[HN Gopher] Deals with the devil aren't what they used to be
___________________________________________________________________
Deals with the devil aren't what they used to be
Author : pepys
Score : 167 points
Date : 2024-08-12 17:47 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| office_drone wrote:
| https://archive.is/1jr1B
| jmugan wrote:
| This is written for someone with a higher reading level than me.
| I skimmed the first few paragraphs and have no idea what it is
| about beyond the title.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| It meanders around the history of tales involving selling one's
| soul for worldly power or gratification, then in the last
| sentence says that's what smartphones are, because we trade
| privacy and identity for convenience.
| galdosdi wrote:
| I don't mean this offensively, but if this is beyond your
| reading level and you went to college, your college did not do
| a good job. The vocabulary and structure is nothing out of the
| ordinary for college level reading.
|
| That said, like some college level reading, it definitely
| meanders a bit, is a little self-important and feels padded
| with unnecessary filler, and is just only somewhat but
| ultimately not deeply interesting unless you are already pretty
| interested in how tales of the devil featured in medieval
| Europe. It's ok. I didn't finish it. If you misspoke and meant
| you didn't feel like reading it, but certainly could have
| comprehended it, then never mind I guess
|
| But again, this isn't personal-- but if you are a successful
| educated software engineer who genuinely finds this beyond your
| reading level, your reading level is low for your station in
| life. It will limit your rise. Take it as an insult if you like
| though I don't mean it that way or else a wake up call.
|
| The reason I dare stick my fingers into this fire and possibly
| offend you is, there is a trend of "educated" people who know
| science but completely skipped humanities, and thus have huge
| blind spots. My real audience for this comment is other people
| who will be encouraged to value the ability to read obtuse
| things and write clearly, to understand history and literature.
| And if you are picking a college for your kids, check out the
| readings for some classes. If they are not expected to easily
| be able to read something at this level, then it's a waste of
| money unless it's very cheap.
| acheron wrote:
| You must be old. Nowadays even Harvard students aren't
| expected to be able to read anything complicated. From
| coincidentally, another New Yorker link:
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-
| the... -- _" The last time I taught 'The Scarlet Letter,' I
| discovered that my students were really struggling to
| understand the sentences as sentences--like, having trouble
| identifying the subject and the verb," she said. "Their
| capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a
| long time ago."_
| galdosdi wrote:
| Ah. So that's why so many people think chatgpt is such a
| boon for drafting trivial things that a competent writer
| could do almost as fast, but with more control. They really
| can't do it.
|
| The deskilling continues. "What can be expected of a man
| who has spent 20 years putting heads on pins?"
|
| PS: I am not that old. I was in the college class '11 at an
| average small liberal arts college with an over 60%
| acceptance rate. I was not exceptional. I think the
| deskilling has accelerated very greatly and very recently.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| The story by E.M. Forster is actually "The Machine
| Stops". The dystopia that came to mind for me was
| Harrison Bergeron, only instead of a human Handicapper
| General enforcing an equality of sub-mediocrity, it will
| be the masses and the tools they were bequeathed by the
| FAANGs. Having also been at uni in '11, I agree - GenZ
| and below are unnerving to observe.
| galdosdi wrote:
| NB- this is in reply to an earlier version of my comment,
| which I edited out purely for brevity, but now guiltily
| am restoring here-- where I worried we're marching
| towards a dystopia like the ones imagined in many works
| like Idiocracy, Wall-E, or The Machine Stops
| (misremembering the title as The Machine Breaks Down or
| something)
|
| You make a very good point. I am starting to hear things
| along the lines of "But it's normal that some people
| learn better from videos" and "Why are you gatekeeping
| this knowledge" and even here you increasingly see
| references to videos that are much lower detail but
| higher time commitment summaries of writing that has much
| more detail available yet could be consumed, skimmed, etc
| more quickly than sitting through a video that your eyes
| have no ability to skip around, rushing past the
| irrelevant and dwelling on the relevant, without ever
| having to click a button.
|
| They already invented telepathic interfaces -- books.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| I was really confused when I posted my comment and didn't
| see any mention of the titles I saw in the original.
|
| A succinct encapsulation of the problem is that the total
| "signal" of civilization is now being eclipsed
| exponentially, in all sorts of ways, by "noise". Some
| people say we're heading towards singularity, and others
| towards collapse; either way I'm confident we'll live to
| see _some_ sort of great Reckoning, because I don 't see
| how the generations after Millennial can sustain the
| current setup and weight of civilization.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Not just Gen Z. 54% of US adults read below a 6th grade
| reading level[1][2][3]. The younger generations might
| skew the results, I haven't dug deep into the links.
|
| 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2020/09/0
| 9/low-...
|
| 2: https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/lite
| racy-s....
|
| 3: https://map.barbarabush.org
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| The mind fairly boggles. That's depressing.
| ryandrake wrote:
| That's what happens when the political apparatus
| shortchanges public education for decades: illiteracy and
| innumeracy.
| ehnto wrote:
| I wonder what impact it will have on America's ability to
| operate over the next few decades. Will a lack of
| intelligent communicators find themselves unable to
| coordinate complex business? Even the simplest of
| enterprises at scale are quite complex.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I expect the end game if it continues is something like
| Elysium where we're going to bifurcate into a small,
| literate, educated class, whose parents were able to send
| them to private schools or overseas to be educated, and
| who will run the show, and a large underclass who end up
| as fodder for the corporate machine and/or the war
| machine. Today, we're in a competitive race to make
| enough to ensure our great-great-great-grandchildren end
| up in the first group and not the second.
| hyeonwho4 wrote:
| That is terrifying. If the elite of the elite can't
| interact with historical works, how can we trust them to
| make informed decisions about the present? I really don't
| want foreign policy on India set by Harvard grads who have
| never read Ghandi, and I don't want domestic policy set by
| people who haven't read the Scarlet Letter.
| voiceblue wrote:
| It's Gandhi.
| throwanem wrote:
| The nineteenth century, hell. I have to limit the
| grammatical complexity I use _here_ , or expect to be
| fussed at by people asking for summarization.
|
| Or, lately, pasting into ChatGPT, I suppose. There's a
| thought: I wonder if I could develop a style that's
| consistent with the rules of English grammar and reads
| naturally to the fluent, but is also too complex for LLMs
| to reliably summarize. It'd be a pure gimmick, of course,
| but it still might be fun to play around with...
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Yes; alas, "fluent" is mu (nothingness). Barriers,
| barriers are. One may permit it in art, but communication
| thwarted brings pain. (This has absolutely nothing to do
| with a squirrel.)
| throwanem wrote:
| Granted. But are we engineers or aren't we? If we won't
| develop the capacity to reckon with complex thoughts,
| then what can we even claim to offer over a coding model?
|
| (You also suggest my use of "fluent" begs the wrong
| question. How so? Not every thought is trivial of
| expression, or we'd need no words but the commonest ten
| hundred.)
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Say not the straightforward deeply, but the deep
| straightforwardly.
|
| (NP-hard so.) Two words, answering directly yet
| explaining nothing. Shibboleths and CAPTCHAs are
| illusionary protection (and really exclusionary).
| throwanem wrote:
| They're poor, early tools. But a complex world can be
| addressed as if only so simple. Or safely, anyway.
|
| It's not that I don't understand the temptation
| otherwise. But those are sent to be mastered, I heard.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Science is not obscurantism. Of their purpose, these
| tools are early (we hope). Of their ilk, these tools are
| late, almost unsurpassable, and unenviable.
| gowld wrote:
| "Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-
| track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with
| burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly
| vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in
| the soil that had so early borne the black flower of
| civilized society, a prison."
|
| Scarlet Letter was important among the limited works that
| could afford to be published. It touches on important idea.
| But it's stilted language of a different society isn't
| better than modern language. Just as we don't consider
| Nathaniel Hawthorne stupid because he wouldn't easily
| understand a modern sentence like "An open source platform
| for building a writing space on the web."
| galdosdi wrote:
| Why do people like yourself have such an allergy to
| becoming familiar with the past? It is as small-minded to
| be parochially bound to your own time as it is to your
| own country. Think of it as analogous to learning Spanish
| or Chinese so you can understand people from those
| places.
|
| Except it's much much easier because it's almost the same
| language, only a very, very, very slightly different
| dialect, that uses words that are still used, just a
| slightly different distribution of which are popular.
| Read a book or two from the 19th century and you'll find
| the rest easy.
|
| When you admit that this is impenetrable to you you are
| admitting you've never tried for very long.
|
| Not a single word in that sentence is uncommon today
| other than "edifice" (though any romance language speaker
| would understand it), as well as the fact that the
| average urbanite today does not know the names of many
| common weeds (but context makes that irrelevant)
|
| Nathanial Hawthorne had no ability to converse with the
| future, but we have the ability, if we choose it, and a
| responsibility, to understand the past, so we can learn
| from it and make good choices in the future.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| That isn't stilted, nor is it some crazy difficult usage
| of past English. If someone really can't understand it,
| then they really are ignorant.
