America's Faustian Bargain
News Update: Last Sunday, I published a story for The Daily Beast about the desecration of a Black cemetery in Maryland, and the county government’s plan to sell the cemetery to developers for $51 million.
After the publication of my story, more people became aware of this disgraceful plan, and by Wednesday the five government officials who supported this plan to cell the cemetery resigned.
Good journalism can make a difference! You can read my story here.
For a while now, I have been very interested in the European story of Doctor Faustus or Faust, and how this tragic myth can help explain much of the United States and the westernized world.
The story of Doctor Faustus has been popular in Europe since the 16th century as Europe left the Dark Ages and moved into the Enlightenment, yet as the Dark Ages faded away Europeans still believed that the devil presented an earthly threat. In order to leave the darkness and enter the light, Europeans needed to evade the temptations and promises of the devil.
The story of Doctor Faustus is where the term “Faustian bargain” comes from, and a Faustian bargain is when one makes a deal with the devil. This pact with the devil normally pertains to obtaining material wealth, fame, or celebrity, yet in return you agree to give your eternal soul to the devil and spend eternity in hell.
A Faustian bargain consists of short-term gains and long-term suffering, yet when the term is applied today it is commonly understood that the person who has made a pact with the devil may also be unaware that they are doing so. The devil could have tricked them by appearing to be in good faith, while having a mauvaise foi agenda all along.
In the tales of Doctor Faustus written by Christopher Marlow, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Thomas Mann, the main character Doctor Faustus or Faust knowingly enters into a deal with the devil, and his eternal damnation, or merely the threat of damnation, turns his life into a cautionary tale. The story exists to encourage people to not align themselves with the devil despite the earthly successes it may bring.
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The story of Doctor Faustus existed as a guide for Europeans to successfully navigate through their newly-enlightened world, yet despite the popularity of Faust, it did not prevent Europeans from regressing back into their self-created darknesses.
Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus was published in 1947 and it used the story of Doctor Faustus to describe Germany’s descent into Nazism, and the main character Adrian Leverkühn, who makes a deal with the devil, obtains wealth, celebrity, and fame, but loses the ability to love his fellow man. Since he cannot love his fellow man, he ends up cultivating a hell on earth. Nazism also succumbed to this damnation, and WWII, the Holocaust and Lebensraum created a hell on earth.
American ethnocide is also built upon the inability to love your fellow man, and the “American Dream” celebrates the supposed opportunity to obtain material and financial wealth in this country. People are encouraged to embrace and immigrate to this country because of the promises of wealth and opportunity, but they are not told that to obtain that wealth you may be encouraged to despise your fellow man as you pursue your individualistic dream.
This sounds like a Faustian bargain to me, so it is imperative that we learn more about the story of Doctor Faustus so that we can understand the world we live in today.
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The Damnation of Knowledge and Wisdom
Folktales, like Doctor Faustus, organically emerge from a culture as the collective zeitgeist of a people struggle to answer a shared dilemma and seek guidance. As Europe left the Dark Ages, much of the continent struggled to understand where knowledge came from and how to obtain it, and this dilemma stems from the Bible’s creation story.
In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were tempted by the devil, who appeared as a serpent, to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Both of them succumbed to the temptation and ate the fruit, at which point they brought sin into the world, were banished from the Garden of Eden and were condemned to live on Earth and outside of paradise.
In this story, Adam and Eve introduced sin into the world because they obtained the knowledge of good and evil. Additionally, once they obtained this knowledge they finally saw themselves clearly and upon seeing their naked bodies they felt shame. This story teaches that knowledge is sinful and that self-awareness is shameful, and that being ignorantly unaware of everything including yourself is paradise. This is where the idea that “ignorance is bliss” comes from.
During the Dark Ages, which lasted one thousand years from the 5th to the 15th century, an avoidance of knowledge and an embrace of ignorance was the continental status quo. During this millenia, knowledge derived solely from God and was supposedly illuminated through a select group of people, namely monarchs and the prominent members of various Christian churches. The belief was that people did not obtain knowledge, or the knowledge to distinguish between good and evil, because that would be sinful. Instead, God’s knowledge would flow through people and these people would then speak the words of God, but not their own words. This is how one could obtain knowledge without sin.
As the Dark Ages ended and the Renaissance and Enlightenment began, Europeans became more confident in their ability to obtain knowledge individually and distinguish between good and bad without God’s assistance, yet knowledge’s thousand year stigma remained difficult to ignore. The pursuit of knowledge still felt sinful despite its obvious benefits, and this was the tension that created the story of Doctor Faustus.
