Something is missing from how we understand our own history. That absence—a gap in our collective story—leaves us vulnerable to forces we cannot recognize. According to systems thinker and New York Times bestselling author Gregg Braden, the chaos unfolding across our screens and communities is not random, nor is it new. It follows an ancient pattern described consistently across humanity's most revered spiritual traditions: a struggle between forces of light and dark that began long before we appeared on Earth and continues today as conflict, division, and the systematic erosion of human dignity.
What Is This Ancient Struggle, Really?
Braden frames the matter with precision: "This context, you and I are part of an ancient struggle." It's a confrontation that allegedly began in the spiritual realm and manifests on Earth as what most people call the struggle between good and evil. Unlike the cartoonish versions many grew up with—the devil on one shoulder, an angel on the other—this ancient conflict operates at every level of human civilization: geopolitical, psychological, social, technological, and cultural.
What makes this framing significant is not mysticism for its own sake, but utility. When viewed through this lens, disparate events—military conflicts, family breakdown, algorithmic manipulation, the weaponization of social discourse—suddenly appear as expressions of a single underlying dynamic. They are not isolated phenomena. They are chapters in one very old story.
The Goal: Denying Your Highest Power
The struggle between good and evil, Braden argues, has one central aim: to deny human beings access to their deepest power—what he calls divinity. This word carries baggage for many, often linked to religion or spiritual grandiosity. Braden offers instead a working definition drawn from contemporary usage: "Divinity is defined as the powers or the forces that transcend perceived human limits."
In other words, divinity isn't mystical or supernatural. It describes capacities—healing, empathy, cognitive ability, intuition, connection—that exist beyond the narrow bandwidth of limitations we've been taught to accept as inevitable. Most of us, Braden suggests, live within artificial ceilings. We've inherited cultural stories about what's possible for a human body, a human mind, a human heart. We accept these inherited limits as if they were laws of physics.
Divinity, then, is the capacity to transcend these false limits and access our actual human potential. And according to Braden's reading of ancient traditions, the entire machinery of the struggle between good and evil exists to keep us from realizing this.
How the Struggle Shapes All of Human History
Braden's systems-thinking background leads him to propose that this ancient conflict is not just a spiritual metaphor but the actual context holding human history together. It is, he says, "the glue that's holding everything together. It's defining all of human history."
Looking outward at the world "right now"—whether at Russia-Ukraine tensions, Middle East conflicts, or the social fractures tearing through families and communities—he sees expressions of this same ancient dynamic playing out in real time. The struggle takes many forms, but once recognized, the pattern becomes coherent.
Evil, in this framework, is not monolithic. Braden distinguishes several categories:
- Kinetic evil: Direct, visible violence—boots on the ground, open conflict.
- Psychological evil: Programs and media designed to generate fear, guilt, and suspicion, fragmenting social bonds and dividing families, communities, and societies.
- Cultural evil: The weaponization of legitimate social topics—gender, culture, family—that could unite us if discussed with care, but instead are deployed as divisive tools.
- Technological evil: The systematic replacement of human biology and autonomy with artificial systems.
Each operates according to the same principle: break the bonds of trust, community, and belonging that enable humans to recognize and access their divinity.
The Weaponization of Social Media and Algorithms
Braden focuses particularly on how algorithms on social media platforms drive divisive behavior. "These algorithms are driving us to be something that we were never never meant to be," he observes. The technology creates conditions for fear, ridicule, shame, and hate—states fundamentally at odds with our nature. "We are nature. In nature, we are all about cooperation and love and empathy and sympathy."
The algorithms, however, are engineered to push us toward the opposite: isolation, suspicion, conflict. The effect cascades from our screens into our dinner tables, our workplaces, our marriages. Psychological warfare becomes domestic reality.
The Normalization of Evil in Entertainment and Culture
Beyond algorithms, Braden points to the normalization of evil in mass entertainment as a tool of the larger struggle. What was once shocking or taboo is gradually reframed as acceptable, even celebrated, until the public consciousness adjusts its baseline for what is normal. In this way, expressions of what ancient traditions call evil become embedded in everyday culture, desensitizing populations and weakening their capacity to recognize manipulation.
Technology as a Tool to Replace Humanness
The most urgent expression of this struggle, in Braden's view, is technological. There is, he says, "a movement right now to replace our biology with technology." He catalogs the specifics: AI, computer chips implanted in the brain, chemicals introduced into the bloodstream, RFID chips beneath the skin, nano-sensors moving through the body and transmitting data to large databases operated by artificial intelligence. "This isn't, you know, a future sci-fi scenario. It's happening now because the technology's available."
The targeting is deliberate: young people are especially in the crosshairs. The aim is not hidden but is rarely discussed in mainstream discourse—the replacement of human agency, intuition, and embodied wisdom with technological systems. In doing so, the very capacity for divinity—the transcendence of perceived limits—is outsourced to machines. Humans become passengers in systems designed and controlled by others.
Where to Go From Here
Understanding this ancient context is not offered as cause for despair but for empowerment. As Braden emphasizes: "Once you begin to recognize them, then you are empowered to navigate in way and make good choices." Awareness of the pattern—the ancient struggle, its multiple expressions, its goal of denying us our divinity—creates a space for discernment. You can recognize the manipulation not as accident or isolated incident, but as part of a coherent strategy. That recognition is itself a form of freedom. The missing piece in our story is the story itself: the long, continuous conflict for human dignity, agency, and the capacity to transcend the artificial limits others have set for us.