| romanows wrote:
| And just 19 years later, Mark Twain published The
| Innocents Abroad, which I remember loving. I haven't
| looked at either in decades, but I'd bet that I'd still
| find The Scarlett Letter to be ponderous and boring and
| The Innocents Abroad to be an absolute delight in its
| subject matter, storytelling, and playful use of
| language.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| This happens every time an article from the new yorker is
| posted. Now we will mostly talk about this, about the merits or
| pointlessness of literary nonfiction and literature in general.
| Maybe recommend each other some brandon sanderson or malcolm
| gladwell and all have a great time.
| jonchang wrote:
| Developing media literacy is an important skill!
|
| One way to approach this work is to understand the _genre_ of
| the work you are reading! We can determine genre in a few ways,
| but in this case, we see that the publication is the _New
| Yorker_ , which tells us to expect magazine-style writing,
| specifically longer form feature pieces.
|
| Another important clue is that this is published in the _New
| Yorker_ 's "Books" section, suggesting that this is a book
| review. And, if you know much about the New Yorker's book
| reviews, they often include things such as history of the field
| the book addresses, compares the book to other related books,
| and what the book's thesis might imply about our world today.
|
| This longer form book review can introduce important context
| and enrich your understanding of the world! I encourage you to
| keep an open mind and continue to read pieces that are outside
| of your usual genre.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Is this written by gpt
| robbiep wrote:
| It absolutely feels like it
| dalmo3 wrote:
| In the style of New Yorker, a joke as old as gpt itself.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The style matches, but I think that's because it's just a
| median style of writing. It's too... _je ne sais quoi_ , to
| be produced by that algorithm.
| darth_aardvark wrote:
| "And, if you know much about the New Yorker's book
| reviews,", specifically feels like a phrase GPT would
| never use.
| wizardforhire wrote:
| Its making a longwinded comparison between eulas and faustian
| bargains, trading short term gains for long term suffering.
| dylan604 wrote:
| So it's a tale of Boeing?
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| Almost any company now. If you're not growing faster or
| making more profit than you were last quarter, forever, the
| entire world will crash, apparently.
| alekq wrote:
| Is English your native language?
| echelon_musk wrote:
| For what it's worth I absolutely loathe this writing style.
| Just look at this sentence:
|
| > No longer open to the pressing torque of divinities and
| djinns, we moderns are closed off and shut down, buffered and
| buttressed, marching efficiently through our merely material
| world, grim-faced assassins of mystery.
|
| You could say instead: "Since the Enlightenment people believe
| in magic less."
|
| Come on, "buffered and buttressed", really?!
|
| This article is one close to my heart but the pompous writing
| put me off.
| buescher wrote:
| Ah, yes, an article about deals with the devil should be
| straight to the point for the effortless efficiency that only
| the best bureaucracy can provide. As I tell my team, "bottom
| line up front, folks!". I hope I have understood you here so
| please understand me - that is meant with irony but not
| sarcasm. Perhaps there is a reason for the purple prose, if
| we only could find it.
| Flop7331 wrote:
| It's not that well-written. It's mostly a literary review with
| a paragraph about silicon shoe-horned in at the end to try to
| bring home some kind of thesis.
| neves wrote:
| I love deals with the Devil. What's your favorite Deal with the
| Devil tale? Tell me one off the beaten path.
|
| My favorite is the Brazillian "Grande Sertao: Veredas"
| paxys wrote:
| Stingy Jack (namesake for the Jack O'Lantern) -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingy_Jack
| jononor wrote:
| Here is a Norwegian tale of the Devil, in form of a traditional
| fiddle song. Music at the bottom, recommend playing it through
| once before reading the post.
| https://www.norskkornolfestival.no/2019/06/18/fanitullen/
| mac3n wrote:
| https://kasmana.people.charleston.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?ca...
|
| "The Devil and Simon Flagg" in which Flagg sells his soul in
| exchange for the proof of Fermat's last theorem. No proof is
| found, but the Devil becomes consumed with mathematics.
| mihaic wrote:
| Cool, someone should update the story now with the Collatz
| conjecture.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I love any story about ancient super powerful creatures being
| defeated by modern people. Humanity kicks ass.
|
| These things are often scaled to be something extremely
| powerful but possible for the hero to struggle against, at
| the time, which often puts them far below the capabilities of
| modern society. This is _usually_ missing the point (the
| ancient God or gods probably set up an adversary that like
| that on purpose, or whatever, to show something to the
| mortals), but just taking that on face value and trouncing
| the thing will never not be funny to me.
| jkaptur wrote:
| It's on the beaten path, but how can you resist (and how did
| the New Yorker resist?) "The Devil Went Down to Georgia"?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_Went_Down_to_Georgia
|
| Most of the deals in the article do not end well for the human,
| but here there's no lesson about hubris, nor the curse of
| knowledge, or anything else. No, Johnny's just a better fiddle
| player, he beats the devil, and he wins a golden fiddle fair
| and square.
|
| (The article might allude to this story: "Satan is not the real
| God, because there is only one God; the Devil doesn't have the
| best tunes.")
| krapp wrote:
| There is a lesson about hubris, but most people miss it. The
| Devil's deal is false, he doesn't play "fair and square."
| Johnny wins the bet but still loses his soul to the sin of
| pride. It's even in the lyrics: "My name's Johnny and _it
| might be a sin_ , but I'll take your bet and you're gonna
| regret 'cause I'm the best that's ever been!"
|
| At least that's how I've always interpreted it.
| jkaptur wrote:
| Very interesting interpretation! I see your point.
| buildsjets wrote:
| Which always seemed to me just a retelling of the Robert
| Johnson "crossroads" legend.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Johnson#Devil_legend
| robbiep wrote:
| Maybe shifting further but _'the silver tongued devil'_ by
| Kris Kristofferson is a beautiful song with a beautiful
| message in my opinion
| bbreier wrote:
| funny enough, "To Beat the Devil" of his is my pick for the
| best riff on the trope of country songs about musicians
| taking on the devil
| butlike wrote:
| A modern take I've always enjoyed is
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1tcj6bUv98
| nox101 wrote:
| If we're mentioning songs then I'd pick T..... & Beer by
| Frank Zappa
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPO1QGhYDjM
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| In "The Master and Margarita", Pilate makes a hard-boiled
| metaphorical, not literal, deal with the devil.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| Crossroads! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossroads_(folklore)
| microtherion wrote:
| My favorite is the legend of the Devil's Bridge
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schollenen_Gorge where some Swiss
| hired the devil to build a bridge over a seemingly unbridgeable
| gorge, and then tricked him out of his payment.
|
| I've referred to the devil as the Patron Unholy of Swiss
| engineering.
| syarb wrote:
| I love "The Grand Inquisitor" from Dostoevsky's The Brothers
| Karamazov. It's not exactly a deal with the devil, but it does
| have some interesting parallels.
|
| Full chapter:
| https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8578/8578-h/8578-h.htm
| Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Inquisitor
| syntheticnature wrote:
| Been fond of "La Chasse-galerie" for a while:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasse-galerie
| kderbyma wrote:
| Bob Dylan. Said he sold his soul to the Devil and promised to
| play til the end of his days
| gambiting wrote:
| Poland has a tale of "Pan Twardowski"(Mr Twardowski) about a
| man who made a pact with the devil for all kinds of powers, in
| exchange the devil said he will take Twardowski's soul if he
| ever sets his foot in Rome - since he didn't intend to visit
| Rome, he assumed this was the perfect deal. However the devil
| outwitted him, by coming for his soul in an inn called
| Rzym(Rome in Polish).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Twardowski
| darepublic wrote:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ydqkBG22Tk8&pp=ygUYaG9tZXIgc2l...
|
| Homers deal with Flanders as Satan, for a donut of course
| cratermoon wrote:
| "But I'm so sweet and tasty"
| devilthrow wrote:
| The Devil & Billy Markham Shel Silverstein Playboy January 1979
|
| https://crazcowboy.tripod.com/Silverstein/markham.htm
| xoxxala wrote:
| The Twilight Zone episode, "I of Newton 666", from 1985. Great
| ending.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0ZRKSoN7Vg
| charonn0 wrote:
| _Phantom of the Paradise_ is a rock opera inspired by Faust.
| alejohausner wrote:
| The story of Faust is about the dangers of knowledge and
| technology. If you know too much, you will eventually lose your
| soul.
|
| As this book review explains, with the enlightenment and
| industrial revolution, this fear of knowledge receded. But the
| myth is still there.
|
| For example, take the "Terminator" movies. They're about the
| dangers of technology: what if we create machines that are
| intelligent enough to turn on their creators and seek to destroy
| them? There is a parallel between gaining forbidden knowledge and
| making artificial creatures. Today, we are afraid that
| corporations and governments will use our inventions to control
| us, but I think that fear has an echo of the old myth that it is
| dangerous to learn forbidden knowledge, or create artificial
| life, because that would be entering the realm once reserved for
| the Almighty.
| hughesjj wrote:
| It's crazy to think that one of the oldest religious stories,
| the whole Adam and Eve don't eat from the fruit of the
| forbidden tree of knowledge, actually has a coincidence (...I
| mean, _I_ believe it was a coincidence) in our past diet
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/03/27/521423216/wh...
