Him: The Structural Evil We Worship

There are systems in the world built on the architecture of evil. They consume human potential as fuel. They demand loyalty that looks like devotion. They reward obedience and punish awareness. And the people inside them will defend them to the death because the system taught them to call captivity opportunity.

I've been thinking about this for a long time. Then a film came out that showed the whole architecture on screen.

It's called Him. Jordan Peele produced it. A young quarterback named Cameron Cade gets attacked by someone in a goat costume while practicing alone on a field. The injury threatens his career. Then his idol, an eight-time champion QB named Isaiah White, offers to train him at a remote compound for a week. Cam thinks it's the opportunity of a lifetime. It's actually a recruitment ritual for something much older and much darker than football.

The film isn't using the occult as entertainment. It's documenting it as infrastructure. The rituals, the blood, the contracts, the sacrifices. And most of the audience will walk out thinking it was fiction.

The Machine You Don't See Until You're Inside It

The film reveals something halfway through that changes the whole story. The attack on Cam wasn't random. The owners of the team orchestrated it. They arranged for him to be injured so Isaiah could step in as the savior. The training, the mentorship, the "opportunity" was all engineered. Every step of Cam's journey toward greatness was designed by people he'd never met, for reasons he didn't understand.

But the part that wrecked me was the father.

Cam's dad agreed to the terms. His father made a deal with the system before Cam was old enough to know what was happening. And then the system killed his father. Not as a side effect. As a tool. They orchestrated his death to create the grief and guilt that would keep Cam playing football. The fatherlessness wasn't an accident the system exploited. The system manufactured it.

That's not a horror movie plot. That's a design pattern. Systems don't just find vulnerable people. The most sophisticated ones create the vulnerability. They engineer the wound and then offer to heal it. And the healing always comes with terms you can't read until it's too late.

Structural Evil

I build systems for a living. I design how organizations work, how information flows, how people move through structures. And the thing I've learned is that systems don't need bad people to produce bad outcomes. They just need bad design.

A feedback loop that rewards extraction will extract. It doesn't matter how good the people inside it are. A church that measures success by attendance will optimize for attendance even if it means neglecting the people attending. A sports program that measures success by wins will sacrifice players for seasons. A corporation that measures success by quarterly returns will consume its workforce to hit the number.

None of these require evil intent. They just require a system that optimizes for the wrong thing. And the people inside the system will defend it. Not because they're corrupt but because the system rewards them for defending it. That's the loop. Awareness gets suppressed. Complicity gets rewarded. And eventually you can't tell the difference between loyalty and captivity.

I think that's what the Bible means when it talks about principalities and powers. Not cartoon demons. Design logic that eats its own humanity. Systems that started with good intentions and slowly became something that feeds on the people inside them.

Paul wrote to the church in Ephesus that "we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world." I used to read that as spiritual warfare in the personal sense. Resist temptation. Fight sin. Pray harder. But I think it's bigger than that. I think Paul is describing systemic evil. The rulers of the darkness of this world aren't hiding in a cave somewhere. They're incorporated. They have org charts.

The Demonic Economy

Here's where it gets uncomfortable.

In the film, the system doesn't just use Cam. It wants to consume him entirely. Isaiah's training involves literal blood transfusions. The philosophy Isaiah teaches is that to surpass your idol you have to consume them. Take them into yourself. Become them. The mentorship isn't development. It's possession dressed up as coaching.

And the system has rituals. Animal masks. A contract presented on a football field. A pentagram. A sacrifice. Cam's health specialist tries to warn him and is murdered for it. The film doesn't hide what it's showing you. This is a demonic economy operating in the open, and the only people who can't see it are the ones inside it.

That's not fiction. That's the entertainment industry. That's professional sports. That's the financial system. That's most of what we call "making it" in America. The rituals might not involve pentagrams but the architecture is identical. You enter with potential. You're offered a ladder. Each rung costs something you didn't price. And by the time you see the contract for what it is, your father is dead and your hands are already dirty.

A demonic economy is any system that converts human potential into fuel while disguising the conversion as opportunity. It feeds on obedience, innocence, and vitality. It doesn't need you to know you're being consumed. In fact it works better if you don't.

The currencies of a demonic economy are not dollars. They're attention. Compliance. Moral blindness. Your willingness to not ask questions because asking questions threatens your position inside the machine.

