Satan hates godly, fruitful, multiplying, ruling, and subduing humans. He hates the Church that is taking back his territory. And he hates most fiercely covenant Christians who catechize their children.

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves (the devils) are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.—C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.—Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Between these two quotes exists a powerful point. As it relates to Satan and the demonic realm, we must not dismiss, obsess, or live in ignorance of our greatest foe. Instead, as good soldiers of Christ, we must understand who our enemy is, what he hates most, and where that hatred is aimed in our society today.
A Crash Course on Satan
In the spirit of knowing our enemy well, here is a bare-bones summary of the prince of darkness.
He is called the devil, the dragon, a deceiver, the serpent, the prince and god of this world, and an “angel” who is in charge of the abyss (Revelation 9:11; 12:4,9, 13-14; 2 Corinthians 4:4; 6:15; Genesis 3:1-5, 13; John 12:31). He is chief among the fallen devils who were cast out of heaven for their rebellion against God (Revelation 12:9). Originally made as the most beautiful of all God’s angelic hosts (Ezekiel 28:12-19), he became the father of narcissism, enamored with his own beauty, a megalomaniac who wanted to elevate his throne over and above the Living God (Isaiah 14:12-15). He and his entire demonic horde of minions were cursed to slither along the face of the earth, like a starving pack of famished lions, seeking whomever they may devour (1 Peter 5:8). He is morally corrupted and evil to his rotten core (Matthew 13:19). He is a pathological liar and has been a murderer from the beginning (John 8:44). He is a seditious schemer and slanderer extraordinaire (Ephesians 6:11; Job 1:9-11). All of this along with the fact that he disguises himself as an agent of light while secretly planning your demise (2 Corinthians 11:14). That is who Satan is.
In regards to what Satan does, he is ever working in opposition to the people of God (Job 2:1-7). He attempts to thwart angelic aid dispatched to us in times of need (Jude 9; Daniel 10:13-21). And he stands vigorously in defiance of all of God’s purposes (Matthew 16:23), His written and spoken Word (Matthew 13:3-19), and against God’s righteousness (1 John 3:7-10). He works for the exploitation of human weakness (Ephesians 4:26-27). He labors incessantly to ensure we fall away from God (1 Thessalonians 3:5). And, along with all of this, he is the chief accuser of humanity before the throne of God (Revelation 12:10).
What Satan Hates the Most
When you take all the verses in Scripture as a whole, you begin to see a malevolent spiritual being who salivates in searing hatred against humanity. After this dazzling creature was cast from the halls of heaven, God knelt down in the dust of the earth to craft a being to rule over and defeat him. As Satan stood from a distance, he watched with perfect hate that God would design such a feeble creature to be the one that rules him. The purest form of disgust washed over him as God imprinted His glorious image upon the soul of man. Blind fury consumed him as God breathed His life-giving breath into Adam’s lungs. Jealousy gripped the fallen spirit’s heart as man and woman, embodied creatures with an immaterial soul, communed in paradise with their God. A past time the cursed angel once enjoyed.
With the envy of a teenage girl whose darling former sugar muffin was now dating her bestie, Satan was driven into compulsive hatred. His jealousy propelled him into an unrelenting war against the man and the woman. He placed the crosshairs of his ire squarely on the shiny new couple, and all of their offspring forever. As man had been sculpted from the dust, Satan took on the body of a slithering serpent and snaked his way into the garden to eliminate his opposition.
Through his cunning and craftiness, he tricked the man and woman into vacating their thrones, abdicating their crowns, and being subject to his slavery and death forever. Like prisoners of war, Lucifer gleefully tortured the race of man, laughing every time they squealed, concentrating the lion’s share of his wrath to be aimed right at the center of their purpose. Since man was made to be fruitful, multiplying, ruling, and subduing, and the extenders of God’s dominion, Satan would attack their fruit, make them divisive, weak, and subjected, and the agents who build up his kingdom instead of God’s. Since men were made to be leaders in their homes and to hold fast to the commands, Satan would convince them to be weak, pathetic, passive, and disinterested in what God says. Since women were made to joyfully submit to her husband, build a home, and bear much fruit, Satan would work tirelessly to convince her to oppose her husband, abandon the home, and abandon her motherly instincts.
