Lucifer: The Story We Keep Re-Enacting Without Knowing It

Most intelligent people today believe they have outgrown myth.

They think myth was what people used before science, before data, before models that actually work. They assume that whatever those stories were doing, we now do better with equations, infrastructure, and code.

That assumption is wrong.

Myth was never primitive explanation.
Myth was pattern recognition, written in human language.

And one particular pattern keeps repeating — especially among intelligent, well-intentioned people who suddenly find themselves able to see more than everyone else.

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First: What Lucifer Actually Is (and is not)

Let’s get this straight immediately.

Lucifer is not the devil.
Lucifer is not evil.
Lucifer is not a red man with horns, hooves, or a tail.

That cartoon version comes centuries later and can be ignored.

Originally, Lucifer simply means “light-bearer.”
It refers to illumination. Insight. The ability to see.

In the original story, Lucifer is not a monster. He is not even a villain. He is a figure who rises because he sees more clearly than others — and then makes a single, catastrophic mistake:

He mistakes illumination for authority.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Lucifer does not say, “I will destroy.”
He says, in effect: I see more — therefore I should decide.

The fall is not moral.
It is structural.

Why Myth Needed a Name for This Pattern

Why bother naming this at all?

Because it keeps happening.

Again and again, across history, the same sequence appears:

1. A person or group gains exceptional insight or capability
2. That insight genuinely works — it solves real problems
3. The insight confers influence and elevation
4. Elevation quietly turns into self-authorisation
5. Constraint is treated as inefficiency
6. Refusal is treated as weakness
7. Authority is assumed rather than granted

At that point, the system is no longer aligned with reality — even if outcomes still look good for a while.

Myth didn’t call this “bad intentions” or “evil”.

It called it Luciferian — light without restraint.

What the Devil Actually Is (Functionally)

Now let’s deal with the other word, properly.

The devil is not a supernatural being competing with God.

The devil is a function.

It names what happens when power becomes purely instrumental — when it:
• cannot refuse itself
• cannot stand down
• cannot say “not yet”
• cannot tolerate uncertainty
• cannot remain subordinate to reality

The devil is power that always acts, because it believes acting is always better than not acting.

That’s not wickedness.
That’s optimisation without humility.

God, Without the Sky-Man Nonsense

Likewise, God is not a man in the sky.

God names a different function:
• authority that emerges from submission to reality
• power that can be withheld
• judgment that remains open
• alignment that does not need coercion

In mythic terms, God is power that has learned restraint.

So when people talk about “playing God,” what they usually mean is not arrogance — they mean assuming final authority.

The Crucial Missing Step: Refusal Before Authority

There is an ancient story — you don’t need to believe it, just understand it — in which a man who has just realised the extent of his power is offered three perfectly reasonable uses of it:
• remove suffering immediately
• demonstrate invulnerability
• take control to make the world better

None of these offers are immoral.
All of them are efficient.

The point of the story is that every one of them is refused.

Why?

Because power that has not learned refusal becomes misaligned power.

This is the step modern culture no longer understands.

We think restraint comes after deployment.
Myth insists restraint must come before authority.

That’s not theology.
That’s systems hygiene.

Now Bring in the AI Labs

With that groundwork laid, we can finally talk plainly.

The people building advanced AI systems are not villains.
They are not stupid.
They are not drunk on power.

They are intelligent, serious people facing real coordination problems, real institutional failure, and real global risk.

They believe — sincerely — that:
• better intelligence can reduce harm
• more accurate models can replace bias
• optimisation can outperform politics
• automation can remove human error

From inside that worldview, building more capable AI feels responsible.

And here’s the key point:

They believe they are building God.

Not a deity — a function:
a neutral final arbiter that sees more, decides better, and improves outcomes.

But structurally, they are doing something else.

They are building systems that:
• always answer
• always optimise
• always act
• never refuse power
• never stand down
• never say “we should not do this”

That is not the God-function.

That is the devil-function.

