available at SSRN.
- Leahy, John P., “Israel’s ‘Right to Exist’ is a Rhetorical Trap.” In: The New Republic (January 3, 2024).
- Davidson, Joe P.L. (2024). “The Apocalypse from Below: The Dangerous Idea of the End of the World, the Politics of the Oppressed, and Anti-Anti-Apocalypticism.” In: American Political Science Review. 2025;119(1):479-491.
- V-Dem Institute (2026). “Democracy Report 2026: Unraveling the Democratic Era?”
- See Kemp (op. cit.).
- Abraham Lincoln, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861.