|
| I don't believe pre-human primates somehow passed that story
| down or anything but old stories always make me curious into
| their origins. Sometimes cool and interesting stuff comes up
| when you do
| gowld wrote:
| Fruit is great, as described. Knowing fruit is great is of
| course adaptive and this receives selective presure. Most
| life forms naturally seek out the things that they need to
| survive. Intelligent beings will use their intelligence to
| seek out such things, and will understand their value.
| krapp wrote:
| I've been told the whole Genesis narrative was essentially
| political propaganda based on the Babylonian creation account
| in the Enuma Elish and written during the Babylonian exile.
|
| I don't know how accurate that is but they do share
| similarities and given the relative cultural influence of
| Babylon I wouldn't doubt some influence was there.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Those are basically two different theories to account for
| the similarities. The one where the hebrews picked up the
| myth during captivity in babylon is mostly out of favor
| currently though it has some reputable proponents.
|
| "Political propaganda" isn't quite how I would put it but
| yes a slightly more main stream theory is that genesis is
| an intentional reconfiguration of a myth that would have
| been widely known in the region, for the purpose of
| repudiating the mesopotamian religion in favor of the
| hebrew one.
|
| Either way, or both, or neither, the story was "in the air"
| in the eastern mediterranean/west asia at that time. It was
| widely known and incredibly influential, and bits of it
| turn up in basically all significant literature with its
| roots in that place & era. Scholars go back and forth on
| the archeological and linguistic evidence but it's fairly
| commonly held that they are all simply a mesh of mutually-
| influenced variants of an even earlier myth that was lost
| or never recorded in its "original" form.
| trhway wrote:
| And not just fruit - getting ability to metabolize alcohol,
| ie. to efficiently consume those ripe fruits lying around
| under the tree seems to be that jump start in the brain
| development, walking up-right, etc. And the alcohol produces
| that artificial feeling of empowerment and freedom (which are
| basically top temptations by the devil). Btw, in Russia
| alcohol has evil image of the "green serpent" (after the
| biblical Serpent, and the Soviet propaganda used all that
| religious imagery - a 1962 cartoon where moonshine
| distillator is ran by a Witch and a Daemon and it morphs into
| the Serpent, and there is also a Faust's Mefistofele signing
| the famous solo of the opera
|
| https://youtu.be/xa7VHwpCgDk?t=352 and
| https://youtu.be/xa7VHwpCgDk?t=482 )
| x3n0ph3n3 wrote:
| > the whole Adam and Eve don't eat from the fruit of the
| forbidden tree of knowledge
|
| _knowledge of good and evil_
|
| It's so odd how often nuance from the bible is lost. Just
| like people say "money is the root of all evil" when the
| quote is actually " _the love of_ money is the root of all
| evil.
|
| These are actually important distinctions. From a literary
| perspective, _knowledge_ didn 't cause the downfall of Adam
| and Eve, it was _awareness of morality_ that did.
|
| Money is just a tool, but _love of money_ is a motivation
| that leads to evil actions.
| hughesjj wrote:
| Oh dang, that's even more interesting
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Continuing with your points, I've been told that "... is
| the root of all evil" is likely an idiomatic use of
| hyperbole.
|
| I.e., in modern colloquial English we'd say, "The love of
| money is the root of _all kinds_ of evil. "
| chimpanzee wrote:
| > knowledge of _good and evil_
|
| This translation shouldn't necessarily be taken to mean
| solely awareness of _morality_. The knowledge of good and
| evil, being opposites, would in fact include the knowledge
| of _everything_. It 's a literary device, like the phrases
| _day and night_ or _heaven and earth_.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| > what if we create machines that are intelligent enough to
| turn on their creators and seek to destroy them?
|
| I disagree with this - it's about creating machines that are
| _powerful_ enough to turn on their creators. Battlestar
| Galactica is more about intelligence /superiority IMO (as well
| as powerful).
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| It's also about making deals with entities smarter than you
| are. Essentially the same thing can be found in Science Fiction
| (e.g. Culture Minds):
|
| > Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate,
| confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and
| willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a
| positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable
| of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of
| their future course of action while in fact intending to do
| exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought."
| -- Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward [0]
|
| In classic Fantasy, it's dragons who take the same role,
| manipulating and deceiving mortals into doing bad things (e.g
| Tolkein's dragons, based on the old Norse traditions of dragons
| being sly and deceptive [1]).
|
| And of course, the Djinn's classic Three Wishes is all about
| being careful what you wish for. The Djinn does exactly what
| the wisher wishes for, but if there's any way of manipulating
| it for evil, they will.
|
| We now have AI and tech, so it's natural that we start telling
| these same stories about our smarter-than-us entities. I don't
| think the Terminator gets into this kind of story; it's more as
| you say about our children being a danger to us (but then the
| Greek creation myths are all about that, too).
|
| [0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/83257-oh-they-never-lie-
| the... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragons_in_Middle-
| earth
| asdff wrote:
| We already have no shortage of machines powerful enough to turn
| on us. A steel rake lying hidden in the grass for example.
| Everyone knows the apparent danger with these things, yet this
| tool has managed to infect our very ethos to the point where
| its potentially operator-harming design has remained
| unchallenged for 100 years, perhaps longer. I trust there will
| still be people getting smacked in the face with rakes in 100
| and 1000 years from now at this rate.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| This was really nice.
|
| I'll just say, it starts out deconstructing the way "magic" in
| the modern world has given way to "engineering" and thus
| mythological things like 'deals with the devil' are no longer
| believed.
|
| But, in my view, a significant part of the appeal of the 'deal
| with the devil' is that it isn't mysterious. A Faustian bargain
| works according to exactly the letter of the deal, and the devil
| always keeps his end of it. Part of what makes it interesting,
| enticing even, is that it looks like there might be ways to
| outwit the devil. The devil then is a force of nature to be
| engineered just like any other branch of engineering in modern
| times, not an arbitrary fact of life beyond our comprehension.
| mrec wrote:
| Coincidentally, I've just finished Thomas' _Religion and the
| Decline of Magic_. It 's very long and massively overexampled,
| but still a good and eye-opening read.
|
| When it came out in 1971 it cost an extortionate PS7; one
| national newspaper had an editorial saying people might be
| forced to pay for it in instalments.
| petschge wrote:
| How is that extortionate? Using the inflation calculator of
| the Bank of England that is 86 pounds now or $110. Admittedly
| that more expensive than the current price of $24 for the
| paper back, but at worst that seems to be twice as expensive
| as a common price for a 850 page book?
| gambiting wrote:
| I cannot imagine paying PS86 for any book tbh. That seems
| crazy high.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Consider that some technical books have a potential
| target audience of thousand or so people. Then ask how
| many hours the book needs to save you to be worth $100.
| Depending on the book that can look very cheap.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I think I paid similar for Wolfram's A New Kind of
| Science back in the early 00's. Huge great beast of a
| hardback tome, promising the secrets of the universe. I
| don't think I ever finished it, and ended up giving it
| away to a charity shop after schlepping it around the
| world with me, unread.
| burkaman wrote:
| Don't go to college, you'll have to do that 5 times every
| semester.
| gambiting wrote:
| Oh I forgot that's a thing in some countries. I did both
| of my university degrees just borrowing books needed from
| the library, they have to have enough copies for every
| student if needed.
| tucnak wrote:
| American way of life
| Izkata wrote:
| Most of the time we'd end up with a group of friends
| where we'd each buy a different book then share among
| each other. Not many were spending the whole amount every
| semester, especially past the first year when we didn't
| really know any better.
| exoverito wrote:
| Luckily most of my courses did not require textbooks.
| Though it was easy enough to get PDFs on libgen.
| michaelt wrote:
| But did you get a loan and.... pay for it in instalments?
| yial wrote:
| At October, 1970, the provisional figures of average weekly
| earnings of full-time manual workers were PS28 Os. 11d. for
| men aged 21 years and over, and PS13 19s. 10d. for women
| aged 18 years and over. Between October, 1965 and October,
| 1970, average earnings of all workers covered by the
| regular inquiry rose by 45.9 per cent. and the general
| index of retail prices by 26.4 per cent.
| https://api.parliament.uk/historic-
| hansard/commons/1971/jan/...
|
| So it would have been around a decent chunk of your weekly
| wage as an average worker, it sounds like. I think what we
| would need to know is how much excess income someone would
| have for something like that at the time.
| robocat wrote:
| > twice as expensive as a common price for a 850 page book?
|
| Costs per page have dropped significantly - so not valid to
| use page count as a fixed comparison point???
|
| So perhaps its price is more reasonable than we might
| assume.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > but at worst that seems to be twice as expensive as a
| common price for a 850 page book?
|
| Huh? https://www.amazon.com/Fires-Heaven-Wheel-Time-
| Book/dp/03128...
|
| Hardcover for $24.49 (703 pages), paperback for $16.99 (848
| pages).
| Narhem wrote:
| Surprised what educating people and making them write their
| own sentences does to the psyche of a population.