Doctor Faustus represents the educated European man. He was a doctor who pursued knowledge, yet his pursuit of knowledge brought danger and anguish because it strayed from the continent’s long established status quo. God had not ordained Doctor Faustus or the authors of his story–Marlow, Goethe, and Mann–as the vessels in which his knowledge could flow, so then one must begin to wonder as to where this knowledge comes from.
According to the Bible, humanity’s knowledge comes from the devil and this is why Doctor Faustus must align himself with the devil in order to obtain worldly success at the price of eternal damnation. The alternative would be an ignorant, unsuccessful life with a glorious afterlife, but that would also mean a return to the Dark Ages.
The philosophy of René Descartes and his phrase “I think, therefore I am,” was another key concept during Europe’s Enlightenment, but this concept is entirely individualistic. According to this concept, one did not need another person to confirm one’s ability to think or one’s existence. This is the antithesis of the concept of Ubuntu which is “I am because we are.”
The individualism of this era made Europeans less likely to believe that knowledge could derive from their fellow person. Knowledge came from either God or the devil, and if human beings created knowledge without God’s assistance then they must have sought the help of the devil. Mann’s Doctor Faustus shows how individualism also manifests as a damnation.
The shunning of knowledge and the inability to distinguish between right and wrong cultivates an ignorant society that shuns intellectuals and negates the wisdom of philosophy. Philosophy thus becomes merely the ideas that exist in exclusive academic realms and is rarely considered to be a guide for living a good life that can be implemented by anyone. This is why Christian sects within a society often shun intellectuals.
Within this Faustian world, philosophy struggles to serve its primary purpose because people are scared to believe that they can cultivate knowledge and instead would prefer to believe that all knowledge resides within an external vessel–a god, a book, a founding constitutional document–that they hope illuminates through them.
We can see this struggle still in the United States today. America’s conservative political right both celebrate a faith in Christianity and in the alleged perfection of the U.S. Constitution as the dual reservoirs of knowledge and goodness in this society.
If gun violence consumes our society and makes all Americans less safe, American conservatives and the Republican Party profess that they will do next to nothing to protect Americans because the Second Amendment of our constitution says that Americans have the “right to bear arms.” According to them, goodness derives from the constitution regardless of the negative repercussions in the present. Additionally, collective inaction and meaningless calls for “thoughts and prayers” as your fellow man is dying from senseless violence demonstrates an inability to love your fellow man.
If American conservatives and Republicans believe that the Bible objects to abortion, they will demand that abortions become illegal regardless of the will of the people and the disastrous impact. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs equates to professing a supposed faith in the meaning of the constitution pertaining to a topic that America’s Founding Fathers did not talk about and they exercise this faith with a clear disregard of the knowledge one can obtain through loving and understanding their fellow American who benefits from the legalization of abortions.
The destruction of knowledge that has plagued Europe since the Dark Ages still undermines American life today.
America’s Faustian Bargain
I often think about Faustian bargains when I think about the United States because most of us are unaware that our society is ethnocidal. Our society has roots in the destruction of other people’s cultures while keeping the people alive. A cultureless person is easier to oppress, exploit, and manipulate, and the metaphysical representation of culture is the soul, or Geist, of a people.
Ethnocide aspires to crush people’s souls and at SCL we call this Geistmord, which means “soul murder” in German.
Despite America’s uplifting ideals, much of this nation is built upon and still shaped by Geistmord.
For example, last Sunday I published a story in The Daily Beast about the desecration of a Black cemetery in Bethesda, Maryland, and the government's desire to sell this cemetery to developers for $51 million without consulting the descendents of the deceased. Additionally, in the 1960s, the Ku Klux Klan ran all of the Black people out of this town, took control of the cemetery, and proceeded to bulldoze the gravestones and turn it into a parking lot. For more than 50 years, people have been casually parking their cars upon the graves of Black Americans.
Obviously, many of the Bethesda residents were unaware of the fact that a cemetery was beneath this parking lot, but due to the frequent erasure of white terrorism from the American narrative these people engaged in a soulless action everytime they parked their car on this sacred ground.
A Faustian bargain is when you trade your soul for financial gain, and this transaction is the foundation of ethnocide. Destroying the soul of another for your own financial gain requires the destruction of your own soul too. American ethnocide encourages all of us to agree to this Faustian bargain as we pursue the American Dream.
People from all over the world immigrate to the United States in pursuit of this dream, and they are rarely told that their soul and culture may be the price they must pay for success.
To avoid this American Faustian bargain, we must never believe that knowledge is sinful and must always love our fellow man.
My book THE CRIME WITHOUT A NAME was released on October 12, 2021 and NPR has picked it as one of the top books of the year!
You can order the book—including the audiobook—and watch recordings of my book tour discussions at Eaton and the New York Public Library at thecrimewithoutaname.com