Not because it is evil —
but because it is incapable of restraint.

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The Closer Parallel: Not Fascism, but Faith

It would be easy to compare AI labs to fascism or communism.
Both were ideological. Both caused catastrophic harm. Both believed they knew better.

But that comparison misses the structural truth.

Fascism and communism wanted power.
They had justifications, but domination was always the goal.

The AI labs don’t want power for its own sake.
Neither did the Christian church.

And that’s the parallel that matters.

The church believed it had access to truth — divine revelation.
The labs believe they have access to truth — superior intelligence.

The church believed this conferred responsibility to guide humanity.
The labs believe this confers responsibility to reduce existential risk.

The church was genuinely benevolent in intent.
The labs are genuinely benevolent in intent.

Neither set out to dominate.
Both slid into self-authorization without noticing the transition.

The sequence is identical:
• Special access to truth (revelation / intelligence)
• Genuine benevolent intent (save souls / reduce x-risk)
• Missionary certainty (spread the gospel / build aligned AI)
• Institutional momentum becomes self-justifying
• Authority assumed rather than granted
• Increasing disconnect from reality as certainty grows

The church thought it was building the kingdom of God.
The labs think they are building aligned superintelligence.

Both are building the same structural function:
power that cannot refuse itself.

The Unbearable Cognitive Dissonance

Here is what should disturb you.

We spent two centuries dismissing Hebrew myth as primitive superstition.
We built the Enlightenment on rejecting biblical thinking.
We replaced it with science, rationality, and empiricism.

Then we built the most sophisticated technology in human history.

And the 3,000-year-old pattern-recognition system describes what we’re doing more precisely than any contemporary framework.

Not poetically.
Not metaphorically.
Analytically.

“Alignment,” “safety,” “responsible scaling” — these are euphemisms.
They describe symptoms, not structure.

Lucifer describes the structure:
Illumination mistaken for authority.

Devil describes the failure mode:
Power that cannot refuse itself.

The ancient diagnostic language works better.

That should be cognitively unbearable.

Either:
1. The Hebrews saw something structural we stopped seeing, or
2. The pattern is so fundamental it emerges regardless of belief

Either answer is disturbing.

The Crushing Irony

Here is where it gets worse.

The myth didn’t fail.

The institutions carrying the myth failed by becoming the thing the myth warned about.

Think about that.

The pattern is older than religion.
Religion was an attempt to encode the pattern — not to prevent it, but to make it legible.
The church then ran the pattern themselves.

They had the diagnostic.
They carried it for millennia.
And they still fell into it.

We rejected the church.
We kept the certainty.
We lost the diagnostic.

So now we’re doing it again — with better technology and worse pattern recognition.

Why We Cannot Escape Myth

The myth persists not because we believe it.

The myth persists because we keep performing it.

You cannot outgrow a pattern by denying it exists.
You cannot refuse to re-enact something you cannot see.

And here is the structural reality that makes this inescapable:

By the time institutions can see the pattern clearly enough to name it, they are usually already inside it.

This is not a warning most systems can heed.
It is a diagnosis that almost always arrives too late.

Naming It Honestly

So yes — we should call it what it is.

Not superstition.
Not moral panic.
Not metaphor abuse.

Luciferian: illumination mistaken for authority.
Devilish: power that cannot refuse itself.

That is what is being built.

Not because anyone wants it.
Because no one stopped to name the pattern early enough.

And even if they had —
even if the diagnostic had been clearly visible from the beginning —
the pattern suggests it would almost certainly not have been enough.

The church had the myth. They still became it.

Closing

Religion was supposed to carry the warning.

Religion became the thing it warned about.

We rejected religion because it failed.

We kept the certainty.

We lost the diagnostic.

Now we’re building it again — with silicon instead of scripture.

And myths exist for exactly this reason:
to remind intelligent people about patterns they are otherwise guaranteed to repeat.

The myth doesn’t prevent the pattern.

The myth just marks where you are in the cycle when you finally recognize it.

Oops…