The ability of some several thousand, even million, to publicly shame, harass, or “cancel” whomever they will is often used as an example of the unparalleled power of speech. This is odd—like arguing that the ability of a million people to drown a politician by collectively spitting at him somehow proves the unparalleled power of human spit. When Christ promised his power and presence to his disciples, he promised it wherever “two or more are gathered in my name.” We promise power wherever a million or more are gathered against a common enemy, and somehow manage to believe that we have tapped a power more real and efficacious than the power of Christ. Surely, the necessity for a veritable army to type all at once, in order for that typing to do anything at all, is evidence against, and not for, the inherent power of the human voice. And this without considering that most people so cancelled and shamed are, with few exceptions, only momentarily affected within the realm of opinion, and that it only works on people who rely on such million-man attention in the first place. The small successes of unified shaming provide brief relief from our chronic powerlessness and little else.
It would be bad enough if all this artificial boosting of the power of speech merely distracted us from the real work of resisting tyranny. But our rulers profit from loosening our tongues, not merely because it distracts us from tightening our fists, but because the words that drop from our loose lips can be gathered as so much “data” by which to target us with propaganda—be it commercial, journalistic, ideological, political, or otherwise.
For all its algorithmic novelty, this particular method of ruining people is nothing new. The Scriptures knew it well. Within its wisdom literature it condemns the fool, a character known precisely by his inability to restrain his tongue. He is the “prating fool” (Proverbs 10:8), the “babbling” fool (10:14). It is proverbial to contrast him with his wiser neighbor by their respective speech and silence: “He who belittles a neighbor lacks sense, but a man of understanding remains silent. He who goes about as a talebearer reveals secrets, but he who is trustworthy in spirit keeps a thing hidden.... A prudent man conceals his knowledge, but fools proclaim their folly,” and on and on, noise and silence contrasted like so much darkness and light (11:13-14, 12:23). And the one who babbles, tattles, titters, and constantly proclaims himself is not merely an unpleasant dinner guest—“he who opens wide his lips comes to ruin” (13:3). Indeed, his constant stream of words is a source of servility: “The talk of a fool is a rod for his back” (14:3). The result of his prattle is a practical lack of ownership: “In all toil there is profit, but mere talk tends only to want” (14:23).
The reason is simple, and we do not need to search farther than common sense to discern it. A man who shows cards does not win at poker; a man who reveals his every idea gives them to others to accomplish; a man who spends his time chatting does not spend his time working; a man who tells secrets is not trusted with them; a man who unveils his fears and desires is easy prey for those who would rule him by the manipulation of those passions. That our tech-lords have successfully created machines by which the babbling of the fool accrues to their profit and his loss is a novelty only in its scope. Mere talk always tends towards material poverty; our tech-lords have simply made an app of the fact.
Now we could lay out how social media turns loose talk into profits, but it seems more effective to offer some (restrained) talk regarding those beings we call demons and what use, if any, they make of Instagram. The great failure of contemporary political thought is to treat the immaterial powers as something immaterial; bringing in angels and demons as so many minor, winged characters of a plot that would progress just the same if they were kept in the wings. Saint Paul says somewhere that our battle is not with flesh and blood but with powers and principalities. We say the opposite and imagine ourselves more principled than the saint.
I share a great sympathy—albeit a literary one—with all those in the habit of calling CEOs succubi and liberals Lucifers. But it is a piddling politics that demonizes its human opponents. Not because the time-honored tradition of calling Democrats “demons” is mean, but because it rather suggests there are no actual demons exerting their power on Democrats. When we turn to the Catholic faith, it does not say that the material is real and the spiritual false any more than it says the opposite. The presence of wicked men does not render the influence of demons irrelevant. There is no human wickedness, however motivated, that is not satanic, for it “imitates him who was the first to sin,” namely, Satan (Aquinas, ST. I, 114 a. 3). That bad men and bad angels act in the same manner does not suggest that either party can be done away with. If anything, it suggests collusion between the two.
And because of this, there is a great spiritual benefit to silence, to all the word-swallowing and tongue-biting that we now take as so much cowardice. For the methods of demons and the creators of our social media worlds are essentially the same—they tempt.
