POLITICAL PUPPETRY: THE WEIRD LONGGAME PLAYED IN THE DARK

It is a kind magician's bargain, a joker's deal: give up your soul, win, get power and wealth in return. But once your soul has been handed over, that is, yourself, your very self, and your soul has been given up, the power thus conferred will never really belong to you nor will anything else be yours ever again. 

You are now a slave among enslaved puppets, a hollow entity and exemplar of all that you have become. You have given up your soul as they have theirs. 

You are just a puppet with a little bit of largely unspendable money at your feet but who can see the strings. Actually, who cares to look for them?

This Faustian deal has been played out for centuries. It turns up in the ballads, its on the stage in so many dramas and movies, and of course its in the puppet-plays which grew out of these deals. It is for the irrevocably damned because those with souls for sale prefer human knowledge over those higher forms of being in the world, those things that have no price – that which souls cannot buy.

The Faustian deal turned up in the 16th century, typically reducing Faust and Mephistopheles to figures of vulgar fun. However it usually turns out that Faust becomes a craven and dissatisfied intellectual who yearns for more than earthly meat and drink in an unsatisfying life. 

All that lay ahead is a deeper darker abyss than the one your soul paid for. It is what it is.