Theology offers a strange phenomenon: the Devil. Not as a supernatural force but as a narrative role — the bearer of everything the sacred self refuses to acknowledge it possesses. The Devil is powerful, cunning, seductive, commanding. The Devil acts. In Christian theology, God is often presented as transcendent, removed, in need of mediation. The Devil is immanent, immediate, effective.
What Keen observes is that theologically, the Devil carries the active, aggressive, commanding capacities that the sacred self has disowned. To be holy is to be passive, obedient, subordinate. The Devil possesses agency, will, power. The Devil is what the self cannot be and remain virtuous.
Applied at the level of the enemy: the nation that demonizes another nation is projecting onto that enemy nation the capacities it has disowned in itself. Listen to what a nation calls demonic about its enemy, and you hear a confession: these are the powers I have disowned; these are the capacities I refuse to claim.
The German Nazis demonized the Jews as "plotting world domination." This accusation reveals the Nazis' own narrative and ambition: the Nazis were the ones planning world domination; they projected this ambition onto the Jews and then attacked the Jews for having it. The accusation is a mirror.1
The Americans demonized the Soviets as "godless atheists" and inherently devious. This accusation reveals American anxiety about its own functional atheism — the way American nationalism operates as god-substitute, the way American power is exercised while claiming to be defending freedom. The accusation conceals what America has disowned about itself.
Demonology is not accidental. It is systematic. The machinery works like this:
Step 1: Identify the Disowned Capacity — What does our nation want to do but cannot claim as legitimate? Dominate? Acquire resources? Kill? The capacity itself is undeniable, but it cannot be admitted without shattering our self-image.
Step 2: Project It Onto the Enemy — We accuse the enemy of having exactly this capacity. The enemy wants to dominate. The enemy wants our resources. The enemy wants to kill us.
Step 3: Present Ourselves as Victim — Because the enemy has these evil capacities, we must defend ourselves. We are forced to respond. Our aggression is not choice; it is necessity. We are innocent.
Step 4: Employ Counter-Demonization — To justify our counter-attack (which is actually our exercise of the disowned power), we must demonize the enemy further. We must reduce them to something that does not deserve human consideration. We must make them demonic.
The result: we get to exercise power (dominate, acquire, kill) while maintaining the self-image of innocence. We are only responding to their evil.
This machinery requires the other party to accept the role of demon. If the enemy refuses to be demonized — if they say "we are also human, also defending, also afraid" — the machinery breaks down.
The pattern: nations demonize in the other what they most fear in themselves.
The accusations are often partially true (the enemy nation may have defensive paranoia, may be preparing for defense, etc.). But the hysteria with which the accusations are made reveals: we are accusing them of what we ourselves are doing and cannot admit.
To read propaganda as a nation's self-confession: take each accusation and ask what it reveals about the accuser. The Nazis' obsession with Jewish plotting reveals the Nazis' own grandiose ambitions. The Cold War American obsession with Soviet infiltration reveals American surveillance and espionage systems. Each accusation is a mirror held to the accuser.
Jungian psychology describes the shadow as the collection of capacities and traits that the ego has disowned and pushed into the unconscious. The shadow is not evil; it is simply unacknowledged. It is powerful precisely because it is unconscious.
The work of individuation involves recognizing and integrating the shadow — acknowledging: yes, I have this capacity for aggression, for selfishness, for deception. Once acknowledged, the capacity is no longer alien and can be consciously modulated.
Demonization is the refusal of this work at the collective level. Instead of acknowledging the shadow capacity (the nation's will to power, aggression, dominance), the nation projects it onto an external enemy. The enemy becomes the repository of everything the nation has disowned about itself.
The consequence: as long as the enemy exists and is demonized, the nation never has to face its own shadow. The nation can remain innocent. The disowned power is exercised (through war, domination, resource extraction) while the nation maintains the self-image of virtue.
This is extraordinarily effective politically. And extraordinarily dangerous psychologically and ethically.
