Could you give an example?
My primary tactic is to get flesh and blood to focus on the wrong information, on data, for example, rather than maturity, or on empathy rather than responsibility, or on self as a category of narcissism rather than a matter of integrity. I was going to say that things were different centuries ago when my main area of interest was religion. . . .
You’ve gone elsewhere?
Oh yes. Now I’m primarily into counseling, any kind of counseling — marriage counseling, family counseling, pastoral counseling, organizational counseling, family business counseling. The more I can get people to rely on expertise, the more it atrophies their capacity to be decisive. The rise of the consulting industry today is a direct result of my efforts to make people afraid to take a stand. I started to say that it was different back then, before I moved over into therapy, but as we speak I begin to realize it really wasn’t.
What is it that hasn’t changed?
I still infiltrate by seducing people into focusing on the wrong issues, and flesh and blood still responds in the same way. It absolutely cannot resist the temptation. Over the centuries, the institutions of salvation may change form (saints, holy works, sacred rites, criteria for heresy) but the problems are the same, the spectrum of approaches is the same — so insight vs. behavior replaces faith vs. works — those false dichotomies work every time. And the fact of the matter is I’m just as successful in thwarting growth now as I was then.
You were going to explain how you go about this.
To begin with, you must remember what I said before. The Creator of this universe, unlike other gods, was not content to clone his image. Being a God of process, the Holy One wanted his creatures to be constantly in the act of becoming. This necessitated a world of absolute freedom, and it meant that the key to life was the response to challenge, but — and I want to emphasize this or you won’t understand the method in my madness, so to speak — the issue of response was not simply of survival but of growth. The whole point of challenge was not simply that difficulties were to be overcome, or nullified, but to be experienced in such a way that the encounter with adversity actually fostered further growth, a higher development of the soul, increased maturity, and so on.
That’s the way the immunological system operates. It learns from its battles. You seem to be suggesting an internal focus rather than an external one.
Correct. Everything that’s true about immunology is true about self. That’s the great hidden message in creation. I’ll say more about that later. For the moment just try to understand that if what the Holy One wanted in his creatures was a constantly evolving state of maturity — which, since the Garden, the Creator has viewed in terms of the capacity to take responsibility for one’s own being and destiny — then it was clear to me that anything I could do to entice creatures away from that perspective would be successful in retarding the evolution of the soul.
A quick example here would help.
Well, a quick one would be making involvement in some cause an excuse for personal awareness.
I see.
But I don’t want to get all bogged down in method; that’s precisely what I’m always seducing others into doing. My game is much bigger than that. I have always known that one of the best ways to hinder evolution was to create societies of intimidation because that gets everyone to herd; it creates undifferentiated globbiness; it induces a big push for togetherness and community all right, but it’s more a stuck-togetherness, a togetherness that nurtures the kinds of communities that inhibit self-realization.
Yet you have the reputation of being against community and behind all acts of selfishness, egotism, narcissism, and pride.
One of my best tricks. Getting humanity to create communities is precisely what I want. It’s the kind of communities I want them to create that is the important issue. You see, it’s really quite easy to get flesh and blood to come together; all protoplasm loves to join. The problem for humanity is not getting close, it’s preserving self, by which I mean integrity, in a close relationship. That’s the basic issue. For years I used to bring about undifferentiated communities by fostering totalitarian regimes; there was always an infinite supply of self-aggrandizing organisms around to inspire to become false saviors. But it got too bloody. In recent years, however, I have come to realize that that approach is very inefficient and that you don’t need totalitarian governments to create monolithic societies.
What works better?
Raising society’s level of anxiety and encouraging PC.
Do you mean political correctness or pastoral counseling?
Sometimes they’re hard to distinguish.
But can’t anxiety be challenging?
I’m not talking about that kind of anxiety — the kind that is connected with a goal. I’m talking about chronic anxiety, the kind that is nonspecific; the kind that just grips everyone like an overall atmosphere. The kind that increases automatic reactivity of everyone to everyone; the kind that increases blaming rather than owning; the kind that creates surges of quick-fix attitudes; the kind that gets everyone to herd. The kind that inhibits the expression or development of well-defined leadership. But raising society’s level of anxiety only sets the scene, and here you will see the essence of my genius — the more anxious I can make society, the easier it becomes for me to tempt creatures into violating the nature of their being, and that’s when I’ve really got them.
I’m still not getting it.
Look at it this way. If you read the accounts of creation carefully, you will see that the Creator established three principles to separate a god from a human. It doesn’t matter what kind of human, black or white, Jewish or Christian, male or female. The three criteria have to do with knowledge, power, and death. Whereas gods can be omniscient, omnipotent, or immortal, human beings cannot be all-knowing, all-powerful, or live eternally. Whenever they disregard, no less try to violate, those basic parameters of existence, they lose their way.
So you’re saying that almost all barriers to community result from trying to will what can’t be willed.
In a way, but let me get to the overarching theme here. It is when human beings become most anxious that they are most liable to forget what makes them human, and then they’re really in my power.
If I get your drift, what you are saying is that you do not want human beings to acknowledge or perhaps even face their frailty. You want them to think that as long as they have enough power or enough knowledge or enough time, they could solve anything.
Precisely. All my temptations work best when humans keep trying to solve what they cannot solve, rather than growing from the acceptance of their limitations.
Satan, sometimes you sound like a preacher.
Darth Vader was once a Jedi Knight.
II
Talk more about the dark side.
Very well. I have designed a whole set of temptations to fit those three natural limitations of the human condition: omniscience, omnipotence, and immortality, which as I said become more tempting as anxiety increases. If you want, I’ll explain how I have structured each set, but let me warn you, you’re going to find some of this very disturbing.
I’ll just pretend you’re not telling the truth.
Fair enough. To begin with: omniscience. What I do here is to get the