To fight and win in the culture war across the West is to first establish who and how your enemy fights. The Christian Bible points out the first vector of battle early on in Genesis 3. The forces of evil won their first battle by changing the epistemic scope of humanity’s knowledge; said differently, humanity’s knowledge moved from a good set of possibilities to a set of good and evil possibilities: “knowing good and evil,” as the text of Genesis writes. This result of knowing good and evil came, of course, through a deception, “You will be like God. . . .” It has been said that all warfare is deception and surprise. Humanity was exposed to a different set of influences, those that were evil, and they certainly did not achieve becoming “like God.”

Fast forwarding to the 21st century, evil’s vector of attack still resides on changing the epistemic scope of humanity’s knowledge. This is a battle every parent, particularly in the West, faces day to day, everyday. The social scientists of the 19th century learned an invaluable fact about humans: kids, ages 1 – 7, have nearly no defenses to the influences to which they are exposed. From this, a whole litany of “influence constructs” were developed, what we call these days “influence campaigns.” The prized target group is clear, ages 1 – 7, where influence schemes get the most bang for its buck. The goal in the evil paradigm for humanity’s ruin is to change the scope of influences to which humans are exposed, especially the kids. Evil influences get fed to humanity, and the more humanity believes those evil influences to be of little consequence, the better.

To get evil influences into humanity’s epistemic field was intentional and done through deception in the Genesis text. Therefore, it is naive to suppose evil has become less sophisticated in the 21st century: it is still intentional and much of it done through deception. The consequence of accepting what I just said often creates cognitive dissonance, making it too difficult to accept. The evil influence peddling now comes through radio, tv, music, internet, social media platforms ,apps, and the like. These are the tools that shape so many’s epistemic field today. It is hard for people to accept that the injection of evil into these tools is both intentional and intermixed with some measure of deception. Being unable to accept that evil intent is part of these tools is to be an utter slave to the deception. As it was in Genesis, so it is now.

To someone skeptical of what I argue here, try asking the question of how the power of shaping the world’s epistemic framework could be ignored or not used? Ask further, if this god-like power (framing how everyone sees things) were so readily able to inject your view of things upon the masses, what would stop you from using it this way? I act as though I am asking hypotheticals here, but really we could produce evidence to show that those–especially social media platform controllers–who had this power at their finger tips have already answered our questions. What they did with it was to use that power to frame how people see things to suit their agenda and how they see things. Bias, recall, is inescapable of all things limited (which every human is, and AI will always be so as well); the question is whether someone’s bias is evil or good.

The presumption Christians–and I invite others not of the faith to join us–should hold is that the world is the same as it was in Genesis 1 – 3. The forces of evil will try to reframe everyone’s world so that there is greater exposure to evil, through deception. The intent, therefore, to use modern digital modes of communication to influence towards evil is adorned in deception but intentional as putting shoes on for the day. Even if we suppose the mouth-pieces of these modes of communication are just fools and ignorant, it does nothing but show fools and the ignorant are useful tools of malice, and the pawns of the ultimate architects of chaos at the top of the food chain. Each adult person’s realm of influence is his to choose; this is the raw responsibility of adulthood and being a moral agent. The love of money is the root of all evil; remember, money is little more than a sign of energy and one’s claim on status in this world. And I’ll tell you what is a very profitable vector: getting as many as I can to see things my way, and then I simply monetize the very thing I fashioned the masses to accept and proclaim. It is amazing Romans 1 ends by establishing that those overcome with evil become the public preachers of the very evils that consumed their souls.

Dr. Scalise