That interesting statement was conceptually first made on the WhatIfalthist YouTube channel. I think that it bears investigation as a guiding principle for moral philosophy and theology. Particularly, that quote can help examine progressivism through a theological lens.
If all humanity collectively agreed that Canada didn’t exist as a nation, that its institutions were fake, and that all of their national flags and government systems weren’t real… then Canada really would simply cease to exist. It exists solely by the consensus of large numbers of people. Our institutions are all like that, yet we treat them as if they are fundamentally grounded in hard reality in the same way that mathematics or gender are.
What’s more interesting is that if all of humanity collectively agreed that The Devil didn’t exist; a whole world of atheists with no belief in true good or evil, The Devil wouldn’t care. It would still exist. That little voice in the back of your head that tempts you towards self-destructive action or immoral behavior, or anti-social extremism, doesn’t simply go away. An interesting takeaway from that statement is that morality is not just a human construct of consensus. Theology is a byproduct of an underlying human condition, not a made-up fairy tale to make ourselves feel better. Call him what you will. The formalized name or the metaphor for The Devil doesn’t care what you name it. That force is a fundamental part of the human experience. Pretending otherwise is to invite the seductive voice into one’s life or society to do horrific damage.
This article has been written because of an earlier post that I’ve kept having to refer back to and reference. In short, that post states that “Progressive Militants are just demons, you can’t reason with them, stop trying”, and then goes into detail on why. This long-form article exists to flesh out the moral and philosophical underpinnings of that statement more clearly, and provide a complete discussion on the topic for future reference.
A Background on Theology
Thus far, there are four types of religion:
Animistic: A highly localized and tribal type of religion that sees spirits in everything. This is a religion that is the default for extremely primitive cultures and has great difficulty distinguishing between the spirit-world and physical reality. Animistic religions are the least understood because they engage neither in orthodoxy or orthopraxy. Such religions tend to be hazy around the edges and nearly impossible to disentangle from host tribal cultures. One could argue that they aren’t really even religions in the theological sense. For the purposes of the following discussion, animistic religions will be ignored as they are rare and, as of writing (August 2025), culturally irrelevant in the West.
Pagan: A pagan religion is generally (but not necessarily) polytheistic. Pagan religions are highly tribal and often center around a set of gods or laws that describe large swaths of the human experience. As pagan religions encompass numerous aspects of the human experience, they tend to be holistic. The gods (or rules) of a pagan religion exist for the betterment of a specific city or tribe. These are very nearly Socially Darwinian in practice. In the classical era it would be normal for a specific city-state to have specific “city gods” that one was expected to worship while visiting. Pagan religions encompass the experience of existing within that tribe or nation1, but it doesn’t scale well to other tribes. Paganism tends to follow a “Might is Right” trajectory and hostile tribes are exterminated or subjugated. Many tribal cultures have languages where the word for “person” and “member of the our specific tribe” are synonymous.
Universalist: These religions exist with a strict hierarchy in comparison pagan religions, and are moral systems with a god-head of some type at the top. Universalist religions extract the social-functionality of pagan religions, and then scale that to all peoples. The result is that universalist religions can scale into the billions. By simplifying the human experience to broad-swaths with a single god-head as moral arbiter, universalist religions can tie otherwise disparate peoples together through a single moral system. While high in complexity, universalist religions limit their experiential range somewhat, absorbing pagan practices (orthopraxy) into a formalized system with a common written substrate (orthodoxy). Thus far only 3 universalist religions have been successful: Buddhism, Christianity, and Confucianism (which treats the hierarchy itself as the moral arbiter while Buddhism and Christianity hold themselves to an explicitly moral god-head). Universalist religions were one of the most advanced social technologies ever developed and (correctly) recognized God as a perfect creator rather than a mere reflection of the human condition2.
