This article appeared in Quadrant Online, May 19th, 2025. It is re-posted here with the kind permission of the writer, Seamus Cole, and Quadrant Online.

I am increasingly reminded that what’s old is also new again” and I suspect great writers, observers and clairvoyants of the future, saw and thought the same thing — the unchanging nature of humanity over time. Of course, one might come to ask ‘Why bother?’ After all, the book of Ecclesiastes details there is indeed nothing new under the sun.

One such soothsayer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, made profound diagnoses of the unchanging human condition when one becomes alienated and morally adrift from society or themselves. Indeed, Marcus Aurelius recognised the dangers of becoming ‘unmoored in the squalls of life’. Dostoyevsky says that without God man would make his own purpose the pursuit of heaven and act as a god in His place. He warns, in other words, that ideas have consequences.

Dostoyevsky saw that the average Russian of the 1860s onwards must worship something; that everything at the heart of a person and their actions was driven only by some religious impulse (conscious or unconscious) and the god or gods one worshipped determine the actions taken. Russia was a place of much social and political upheaval. Enlightenment ideas such as liberalism, democracy and rationalism and events like the French Revolution shook Russian society to its core. Ideas such as socialism, alongside liberalism wrestled for control of Russian minds of Russian folk, especially the intelligentsia. Scientific developments displaced the ideas of a Christian God, sought to undermine the Orthodox church and the deep Christian faith of many Russians. Out of these developments came Dostoyevsky’s most feared ideas, his arch Demons – Nihilism and Atheism, which he forecast with uncanny accuracy – would cut the moral ties of social and, worse, personal order.

Whereas Tolstoy saw the process of history moving us by some greater Will like individual chess pieces in a grand strategy unknown and unknowable to us, Dostoyevsky saw us moved around by the certain ideas we hold and the consequences they create. In his book Demons (also known sometimes as The Devils/The Possessed) he asks us what Ideas are truly good, and instructs us that bad ideas are eternal, cast from some Miltonian hell, dug up from man’s own pride, ambition and vanity. These ideas are the equivalent of Demons that possess us and control us, diminishing our humanity by using us for one major purpose — destruction.

He isn’t overly optimistic about the other options either. Agree or disagree with him, he makes it clear he doesn’t like Western liberalism, empiricism and rationalism because at their hearts they have drifted from God

The story of Demons at its core asks us; how so much can change between one generation and the next, and how it is that well-intentioned and fair-minded people can produce Demonic offspring. We might ask ourselves that same question today as bored middle-class kids harbour grievances against the past in the name of “social justice”. Perhaps the road to hell really is paved with good intentions

The father, Stepan Verkhovensky, the archetype of inner-city elites and soft-left thinking – and his revolutionary son, Pyotr, who might as well be evil incarnate, show us how vacuous are the ideas the older Verkhovensky holds and how in the vacuum something darker emerges in the son. A home-grown narcissism and self-righteousness that would justify not only one murder but a million.

The younger Verkhovensky; a leader in a local revolutionary socialist cell along with his counterpart Nikolai Stavrogin begin to sow discord and mayhem within a fictional Russian town as part of a ‘wider revolution’ to overthrow government and society by force. With dreams of grandiosity and destiny in their hands they overthrow the human constraints of their own morality. Their offered choice: join them or die.

The younger Verkhovensky is a serpent manipulating with forked tongue most who come into his orbit. His co-leader, Stavrogin, acts as the ideal man that Verkhovensky worships and imagines will lead the way to the new world.

Of course, Dostoyevsky predicts with certainty that the future of Russia at that time (unless a counter-revolutionary Christian movement swept the country) would trend toward a tyranny of the soul whereby, out of moral relativism and narcissism, a million Verkhovensky’s and Stavrogins would emerge and, in the name of human liberation, free themselves from moral laws and remake the world into an imagined paradise. As we know, this was literature as prophecy.

Bolshevism was indeed such a movement to the equivalency of Verkhovensky’s vision where the dark symbols of Verkhovensky and Stavrogin from Demons manifested in the flesh. The shapes they took weren’t just the millions of Russians morally and spiritually bankrupt that leaned into Socialism and Communism but in Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin and the pseudo-religion of Communism.

In Nikolai Stavrogin and Pyotr Verkhovensky’s case; what they worship is nothing itself combined with self. As Goethe’s satanic character Mephistopheles from Faust declares, he is “The spirit that negates”. The philosopher Georg Hegel, heavily influenced by Goethe, believed that history rolled along only by a process of negation and, like a phoenix from ashes, Man arises anew.

This underpinned the theological and religious nature of Soviet Communism in which the state became God – and the mission imposed by the state is that Man must work himself back into ‘liberation’. In Marx’s case this was an inverted form of Christianity that claimed nature and Man were mouldable, and if Man possessed the right ‘consciousness’ – enforced by the State, of course —  then the State would recreate the Garden of Eden. Thus, true communism would emerge. However, Marx believed mankind was unjustly thrown from the garden, that the serpent was a liberator of knowledge and God a gnostic demiurge set on subjugating and oppressing humanity. It was our destiny to march headlong back into Utopia, themselves now gods of their own making.

In Dostoyevsky’s case the ‘spirit of negation’ can only be destruction brought on by radical socialist revolutionaries, and if Dostoyevsky sees Christ as the only barrier of protection against the darkness, then Stavrogin and Verkhovensky are the destructive spirits of Faust’s Mephistopheles that seek to infiltrate and destroy that light.

One can argue why in Australia radicalism is growing. Perhaps the Demons within our own nature are alive and well.

The messaging given to many young people today in the names of compassion and empathy seeks to imbue the student or child with a sense of value, to change the world for the better and give the ‘unmoored’ something to do. Nourished like monsters, Stavrogin and the Verkhovensky are warnings that murderous rage arise from self-righteous/self-appointed messiah syndrome and feed upon the ‘care and compassion’ of soft-left elitist education.

The recent canonising of Hamas and murderer Luigi Mangione (a Raskolnikov-like figure from another Dostoyevsky masterpiece Crime and Punishment) as freedom fighters delivering justice or liberation poses the question – is doing what is reasonable and rational also morally justified and right? Often the moral answer and the reasonable answer will be two different things.

Another question arises: What ideas possess many Australian people today? Is murder ever justified?

Many anti-Israel/Pro-Palestinian/Hamas protestors would claim that human liberation be delivered by ‘any means necessary’. We must fight to liberate ourselves from oppression, from the very nature of our conscience which only hinders our evolution, our challenges to come. Does murder, arson, rape, torture, cruelty and absolute dominance over the enemy fall into this category of self-liberation?  Verkhovensky and Stavrogin believe so.

Many of the radical right and left are increasingly alienated, therefore it is incumbent upon us all not to condemn but to improve the internal condition of the lost, the angry and the proud as we might do ourselves

Any way we spin it, the Demons of Dostoyevsky’s book are the Demons within ourselves, ever-lying in wait. And while Man exists, so too will they.