The man that serves God with all of his mind and all of his heart is the highest man, the one capable of the most good, both in courage and in love, able to change himself in a way that matters, and who inspires people for centuries to come. But in a world without God, what is the next best option for embodying virtue?
As Nietzsche's work points to, it is the self-defined man, who rises above the tyranny of democratic demands and harnesses the will to power to shape his own life, as well as those of the people around him. To most people, the Ubermensch is a demonic man, an amoral force which is only interested in itself, because most people rationalize their lack of virtues as being itself a virtue, the inversion of the slave morality which perceives their own weakness and inability to harm others as being a conscious decision, as opposed to the inconvenient truth that they are too cowardly to own and follow their own desires, and fight against the resistance provided by the world and by life—in other words, most people are 'nice' and 'peaceful' because they are impotent, not because they are fundamentally good.
There is much that we can learn from Nietzsche's writing in our age of oversocialization and pathological niceness, but still, the fact remains that he wasn't able to see the limitations of such a self-informed life. The will, as Schopenhauer noted, might be 'beneath' representation, in that we can for instance move our body, and intend something, without going through the process of representation of the mind, but it is still limited in the fact that it is selfish, which is why those with the strongest will are hardly beacons of virtues, they are merely obsessive people, who might certainly be very successful in the world, but hardly conscious, loving people.
Being a devil is preferable to being an average person, who is conditioned by their environment to replicate what they've learned (explicitly but more important implicitly, the fear of authority you get from school for instance) and lives their life mainly on habits and momentum, but devils are ultimately inferior to angels.
The problem is that hardly anyone is an angel nowadays, and there is a game of deception that makes the identification of a man into the categories of regular person, devil and angel, rather tricky. Regular people want to be seen as angels, which is why compulsive niceness has almost become a religion in our times, because anything that could offend or exclude someone is seen as a fundamental act of violence.
On the other hand, angels often appear to regular people as devils, because truth, love, beauty, freedom and meaning are beyond the confines of our current society, which means that only someone with high integrity, and the willingness to reject the values of our world if need be, can embody those virtues. Which is to say, 'nice' is pretty much always the enemy of 'good'. Devils and angels both reject the world, but the latter favor God instead, whereas the former favor their own ambition. To the undiscerning eye, there is neither Heaven nor Hell, neither good nor bad, only 'okay' and 'fine', a gray paste of mediocrity which seeps into everything that they see, feel, hear, and produce (if they ever produce anything of their own).
Devils have a crystallized, unified will, which is much more than what the average person can say about themselves, who essentially follow whatever is dangled in front of them, completely bound by incentives and distractions, instead of living from a personal compass. The problem with the devils is that they are driven by obsession rather than love, which still allows them to rise above most people who are either utterly aimless in life, or stick to the safe, predictable script provided by their society, neither of which are satisfying.
Obsession is a double-edged sword, because on one hand it can lead to excellence, but on the other hand it makes people lopsided, the type of people who spend all of their time around their niche obsession and cannot appreciate anything outside of that, or who will sacrifice the other aspects of their life just to be great at one specific thing.
The difference between lopsidedness and simply having weaknesses in our life, which we all do because we only have so much time and energy, is that the former leads to unhealthy ways of compensating that end up creating more problems. For instance, someone who is emotionally repressed will then use their mind to manage their emotions, or to try to understand what they want out of life, both of which are things that the mind can simply not do. Or someone who is unable to engage in healthy confrontation will try to build their entire life around not having to confront people, using roundabout strategies like passive aggressiveness, gossip, or avoidance, instead of taking the cleanest, most direct approach of talking to the other person.
In the case of obsessiveness, the kind of lopsidedness that we typically see revolve around intimacy, relaxation and playfulness, in that by and large, obsessive people aren't able to engage in any of those. Obsessives tend to escape from personal conflicts into their work, or tend to have severe health problems due to how much stress they feel on a daily basis, or are simply unable to engage in something just for fun, instead feeling compelled to get something out of every experience and every thing they do. This latter tendency might ironically get in the way of their achievements, because a mind that is constantly focused on narrow things lives it life with blinders on, unable to see all the opportunities and delight around it. Moreover, the constant high-pressure state that they are in, and the high expectations that they have built for themselves lead to a state of mind that makes it difficult to learn anything new, because obviously being a beginner at anything involves a great deal of mistakes and confusion, something that the obsessive might interpret as a deep problem about themselves.
Obsessive types are particularly bad at dealing with other people when it comes to work, because they usually lean into micro-managing if they are in a position of power, or being hyper-critical of others, both of which foster a negative atmosphere under which most people do not want to work on, leading to a downwards spiral of increasing doubt, fear, and loss of joy.
By and large I stand with the opinion that there are many things we can learn from obsessive people, because their ability to focus their time and energy on a single thing is very impressive, a far cry from the average person who has essentially (especially with the advent of screens) no control over their attention, and who has incredibly low standards to which they inevitably fall down to.