We must remember, it was Satan who came first to Eve, the one who would bear the race of serpent-crushing men. Under the influence of this unclean spirit, it was Cain who butchered human life, killing his brother in a fit of rage. It was the serpent-wearing Pharaoh who called for all the male children to be murdered in the Nile. It was the serpent-worshipping people of Canaan, who threw their children into the flames of Molech. And it was the maniac despot Herod, who worshiped the lord of darkness, by killing all the infants in Bethlehem. Throughout the Bible, Satan has been attacking the race of man, stealing, killing, and destroying everything man was called by God to be.
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I have been rebellious and sinful, absolutely, but I have been forgiven and adopted into God’s own family through Jesus Christ. Whatever I’m wearing, wherever I am, this is my identity. Whatever I’m wearing, whoever I’m with, I want to live this identity out faithfully in every word and every action.

I was sitting in a meeting this week when a thought randomly crossed my mind about how odd it would be if I had come in wearing the clothes I had on earlier that same day, when I went to swim laps at the pool. My goggles and togs didn’t raise any eyebrows at the pool, but they would have at the meeting. And if I had shown up at the pool with my meeting clothes on, that would have drawn a bit of attention, as well.
Clearly, there are appropriate things to wear at appropriate times. When I get this wrong and realise that I’m overdressed or underdressed or somehow looking out of place, I’m embarrassed (though I’ve never worn swim togs to a meeting). This is true of clothes, but it can also apply to the demeanour I put on in different settings. In a formal meeting, I try hard to remember to be formal in my manners and speech. I don’t shout in a setting like that. But I do shout at the basketball court, and I’m even louder on a roller-coaster. I happily make silly faces for small children, but I don’t make any faces like that for airport security officers. Clearly, there are appropriate ways to behave at appropriate times. When I get this wrong and realise that I’ve acted or spoken in ways that do not fit the circumstance I’m in, I’m embarrassed.
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Many of those who express concern for the current condition of our society, as well as the trajectory it is on, tend to pour a lot of their energy into examining political ideology, political parties, the role that social and economic class play, but do not often look into the interconnected web of culture defining myths and how these play out in “the current situation.” One of the values of a thinker like Jacques Ellul is that he makes the connection between the administrative state and the fundamental myths of our culture. It is one thing to rail against the administrative state, against big government; it is another to peer into the problem and understand that the administrative state is a cultural necessity in the west. It is encouraging to see people reading Ellul, Burnham, Francis and others on this subject. The more the better. It is important that we explore all the connections between enlightenment liberalism, personal autonomy, the idea of human rights, the idea of human progress, scientific thinking, technology, and the administrative state.
The administrative state is not something that is ruining a good thing, that is, a free society. Rather, the administrative state is its logical conclusion, at least when liberty is conceived of in enlightenment terms. It is imperative we see that managerialism is the logical expression of western rationalism. To talk of wielding power to control and direct the bureaucracy for the aims of the right or for conservatism is to misunderstand the fundamental nature of the administrative state. Left wing politics is the natural expression of enlightenment liberalism. And the administrative state is the instantiation of both. Although people will try, there really can be no “right wing managerialism.” To proffer “solutions” which will be enacted and realized through policy or management is essentially to embrace the rules of the game as set up by our liberal culture following the enlightenment. The core myths of our society are essentially liberal. The implication of this is that any attempt to fix the problems generated by the managerial state using the managerial state can never arrest the trajectory of our society. They are built into managerialism itself.