| nine_k wrote:
| Yes, the point, as I have always thought, is not that playing
| with the devil is playing with a deceitful sharper, but playing
| against one's own inability to handle one's desires, one's own
| imperfections and basically facing the corruption of the
| original sin in oneself. The devil just sets things up in such
| a way that the human who yielded to the temptation arrives to
| the state of ruin faster, and initially enjoying the ride, all
| while not being formally lied to at any moment.
|
| The idea is that there _logically_ may be ways to outwit the
| devil, but he will never offer you a deal where you would be
| able to outwit him by the power of your (weak and corrupted)
| mind, so the faith is the only salvation, and rejecting any
| deals is the only non-losing strategy. Remember, _Dr Faustus_
| was not written by an atheist.
| moffkalast wrote:
| So in a nutshell the whole genre can be reduced to "be
| careful what you wish for, you might get it"?
| nine_k wrote:
| Not just that, but also "...and you'll never be able to
| handle it, and the sleek scoundrel on the other side knows
| it".
| throwanem wrote:
| Or "don't think you're as smart as you think you are."
|
| Perhaps there's a line to be drawn from here to the dictum
| that code should be only half as clever as it could be,
| because debugging is twice as hard.
| nine_k wrote:
| Jokes about recursion are always funny, just like this
| one!
| ozim wrote:
| So you want to wave away whole storytelling experience by
| sentence that fits in a tweet.
|
| Gist of it might be true but reading dry sentence doesn't
| do to a brain same thing as reading a story and going for a
| ride along with the imaginary person.
|
| Well done story evokes emotions, makes one think of what
| ifs and what nots.
|
| Also a lot of memes or tweet length life lessons are not
| possible without long form background we share as a
| society.
| theendisney4 wrote:
| I see a "discussions" one time where a professor tried to
| explain why Twitter is actually bad for the wiring of the
| brain. The other guy was a self proclaimed twitter
| expert. Every time the professor tried to say something
| the twitter expert interupted him just around 500 chars.
| The professor eventually got angry then the twitter man
| said, but i already knew what you wanted to say.
|
| Enraged the professor stood up then left the room.
|
| I thought it was the best instance of _my work here is
| done_
| mock-possum wrote:
| And then the whole class stood and clapped - and that
| twitter expert's name?
| latexr wrote:
| > The idea is that there logically may be ways to outwit the
| devil, but he will never offer you a deal where you would be
| able to outwit him by the power of your (weak and corrupted)
| mind
|
| If it's a comedy, The Devil may end up outwitting himself.
| Doubly funny if the human was suspicious at first.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnhfjdVYRrk
|
| Though in the end, The Devil may still get what he wanted.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwg8EjQXEc4
| limaoscarjuliet wrote:
| Reading the description I immediately knew what will be
| under the links. Nice reference!
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| Or in other words "it's hard to get scammed if you're not
| greedy"
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| In Pratchett's "Going Postal", there's the following quote:
|
| There is a saying, "You can't fool an honest man," which is
| much quoted by people who make a profitable living by
| fooling honest men. Moist never tried it, knowingly anyway.
| If you did fool an honest man, he tended to complain to the
| local Watch, and these days they were harder to buy off.
| Fooling dishonest men was a lot safer and, somehow, more
| sporting. And, of course, there were so many more of them.
| You hardly had to aim.
| ano-ther wrote:
| The Swiss outwitted him at the Gotthard.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sch%C3%B6llenen.
| .. (look for Devil's Bridge legend)
| jimbokun wrote:
| Or you can beat him just by being really good at playing a
| fiddle.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| It worked for me. The first part did a great job of painting
| the horror of living in an age of ignorance, at the mercy of
| unseen, never understood forces. But I kept thinking... no,
| hold on... that's now too! [0], so was pleased the last stanza
| wrapped up as I anticipated, concluding modern forms of magic
| and Faustian bargains are indeed "exchange in which short-term
| gain threatens long-term security." As a book review it went
| off into the long grass for a bit in the middle.
|
| [0] EDIT; sorry but that SouthPark episode where Butters prays
| to the government just popped into my head; "And if it wouldn't
| be too much trouble, I'd really like to get a puppy for
| Christmas this year. G'night, Government!"
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Exactly. All of magic is like that and has never really been
| mysterious... the people actually practicing it have mostly
| always understood that it was psychological hacks: that people
| are mostly holding themselves back from what they want, one
| just needs to align their unconscious desires with their will,
| and it will happen.
|
| (in)famous occultist Aleister Crowley was asked if magic is
| "real" e.g. can you actually do physical things like light a
| fire with your mind. His answer was basically that he didn't
| care or it doesn't matter- because the magic that aligns your
| unconscious with your conscious will is more powerful than
| people even imagine that type of magic would be.
|
| "Magic" in its various forms is alive and well, and is actually
| widely used (although often on the down low) by creative types
| to create things that far exceed what confused/ignorant lay
| people historically imagined magic to be capable of.
| im3w1l wrote:
| > (in)famous occultist Aleister Crowley was asked if magic is
| "real" e.g. can you actually do physical things like light a
| fire with your mind. His answer was basically that he didn't
| care or it doesn't matter-
|
| Aligning the conscious with the subconscious is surely
| powerful, but this dismissal seems more like sour grapes tbh.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Perhaps, but Crowley actually claimed to be capable of that
| type of physical magic, and still dismissed it. I'm not
| sure what to make of that- he was brilliant but probably
| both crazy and dishonest.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > I'm not sure what to make of that
|
| Easy. Crowley was a grifter taking advantage of credulous
| people for his own ends. "What has been will be again,
| what has been done will be done again; there is nothing
| new under the sun."
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Grifter is uncharitable for someone that is dealing with
| esoteric things relating to the unconscious where words
| fail, and who openly admits that what he says isn't
| intended to be taken as literal truth- I mean he even
| titled his books things like "the book of lies." His
| intended audience is too intelligent to be easily
| "grifted" or to take him literally.
|
| In the words of Garek (Deep Space Nine):
|
| Doctor: What I want to know, out of all of the stories
| you've told me, which ones were true and which ones
| weren't?
|
| Garek: My dear doctor, they're all true.
|
| Doctor: Even the lies?
|
| Garek: Especially the lies.
|
| Source: https://youtu.be/4n8j6z8fQ_c?feature=shared
| markovs_gun wrote:
| Aleister Crowley's conception of magic is much more modern
| than the forms of occultism discussed in this article though.
| He was a modern man living in a modern world, influenced by
| modern philosophy. If you had asked someone in the 1500s that
| question, they would have said yes and thought you were an
| idiot for asking about it.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I disagree - I think more intelligent people have always
| had a more nuanced view of things like religion and magic,
| but it wasn't accepted to talk openly about it. You don't
| need science or modern philosophy to be curious and
| critical of what you hear. Marcus Aurelius touched on this
| in his private journal ~2k years ago, and it was clear that
| he understood magic and religion as useful metaphors.
| mionhe wrote:
| Agreed. Interestingly, my understanding is that it was
| quiet-ishly passed on by monks and clergy through the
| middle ages. See John of Morigny on Wikipedia as an
| example.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Interesting example, I hadn't heard of Morigny, and will
| look at his book.
|
| I think one reason these things are 'mystical' and
| 'mysterious' is because the people that understood them
| did openly talk about them and write about them, but used
| literary and speaking techniques that give them plausible
| deniability, and mostly limit the audience to people
| intelligent enough to decipher them. William Blake is a
| great example of this- he was writing about ideas so
| progressive and ahead of their time, many are still today
| unacceptable to talk about, yet he was able to publish
| book after book about them in the late 1700s, and was
| regarded as kooky, rather than dangerous.
| ryandv wrote:
| This idea was discussed in "On the Practice of
| Esotericism," 1992. https://doi.org/10.2307/2709872
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Try reading what Renaissance humanists actually wrote about
| magic -- like Pico, Ficino or Porta. ChatGPT can help you
| explore. It is a lot more complicated than you portray.
| ben_w wrote:
| ChatGPT is like Wikipedia c. 2005: simultaneously very
| useful and yet with just enough junk to cause problems
| which mostly affect those who know the least about
| whichever topic.
|
| Still better than learning from newspapers, though.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I think scholarly books and translations create a sense
| of "Truth" that is dangerous for beginners. With ChatGPT,
| it creates an automatic "should I really believe this?"
| sensation in the reader. I LOVE that sensation when
| dealing with old literature.
|
| Most translations have serious issues. Most human
| summaries and books about old literature are crushingly
| wrong or misleading in key ways. That's not necessarily a
| problem, unless the reader takes them as the "Truth." It
| takes a long time for a beginner to get the confidence to
| doubt the experts.
|
| Wikipedia had this effect: making us question what we
| read on the internet (since it was written by amateurs).
| However, now that wikipedia has largely become the best
| source of information on the web (due to insistence on
| sourcing), I see chatGPT playing a key role in building
| critical thinking skills among topic n00bs. It can help
| guide a beginner towards new knowledge in an accessible
| manner, but yet leaves them feeling skeptical and wanting
| more direct information. Many experts doubt that the
| average person can think this way, but my experience with
| 15 year olds using chatGPT is that they very quickly
| learn to maintain skepticism. They just need about an
| hour or two of use, and it comes naturally.