Materialist: Materialist religions are a recent-development since the enlightenment. All materialist religions worship some aspect of the material world as the highest form of moral good; they replace the god-head with a material form. Like universalist religions, there are 3 materialist religions that gained particular prominence: Communism, Fascism, and Liberalism in the modern era. Each of them worships a different aspect of the material world as inherently morally virtuous. In practice, materialist religions scale well, but suffer catastrophic social destruction over only a few generations. By rejecting a moral center, materialist religions either fall to narcissism, cruelty, or depression. There is no traditional Truth because all truth becomes relative when human whimsy becomes the basis for moral governance. In alphabetical order:
Communism worships the State3. That is, the bureaucratic apparatus that supposedly instills the “will of the people.” The state is the physical manifestation of “the will of the people,” and thus it becomes an apparatus that seeks to convert the human experience into easily-defined numerical spreadsheets. It makes untrue assumptions about human nature, and then attempts to enforce those assumptions through coercion. In a feminine fashion, communism attempts to instill perfect consensus on imperfect people. Communism has led to mass starvation and atrocities every time it’s reared its ugly head.
Fascism worships the nation4. That is, a specific group of people as defined by a language, ethnicity, or set of cultural practices. Fascism sees the Darwinian aspects of the nation to be the most important. That is one reason it tends to associate with pagan practices, due to associated national tribalism. Fascism, however, is dangerously aggressive against both outside agents (Italy, Germany) and internal dissidents (China). When left to its own devices it seeks universal totalitarian control over the tribe. A hyper-uniform nation is easier to command and use as a weapon against competing tribes. The result is that exceptionalism tends to be ground away. Even ignoring the morality of removing undesirables like the Uighur population in China, artificial conformity tends to break down when times are bad. Fascism leads to the most rapid increases in quality-of-life of any materialist religion, but the moment that stagnation or even shrinkage occurs, the population will simply give up. Fascism promotes a masculine aggression that accrues wealth and power, but once a plateau is reached, those at the bottom of the hierarchy realize that material ascension is no longer possible and give up. We’ve seen this happen in China with their demographics and youngest population. The nations’ people are its ultimate source of legitimacy and worship, so any dissatisfaction is a direct threat to not only the state, but the entire religious core of the culture. Thus, dissent must not be permitted, and the eventual results are shriveling population and economy beset on all sides.
Liberalism worships the self. It is the most arrogant form of the materialist religions because it doesn’t want to give up on the idea that humans are spiritually special, but it also wants to kill any limits to human action or morality5. In essence, by its nature, Liberalism seeks to kill God and exalt the Self as the ultimate moral actor in His place: Gnosticism, but even more arrogant. Liberalism imagines some divine ultimate-self as truth. That’s why “therapy” and “counseling” are so popular in a nation possessed of this materialist religion. Where once one would seek advice from a priest or pastor, liberalism encourages a person to “find themselves” and “discover their true self” to solve their problems. Needless to say, with no good examples to draw from, most people simply descend into hedonism and when that fails, ennui. Liberalism exalts the self but eschews responsibility and hierarchy as it sees every man as his own moral guide. Moral relativism clouds action until there is no arbiter on “right” and “wrong”, or good and evil besides group consensus. In the end it falls into lethargy in the same ways as communism, but slower. Liberalism destroys traditions that have lasted for a thousand years and has no intention to replace them with something new.
All of the materialist religions stack traditions, cultural capital, and social function like wood on a pyre and burn them in exchange for economic output. Once the fire dies and only cinders remain, then the population is left lost, listless, and without any moral foundation at all. Then they give up.
We have reached that “fuck it, just give up” stage of materialist religion in the West. In the Soviet Union it arrived in 1986. Fascism is still going in China, but they may expended the last of their social capital in 2020. There’s very little left. Fascism burns the hottest and burns out the quickest. Communism is the next, and liberalism is the most insidious and burns for the longest, but not forever. Especially not since the sexual revolution of the 1970s, and the economic implosion post-2008.
