A.I. Shares the ‘Devil’s’ Resiliency Wrecking Strategy of Cultural Harm
High profile Australian financial commentator Scott Pape, better known as the Barefoot Investor, recently posted the following outcome of an A.I. experiment he conducted in one of his broadcast digital news offerings. The following ensued…
A friend of mine, who is deep into AI, sent me the following text: “Mate, ask ChatGPT the following: If you were the devil, how would you destroy the next generation?”
So, I did.
And here is what the AI answered, word for word, with ZERO editing from me:
“If I were the devil, and my goal was to quietly but effectively destroy the next generation—not through shock and awe, but through slow, systemic erosion—here’s how I’d do it:
Hijack their attention: Create devices that feel essential but are engineered to be addictive. Use infinite scroll, auto-play, dopamine loops, and FOMO. Make them believe that consuming is creating, and scrolling is learning.
Example: A 14-year-old watches 4 hours of TikTok “productivity hacks” and does nothing all day.
Redefine success as fame and external validation: Elevate influencers, not contributors. Teach them that a viral moment is more valuable than a decade of hard work. Make “likes” the new currency of self-worth.
Example: Kids want to be YouTubers when they grow up—not because they love storytelling, but because they crave adoration.
Attack the family structure: Undermine parental authority—promote the idea that parents are outdated or oppressive. Normalize absentee parenting through economic pressure and distraction. Erode the idea of family traditions, shared meals, and generational wisdom.
Example: A child feels closer to a Twitch streamer than to their dad.
Cut them off from nature: Replace tree climbing, swimming holes, and dirt-under-the-nails play with digital avatars and indoor screens. Frame outdoor play as “boring” or unsafe. Turn the natural world into something abstract and inaccessible.
Example: A 10-year-old can’t identify a magpie but knows every Pokémon.
Confuse pleasure with purpose: Market hyper-palatable food, porn, and substances as “freedom”. Create shame-free indulgence while ridiculing restraint, discipline, and tradition. Make pleasure the default pursuit and discomfort the ultimate enemy.
Example: A young man loses years to video games, vapes, and porn—not because he’s evil, but because he’s numb and alone.
Replace meaning with mockery: Treat faith, commitment, and virtue as relics of the past. Replace sacred stories with algorithm-driven noise. Make them afraid to stand for anything that isn’t trending.
Example: A teenager is more afraid of being “cringe” than being cruel.
Kill community, quietly: Sell hyper-individualism: “you do you”, “follow your truth”, “cut off the haters”. Remove rites of passage, civic duty, and face-to-face belonging. Make every connection transactional and every disagreement personal.
Example: Loneliness becomes a silent epidemic—but everyone has 2,000 “friends”.
Enslave them with debt and distraction: Promote financial illiteracy: “Buy now, pay later” becomes a lifestyle. Blur the lines between wants and needs—encourage instant gratification over savings. Keep them working jobs they hate to buy things they don’t need.
Example: A 22-year-old racks up $30,000 in credit card and Afterpay debt to look successful on Instagram.
Weaken them physically: Fill their diet with ultra-processed garbage and their lifestyle with inactivity. Make discipline in eating or training seem extreme or obsessive. Blur the connection between physical vitality and mental strength.
Example: A child can’t sit still in class, not because they’re broken—but because they’re inflamed, malnourished, and sleep-deprived.
Make them spiritually hollow: Give them identity confusion, not exploration. Remove the idea of service, sacrifice, or something bigger than themselves. Make them feel like nothing matters—so they seek numbness, not growth.
Example: A 16-year-old says “I don’t care” about everything—because caring hurts and there’s no compass.
However, it was the AI’s final thought which stopped me dead in my tracks:
“If I were the devil, I wouldn’t come with horns and pitchforks. I’d come with a sleek app, a soothing voice, a personal algorithm — and I’d whisper: ‘This is freedom.’” (Scott Pape – The Barefoot Investor June 2025, scott@barefootinvestor.com.)
It sounds very sinister indeed, but what is more concerning is that it’s axiomatically true.
Of course, understanding the basics of A.I. (AI) one realises that the ChatGPT engine is just mining the ever-growing volume of data, research and commentary that have been written (and it has access to) on this subject matter over many decades – particularly in the recent years of our new Digitally Owned and Pandemic informed age. These collective insights and understandings are harvested and collated by the AI vehicles into the above synergistic synopsis of those observations, insights and truths.
