> Out there, said all the old tales from all the old cultures, is another realm. It is the realm of the demonic, the ungodly and the unseen: the ‘supernatural.’ Every religion and culture has its own names for this place. It lies under the barrows and behind the veil, it emerges in the thin places where its world meets ours. And the forbidden question on all of our lips, the one which everyone knows they mustn’t ask, is this: what if this is where these things are coming from?

Both yes and no, in a sense.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

We are doing this because our individual incentives are not aligned with those of the group. Moloch is the god of misaligned incentives, of coordination problems, of arms races and races to the bottom. It's a property of any system with selfish actors, which means any system that humans are part of, and probably any intelligent being that arose out of natural selection would have been hypothetically been part of.

From `Meditations on Moloch`:

> There’s a passage in the Principia Discordia where Malaclypse complains to the Goddess about the evils of human society. “Everyone is hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war.”

> The Goddess answers: “What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to do?”

> Malaclypse: “But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!”

> Goddess: “Oh. Well, then stop.”