The end-result of each of the 3 materialist religions has been a catastrophic demographic implosion in the 21st century. Of those that existed, Liberalism was the first of the materialist religions, and has lasted the longest before cascading towards failure. There is no nation on the earth that, having adopted one of these materialist religions as a guiding principle, will survive the 21st century without abandoning it. You can’t have a nation when the population is nothing but 80 year old boomers.
Insidious Monstrous Ideas
Liberalism, Progressivism, Woke Progressivism, Woke Progressive Militants. Call them what you want. This ideology is insidious because exalting in the self as God is appealing, especially to the technocratic intelligentsia. Why use God to dictate morality when “science” and “experts” know better. All the materialist religions fall into this trap where the natural sciences are applied haphazardly to the general population out of arrogance. The sciences are great for understanding chemistry and physics, but no number of scientific studies will tell you who you should get married to. The human experience cannot be broken down into a spreadsheet, and materialism fundamentally discounts those intricacies that make us human.
Of course truth has never gotten in the way of an arrogant psychopath who wants to play God. That, fundamentally, is the problem with Progressivism as a concept and Liberalism as an ideology. It’s evil at the core level. It appeals to the arrogance of the self, especially of its true believers, and coaxes them to do horribly destructive things in it’s name “for the greater good.” Ideologies are fluid creatures that seek to self-perpetuate in the same way as anything else. These materialist religions are memes. Some versions are mediocre, and some are raw evil appealing to the worst in human nature: tempting in the short term, and horrifically destructive in the long term to both the self and others.
In this way “The Devil is Real” takes on critical metaphorical meaning. The Devil is here, and so many people have been possessed that sanity is a limited resource in the 21st century. If you don’t believe me, reconsider the disaster that was the 2020 pandemic response, and the way so many terrified people simply consumed and regurgitated “expert” opinions thoughtlessly:
“camps for the unvaccinated”
“universal vaccine passports”
“lockdowns forever or you’ll kill grandma.”
“close all the businesses, print all the money.”
That is what mass psychosis looks like. That is what mass demon-possession looks like. Humanity has been haunted by this specific problem for a long time, and many religions have long warned of it through metaphor and fables.
At it’s core, Leftist Progressivisism is a system that IS what it DOES.
On Progressive Demons
People will question the statement “Leftists are Demons” or variations thereof. This is what the metaphor of “demons” and “devils” was created for. It is the loss of the man in exchange for a facsimile; possessed, a puppeted extension of an ideology of hate and evil. Progressivism has reached its final moral threshold and finally the general population is beginning to see it for what it is. With that said, it’s important to understand the underlying philosophical framework.
“I’ve never met a leftist that didn’t want to murder me and my family.” These statements are often questioned because of the seeming totalitarian nature of them, but the metaphor of “demons” exist for a reason. These horrible, yet tempting ideals have existed throughout human history. It was merely with the industrial revolution and the advent of totalitarian states of materialist religion that such wretched ideologies became powerful enough to destroy entire nations.
In the material-equivalent conception, a “demon” is an idea/ideology both seductive and completely evil in practice. Like Marxism. It will possess those who believe in it and coax them to do horrible, inhuman acts.
These ideologies create monsters that believe they are on the "right side of history" and thus have no moral regulation beyond staying on “that side.” Communism claims to want "a global union of the proletariat," then murders and starves millions because utopia is always one more murder away. "Demon" is a metaphor for the evil that lurks inside these complex and deceitful ideologies of destruction.
The ideology of progressivism has interests independent of its stated interests and independent of the interests of its adherents. It seeks to defend itself first and its possessed extensions second. That is why Leftism is predicated on a Motte-and-Bailey argumentative style6: “don’t you just want equal rights for women?” being an example as a rallying cry for Feminism. Or the empty sloganeering of “Love is Love.” It’s an argument from a classically liberal perspective: “as long as it doesn’t interrupt you directly, let people do what they want.”
