Posted Aug 7, 2026
The scene is almost stereotypical. A cartoonishly slim-faced thin-moustache-twirling man in a black zoot suit and red button up emerges from a pentagram-inscribed circle and approaches a desperate individual with an all too familiar offer: comfort, riches, fame, and glory for the pittance of a single soul. The audience feels their stomach drop as our short-sighted protagonist signs the instrument of their own destruction before proceeding to not only to lose their immortal soul but also, comically, get cheated out of the compensation received for the ultimate sacrifice. While we may empathize with the weakness or specific vices of such a character, we intuitively understand that one who is foolish enough to give up their eternal soul to a devourer of infants is enough of an impotent to almost cosmically demand the reversal of the reward they exchanged for it.
Yet while many of us are befuddled by this seeming incomprehensible inability to detect the most plainly evident unwritten rules of existence, I would posit that this experience strikes closer to home than most would like to admit. While the concept of an immortal soul appears unjustified scientifically, the spirit as an emotional essence has been the subject of a long and storied literary history. Plato defined the soul as containing three distinct parts. Reason sits atop the hierarchy here, with Plato characterizing it as tasked with guiding the others. Appetite was the utilitarian value, comprising of biological necessities like hunger, thirst, and desire as well as comfort and luxury. Finally, Spirit was characterized as the emotional part, comprising of aspects like courage, anger, and indignation. Plato characterizes the latter two as oft being in conflict. Our modern sensibilities lead us to a conclusion that Appetite would be the ally of reason in this conflict. After all, according to pop psychology tools like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the human being requires sustenance before even being capable of truly comprehending lofty ideals like courage. Yet, Plato explicitly assigns Spirit as the ally of Reason in the containment of Appetite.
While parallels with soul-bargaining have limitations, I would argue that selling your Spirit to satisfy your Appetite is at least directionally similar to it. Some of us would gawk at the suggestion that they would put material gain over spiritual health. While difficult, there are plenty of people who have made material sacrifices to improve the condition of their spirit. Yet, on the whole, our public discourse does not reflect this in the stage that representational stage that reflects the structures meant to enable the realization of, in the words of our Declaration of Independence, our “unalienable Rights” of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. In fact, one seldom hears in the common political discourse, any centralization of issues of the Spirit. One can argue that opposite, an embrace of materialism is closer to omnipresent in the political imagination of the ruling class from the incessant hyperfocus on inflation from the center right to the new ‘sewer socialist’ monicker of the insurgent left. Issues of the Spirit are labeled as unserious, unproductive, bourgeois distraction, identity politics, or even fascistic by a select few. Yet as with the bargainer we label a rube, we are repeatedly disappointed when we are cheated of our reward for opting for this bargain.
One might interject here and say that this comparison is unfair. After all, the demon Is a malicious actor whom we cannot equate the modern political class to. Yet to the narrative thrust of the story, it matters not whether the bargain was done with a cow, a man, or even a rock, we intuitively understand the betrayal of oneself for the material to be beacon to the cosmic order for a monkey-paw-style retribution. I would say there are two dimensions to this.
The first is the misattribution of material goods to human needs. Goods are a tool to achieve a goal such as achieving sustenance, gaining status, or staving off boredom. However, confusing the tool with the goal itself has long been intuitively seen as a betrayal of oneself and folly worthy of great punishment. Take the parable of King Midas, who misattributed his desire for status and glory for a material want of gold. By pursuing this end, he was left with not only nobody to provide him with status or glory but also was revealed to have betrayed matters of the Spirit revealed to have greater importance to him like love of family.
The second is a broader understanding of having betrayed oneself. In Dev Patel’s excellent rendition of Gawain in The Green Knight, the knight sentenced to death by means of an agreement on his own honor leads to an intense premonition upon receipt of a magical sash guaranteeing immortality to bodily damage to its wearer. The conundrum of whether to deceive the challenge puts Gawain’s chivalry as a knight (an aspect of his Spirit) against his Appetite for survival, and when considering how to proceed, Gawain draws out his life post-survival. While returning home a hero, he is forced to always wear the sash to keep his body intact. He betrays the prostitute he called his lover in pursuit of greater glory and marries a woman he doesn’t love. The sad tale ends with an unspecified rebellion I interpret to be an implied result of unkingly leadership, leading to Gawain accepting his fate and removing the belt. While cinematically enjoyable, the key moral intuition this pulls upon is that the betrayal of one’s principles in one domain is a likely betrayal of other principles oft leading to a house of cards primed for collapse. Thus, Gawain bravely unbelts and accepts his fate, and, in doing so, saves his Spirit.