|
| Maybe with better models, they won't get this practice.
| Maybe in the future, we will roll out GPT3 for human
| training.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I also read a lot of old translations, especially
| philosophy, and completely agree. It is amazing how many
| translators that are academic professors with PhDs in the
| subject matter fundamentally misunderstand the ideas they
| are translating, or try to seem "impressive" (and obscure
| their lack of comprehension) by translating simple plain
| text into pompous and indecipherable jargon.
|
| Personally, I usually deal with that by reading the
| translators commentary so I can see where they were
| missing the point, and reading multiple translations.
|
| A lot of the time I think certain ideas are semi-
| intentionally misunderstood, because they are personally
| threatening or upsetting to the translator. Nietzsche for
| example had a deep disdain for the type of professor that
| translates classic texts- from having had a bad
| experience as a professor of classics himself at
| University of Basel. His books are filled with cutting
| deep insults directly targeted at this type of person and
| their career, and when they translate it, they seem to
| almost always manage to "subtly misunderstand" what he's
| saying.
|
| There is also an aspect of (for lack of a better term)
| "spiritual progression" where unless you are already at
| or nearly at the level of the author, you can't
| comprehend the ideas, and then tend to assume it is
| something else entirely that you can comprehend.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I'll take a look, but not going to use ChatGTP to learn
| about historical texts...
| ryandv wrote:
| > it was psychological hacks: that people are mostly holding
| themselves back from what they want, one just needs to align
| their unconscious desires with their will, and it will
| happen.
|
| This is the correct understanding of magick, at least as
| formulated by Crowley and other western esotericists such as
| the Hermeticists. "As above, so below" and the principle of
| correspondence refer to the way in which our inner
| psychological worlds correspond to the external world
| without. To the degree that we are able to transform our
| inner psychological world and the ways in which we perceive
| reality [0], we are able to at least modify our own
| subjective take on the world, which influences our behaviour
| and the actions we (are willing to) take or don't take in the
| objective, outer sphere, and thus, as a downstream
| consequence, modifies the external world without.
|
| Crucially, this modification of one's internal state can be
| done through sheer application of will alone, and so in a
| similar fashion as one can invent entire software systems,
| logical structures, and psychotechnologies [1] through
| nothing other than the operation of one's mind, one can
| rewire aspects of their own subjective, psychological
| reality, and thus minutely affect the real world without.
|
| The conjuring of firebolts and magic missiles are to be
| regarded as "stage magic" or prestidigitation, not the
| psychological/spiritual practice that produces inner
| transformation and mastery of the self (magick). Religion,
| spirituality, and mysticism are studies of the mind/soul
| (synonyms for the exact same thing, that which beholds the
| unconscious, intellectual, emotional, and other aspects of
| reality not having to do with meatspace), not cheap conjuring
| tricks or metaphysical assertions about bearded men in the
| sky or "energies" pervading the universe.
|
| [0] As a modern, practical, worked example see the
| "Practices" in Igor Kusakov's Psychonetics which can be tried
| right now, in your browser: https://web.archive.org/web/20160
| 520233250/http://deconcentr...
|
| [1] https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-1-introduction/
| mistrial9 wrote:
| well said but lacking?
|
| > modification of one's internal state can be done through
|
| there is an old theology question.. can
| enlightenment/grace/salvation come through individual will
| and effort? purifications? a certain diet? the right books?
|
| extend that to all manner of transformations .. is it
| really the sole power of an individual human that can
| effect such changes? How does a human live, eat, exist each
| day.. not alone really.. similarly in the unseen realms..
|
| Those who have strong will tend to see the case for
| individual efforts.
| simiones wrote:
| There are plenty of people "practicing magic" even today that
| are fully convinced they are producing physical results
| through non-physical means. I would bet anything that there
| has always been a mix of both of these types of people, plus
| a huge array of charlatans.
| jfengel wrote:
| Faust himself didn't get tricked. He was offered the chance to
| get out of it until the very last instant. There wasn't any
| sneaky wording. There wasn't anything to outwit.
|
| At the beginning he somehow convinced himself that his soul
| didn't really exist, despite the presence of a literal devil in
| front of him, offering the power to do genuine magic. At the
| end he somehow just couldn't bring himself to repent.
|
| In between he uses his power for absolutely nothing of
| interest. The most earth shaking thing he does is that he plays
| a prank on the Pope.
|
| I'll be honest that I really don't get the point of the story.
| It's not about the devil being a trickster. If anything it
| reads kinda like a self critique by Marlowe, but that reading
| is also kinda shaky. It's more like people just wanted to see
| an academic get taken down a peg.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Even if the Devil was being honest with the terms, Faust did
| get tricked so long as he did not believe in souls, even if
| it was Faust tricking himself, and presumably the Devil was
| counting on that, knowing as he did that it was a bad deal.
|
| That's not unbelievable. It's human nature. I think a lot of
| real life businesses that work more or less the same way.
| It's a tragic tale about a pretty regular guy convincing
| himself to accept a shitty deal because the short term upside
| sounds pretty great, despite not even particular wanting or
| needing that upside.
| lazide wrote:
| Have I mentioned that I'd be happy to loan you money for
| your startup's cashflow issues, with deferred interest,
| secured only by your immortal soul?
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Have I mentioned that I'd be happy to loan you money
| for your startup's cashflow issues, with deferred
| interest, secured only by your immortal soul?
|
| Well I'm atheist, so I don't believe in souls. I guess
| I'll ... take the deal?
| lazide wrote:
| Which brings up another question - is selling something
| for material gain that you legitimately believe doesn't
| exist fraud?
|
| I'm imagining the court precedent in this particular case
| would be _delicious_.
|
| Also, this is funny [https://www.catholic.com/qa/is-it-
| possible-to-unsell-ones-so...].
| mjan22640 wrote:
| As long as you are open about it and the other side is
| fine with that, it's not a fraud from your side.
| derivagral wrote:
| This goes somewhat deeper than you might expect.
| "Literal" spells are for sale on e.g. ebay, and
| presumably authenticity/belief are managed like
| reputation?
|
| https://www.ebay.co.uk/b/bn_7023443545
| jfengel wrote:
| I recall when eBay had to face that question. Their
| conclusion:
|
| * If a soul does not exist, it's not a valid eBay
| auction.
|
| * If a soul does exist, it's a body part, and forbidden
| from selling on eBay.
|
| I could poke some holes in their ontology, but I thought
| the conclusion was very clever.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| That was such a cop-out. Souls are part of the person,
| but their whole deal is not being part of the body.
| aftbit wrote:
| How much money and how deferred? If you're willing to
| wait until after I'm dead, we can talk.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| This sounds like an SCP waiting to be written.
| biztos wrote:
| The point depends on the version, no?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_based_on_Faust
|
| Marlowe being neither the first nor the most influential.
| jfengel wrote:
| Yeah, true. I'm a Shakespearean actor, and so Marlowe's
| version is most important to me. It has at least has one
| famous line ("The face that launched a thousand ships").
|
| I actually should at least familiarize myself with Goethe's
| version.
| Lerc wrote:
| Recently I encountered a piece discussing "The Prestige" as a
| counter to the opinion that science dulls the wonder of the
| world by removing magic from the equation.
|
| The idea is that the machine in The Prestige is stipulated as
| being science as a conceit to allow the audience to experience
| an unexplainable phenomenon as the people of the time of the
| film would have experienced to technology of today.
|
| The distinction between magic and technology is shown to be
| that the wonder goes away for magic tricks once you know how
| the trick is performed. Technology maintains wonder even after
| you know how it works, because the wonder is the appreciation
| of how the goal is achieved by known principles.
| lazide wrote:
| Honestly? 'deals with the devil' aren't dangerous because _the
| devil_ is doing any of the enticing, we are to ourselves.
|
| The devil just gives us a glorious chance to be hoist on our
| own petard (long term) in exchange for short term
| glory/enjoyment. A temptation eternally present in humanity, no
| matter the environment. We're more than happy to scam ourselves
| later.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| You mean like burning oil and single use plastic?