Jesus had a word for this. He called it Mammon. Not money. Mammon. He named it. Mammon wasn't a metaphor for money. It was already understood as a spiritual force in the ancient world. Jesus was telling his audience what they already sensed but hadn't confronted: the economic system they served had a will of its own. And he said plainly you cannot serve God and Mammon. Not "you shouldn't." You cannot. They are mutually exclusive operating systems.

In Revelation 18, John lists the cargo of the Babylonian economic system. Gold, silver, fine linen, wheat, cattle, horses. And the very last item on the ledger is "the souls of men." That's the bottom line of the demonic economy. Everything else is overhead. The real product is human beings reduced to fuel.

How It Works on You

The mechanism is not complicated. It's just invisible from the inside.

First, you have potential. Everyone does. Some talent, some drive, some hunger to become something. That's real and it's good. God put that in you.

Second, a system offers you a ladder. Come in. We'll develop you. We'll give you a platform, a title, a paycheck, a community, a sense of belonging. And it delivers on all of those things. The ladder is real.

Third, each rung costs something you didn't price. A compromise here. A silence there. A relationship you let go because the schedule didn't leave room for it. A question you stopped asking because asking it made people uncomfortable. None of these feel like sacrifices in the moment. They feel like maturity. Like "this is just what it takes."

Fourth, by the time you can see the whole machine, you're already inside it. You've built your life around it. Your income depends on it. Your identity is fused with it. Your friends are all in it. Leaving would cost everything you spent years building.

And the system knows this. The final threat is always the same whether it's spoken or not. Belong or die. In the film they say it out loud. Sign the contract or we kill your family. Most of us experience it financially and socially. But the architecture is identical.

That's the loop. Awareness gets suppressed because awareness is expensive. Complicity gets rewarded because complicity is productive. And the system sustains itself not through force but through the simple fact that everyone inside it has too much to lose by seeing it clearly.

The Contract

There's a scene near the end of the film that I think is the most important moment in any movie I've seen in years.

Cam is brought onto a football field. The owners are there in animal masks. They present him with a contract. They reveal everything. His father agreed to this. His attack was staged. His entire life has been engineered to bring him to this moment. Sign and become the next GOAT. The system continues. You get everything you ever wanted.

And Cam says no.

He refuses to sign. They threaten his family. And instead of caving, he fights. He kills the owners. He destroys the system that built him. And the line he says is the one that matters: "at least I'll have saved the next generation."

That's not destruction for destruction's sake. That's a man who saw the machine clearly and decided the cycle stops with him. He didn't just refuse the contract. He broke the mechanism so nobody else would have to face it.

Most films about systemic evil end with the character either escaping or being consumed. Him ends with the character dismantling. Not running. Not coping. Choosing to pay the price of ending it so the next kid doesn't have to.

The Alternative

There's a line in the Bible that I think about constantly. Paul writes that we are to "be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind."

Not escape this world. Not destroy this world. Be transformed inside it. The word he uses for "world" is the Greek word that means the ordered system. The arrangement. The architecture of how things work. He's saying don't let the architecture shape you. Let a different architecture shape you.

That's not abstract to me. I think about it in terms of design. If the demonic economy is a system that extracts, the alternative is a system that regenerates. If the demonic economy converts human potential into fuel, the alternative converts investment into human flourishing. If the demonic economy demands obedience, the alternative invites participation.

The early church in Acts built exactly this. They didn't leave Rome. They couldn't. But they built an alternative economy inside it. They shared everything. They ate together daily. When someone had a need the body met it. When someone had a skill the body used it. Not for the institution's benefit. For each other.

That wasn't charity. That was a parallel economy operating on completely different rules. Generosity instead of extraction. Transparency instead of hidden ledgers. People as image-bearers instead of commodities. And it worked so well that it destabilized the Roman power structure without ever picking up a weapon.

Cam's answer in the film was violence. He had no other option. The system gave him nothing else. But the biblical answer is different and I think it's more dangerous to the demonic economy than any sword. You build something parallel. Something that operates on different rules. Something that takes the kid with potential and actually develops him instead of consuming him. Something where the mentor's goal is the student's flourishing, not the system's reproduction.

The antidote to a system that consumes is a system that cultivates. The antidote to extraction is reciprocity. The antidote to Babylon is Acts 2.

And the question every builder has to sit with is the same question I sit with: what am I actually building? Is the system I'm creating designed to liberate the people inside it? Or will it eventually feed on them the way every other system does?

I don't have a clean answer to that. But I think the question itself is the first act of spiritual rebellion. Because the demonic economy depends on you never asking it.