So where does this lead us? It’s hard to pinpoint a specific policy proposal, though I’d argue that’s not the point. There’s a recent strain of thought amongst center-left types like Ryan Geddie that pull at this thread more where they essentially brand liberal neutrality as obsolete due to the emergence of competing value systems disrupting the “long 90s” (I stole this term from this article. While a valuable rebuke of neoliberal maximization, where this sort of framing fall short are their understanding of what is important. Generally, there are two potential failure modes.
The first is changing the material optimization goal. These critiques come from both the left and the center-left and mostly revolve around framing the fault of the neoliberal regime as paying insufficient attention to distributional outcomes or some undermeasured quantity like walkability. Solutions for this class of problem have the comforting shape of neoliberal optimization that allows for the recycling of the impersonal state tools used to boost GDP to flow to these other goals. Proponents, especially of the latter kind, often extol the virtues of their proxy goal, ascribing dubious benefits like the return of the American spirit or the revival of community through, in my view, often contrived logic. These goals might improve certain outcomes, but just as the Free Silver movement in the late 19th century, there is great cause for skepticism for these, in the grand scheme of things, minor technocratic tweaks like universal healthcare to solve the underlying spiritual rot.
The second is adhering to some sort of rationalistic philosophy. There are a bazaars worth of understandings of the natural orders of the world, humanity, fairness, justice, and nature to choose from, and almost all of them promise a more meaningful existence than managerial status quo politics. While broadly a positive direction to search in, a possible pitfall of many of the more rigid and foundational of these is the overrationalizating of existence as to where the purported system of values lacks any accord with one’s Spirit. Is someone’s understanding of a contradiction in conception closer to that of feeling a mother’s love or calculating the optimal monetary policy? Some may argue that this is an infeasible standard on matters of societal values of governance. After all, relying on the often contradictory instincts of a single person, let alone a collection of people, is not likely to lead to a comprehensive policy proposal. Thus, they argue that their mechanistic derivations from broadly accepted foundations serve as more stable indicators of a moral system to build from than the whims of the time. Yet, I’d argue that this misses the solution by branding in the problem. Unlike a rigid moral system, the Spirit of a people is satisfied by a variety of ever-changing ideals, movements, and trends that can expand to encompass the naturally uninclined. This malleability and embrace of proselytization makes this approach to politics both more energizing and meaningful.
Now what would this look like. Firstly, to show my cards, I would consider myself to be firmly a man of the left. However, I would be dishonest if I were not to admit that most of the spiritual energy politics exists on the right at the moment. From religious nationalism which gives people an ordained place in the world of a god commanding a roster of aesthetic painted-glass cathedral to fascists fighting for a JPEG depicting an AI generated 1950s America free of crime, sadness, women and coloreds, the vision of the right appeals primarily to the Spirit before all else. While devoid of Reason and, thus, devoid of any actualization, the left can, nevertheless, learn from the abject domination the right has in this sphere. Whether that means developing a vision, naming an enemy, or fighting with courage, there are a variety of approaches, but the only requirement is that these must be centered. The average Trump voter neither knows nor cares about the day-to-day policy goals of the administration and polling shows that they follow the leader very well. I hypothesize that this is due to the leader being the spiritual core of the movement. This would not work if the cult of personality around the man was a sideshow for center-right wonkery.
Thus, to achieve this sort of effect, and, more importantly, to restore the spirits of the supporters and the nation at large alike, the democrats must say no to their professional operating class and intelligentsia and instead focus of grandiose embarrassing visions, proclamations and leaders, which I believe many of these types would rather defect to the other side than support. But through what these elites term embarrassment, the left will finally return to where it sees itself, as the rightful herald of the common man, and the political and moral quicksand underneath them will naturally solidify to be the foundation of whatever future we advocate.