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| No, no, we totally have an infinite number of technological
| tricks to pull out of a magic hat and will roll nat20 every
| time.
| shostack wrote:
| If you like the structured nature of deals with Other beings
| and the intersection of that with magic, you might really enjoy
| the Pact web serial and its sequel Pale by Wildbow.
|
| They contain an exceptionally intricate and well thought
| through magic system in a modern "hidden world" setting.
|
| My favorite part is how litigious it all is. Power is gained,
| lost, and traded through deals practitioners make with Other
| beings, and these are mired in details and exploitation of
| nuanced language and such. It even features diabolist lawyers!
|
| https://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/
| throw7 wrote:
| The devil never lies.
| 98codes wrote:
| Or so the devil would have you believe.
| kstenerud wrote:
| The mark always believes he has an edge.
| thimkerbell wrote:
| Are the persistent themes the outcome of generation via the
| authors' predilections, or of winnowing via the readers'?
|
| Ok I read it. More it served the interests of power,
| "Protestantism (and, of course, Christianity generally) had a
| need to enforce the discipline of delayed gratification".
|
| It has a heckuva closing sentence.
| thimkerbell wrote:
| Interesting, the theme that "the dangers of knowledge
| (Pandora, Genesis) may be as old as humanity.". Did that one
| stem from power (and pesky upstarts) too?
|
| (Is nixtamalization (of cornmeal) an example or a
| counterexample?)
| thimkerbell wrote:
| What is the field that studies or pontificates upon the
| historical? forces that led to various cultural themes?
| throwanem wrote:
| This reads as if the author set out to make a point about modern
| traditionalism, got distracted with Renaissance literature
| halfway through, and then gave up on the piece with three or four
| paragraphs still to write.
|
| It's a shame. Something a little trenchant about the vacuity of
| "forward unto the past" would've made a better read than this.
| why_at wrote:
| I agree it seems pretty unfocused. To be fair I read it quickly
| so I might be missing something, but I'm struggling to pull a
| thesis out of this piece.
|
| At the beginning it seems like it's trying to make a point
| about society becoming better after eliminating superstition,
| but then it mostly just goes through a history of Faustian
| bargains in literature before ending with one paragraph that
| implies that the modern equivalent is EULAs in software.
|
| EDIT: I just realized from the URL that this is supposed to be
| a book review? I probably didn't notice because the book isn't
| mentioned in the title or even in the article until four
| paragraphs in.
| throwanem wrote:
| Yeah, on reflection my initial reading was a little unfair.
| The focus makes sense given what it is, although it still
| feels odd to start out with what sounds like it wants to be a
| critique of a critique of materialism.
| turing_complete wrote:
| Especially funny since he calls Goethe's Faust incoherent.
| fnikacevic wrote:
| I don't know if I'm missing something about the Newyorker but
| every article I've tried to read loses me in a similar chaos of
| literary references and excessive thesaurus usage.
|
| I can't tell if I'm illiterate or it's overhyped.
| beembeem wrote:
| I'm glad I'm not the only one who found the title and content
| disconnected. Seems like the author got a chance to talk about
| their interest in literary history by adding a paragraph at the
| end and an enticing title.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| That type of essay often works like that: start with a few
| paragraphs that are interesting to a broader audience, write a
| book review while showing off your literary chops, and then tie
| it together sloppily the end.
|
| It's like they need to continue the book review genre, and add
| the required literary flourishes, _and_ have a book review at
| its core.
| plg wrote:
| It drives me BONKERS that I can read the new yorker within the
| apple news app (because I pay money) but I cannot in any way
| through any means read the same words via a web browser to the
| actual new yorker site.
|
| I know, welcome to the new internet. Apple sells me discounted
| access via their app because in doing so Apple can monetize my
| eyeballs. I hate it.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Could this be the New Yorker's problem and not Apple's? I'm not
| super familiar with how Apple News subscriptions work, but
| there's probably a way they could let you log in to the New
| Yorker with your Apple ID or link the accounts somehow.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Only insofar as the New Yorker chose to be available on Apple
| News.
|
| If you subscribe to Apple News, you have to read this article
| in the Apple News app on your Mac, not in a browser.
|
| It does seem like there ought to be a way to take a web URL
| and tell Apple News, hey, I want to read this article in your
| app. I don't know if that's a thing, though. It certainly
| _should_ be.
| riwsky wrote:
| Share button does that, at least
| jajko wrote:
| Not sure what problem you are facing, but I could read that
| article just fine, no subscription. Win 10, Firefox. For the
| rest there is always archive.is
| mceachen wrote:
| Gosh, one might even characterize this as a Faustian bargain
| with some sort of FANGed daemon.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| Isn't the faustian bargain a warning against taking money from
| unscrupulous lenders? The promise of riches, but in the process
| you lose your freedom (still true for business owners)
| kderbyma wrote:
| it's selling your soul to the devil for something you desire
| crazygringo wrote:
| Not historically -- not in _Faust_ nor in the history of the
| concept [1].
|
| You're certainly free to call borrowing money a "deal with the
| devil" or a "Faustian bargain", if it's something you can
| describe as metaphorically "selling your soul" -- e.g. losing
| control of your company or giving up your vision for it -- but
| the concept did not arise out of anything related to lenders.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deal_with_the_Devil
| swayvil wrote:
| "Engineering" reflects the popular way of thinking. So when magic
| is explained for the popular mind it looks like engineering.
| excalibur wrote:
| > Jesus again rejects material gain, and finally banishes the
| tempter: Satan is not the real God, because there is only one
| God; the Devil doesn't have the best tunes.
|
| Hard disagree. Though playing them on a golden fiddle certainly
| doesn't help.
| jimhefferon wrote:
| One thing I never understood about dealing with the Devil. When
| the Devil shows up, it changes the calculus. Now the person
| _knows_ there is a heaven and hell, etc. What used to be a
| reasonable decision is now outrageously wrong.
| antonvs wrote:
| You're applying a modern sensibility. Originally, the
| skepticism you're alluding to didn't exist. The existence of a
| god and the various related phenomena was taken for granted.
| Given the knowledge of the time, how else could humans have
| come into existence?
|
| Widespread skepticism of those beliefs didn't start until the
| Englightment and the discovery of evolution.
| im3w1l wrote:
| I wonder.. Back in polytheistic times did people really
| believe all those stories about their pantheon? It seems to
| me that the lines between true history, pious belief, and
| entertainment were all kinds of blurred.
|
| Maybe people simply didn't really care too much whether the
| stories were true or not?
| solresol wrote:
| Pretty much. The Greek pantheists weren't that different to
| Marvel or Star Wars fans. The point of the mythology was to
| have a common identity. If you asked the priest at the
| template of Demeter "Next spring, I'd like to go and meet
| Persephone on her journey to home to Demeter, which road
| does she normally take?" -- they would think you were some
| kind of fool getting reality and myth confused, while
| thinking up some mythology about your journey that would
| turn into a nice play next year.
|
| The modern-day equivalent would be meeting a travel agent
| at a DC Comics convention and asking them to book flights
| for you to Gotham City. The best-case outcome is that they
| write some fan-fiction about you.
|
| This was one of the reasons that Christianity was very
| disruptive, and exploded across the Graeco-Roman world over
| the following centuries. It provided a common identity with
| _historical_ grounding -- if you wanted to go to the temple
| in Jerusalem where Jesus had kicked the merchants out, you
| could, and there was no ambiguity or vagueness about which
| one this happened in even after it was destroyed.
| asdff wrote:
| Graeco roman beliefs had historical grounding too. Mt.
| Olympus is a real place. The pillars of Hades were real.
| Cities were founded by gods and they existed right in
| front of people. Offerings would be made and outcomes
| would happen.
|
| What was really so disruptive about christianity was the
| aspect of proselytization. That was new with christianity
| that wasn't really an aspect of judaism. And with
| proselytization came a need for formal organization of
| the faith, which served as a useful tool for government
| to maintain a mandate of power and quell divergent
| beliefs as heathen or even worthy of crusade, in contrast
| to synecratic greco-roman paganism.
| simiones wrote:
| > The Greek pantheists weren't that different to Marvel
| or Star Wars fans.
|
| What are you basing this on? (And note, I think you mean
| "polytheists", as pantheists are people who don't
| typically believe in gods, but in the idea that
| everything in the universe is divine).
|
| Polytheistic people pray to the gods just like
| monotheistic people do. Some believe in more concrete
| notions of their gods, some in more poetic ones, and both
| co-exist in the same societies. Just like many Christians
| believe Jesus existed, lived, died, and became physically
| resurrected, so do many modern-day polytheists, and many
| ancient ones as well.
|
| And beyond the specifics of the stories, people most of
| all believed and believe that performing or not
| performing certain rituals will attract the benevolence
| or ire of their gods. They perform rituals to attract the
| rain, or to bring good luck in battle, or to bless their
| crops. They try to put curses on their enemies or
| competitors. These are all real beliefs that exist today,
| in both polytheistic and monotheistic religions, and that
| have existed since the dawn of humanity based on
| everything we know.
|
| And one clear proof that people truly believed and still
| believe in the importance of these things is the
| significant resources they are willing to invest in them.
| Sometimes they directly perform sacrifices, sometimes
| they give money for the building of altars, sometimes
| they sacrifice their time or enjoyment towards these
| goals.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think this is not really true. They did all sorts of
| things... like, these fairly poor (by modern standards)
| people sacrificed valuable resources to their gods. There
| is no particular reason to think they believed in their
| gods any less than current religious people.
| JackMorgan wrote:
| I know people with tens of thousands of dollars of Marvel
| paraphernalia. They spend thousands a year on tickets,
| events, comics. These people are not well off, it's money
| they otherwise would do well to have in retirement
| savings. Humans are not always rational.
| bee_rider wrote:
| They had big rituals that cost them a lot. I could see
| these as being performative. But then, for something to
| be performative, the people it is being performed to need
| to believe in it, right? Like modern generals don't
| perform a sacrifice to Iron Man because modern soldiers
| don't believe it is necessary.
|
| They also had boring little rituals that weren't really
| very effective performative signals.