As I will soon be discussing in an upcoming piece on Ellul’s “The Political Illusion,” we do not really have a choice at this point but to harness the power of the technical approach to societal management. It is of a piece with mechanized forms of production and manufacturing. As a nation we are no longer free to reject technology in spite of its ills, because that would make us vulnerable to our neighbors. Thus we must be rolling tanks off our assembly lines because other countries have assembly lines producing tanks. We must be a technical society because all other sufficiently powerful states are also technical societies. This means that technical management will be with us for some time yet, likely until some form of global collapse renders it dead. At that point, real political choice will return. Until then, we must learn to deal with a system that is designed to realize liberal ideology. We on the right, when we deal with the administrative state, must understand that we are playing inside someone else’s game where all the rules are designed to produce outcomes in line with liberal ideology. If you try to instantiate conservative ideas by means of the administrative state, they will end up becoming liberalized in their realization. Knowing this, though, it is imperative we understand as fully and deeply as possible what managerialism is, how it works, what are its strengths and, most importantly, its flaws. In aid of this goal, we turn today to a portion of Alasdair MacIntyre’s “After Virtue.”
Why the Manager?
MacIntyre wrote his book to help us understand the devastating effect that enlightenment rationalism and liberalism has had upon our moral thinking, and then how that change in thinking also had a ruinous impact upon the moral practices of western society. He also offered a proposal for a way forward, that is, the recovery of virtue. The quick version of his argument is that enlightenment thinkers wanted to found morality on reason alone. They did not want to base it upon superstition, that is, on the Christian-Aristotelian understanding that morality is based on a metaphysical order directed towards realizing in our actions our purpose, our telos, as human beings. Enlightenment thinkers thought they could find a way to ground morality and ethics in reason alone. This, MacIntyre shows in exhaustive detail, has been a miserable failure. This was one of the main goals of the enlightenment. The failure of this project effectively renders the enlightenment experiment a failure, with devastating consequences for our society.
He argues that what has emerged to replace the old teleological system of ethics is “emotivism.” Basically, I do whatever feels right to me. What happens when my feelings conflict with your feelings? They can only be resolved through the will to power. I have the power to impose my feelings upon you. This is why the hysterical protestor is such a feature of our society. They are logical expression of enlightenment liberal morality.
MacIntyre argues that we as human beings tend to be drawn to archetypes and he identifies three main mythical figures that guide our expression of personal moral autonomy. On the personal level we elevate the “Rich Aesthete” who lives for their own enjoyment, tasting all the pleasures of life. Their work, their play, all of that they do are done for their own personal advancement and fulfillment. This is the person who is projected to us through our televisions and social media. The second figure is that of the “Therapist” who is there to help us become “adjusted” to this modern life using scientific methods. They are not there to judge us or to speak truths we do not want to hear; rather, their purpose is to transform people who are maladjusted and unhappy into happy, well-adjusted persons suited to live in the modern world.
In the public realm, since the enlightenment has banished moral and religious questions from the public sphere, we are expected to deal only in questions of “effectiveness.” The archetype of this effective person is “The Manager.” The manager is the hero of the era of reason, science and technology. He is the one who turns raw materials into finished products, unskilled labor into a effective work force, and turns investments into profits. The expert manager is an aspirational figure, someone to be looked up to and admired. The manager is there to run society quietly and efficiently. Effectiveness is its own end, its own purpose, its own reason.
But managers, argues MacIntyre, do have the control they think they do. Managerial effectiveness is a fiction, he argues. The idea of “managerial effectiveness” functions much in the same way that “God” used to operate within society prior to the enlightenment. The pronouncements of expert managers are to be received with a kind of awe. They will effectively direct our lives in complete neutrality, basing their decisions on nothing more than “facts” and “science.” They are not clouded by moral prejudice. The expert manager rejects all teleological conceptions, that our life has a metaphysical purpose and that we live best when we pursue that purpose. No, his authority rests purely on his “effectiveness” and his reliance on “facts.”
This conception of the expert manager is built on the enlightenment idea that truth is “self-evident.” The “facts” will speak for themselves. All you have to do is simply collect them as they present themselves and their meaning will be obvious without any necessity for interpretation or an interpreter interposing himself between us and the pure necessity dictated to us by the facts themselves. The problem with this idea, argues MacIntyre, is that a “fact” so conceived requires a world without any prior theories or knowledge. Neither can you form any theories from these “facts.” Otherwise the pure “fact” would be tainted with my prejudices. The world in which “facts” exist is a world that can only exist if there is no interpretation of the world. The world would be uninterpretable. It is a world without theory and from which theories cannot be drawn.