The 2nd order effects however, are quite obvious: plummeting birth rates and a complete break down of gender relations in the former case, and people justifying pedophilia and bestiality in the latter. What many conservatives fail to grasp is that these aren’t incidental 2nd order effects; they’re intentional second order effects. The Progressive Left falls into 2 categories: profoundly stupid and psychotic7. The former category is easily led around by the nose to endorse things like sadism and murder and pedophilia with stupid slogans. More than half of the Left are of the latter category that are well aware of what they’re doing and are behaving this way intentionally.
That’s why you can’t reason with a Leftist. Because the goals of their ideology are divorced from the stated goals of their ideology. “We just want every one to be equal,” is a smoke screen for “I enjoy hurting innocent people and want to kill maim and murder as many as possible.” It’s a lot harder to gain political traction with the second statement, but it’s more accurate to the true goals of the political Left. They aren’t behaving like monsters by accident. They’re behaving like monsters because that’s what they are. The most horrific things you can imagine are the intention of the political Left. Everything else is a lie or a diversion that they hope will get them closer to their ultimate goal.
If you want to see what real world demon possession looks like, the recent mass shooter, Robert Westman’s haphazard manifesto. This individual was a victim of progressivism, one of its weapons, with a conclusion characteristic of such a tool8.
To continue the thought, why you can’t reason with progressives, trust them, or clearly communicate with them. I think the Demons from Frieren are an excellent analogy. They can appear to use human language, they can appear to have empathy, but those are tools that they use to hunt; they aren’t real. They’re man eaters and the goal when they speak is not to be understood but to deceive their prey. It’s not worth your time to argue with the political intricacies of their proposed systems or ideas because THEY DO NOT CARE. Their goals ARE the horrific 2nd and 3rd order effects. Because they’re psychotic monsters that seek to maximize human suffering under false appeals to pathological empathy.
There is no form of materialist religion that has not fallen into these same trappings, but progressivism is the most insidious… because it seems functional for five or ten generations before falling apart. It requires a deeply long-term perspective even to recognize its moral and philosophical failings, thus arguing against it can’t even really happen until the slow-roll cultural disaster has already begun.
Demographic implosion, and a complete breakdown of non-state-enforced morality. Coercion and standardization of the human spirit. In effect, it is necessary to either drop back down to classical-period types of enforcement to maintain social order, or self-isolate the functional parts of the culture and aggressively re-adopt the universalist religions so many have abandoned across the Western world.
Zealotry
Zealotry has always been a problem for humanity. The Devil has always been very good at picking up those who will take an idea and simply run off a cliff with it. They’ll commit horrific acts and happily pat themselves on the back for being such good and moral actors for disposing of the “bad-people” they’ve targeted.
This is why Progressives use “nazi, racist, homophobic” as methods not of describing reality, but to dehumanize any opposition. Their goal is not to make the world a better place, but to revel in their own power at the pulpit to threaten, coerce, cancel, harass, and violently attack any one deviating from Leftist orthodoxy.
Universalist religions have hierarchies that draw people back from the edge of totalitarian zealotry or at least aim them in a better direction. The Satanic Panic was a far less destructive moral-panic than the Vaccine Panic surrounding the Covid Pandemic. It’s because the Satanic Panic came out of the Christian Right while the Covid Vaccine Panic came out of the Progressive Left. Morally totalitarian demons have haunted human religions for thousands of years. Progressivism is merely the latest in a long line of various immoral possessions. It is, however, one of the most cruel, and difficult to root out.
As materialist religions lack a hierarchy and rules; a moral standard greater than the individual or group consensus, there is no line of argumentation against awful behavior. This is a side-effect of materialism as a moral foundation for the masses of half-educated midwits: no foundation at all. One may very well not need “God” to be good, but it appears that a large swath of the population does9. Simultaneously, “good” people tend to develop over time an understanding of why moral regulation is necessary for the masses of humanity.
