Everything done in darkness

"After flying private a few times with gilded friends, I am convinced it’s the single most seductive experience in the world. You realize there is no one you wouldn’t kill, betray, or sleep with to ensure a lifetime of luxe relief from the armpit of mass transit." – Tina Brown

Tina Brown's piece "After flying private a few times with gilded friends, I’m convinced it is the ultimate corrupting force" recently charmed me with its clear-eyed view of the basest human foibles, but it also stirred up in me the remembrance of an intuition that I've been nursing lately, one that I've been struggling with how to put into words – I think that when we see the wealthy and powerful, we must remind ourselves that we're looking at people who have paid some horrible cost. We will be led astray if we do not bear this in mind.

The longer I've lived life (and God willing, I still have much more to go), the more I'm convinced that the story of Faust tells it exactly like it is – we access power only through cutting some demonic deal. I leave it up to the reader's discretion whether they believe in demons or not, but let's not let that debate distract from the iron law that nothing in this world comes without a cost. Why would power be any different? The only way to access some vector for the exercise of power is to be granted it by the one who rules over that flow. The archon must extract a tax. No reward without risk. No free lunches.

Here's the problem though – the deals we make can trap us in the long run, and we probably don't realize all the ways that these deals come to structure the basic shape of our lives. When we see the one who wields power, we must see someone ensnared in a myriad invisible deals with their terms penned in blood. A contractual existence hemmed in by a million small decisions to pay the price to unlock the next stage of power. We might say that it's not really power which corrupts, but rather that the decisions we make along the way slowly close off the exit doors, driving us to ever more desperate behavior to maintain what we have gained (loss aversion is the real killer). Drowning in the deals we've made, we suddenly find that we've come too far to turn back now. We have to keep going.

This is precisely the point that Tina Brown makes in her piece, namely, that we underestimate the role that access to flying private and the billionaire connections that make that possible have probably affected our political leaders. Once you've tasted the sweet honeycomb of not standing in line at the TSA or bumping elbows with the person spilling into your seat, what wouldn't you do to maintain a personal connection with someone who allows you to never have to go back to that? But, of course, Ms. Brown mocks, "Name me the pure-hearted billionaire who wants nothing in return." The private jet ride is not free. So how will you pay your ticket? With a warm introduction? Perhaps looking the other way? If you aren't paying with money, you can be sure that you're paying with blood.

But all this precipitates the question – what if we don't pay up? Why can't the powerful person just drop it all and walk away? What about "f*** you money?" We need to realize that the moment we try to walk away, all our debtors will appear at the doorstep, demanding a pound of flesh. These are the counter-parties to every deal we've ever made. If you stop paying interest on the loan, they start coming out of the woodwork looking for their money. Unlike in judicial courts, even your soul is on the table in the case of metaphysical bankruptcy. No shell companies or offshore accounts will save you from this type of ruin.

I've been writing a bit more at over at my Substack called Samsara Media, and late last year I re-branded to add the tag line "Moloch Theory | How power works today." I picked those words specifically because I've been playing with a framework which opposes fear and love, Moloch and Yahweh, politics and religion. Nick Land's work especially makes me wonder whether capitalism and AI are summoning a machinic Moloch from the future. But the question of that vital energy we call Power looms behind all these couplets and their eschatologies.

I must confess that I see power itself is neither good nor evil. For Foucault, power is simply intrinsic to every social or productive relation. One could say that wherever two or more things interact (or even when a reflexive relation takes place), power just happens. Like gravity pulls a rock to earth, so too every encounter involves an asymmetry of force. This Foucauldian framework would describe power simply as 'force,' and every relation as a vector composed of both force (magnitude) and direction.

However, this framework of 'vectors' consequently raises the question of 'direction' – might we call this value? What about energy? Maybe even worship? I think that this directionality part of the relational vector makes all the difference in the world, but what's more is that it seems to pertain to the spiritual aspect of the human. The spirit which animates us, the angel or demon we serve, the God who we bow down to and from whom we receive gifts will ultimately determine the directions of our exertions. And perhaps these gifts contain within them a certain directionality which changes us precisely in our reception of them.

The direction of power seems spiritual to me because we cannot reduce any particular act or event to a complete set of information which exhausts it. We can't read the directionality of the vector simply from the event itself – we can only come to understand it through a participation in whatever spirit or energy is actualizing itself through that event. Nietzsche thinks that value is not inherently a rational act, but instead the expression of either an ascending or descending spirit, the will of an animal which is either healthy or sick. This unreason of reason emerges not from the operation of a single mind, but rather as the upswelling of something older than and deeper than any single organism, although every creature must embrace and affirm this primordial will to make it their own.

I'm starting to get too abstract, so to come back down to earth again, I want to emphasize that we always pay a price for power, we must engage in an equivalent exchange, and it's this deal-making and sacrificial mechanism which operates at the heart of power which is really the source of its warping effect on us. Because power involves exchange, it demands some sort of sacrifice, and sacrifice is inextricably bound up with what we worship. Those who have great power have thrust themselves into the most precarious position imaginable. They live large as long as they can avoid all of their creditors showing up at their door at once, and they have to work harder and harder to keep the collateral damage of their decisions swept under the rug.

But, as Jesus said: "For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops." (Luke 12:2-3)

In the long run, everything will be exposed. Time reveals everything, and anything which cannot last will be utterly unraveled by the inexorable march of the Truth.

So, what sort of deals will you make with your life?