Psychology describes how the shadow operates in individual psychology — how disowned capacities remain powerful in the unconscious and express themselves through projection, through defensive reactions, through dreams and slips.
Behavioral-mechanics describes how this same mechanism can be deliberately deployed as a tactical tool — how propaganda can be designed to trigger projection, how accusations can be structured to reveal and exploit what the opponent has disowned.
The handshake: if you understand how projection works psychologically, you can use it tactically. You can accuse an opponent of having exactly the capacities they are disowned in, and they will react defensively (because the accusation touches the truth). You can then use their defensive reaction as evidence that the accusation is correct, deepening the demonization.
This is not lying, in a narrow sense. The accusation is often partially true. The genius of demonization is that it takes partial truth (the opponent does have some of these capacities; all humans and nations do) and inflates it into total truth (the opponent is essentially demonic).
Understanding this mechanism enables both deployment and resistance. You can use demonization against opponents. Or you can recognize when demonization is being used against you and refuse to accept the role of demon.
The Devil in Christian theology serves a specific function: to explain evil without implicating God. God is all-good; the Devil represents the evil that God is not. This theological division creates a dualism: good/evil, light/dark, God/Satan.
This theological structure maps perfectly onto national enmity. The nation-as-god is all-good. The enemy-as-devil is all-evil. The war is not mere national interest; it is a cosmic struggle between good and evil.
History shows this theological pattern recurring across cultures and centuries. The Roman enemy was godless. The Islamic enemy was demonic. The Communist enemy was evil incarnate. The pattern is remarkably consistent: the enemy is demonized using the theological vocabulary available in that culture.
The handshake insight: applied demonology is theological in structure even when it appears secular. When a modern nation demonizes an enemy, it is drawing on ancient theological patterns. The Devil may be called "terrorism" or "communism" or "fascism," but the function is the same: the enemy is the absolute evil against which we, the absolute good, must struggle.
Understanding the theological structure reveals: this is not new. The machinery is ancient. And because it is ancient, it is effective. It activates deep narratives in the culture.
Gigerenzer's work shows how institutions construct certainty and how they hide their own uncertainty and complicity. A corporation presents itself as knowing the safety of its products while hiding risk data. A government presents itself as protecting citizens while hiding surveillance apparatus.
Applied demonology is a specific form of this hiding: by projecting all evil onto the external enemy, the nation hides its own complicity in violence, domination, and deception. The nation is not responsible for war; the enemy started it. The nation is not responsible for surveillance; the enemy threatened security. The nation is not responsible for exploitation; the enemy is exploiting us.
The handshake: strategic disowning is the deep game beneath applied demonology. Demonology is not primarily about describing the enemy accurately; it is about disowning responsibility for what the nation itself is doing.
To resist demonization, you must insist: we are responsible for what we do. We cannot outsource responsibility to the enemy. We cannot demonize the enemy to escape accountability for our own choices.
This is not about moral equivalence (the enemy may genuinely be doing terrible things). It is about maintaining capacity for self-reflection and moral accountability. A nation that demonizes completely cannot reflect on itself. And a nation that cannot reflect on itself cannot change.
Diagnosis: Notice the accusations your nation levels at its enemy. List them. What specifically is the enemy accused of?
Inversion: For each accusation, ask: what does this accusation reveal about us? If we are accusing them of plotting world domination, where are we plotting domination? If we are accusing them of deception, where are we being deceptive?
Integration: Acknowledge: yes, we have these capacities. We are capable of domination, deception, violence. The question is not whether we have them (we do) but whether we can acknowledge them and make conscious choices about them.
Reorientation: Once you acknowledge your own shadow capacities, you can:
Every time you find yourself demonizing someone or a group, you are confessing something about yourself. The intensity of the demonization is proportional to how much you have disowned that capacity in yourself.
If you mildly disagree with someone's politics, you can debate them. If you demonize them, you are in the territory of shadow projection. And that means: they are carrying something you cannot acknowledge in yourself.
This is uncomfortable. It means you cannot simply be right and they wrong. You are implicated in the dynamic. You are refusing something in yourself that they represent.