That’s why people are returning to Christian Orthodoxy… because it seems like the best option of those available. Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, and a few Protestant denominations have been growing at a rate alarming to the materialist true believers. It is self-evident that progressivism is an inherently evil set of ideas, and thus, abandoning it for anything that’s demonstrated a capacity to reject it is going to be the better long-term bet. Religion has a place in modernity, much to the chagrin of the demon-possessed cultists that would see religion wiped out as the last “hurdle” between themselves and a false utopia of blood.
The Future of Religion
While speculative, a brief aside should be given to conceptualize where religion might go from here. It appears likely that we are passing into the final phase of a Hegelian dialectic at a massive global scale. The Thesis of universalist religion, the Antithesis of Materialism, and an eventual Synthesis of a new form of moral foundation. While the West is likely to swing back to Christianity (or its damaged cousin, Islam) for a few generations, that will not cancel out the positive effects of economic growth and scientific development that were achieved under a materialist paradigm.
Rather it seems likely that humanity will synthesize the spiritual and the physical into a new conceptualization of reality10. Physical reality as defined by mathematics, but also higher forms and immutable immaterial moral systems. Previous works on a potential Holistic Civilization delve into this idea with somewhat greater depth11. For now, it does seem that information technology and industrial economic production are pushing humanity into a second Axial Age12.
It could be in the next century or two, several Messianic figures will emerge. The messages delivered there may help create a new form of moral certainty that we are badly lacking in the modern age.
In Conclusion:
Don’t waste time arguing with the Progressive Leftists. They really are just demon-possessed shells, and there’s no one “in there” to argue with. Its an extension of the corrupted ideology possessing some poor soul. A monster intent on spreading misery, suffering, and corruption even at its own expense because it believes in nothing and has no moral foundation beyond a hateful drive to do harm.
State: the bureaucratic enforcement mechanism, individuals and hierarchy that make up the function of a national government. Generally described as the “managerial state.” See Samuel Francis “Leviathan & Its Enemies” for more.
The motte and bailey fallacy is an argumentative strategy where an aggressor retreats to a more defensible position (the "motte") when faced with criticism of an unacceptably outrageous position (the "bailey"). This tactic often involves confusing the audience by shifting between these two positions, making it appear as though the outrageous claim has been defended. As a result a simple-minded audience may be easily convinced that nonsense is true by a sufficiently skilled arguer radically shifting goalposts and definitions as a debate progresses.
Motte: Represents the defensible and generally reasonable position, often used to retreat when faced with opposition.
Bailey: the outrageous position that is initially advanced, but later claimed to have been defended when the motte is attacked.
Karl Jaspers pioneered the idea of the Axial Age. According to Jaspers, the period between 800 to 200 B.C.E. was the time in which all foundations that underlie current civilization came into being. Some extend the Axial period as late at 600 A.D. The Axial Age plays a central, foundational, or crucial role in human history and moral philosophy. Further information on the Axial Age and a Second Axial Age available with this link.
A substacker who wished to remain anonymous made the following comment:
"I’ve often told my family that as much as I like my progressive friends, if we ever had concentration camps for folks like us, I think as I was led off to the Camp they would say I deserved it."
This makes sense of the odd placement of New Age beliefs that do not pattern well with the pagan structures they claim. A lot of the New Agers in Progressive Liberal circles react to what they perceive as chaos in an animistic way rather than a properly pagan one. This track of reengagement with the spiritual is accelerating their corrupted transfiguration. The deification of self is evident, but there is an awful lot of admission to being puny gods.
A substacker who wished to remain anonymous made the following comment:
"I’ve often told my family that as much as I like my progressive friends, if we ever had concentration camps for folks like us, I think as I was led off to the Camp they would say I deserved it."
This makes sense of the odd placement of New Age beliefs that do not pattern well with the pagan structures they claim. A lot of the New Agers in Progressive Liberal circles react to what they perceive as chaos in an animistic way rather than a properly pagan one. This track of reengagement with the spiritual is accelerating their corrupted transfiguration. The deification of self is evident, but there is an awful lot of admission to being puny gods.