|
| What reason is there to think they _didn't_ believe in
| their gods? It is hard to query what's going on in the
| heads even of living people, let alone long-dead ones.
| But I think the null hypothesis should be that people in
| the past at least believe their religion as much as
| modern ones do.
| im3w1l wrote:
| The comparison I would make is Santa Claus. He is not all
| powerful, but he has a lot of supernatural powers. He
| makes demands of your behavior (but you don't have to
| align your whole life around him) that comes with a
| tangible reward (presents). There are big, expensive and
| complicated rituals relating to him.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Do you have any evidence of this or reason to believe it?
| cjameskeller wrote:
| The Christian Scriptures actually include something of a
| counter-example to this, in Acts 19:35 and following,
| where an angry crowd is settled by being reminded that
| the statue in their temple _fell from the sky_:
|
| "When the city clerk had quieted the crowd, he said: 'Men
| of Ephesus, what man is there who does not know that the
| city of the Ephesians is temple guardian of the great
| goddess Diana, and of the image which fell down from
| (Zeus/Jupiter)? Therefore, since these things cannot be
| denied, you ought to be quiet and do nothing rashly. For
| you have brought these men here who are neither robbers
| of temples nor blasphemers of (y)our goddess. Therefore,
| if Demetrius and his fellow craftsmen have a case against
| anyone, the courts are open and there are proconsuls. Let
| them bring charges against one another. But if you have
| any other inquiry to make, it shall be determined in the
| lawful assembly. For we are in danger of being called in
| question for today's uproar, there being no reason which
| we may give to account for this disorderly gathering.'
| And when he had said these things, he dismissed the
| assembly."
| bee_rider wrote:
| Sure, but for some reason we are assuming that people
| don't believe their religions... if we apply that logic
| to Christians as well, I guess an excerpt from their book
| won't be very compelling.
| krapp wrote:
| I think they certainly believed in the _existence_ of the
| gods as something more than metaphor (although there were
| skeptics then as there always are,) and many people
| probably considered their own local myths to be true.
|
| It doesn't seem any less likely to me than Biblical
| literalists today. I think people forget that what we now
| consider mythology was more often than not religion to
| people of the time.
| User23 wrote:
| > It seems to me that the lines between true history, pious
| belief, and entertainment were all kinds of blurred.
|
| This is (unintentionally?) hilarious.
| mcmoor wrote:
| This article argues that people did believe it, or at least
| believe that their rituals actually matters
| https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-
| polythei...
| bee_rider wrote:
| Darn, I wanted to link the article.
|
| Something that really stuck with me is that they seemed
| to believe in their gods in an interesting way: they
| specifically negotiated their vows, being very explicit
| about what is promised. Because they really expect the
| gods to punish them in the corporal world, shortly
|
| We're a lot more loose with our vows nowadays. Although
| to be fair, negotiations with all-powerful monotheistic
| gods don't make as much sense in the first place, really.
| Most of these gods are so powerful that you can't really
| offer them anything but obedience/loyalty/love.
| asdff wrote:
| Back then people probably didn't even all have the same
| sorts of stories about their myths straight. And while we
| think today we are so enlightened having little faith in
| these things, we are more in line with these people than we
| might admit, the common thread being herd mentality.
| Consider yourself, are you an atheist because you sat down
| one day and came up with your own philosophy about it? Or
| are you an atheist because there are millions of westerners
| today who are also atheists and its an existing off the
| shelf philosophy that is easy to adopt, and you happened to
| fall into it? Maybe you did work it out yourself, but for
| many people their sensibilities and beliefs tend to fall
| into discrete categories already present to a good degree
| in a society, versus being truly novel concepts unique to
| them.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| "Atheist" feels like such a strange and artificial
| category, lumping people together on the basis of what
| they don't believe rather than what they do.
|
| It's a bit like defining everyone who isn't Indo-European
| or Asiatic as "black", even though there's more genetic
| diversity in Africa than the rest of the world put
| together.
| renox wrote:
| > "Atheist" feels like such a strange and artificial
| category
|
| Bah, not any more that any other category: I have
| religious friends who are _in theory from the same
| religion_ : some believe in heaven some don't, some
| believe in the miracles some don't, etc..
|
| But yes, there can be atheists who believe that the earth
| is flat or that crystals can heal, etc.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Those stories also serve as a tapestry upon which to build
| tribal bonds. Beliefs are not necessary for them to serve a
| purpose.
|
| Just like how 90% of people who proclaim they belong to x
| religion don't actually believe in stuff the religion
| proclaims, but it is useful for displaying tribal
| allegiance.
|
| In some cases, the feigning of belief in obviously false
| things can even help to serve as a signal for how strong
| your conviction is to others in a tribe. In the same vein,
| being a hypocrite can also be seen as a display of "look at
| the rules I am willing to break, and so I might be willing
| to break some for you". Or at least, it shows the belief
| that some people are above the rules.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| "believe" and "true" as you're using them are relatively
| modern, secular concepts, the idea that anything can be
| tested to destruction and deemed true or false, and the
| idea that stories are superimposed upon the world rather
| than being inherently part of it.
|
| If as a pre-modern person, you don't believe in a God or
| Gods, what fills the void? Nowadays the boundary of our
| knowledge stretches far beyond day to day life in many
| respects, but if you don't know about a round Earth, or the
| solar system, or how weather systems work, how else do you
| explain phenomena that have a material impact on your day
| to day life as a subsistence farmer?
|
| Pre Christianity, there wasn't really God's law and Man's
| law, there was just law. Even today, if you ask a highly
| educated religious person about their faith, you'll often
| find a concept of truth in some ways broader than the
| secular, material variety.
| lazide wrote:
| Do you really believe in the existence of Pluto?
|
| For them, it was the same type of situation.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > did people really believe all those stories about their
| pantheon
|
| They did, in the same way we still believe in the
| horoscope, lucky numbers, miraculous diets or having
| success by reading the same books CEOs read.
|
| Does it really brings bad luck if 13 people sit at the same
| table for a dinner?
|
| And what about Friday the 13th?
|
| In many sports competitions the number 17 is removed,
| because, you know, better safe than sorry.
| robocat wrote:
| Baysian probability is technology??? The term
| Bayesian derives from Thomas Bayes (1702-1761), who proved a
| special case of what is now called Bayes' theorem in a paper
| titled "An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of
| Chances".
|
| Did the devil know about modern probability theory before we
| did?
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Bayesian probability is just a mathematical description of
| optimal learning process from data, e.g. common sense. It is
| already built into every living thing[1], because it is the
| best way to respond to your environment.
|
| [1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2017.
| 079...
| bee_rider wrote:
| If a Devil showed up and could grant wishes, it would be a
| phenomenon in the universe we could do science at. Thing better
| look out, we're going to try and capture it, squeeze the wish-
| juice out or whatever.
| tines wrote:
| Ah, the hubris!
| bee_rider wrote:
| Not hubris, pride--I'm the bait, I'll draw the thing's
| attention with all my sinning, you see if you can knock it
| out.
| motohagiography wrote:
| weird story, I happen to have known the devil quite well. all the
| things they say about him are true, and that's the uncanny thing.
| you'd look at this man, slightly too large, objectively not
| attractive, impossibly clever and disarming, wealthy, seemingly
| impervious to any known law, known and welcomed everywhere, the
| exception to every rule and convention, accompanied everywhere by
| beautiful women, with literal horns on his head, and never once
| said a dishonest word even for the sake of politeness.
| Rationally, it was impossible that he could have been the devil,
| even if he specifically said it, broadcast it, and advertised it
| in every humanly possible way, the more he told you, the less you
| believed it, the more you felt like you were in on it. After all,
| he was harmless and fun, nobody around him ever did anything they
| didn't want to do. They always chose, they always consented with
| enthusiasm, and there are thousands of people who would rush to
| his defence and aid if anyone were to suggest he had ever done
| anything untoward. He is quite legitimately a great man in this
| world of men. Even when you knew, how much harm could be done in
| letting people who are already lost mislead themselves? We are
| not their keepers. They were having the time of their lives, but
| without him, their lives were less. He encouraged them up the
| hedonic treadmill to see how well they swam out of their depth.
| Decadent nights out became credit card bills, indulgences became
| needs, flings became transactions, familiarity contempt. They
| were all my choices as well, and I spent them unwisely, and at
| some truly astonishing personal cost, because we were spending
| what we wouldn't miss until it was gone. You couldn't know
| because you didn't know you were valuable. That was the
| impossible brilliance of it. I allowed myself to be seduced and
| misled because that was the whole ride. It's awesome. You can't
| judge the devil, it doesn't mean anything to him, but you can
| learn to appreciate and respect him for what he is, it's only a
| question of what you will pay for that education.
|
| I haven't seen him in many years and it's hard not to miss him,
| but with some distance and respect I'm good with that. If you
| don't believe me and maybe think I'm insane, it doesn't matter
| either. If you ever want to prove it to yourself and find him,
| all you need to do is want for the material things in this world
| a bit more than others for whatever reason, and I guarantee he
| will find you. Bye old friend, you're missed, and may we never
| meet again.