That being said, they obviously have some major, major problems that are fundamental to how they operate in life, and one of the main consequences of their narrow, and rather selfish, form of focus is that they are unable to love anyone or anything, because love requires a broad, soft, embodied and selfless form of attention. 1 This is why their relationships are terrible, why they are unable to devote themselves to a community, and why they cannot face their own death, because the will, by itself, is selfish, which is why it takes self-perpetuation as its highest value, and thus does everything it can to push death away from its awareness. Devils are better than mediocre men, but angels are better than devils, because only they can love and surrender to God, which is to say, be aligned with Truth.
Let's distinguish between different forms of devils to be more precise. There are people who become very rich through a variety of reasons, such as fruitful investments or a successful company, but ultimately they are only interested in money. Let's call them 'financial devils', they are 'higher' than the average person in that what they did was more difficult than what the average person does (I'm not including in this category the people born into wealth), but they don't have any notable virtue, no notable character, which is why they tend to read and write forgettable self-help and investment books, and hardly anyone could be inspired by them.
Regular people tend to think of themselves as better than the financial devils because of superior 'morality', but again it is really bullshit, most people would trade their "morals" in exchange of vast money in a heartbeat if they could change their life without much struggle, it's just that they never bothered to pursue that seriously.
Then you have the more spiritual devils, the ones that actually think about goodness, courage, freedom, and other virtues, put those above worldly concerns in terms of their priorities, and seek to live a life in alignment with those principles. They are devils in the sense that they reject most of the aspects of the society they are born in, and do not strive to be seen as good by the majority. The most notable examples are, of course, Nietzsche, with his idea of the Ubermensch, and his hatred of the herd, or Gurdjieff, who didn't shy from inflicting onto his students what many could (rightfully) call abuse.
There can of course be an intersection between the financial devils and the spiritual devils, but most of the time it's the latter who dabble in the games of the former, in order to acquire enough money so as to not have to compromise their time and energy, like what Gurdjieff did, rather than the former moving towards the latter, because it's hard to imagine someone who is only interested in money suddenly having an interest in growing their conscious character.
As a third type, we can add the political devils, the ones that write manifestos that inspire crowds of people, or who lead revolutions. I don't have much to say about them because I am not super interested in that form of history, I prefer to focus on brilliant individuals personally, but I am adding this to give a more complete version of what I mean by 'devil': people who have enough qualities in themselves to have an impact on the world, regardless of whether their impact was positive or not. There are of course many more types, like in various domains of competition, but by and large, it is the spiritual devils that interest me here.
Another thing we can learn from devils is that accepting to be seen as evil by some people is a necessary condition for being good. This is because goodness is not a matter of consensus, or of social rewards, but rather it comes from an attunement to truth and love, and from the ability to act despite one's fears. Society could never be a reliable basis for morality because society is a self-informed collective, the same way that ego is a self-informed self, meaning that all it can do is perpetuate and expand itself, make itself more powerful and efficient, but never more loving or truthful, because those qualities are about attuning to Unself, what is beyond the self and the world that it builds.
People who get their sense of morality from their ambient society will necessarily change what 'good' means to them depending on what they get socially rewarded for. It's fascinating to witness people who harbor a hatred for the system in their youth, but who then become richer and more successful in the world, and then rationalize how rich people are actually virtuous, now that they have become one of them. The human mind is fantastic at rationalization, because it tends to prefer the path of least resistance: resolve cognitive dissonance instead of facing the truth and having to change itself.
Just because most people aren't rich doesn't mean that they are good however. Most people aren't successful because they don't have the courage, focus, vision, tolerance for failure, and patience to obtain results, but what they do is that they pretend to themselves and others that they lack success because they are too moral to seize power. This is bullshit. Again, this is why I peg devils as being higher than most people, even if their goals and 'successes' can be so hollow, because the ability to pursue worldly success requires more virtue than what the average person can, and it is far, far more difficult and humbling than sitting on the touch and complaining about rich people.
Goodness has to be its own reward, this is the basis of real integrity, because otherwise we become captured by external rewards. This has become incredibly obvious nowadays, where optimizing for views, likes and shares leads 'content creators' (a dreadful term if there has ever been one) to produce whatever the lowest common denominator wants to see in their feed to scroll away their time. Mass appeal is the death of all virtues, which doesn't mean that sitting in obscurity makes one's work good, obviously by sheer statistics most of the unsuccessful artists are also terrible, but it does mean that if your work becomes appreciated by the masses at large, you might have to wonder where you have gone wrong, because most people are so undiscerning that they cannot see any conscious quality in anything, which is why their opinions are essentially worthless, something which the devils understand very, very well.
Devils don't appeal to the masses, instead they pursue what they want, simply shrugging away the criticism and ridicule in the meantime. People pleasers on the other hand have no coherent sense of self, no integrity on which to build any virtue upon, because people's needs are constantly fluctuating, as a collective especially, but even as an individual. Most people don't even know themselves enough to simply know what they want, so how could you even please such a person? You can't, and even if you could, it would be a terrible idea regardless.
People who cannot accept being seen as bad by others have to play all kinds of mental games to convince themselves, and the others around them, that they are good little boys or girls, that it's really the other side who is full of meanies and baddies, which ironically leads to a lot of self-righteous evil, because they cannot simply take responsibility and admit whenever they do something bad.