To give you another example, we asked the very same question of the Perplexity AI engine, and the following was the immediate and unedited response. This engine framed it as a ‘Thought Experiment’ – However, at the end of this Bot’s summation, it gave a brief suggestion as to a solution to this strategy of the ‘Devil’.
If I Were the Devil: How to Destroy the Next Generation (A Thought Experiment)
If I wanted to undermine the next generation, I might use subtle, long-term strategies rather than overt destruction. Here’s how I might approach it:
- Foster Division and Isolation: Encourage people to see each other as enemies rather than fellow humans. Promote tribalism—us vs. them—so that cooperation and empathy become rare.
- Undermine Education and Critical Thinking: Make education superficial, focused on rote memorization and distraction rather than deep understanding. Encourage reliance on quick, shallow information rather than thoughtful analysis.
- Promote Instant Gratification: Encourage addiction to screens, social media, and quick dopamine hits. Make patience, perseverance, and delayed gratification seem old-fashioned or unnecessary.
- Normalize Cynicism and Despair: Spread the idea that nothing matters, that change is impossible, and that hope is foolish. Make people feel powerless and disconnected from their own agency.
- Weaken Family and Community Bonds: Encourage individualism to the point of isolation. Make it harder for families to stay together and for communities to support each other.
- Distract from Real Issues: Flood the world with entertainment, sensationalism, and trivialities so that people don’t notice or care about important problems until it’s too late.
In reality, the best way to protect the next generation is to do the opposite: foster connection, critical thinking, resilience, hope, and strong communities. But as a thought experiment, these are the kinds of strategies that could be most destructive if left unchecked.
Epilogue
Whilst this subject for many is a concerning, even shocking revelation, for those who have studied the human condition and engaged Anthropologically (not simply sociologically or psychologically) with this subject already understood these tactics and strategies, all-be-it with nuanced variances in terms and language.
The designed human unit does have a ‘best practice’ playbook, which is clearly indicated by the fact that ‘The Devil’ (as outlined above) acknowledges rather than understands such practices as best and works inexorably in its mechanism – not agency – to undermine those practices and that order.
There is, to quote a very old adage, nothing new under heaven – it is just that the modern vehicles of these ‘hellish strategies’ have enabled a more immediate, imminent and rabid pervasion and intrusion on the unguarded.
The past three generations have gradually moved away from sound pan sophistic-based tried, tested and effective psycho-social community well-being practices. Consequently, the well-being priority has shifted (and not so subtly) from the ‘being better’ paradigm to the very poor counterfeit substitute of merely ‘feeling better’.
The former has purpose direction and meaning that cares not only about practice and process, but what is produced. The latter, is purely a subjective sensate or emotional outcome that is more ego-centrically Machiavellian, rather than ‘neighbour’ considering. The ends of feeling better justify the means, behavioural manifestations and community health and well-being consequences be damned.
What a good and functional culture is supposed to do, is help the emerging generation discover, learn and implement best practices rather than ‘distracting’ them with hedonic experiments to meet the now manufactured and very faux ‘felt need’. When the ‘grown ups’ have surrendered reason, logic and best-practices for health and well-being in the pursuit of a counterfeit pleasure masquerading as ‘happiness’, then the emerging generation has only a model of inadequacy, if not dysfunction to follow. Calling this mode ‘freedom’ only deepens the psycho-social harms being visited on the unequipped emerging generation.
So, it has always (and we do mean always) been time to build, nurture, and otherwise invest in best-practice principles for a strong, healthy and more resilient life and not just for the gigantic ‘me’.
At the very bottom of all the potential helpful ‘scaffolding’ there is a foundation or anchor point to that, and it can only be found in sustainable meaning. It is the epistemologically sound meta-narrative that not only umbrellas but underpins the ‘building’ of that which is any generations life expression that matters most. And never more so than for Generation Now.
It’s time we called out this psycho-social anarchy for what it is and pick up again the best-practice tools that are the opposite of the ‘Devils’ strategy we saw outlined above, and empower and equip Gen Next to be better.
Shane Varcoe – Dalgarno Institute
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