The greatest trick of the devil

I think about the probably most famous quote from the movie The Usual Suspects these days:

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. (The Usual Suspects; see YouTube)

In the German dubbing, Die üblichen Verdächtigen, it is translated: Der größte Trick, den der Teufel je gebracht hat, war, die Welt glauben zu lassen, es gäbe ihn gar nicht. (see YouTube)

Infinitely wrong

It must be a thought in the air these days. This morning I stumbled upon this X-posting by NIUS chief Reichelt:

The most extreme trick of the devil was to convince the world that he doesn’t exist. The most extreme trick of the left cultural warriors was to convince conservatives that cultural struggle is not appropriate. (@jreichelt, 13.07.2025)

It is a coherent analytical analogy, and a precise, refreshingly new observation anyway. The comparison of left cultural warriors with Satan seems just as coherent as it is charming.

But after reading the post, something struck me: How sure are we that the author of the post, Mr. Reichelt, himself believes that the devil exists?

Not a few of us saw the movie back then, and we chuckled at this point. We specifically remembered this sentence. Yes, many know exactly this one sentence, without ever having seen the movie! We have repeatedly applied the quote to concrete situations over the years, just as Mr. Reichelt did in this post. All of this together is an indication that this quote contains a truth.

What truth is contained?

A person who considers themselves a non-believer might say something like: That the devil has convinced people that he doesn’t exist is a metaphor for the fact that people do not want to admit to themselves that one of their actions is evil. (It is quite possible that a better atheistic interpretation comes to your mind. If every such interpretation is wrong, infinitely many of them are possible. While for the equation 1 + 1 there is only one correct solution, literally infinitely many wrong solutions are conceivable.)

I have dedicated a good part of my life to the futile task of explaining to people how their concepts of good and evil work. It has to do with Relevant Structures, and over the years this explanatory approach has proven itself and been confirmed.

However, the great mistake of my (previous) life was to think that if people only understood how good and evil function, they would be motivated to strive for an adequate harmonization, in other words: to act well within the framework and context of real possibilities.

Oh, how I was wrong!

Psychology and the How

When I say evil action, I mean here: an action that rationally foreseeably leads to the detriment of structures for whose preservation the individual is responsible or in which they are involved – actually relevant structures.

So what drives a person to do evil? And if they know what drives them, from where do they derive their justification?

Psychology provides various explanations, but they all seem helpless.

Theories like Moral Disengagement by Albert Bandura describe how people cope with doing evil. For example, by citing a supposedly higher morality, such as a supposed divine will. For example, through euphemistic language that conceals the actual act, such as women’s rights instead of murdering ‚disturbing‘ children. For example, through diffusion of responsibility, like the police officer who beats up demonstrators for basic rights while just following orders. For example, through dehumanization of the victims, like the German propaganda that today degrades dissenters to rats or pus-filled appendices.

These approaches explain how evil people hide the evil of their actions from the still-living remnants of their conscience. It explains why they even want to do evil in the first place.

Further explanatory approaches in psychology include narcissism, Machiavellianism, or psychopathy, but upon closer inspection, one finds that here only attempts are made to find metaphors or schemas for evil – but not to name the engine of why a person knowingly does evil.

When I first heard someone throwing around the accusation of narcissism, I looked up what it actually means today. The literature quoted typical example sentences from narcissists, and ironically, it was literally the kind of sentences that person incessantly uttered. Later I learned that the motivation of those prone to narcissism is their own injuries and earlier insecurities.

But narcissists are not the only injured ones, and so the question remains again: Why do some people willfully and seeing the damage choose to do evil permanently and repeatedly?

The famous Stanford prison experiment describes the slide into structural evil. Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil. Hollywood particularly enjoys films about psychopaths who take pleasure in the suffering of their victims and are neither restrained by empathy nor by conscience or fear of punishment in their actions.

All of this describes the structure in which evil implements its actions. The early injuries of the narcissist, the lack of empathy of the psychopath, and so on, they are the gateway of evil, but they are not the drive, the first motivator – the first cancer cell that was not destroyed in time.

Psychology, I believe today, describes the how of evil, but not (convincingly) its why. Similarly, by the way, science still has no clue how consciousness arises.

Ignorance and Confusion

In 2023, I published an essay, also as a video, titled Wieviel Teufel steckt in der Politik?.

In it, I wrote sentences about my then state of knowledge, for which I am almost ashamed today because they are embarrassingly cowardly – and grossly wrong as well. I wrote: I consider ‚God‘ to be the metaphorical anthropomorphization of all that exists and its rules. And ‚devil‘ is our metaphorical language for a felt principle behind everything we consider evil.

I spent many years of my productive life searching for metaphors. My thinking was so consumed by the search for metaphors that I could no longer help but see metaphors everywhere – mea culpa!

Today I feel in my bones that it is simply cowardice to see metaphors everywhere. I murmur mea culpa and hit my chest again. I have learned since then, at the latest when I saw certain reactions; see my video on this.

I see people doing evil who clearly see how their actions cause concrete harm and suffering to others – and yet continue to do so.

And all too often I can no longer explain their motivation solely through ignorance and confusion.

In German: There exists a force that is most precisely described as demons. An external power that humans open the door to (for example, through the indiscipline of the simple person or certain rituals of the higher-ups) and that then drives humans to do evil.

And I sigh

The film The Usual Suspects was released in 1995, so three decades ago – yes, thirty years ago!

I note this and sigh: Where has the time gone?

In fact, the thought is still much older. The quote known from the film can be found practically verbatim in Baudelaire: que la plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas.

My second, much more concerned thought then is: Why has humanity mentally regressed in these thirty years?

The greatest trick, as that movie quote goes, that the devil ever pulled was to convince the world that he doesn’t exist.

Instead of doesn’t exist, it could also be phrased as that demons are just metaphors – mea maxima culpa.

Against the evil spirits

We could have known it all! We were warned, by Paul himself:

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12)

This is not just the word of the apostle. It seems to me today to be the most rational explanation for the events.

‘It is what it is, you can’t do anything about it’, ‘They had a difficult childhood’, and ‘Money doesn’t stink’ are no longer plausible or even acceptable as explanations for evil.

We are not (only) fighting against people of flesh and blood, we are fighting against the evil spirits in whose service these people stand.

It would be rational not to want to stand alone in this fight.