Saturday 16 February 2002

Pic of the day: Smart cards, stupid people.

Satan and credit cards

I listened to some old songs by Infinity, the bouncy Norwegian electronic dance group. I noticed how the lyrics both in their first album and the last casually refer to freedom. I like freedom, so that's fine by me. I can certainly agree with a statement like this: Free, free, free your soul, that is my entire goal. But then again, the difference between Prometheus and Satan is sometimes disturbingly small.

(For the purists, I should clarify that I refer to the contemporary Christian image of Satan, neither the original Jewish version nor the New Age version. Thereby hangs a tail all of its own, which we shall skip here. Suffice it to say that the whole Lucifer part is incorporated well after the Bible was written.)

The way I see it, Satan and credit cards work in about the same way. They both promise you freedom, and yet the more you enjoy their freedom, the more bound you become. It's not quite that the freedom is not genuine. You may think it over logically and it seems real enough. What you fail to consider is human weakness in the face of freedom. We believe too strongly in our will to do the right thing. We underestimate our power to come up with good explanations for dumb thing.

There are those who see a pattern: We stopped believing in Hell, and so we developed poison gas, anthrax spores and the nuclear bomb. If so, perhaps we stopped believing in Satan, so we invented the credit cards. That way common people can still be led into temptation and suffer slavery of the soul. As the editorial in the New Norwegian newspaper Firda said some years ago: "Where have all the evil spirits gone? Perhaps they have gone into politics." Yeah, and perhaps they have gone into marketing. The Christian book of Revelation has a weird imagery of three evil spirits shaped like toads, going out to gather the people of the world. Have you noticed how marketing toadies to you, promising to fulfill your wishes if only you buy some unrelated product? Cheap too. They show you all the kingdoms of the world and their glory.

***

As some of you may know, I learned most of what I know about Christianity from the small group of mystics known as "Smith's Friends", originally a Norwegian movement, now global and more numerous. When I was young, it was customary among them to not have television (and preferably not radio, unless work demanded it). They also dressed very conservatively, and abstained from displaying worldly riches. (Not that most of them had much of that, either.)

Time and time again we noticed, when someone (or a family) left the congregation, they would almost immediately buy a television. Thereafter in short order came jewelry and revealing clothes for the women, and often divorce for married couples. But the TV was pretty much the first thing to come. It was hard to resist the thought that they had wanted this all the time, but not dared to for fear of what the other church members may say about them.

On a vaguely related note, I come to think of what happened in Kabul after the fall of Taliban. Now in all honesty, Smith's Friends never had public (or even private) executions of their sinners. The one common ground is that when people get the freedom to it, they will jump on the American Way of Life. Whether they are former preachers, Muslim peons or stone age tribesmen, they will drop everything to get Coca-Cola and Jerry Springer. It is a fascinating phenomenon, I dare say.

Oh, and I still don't have a TV. I do have a computer, though. I guess that's even more freedom, but you have to think a bit to exercize it.

***

One of the things I have heard over the years is that I make people think. I find this natural. I am sane, but I am not just sane. Sanity is just a subset of my mind. I routinely go outside it and see things from angles that normals either can't or don't dare. Mostly I ask questions, though. Don't take it that I mean anything I hint at, unless I say so (or act accordingly). I just use various theories for a point to stand on outside the field, to get a better view. I don't really believe all manner of different things at the same time! I can however see them all at the same time, and I guess that alone can scare the inexperienced.

Indeed, freedom itself can scare people. And it ought to scare much more people than it does. As you may have guessed already, I think that not all people benefit from freedom. At least unless you assign a very high value to freedom itself. Often people are better off living by the book, or just mindlessly doing what their preacher tells them. (Or their boss, in their paid time.) Of course, this may also go terribly wrong; finding the right leader to follow is no simple task. But it is usually easier than deciding everything on your own. Which is why people let professionals handle their money, for instance.

Perhaps this is what Jesus meant in his parable of the guys who got various amounts of money to take care of while the king was away. The guy who got the least, just hid it away. The king was angry: "Why didn't you at least place it in the bank so I could my money back with interest?" I guess in the same way, following someone's lead may be better than hiding in a corner for all of your life. There is freedom to choose, but no freedom not to choose.

Evidently then, freedom itself is so valuable to God that he was willing to tolerate both the Tree of Knowledge and Satan himself in order to make sure people had a choice. And who am I to disagree with God in matters of principle? Here, little credit card, come to daddy ...