| nc0 wrote:
| Amen brother, hope everything is good for you now
| justanotherjoe wrote:
| I mean, the horns kinda give him away, don't they? Or are you
| saying you are the only one who sees the horns? It's not like I
| want to dismiss you but you are making it really hard to know
| what level of abstractions you are talking in. On one hand it
| sounds like symbolism and yet the descriptions are very
| specific.
| motohagiography wrote:
| If someone wearing horns told you they were the devil, would
| you believe them? Of course not. It would be insane. But
| that's the trick.
| cratermoon wrote:
| I disagree. "For most people, life was a business of terrifying
| external forces and arbitrary powers, both spiritual and legal."
| Substitute "economic" for "spiritual" and it describes the
| experiences of the majority in modern societies. To most,
| searching for a job involves appeasing various inscrutable
| forces, such as AI resume filtering, HR hoops, and interview
| questions that might as well be asking about how to cast spells.
| Employers are arbitrary and capricious entities of enormous power
| over individuals and with the ability to influence the world in
| ways the individual has no hope of matching.
|
| We don't call it magic, but there are other incantations for it.
| The adherents to the True Way of economics and law elevate
| themselves to positions of power and influence.
| wsc981 wrote:
| _> In these two early stories lie most of the subsequent Faustian
| motifs: the temptations of knowledge and power; the bargaining
| away of more distant spiritual gains for nearer material ones;
| the almost symmetrical rivalry of good and evil forces; the taint
| of the commercial or contractual bond; the picaresque flights
| through time and space; even the odd obsession with exciting
| women called Helen._
|
| In apocryphal Bible texts, it's claimed corrupted angels called
| "The Watchers" gave humans various technologies, in exchange for
| their women.
|
| _> In the Book of Enoch, the watchers are angels dispatched to
| Earth to watch over the humans. They soon begin to lust for human
| women and, at the prodding of their leader Samyaza, defect to
| illicitly instruct humanity and procreate among them, arriving on
| a mountain called Hermon. The offspring of these unions are the
| Nephilim, savage giants who pillage the earth and endanger
| humanity.
|
| > Samyaza and his associates further taught their human charges
| arts and technologies such as weaponry, cosmetics, mirrors,
| sorcery, and other techniques that would otherwise be discovered
| gradually over time by humans, not foisted upon them all at once.
| Eventually, God allows a Great Flood to rid the earth of the
| Nephilim, but first sends Uriel to warn Noah so as not to
| eradicate the human race. The watchers are bound "in the valleys
| of the Earth" until Judgment Day (Jude verse 6 says, "And the
| angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own
| habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness
| unto the judgment of the great day.")._
|
| Source:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watcher_(angel)#Rogue_watchers...
| Animats wrote:
| I thought this was going to be about deals with VCs.
| askvictor wrote:
| I thought it was going to be about the Disney+ shenanigans:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41242400
| niemandhier wrote:
| We are witnessing the beginning of a significant shift in how we
| perceive the world--a "remagicalization" driven by technological
| advancements. Technology has progressed to a point where it often
| feels indistinguishable from magic to many.
|
| In the past, building a radio, the primary tool for real-time
| information, was within reach of anyone with basic components
| like wire, a speaker, a capacitor, and a coil. Today, however,
| technology has become so advanced that it is incomprehensible to
| most, controlled by experts who can seem like modern-day wizards.
|
| I fully agree with the conclusion of the article.
|
| * We're all Faustians now. These days [...] we write our
| contracts not in blood but in silicon--both figuratively, insofar
| as we sign away our identities and privacies for all the short-
| term benefits of material ease, and literally, whenever we scroll
| rapidly through one of those unreadable online contracts, eager
| only to assent.*
| bee_rider wrote:
| Well, I hope not. Sagan warned us about this decades ago.
| netcan wrote:
| In some sense, the world today is the world we previously
| believed it to be.
| gbjw wrote:
| Great piece, though I do wish there was some more discussion
| about the Book of Job, in which God Himself makes a deal with the
| 'accuser' (Satan). The parallels with later 'deal with the devil'
| stories are numerous. I think it's particularly interesting to
| note that in Job, 'Satan' must still get permission from God to
| torment Job, and that, arguably, Job's final redemption rests on
| God coming down and speaking directly to him.
| ranprieur wrote:
| Disenchantment was well underway in the 1600s, and arguably
| peaked in the 1700s, the Age of Reason, before it was partly
| undone by Romanticism. The disenchantment narrative goes back at
| least as far as Chaucer: https://aeon.co/essays/enlightenment-
| does-not-demand-disench...
|
| If you want to go back the age of magic, try the 900s, or better
| yet, prehistory.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| I would add that Christianity was all about "disenchanting" the
| world (and my interpretation of Die Nibelungen as taken to
| express this in literary form). The enchanted universe, a world
| of magic rather than wonder (some may confuse the two, but they
| are quite different), is rather characteristic of the pagan
| world and its superstitions and irrationalities, rather than
| the rational world of the Divine Logos. To disenchant is to
| "free from enchantment, deliver from the power of charms or
| spells" [0], that is, to free people from lies and deceit, the
| fake and unreal, sometimes tyrannical constructions.
|
| You find neopagans today who want to "reenchant the world". It
| is an expression of hopelessness running into the arms of a
| demon who promises them relief if only they believe his
| madness. What they don't understand is that it isn't their
| rationality that has produced their misery, but they're
| irrationality.
|
| [0]
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/disenchant#etymonline_v_1142...
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| I would also add that the article confuses Christianity with
| superstitious Christians. They still exist. But this is an
| aberration, and always was. Human beings are prone to the
| vice of superstition. Our age is no less superstitious, I
| would say. We've merely given our superstitions other labels,
| or they've taken other forms. And it was in Protestant
| societies that witch hunts really took place, which makes it
| all the more mystifying why the author would have expected
| Protestant England to deal with superstition better than the
| Church, who was not in the business of witch hunts and who
| condemned superstition as irrational, as rooted in a lust for
| power over and domination of others, and as an attempt to
| coerce God into doing one's will, defects of will and
| intellect that predispose a person to still further evils.
| (He does admit that Protestant theology actually predisposed
| people to more superstitious compulsions, but the fictitious
| examples suggest otherwise. I would also point to the
| Puritans as perfecting Protestant rebellion in the Salem
| witch trials.)
|
| Knowledge and power, in the abstract, are good as such, but
| like all appetites, they can get the better of us. Lust for
| knowledge, or curiosity as it was called, is self-destructive
| and irrational, as opposed to studiousness, the pursuit of
| knowledge according to right reason (our information glut
| today is rather shallow curiosity and desire to know what is
| none of our business to know; gossip). Lust for power is
| likewise, turning the desire to be and to do good into an
| irrational craving to dominate and exploit other people, even
| forgetting that one's very being is utterly dependent on the
| will of God sustaining you in existence at every moment; were
| it not for God willing you, you would not be.
|
| Also, the failure to distinguish between "religious" (a
| wishy-washy and nebulous term, if there ever was one) from
| "magic" is annoying. Magic is about power. True faith is but
| trust in what the human mind can only partially, but
| sufficiently grasp to warrant trust. There is no Manicheanism
| in Christianity, as evil is privation of the good, not an
| ontological equal of the good, and Jesus could very well have
| expelled the Devil. He was not in danger of succumbing,
| though his human side, as it were, was subjected to the
| temptation. I don't see how the author could claim otherwise.
| What I see is lazy prooftexting, not serious scholarship.
|
| The idea of "selling your soul" is figurative. One can live
| in accordance with the objective good, or violate it. One
| cannot sell a soul, and God is not in competition with
| created beings, but rather their fulfillment, as God is
| Being. The author's view suggests strongly a liberal view of
| freedom, not as the ability to be what you are by nature and
| to do what is good, but the ability to choose _anything_ ,
| even your own harm. But how is that freeing? It isn't. That's
| the fundamental mistake of philosophical liberalism.
|
| No one claims pleasure in this world brings pain in the next.
| The Church has never taught that pleasure as such is bad. It
| only taught that the pursuit of illicit pleasures is harmful.
| We get this, so why do we pretend otherwise? We know that
| eating tasty treats in excess jeopardizes the higher good of
| health. We know that pursuing depraved desires, like
| pedophilia, is evil and jeopardizes both the good of the
| pedophile and the children he intends to exploit and abuse.
| There are wicked pleasures, and there is a hierarchy of
| objective goods.
|
| Ultimately, the vice is pride, the refusal to submit to the
| truth, the refusal to live according to reality. As Satan,
| the poster child of pride, says in "Paradise Lost", "The mind
| is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a
| hell of heaven." _This_ is the essence of pride, to live in
| the "enchanted" fictions of one's mind rather than face
| reality as it is.
|
| So yeah, we're all Faustians because we're all sinners. We
| all whore ourselves, bit by bit, some more and some less,
| betray higher goods for the sparkle of a lower good. This
| lower good may be an illusion, or it may even be good as
| such, but it is the decision to violate a higher good for its
| sake that offends and corrupts.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| There's no way to see this and not include this neat little
| Twilight Zone episode.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29sd4IneEm4&pp=ygUZaSBvZiBuZ...
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