Dealing with the devil: Faust/Eric, by Terry Pratchett

 It is time for a Pratchett post.  Last week, I wrote my Sunday piece about K.J. Parker's The Folding Knife, and Pratchett is always a good palate-cleanser, including after such a perversely weighty book.  So we turn to Terry.  My last Pratchett post was about Pyramids, and were I to go in order, that would take us to Guards! Guards!  That one is actually quite good, but I think I may come back and revisit the City Watch books at a later date, if I can stomach the series they tried to make of that particular corner of Ankh-Morpork.  For now, we'll skip ahead to Faust Eric.  I can work with that, topically.  I remain in terror of whatever the modern television industry would do to Sam Vimes and the rest of the Watch, though.  (Sgt. Detritus, don't salute!)

Regardless, Faust Eric follows a child demonologist named, um... I can't remember.  He intends to summon a demon to grant him three wishes.  Immortality, power, and the most beautiful woman in history.  Yet the spell goes wrong, and instead of the intended demon, he gets the bumbling wizard, Rincewind.  The powers of hell work with what they have, and Rincewind is demonically empowered to take Eric on a journey through time to grant Eric his wishes in demonically perverse fashion in their plan to recruit discworld's childish Faust.

They visit an analog to the Aztecs, where a tribute would be paid to Eric, should he survive.  They visit discworld's historical equivalent to the Trojan War to meet their middle-aged Helen (and a pretty cool Odysseus).  Then, finally, for immortality, they must travel back to the beginning of time to experience all of time.  See?  Do you see what happens when you bargain with the powers of hell?  As this is happening, hell itself sees its own internal struggles.  A new demon king, Astfgl, has taken over the place and instituted some new policies.  You see, without a corporeal body, corporeally-conceived tortures are rather pointless.  So, the new demon king concocts spiritual tortures, like reading you the rules of the torture.  In full.  He bureaucratizes the place.  The problem is that this makes it hell for everyone, demons included.  The book ends with the demon king of hell getting sacked, through the guise of a promotion to an office where his endless memos will go ignored rather than torturing everyone, and the demons and damned souls can go back to the mutually agreeable illusion of torment and everyone dies acceptably ever after.

So let's talk about deals with devils.  The irony within Faust Eric is that some of them kind of do work.  The deals between the damned souls in hell and the demons who merely act out the tortures, prior to the new demon king's reforms.  Eric can no more make a deal with hell than the crossed-out namesake of the book, but why?  The new demon king of hell actually believes in true torment.  Your torment is his gain.  Your utility is a negative parameter in his utility function.  The lower-ranked demons are content to act out the torture for the sake of the show.  You can, it turns out, deal with them because they are less interested in whether or not you suffer than their own suffering.  It may torture you to have to listen to the full legal code, but it tortures them to have to read it to you.  They would rather stick you with hot pokers, even if they know that you have already realized it can't hurt you anymore because you no longer have a corporeal body.

The selfish, and the malevolent.  You can deal with one, but you cannot deal with the other.  Your interaction with the malevolent is zero-sum.  No deal, no dice.

There are devils with whom you can deal, and there are devils with whom you cannot.  Bu-bye, Tucker.  Feel free to let the door hit you on the way out.  Fox, it turned out, could not deal with that particular devil.  The Republican Party establishment figures have been trying to worm out of their deal with Trump for years.  And failing, after everything he has cost them.

Consider one of those establishment figures who wants out of the deal.  Mitch McConnell.  I have often said the following:  When the epitaph for American democracy is written, it will say, "Murdered in cold blood by Mitch McConnell."  And yet you can deal with Mitch McConnell.  McConnell is not the one fucking around with the debt ceiling, and he never has been.  Back in 2011, he wanted to change the whole law to give the president unilateral authority to raise the debt ceiling, unless overridden by Congress (subject to a presidential veto, and congressional override, but that would take 2/3, and hence, any congressional vote to override a debt ceiling increase would be pointlessly symbolic).

You can deal with McConnell.

On the left, there are the woke.  You cannot deal with the woke, because they are engaged in a purity spiral.  They inevitably eat their own, because the goal is not to accomplish anything, but rather, to signal their own purity.  The purity spiral is what turned the right wing into fanatical nutjobs too.

There are the devils with whom you can deal, and the devils with whom you cannot.  Fox eventually had to cut Tucker loose, and we are getting hints of why, yet Tucker Carlson's particular brand of evil created dangers not merely for the country, but for Fox itself.  Malevolence rather than selfishness.  You cannot deal with that.  Trump?  It should go without saying that you cannot deal with him.  He'll never even pay a contractor.

And no, you cannot deal with the woke.  If you are unfamiliar with the story of Vincent Lloyd, go and read.  He is a critical race theorist who got canceled for being insufficiently woke.  There is nothing the woke crave more than cannibalism, because the ritualistic eating of their own proves their own purity by demonstrating that they found a heretic in the ranks who needed to be eaten.

And then there are devils like Mitch McConnell.  You can deal with him.  Reprehensible as he is, you can deal with him.  Not Tucker Carlson, not Trump, not the woke, but with Mitch McConnell.

As we stare down another debt ceiling crisis, McConnell doesn't want this.  He tried to stop them all, not out of the goodness of his heart, but out of selfishness.  That selfishness is the basis of bargaining.  You can bargain with that.

You cannot bargain with malevolence.

I will conclude with a minor observation.  The demons of hell in Faust Eric decide that the easiest way to sack Astfgl is not a bloody coup, but to tell him that they are promoting him.  The job was too small for his talents.  Go!  Go somewhere deserving of your great talents!

Bloody brilliant.

Would that work with Trump?

And music.  I was overloaded with choices for this morning.  Let's go with some bluegrass.  Peter Rowan, "Deal With The Devil," from Crucial Country: Live at Telluride.  This one has the added benefit of a Vincent Lloyd connection, via Telluride.