Activists for instance are essentially the exact opposite of the (spiritual) devils: they see themselves as inherently good, almost to the point of thinking that they are the arbiters of morality, but they also must convince others around them that they are good, because their ideas can only do so much without funding and mass approval. This is why they have to engage in various games to manipulate the public into doing this or that, pulling on their heartstrings, but on top of that, if this were ever brought to their attention, you can be sure that their excuse is that they are ultimately doing a good thing! Changing the world for the better is a good excuse for using shame, catastrophization, deceit, and for being highly emotional in their arguments according to them, which is why an increasing number of people don't align so much with modern activism, because they can feel the energy of manipulation underneath their seemingly 'moral' ideas. People are really good at sniffing out when someone is desperate for approval, especially women when it comes to men.
As François de La Rochefoucauld said, "The display of virtue is often rewarded, but virtue itself hardly ever." Once goodness becomes a matter of approval, it necessarily devolves into a racket of virtue signalling, which is of course what we see all around us. The faster our communication technologies become, the larger the gap between the display of virtue, and actual virtue, integrity of character and depth of living, becomes, which is why we live in the age of the lowest common denominator, of bureaucratic bloat and democratic tyranny, of complete and utter slop.
Finally, one thing we can appreciate devils for is just how much they care about their obsession, how high their standards tend to be, and how willing they are to rise above the masses to live more fully.
A general guideline I believe in is that someone's flame should never be tempered, but sometimes it might have to be redirected. Devils hold a very strong flame inside them, but because it is rarely healthy, the world demonizes them for it. A man in our times might for instance be obsessed with pursuing his ideal of masculinity, through lifting weights, removing distractions, pursuing financial independence, disciplining himself, something that the agreeable, ever so 'nice' middle class loves to sneer at 2, or critique on the grounds of misogyny (which is certainly a problem, but more of a symptom of our loveless world than a root cause that can be changed), none of which can meaningfully change those people.
You do not create angels by extinguishing the flames that animate the devils, because that either leads them to becoming weak, oversocialized puppies who are unable to embody any virtue due to a lack of integrity and drive, or more often than not, the pushback only leads to them double down on their way of living and their ideology, preferring to retreat to their in-group rather than interact with people who clearly don't understand them.
One of the most crippling blind spots of the left is that they treat every problem through structure and restrictions, which inevitably destroys any drive for anything, hence leading to the well known problem of a mass of people leeching from a few productive people, something we see in larger companies, and in more socialist societies at large. This is why they are obsessed with government regulations—which of course are important because unchecked market forces lead to disastrous externalities—or using shame to change how people behave—shaming people for being racist, misogynist, instead of building bridges between people of different groups—or bureaucracies and guidelines, some of which can be good in some contexts, but all of which are worthless if there is no drive for goodness, no energy to build a better world.
Leftists cannot hold intensity and energy in their body, which is why they are often so depressed, tired, and dissociated, why they resort to collective action, because they do not have enough personal drive to change themselves as an individual, and why their strategies so often revolve around restrictions, as mentioned above, because they do not feel in their body what the cost of preventing someone's drive entails, because they themselves have little to none of it.
Goodness is not fostered by tempering people's flames no, instead there needs to be a small set of conscious people who inspire others around them to be better. This is why devils are so much more respectful than the average, mediocre person, because you can respect a figure such as Nietzsche, or Gurdjieff, or even in our times, someone like Andrew Tate—not that I approve of his views in any shape or form—because they are not people pleasers, they are not buzzkills who walk around telling others what they can't do, they are people who pursue their path and brush aside any resistance, any critique, through their integrity.
Ultimately angels are more conscious and virtuous than devils, because there is nothing higher than serving God. Devils can only serve themselves, which is where so many of their problems and blind spots come from, but better to be a devil in a Godless world than to be part of the herd that worships conformity, mediocrity, passivity, security, comfort, and pleasure, such as the masses of our times.
1 Compare the hard attention that results from pornography for instance, which makes you stare at details, and at flat images, to the soft, gentle, embodied attention that comes from being with one's lover. Hard attention is all about what I want, what I crave, what I want to do to the other person, which is why it is so dehumanizing, because it reduces the quality of the other into a thing that I can own and manipulate. Soft attention on the other hand is about attunement, such as the ability to take in an entire scenery, or feel the vibe of the room, or get in touch with what my partner is feeling at this moment. This is the only meaningful form of love: the ability to feel the other from within, such that the sense of separation that we typically operate from vanishes.
A hallmark of people who live their life on soft attention is that they constantly notice details around them that they find beautiful, amusing, or interesting, whereas hard-attention people can only scan their environment for threats and rewards, things to be afraid, or things to desire. Nothing is vivid or mysterious to the hard-focusing eye, only 'nice' (meaning that it is good for my self), or pleasurable, or useful.
2 Such as Louis Theroux's Inside the Manosphere documentary.
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Devil God Nietzsche Virtue Niceness Softhardattention Porn Lopsidedness
2026-06-25