Dossier: Satan

Destroy weakness

Purpose

Tagline: Adversity destroys weakness and forges strength.

Trivialized: Destroy weakness

Benign: Endure hardship to become stronger.

Satan is the adversary. He causes injury and pain. Through his efforts, anti-fragile people and systems become stronger.

Worship

Satan can be worshipped by inflicting damage on any person or system. Oddly enough, both homonyms of beating apply. Beating with a stick produces physical injury, beating in a contest inflicts injury to the ego, and beating in a fight can result in both.

Weakness can be destroyed within a morphon or the morphon itself. It can also be destroyed within a swarm or the swarm itself. Hard times can apply this adversity at different levels: job loss is at a local level, war at a swarm level.

A dedicated believer in Satan might say “We need a plague to clear out the old and infirm, a recession to repair the economy and a war to toughen up the youth.” Someone espousing those beliefs would be considered evil and face ostracism.

Advantages

We have an interest in complex and capable systems. There is no reason to develop these without adversity to overcome. All the overcoming requires strength. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Stated more technically: in a process known as hormesis, eustress causes improvement of the entity.

All systems decay, as entropy seeps in and the quality is eroded. Even vast intelligence cannot counter entropy, since entropy can attack the purpose of the intelligence and purpose cannot be derived from intelligence. The only known counter to this entropic decay is The Life Algorithm.

The Life Algorithm requires good agents reproducing faster than the bad (as well as imperfect reproduction). Satan provides the adversity used to distinguish between the good and bad and administers consequences to the bad when they fail.

Increasing the strength of adversity to an anti-fragile system, whether it is an individual, a swarm, or some evolved structure will cause it to adapt faster. There is some risk of breaking or introduced fragility along a different dimension, but for rapid improvement, consider Satan.

Disadvantages

Deliberately causing harm, or even wishing it, is cruel and easily considered evil.

Targeting eustress and avoiding distress is challenging, and Satan delights in crossing the line between them. For instance, the infamous “code red” scene from A Few Good Men is an canonical example of a Satanic practice that led to fatal consequences and yet was deemed acceptable by the practitioner. The moral of the story also serves to cast Satan out of Western society.

Applying adversity along a single dimension results in weakness in other aspects. For instance, a desperate war for survival can weaken individual liberty, which, in turn, may hinder innovation and economic prosperity. Similarly, selecting food crops for increased energy output might reduce their ability to compete with weeds and lower their nutritional value. These issues can be mitigated by applying a more diverse range of adversities.

Efforts to overcome adversity are essential, with those providing such adversity liable to become targets themselves. Individuals who have experienced and endured significant adversity may view it as beneficial and are more likely to perpetuate it.

A highly adverse environment has an extreme negative aesthetic. For instance, war zones are not only harsh but their very existence is repulsive. Most people not only seek to escape such environments themselves, but also to pacify them. Despite the potential strength and resilience such environments may confer, people instinctively reject them and advocate for their prevention. The same applies to plagues, famines, bushfires or any other extremely adverse environment.

Cooperation

Multiple sources of adversity naturally combine their effects. When these sources differ in nature, over-specialization of strength is reduced and overall benefit is more reliable. For example, experiencing war with famine and plague is far more challenging than war alone, but the net selection is for strong men and strong communities rather than for warriors and generals.

However, the confluence of war, famine, and plague is an exceptionally horrifying prospect, and one that a compassionate person would not wish on anyone. It also risks breaking the nation, creating opportunities for external forces to seize territory.

Additionally, with kind society overcoming and ostracizing Satanism, those who favor such adversity may need to unite for mutual support and safety. The groups embracing gentler forms may engage in friendly challenges to strengthen one another, while the rougher groups may celebrate or even instigate hardships upon the wider population.

Opposition

The struggle against adversity is a key feature of life. Cooperation forms rapidly when there is adversity that may be overcome better in a group than alone. It is instinctive and maternal to attempt to stamp Satan’s influence out entirely. This is an efficient instinct where it is not possible to succeed.

Religions struggle and overcome Satan. This is their first and most prominent value proposition. Overcoming Satan is also the sales pitch for most governments. This can cause prosperity and comfort. In much the way that you don’t die from falling, only the sudden stop at the end, the disaster here isn’t in eliminating adversity, only in being totally unprepared for its sudden appearance.

Locality

Satan is generally unacceptable in civilization today, with warfare being the only public way he can acquire a nexus. For instance, Hell Week for Navy SEALs is named correctly. More serious presence can be found in parts of Ukraine and Syria.

Other

Species 8472 in Star Trek: Voyager was initially portrayed as being a species devoted to this idea of Satan with the catchphrase “The weak will perish”.

Eugenics is an attempt to gain the benefits of Satan by instead worshipping Lucifer. A more perfect target for corruption by Moloch is hard to imagine. As such, there is no shortage of reasons to oppose eugenics and declare it unethical. However, in a society where Satan has been suppressed, the demand for eugenics will simply keep on rising.

Some other deities, such as Moloch and Belial, are less focused on a goal and largely serve Satan. It is quite reasonable that these are considered to be demonic.

In Western Society

While Mammon and Lucifer have ascended, worship of Satan has been systematically eliminated from Western society. This starts early, with a blanket ban on hitting children and peaceful parenting being a self-evident moral good. Next comes helicopter parenting, a widely acknowledged cultural defect that is still somehow expected. In extreme cases, children’s football games do not keep score to spare the losing team, and player of the match is taken in turns. This continues to trigger warnings, safe spaces, and all manner of protection from dangerous words.

Even those who dislike the weakness will usually be found opposing bullying and suggesting that countries should be able to settle differences without war.