Now, tempting must be understood, and understood well, for demonic temptation is not merely some odd, malicious banana peel thrown by the fallen angels for the sake of tripping up the faithful. It is necessary. They cannot do otherwise. Despite popular portrayals to the contrary, man is not normally available to demonic influence. This is so in an extraordinary way for Catholics, who are exorcized, baptized, and freed from the dominion of the devil, strengthened against his wiles and deceits by the sacraments of the Church, and given to regularly sprinkling themselves with holy water, an act of devotion which pagans, post-Christians, and even some Protestants don’t perform until they start hearing voices behind their drywall, which has always struck me as leaving it a bit late. But even the unbaptized have angels assigned to their protection and—more to the point—their very creation as free creatures resists the demons who would drag them into hell if they could, but find they must convince them to walk there themselves, lock the gates behind them, and hand in the key at the front desk. Human beings are a synthesis of exterior and interior, body and soul, and this latter dimension is mysterious and inaccessible to everyone but its Creator. No one but God knows our thoughts. No one but God knows, with certainty, our dispositions. We are naturally demon-proof in this manner: “[O]nly God, to whose ordination the movement of the will, and so voluntary thoughts, are directly subject, can move the will internally, neither devils nor anyone else but God and the person willing and thinking can know such thoughts” (Aquinas, De Malo, 16, a. 8).
And so the demons, to damn us, must tempt us. Thomas Aquinas argues that “to tempt [tentare, to try], properly speaking, is to make a trial of something” (ST. I, Q. 114, a. 2). And this “making trial” is not, in an immediate sense, for the sake of causing someone to sin. Satan’s suggestion to Jesus, that he “tell these stones to become bread” (Matthew 4:3) would not have been sinful in itself—certainly not for one who had so recently transformed water into wine. Rather, the proposed miracle would reveal who and what Jesus was: God’s son. Temptation stirs us into revelation, to make outer what is inner, to manifest what is secret, and so Aquinas can argue that “the immediate end [goal] of the tempter is knowledge” (ST. I, Q. 114, a. 2). Because of this, there can be such a thing as a good tempter—one who puts a person through some trial so as to test his mettle and “with a view to his promotion” (ibid.).
Obviously, the demons have no such desire for our promotion, only for a steady series of demotions which we scarcely recognize as such until we are, one fateful day, fired—and on fire. Still, the ultimate end of getting Jack to hell is achieved through temptation, by which Jack is made to blush, shiver, shake, move, speak, act, and otherwise make present in his body what dispositions and thoughts are kept secret from every power and principality by virtue of residing in his soul.
The demons know what happens outwardly among men; but the inward disposition of man God alone knows, Who is the weigher of spirits (Proverbs 16:12). It is this disposition that makes men more prone to one vice than another, hence the devil tempts, in order to explore this inward disposition of man, so that he may tempt him to that vice to which he is most prone. (ST. I, Q. 111, a. 3)
All of this shows what we really should know, that demons are not that frightening. They are smarter than us, stronger than us, and fixated on our misery, sure, but they are not omnipotent. An intellectual creature is not bound to a physical location, like us clods, but one must never mistake this for omnipresence, which belongs to God alone, present to all things equally and everywhere for the simple reason that All Things and Everywhere only exist as a stream of light flowing from his generous hand. Unlike God, an angel is limited to a location in the sense that the angel only “is” where it exerts its power. And though angels are awesome, still, they cannot exert their power everywhere at once—any more than our own, comparatively paltry, intellects can think of everything at once. It follows that there are words, actions, expressions, and gestures that may very well go unnoticed by any and all demons. There is no necessary reason why a servant of Hell may hear us say this rather than that. It would be unreasonable to fear them as if they were a constant presence to us, incapable of “missing” our various revelations.
Again, this is confirmed by the demonic need to tempt—if they were capable of undivided attention, it is difficult to imagine that they would need to figure out our primary dispositions by way of temptation. An uncle may need to test the mettle of his nephew, a grocer may need to interview him to find out whether he is habitually disposed to bag groceries; but his father, a more constant presence than both, needs no special trial to discover the weakness and strength of his son. I dare say that, barring some perversion of sin, a mother knows her daughter better in the intimacy of her love than the Prince of Darkness knows her in all the malice of his intellectual power.
If we take these two facts together, that demons must tempt us to reveal ourselves, and that, by the limitations of their nature they may well miss our various self-revelations, then social media becomes concerning. I do not mean to sound like an alarmist (though, admittedly, I am ringing an alarm bell). But if it is true that the demons need us to reveal ourselves, and do not necessarily “catch” our every revelation, then it must be true that we can make their foul work easier or harder. We may, for instance, and as an extreme example, invoke them, call on them to be present, and ask them to pay attention by taking on the whole host of irrational, occult practices which attempt to attract the naturally limited power of demons to our person. This makes their job easier in rather the same manner that a man who talks only about Marvel movies makes the job of the advertisers a breeze.
We may, to take the other extreme, become ascetics, take vows of silence, conform ourselves to a rule of life, and so reveal very little of our dispositions and thoughts in outward gesture and word. Ultimately, this would involve becoming holy, a state in which our every blush and word, insofar as they do reveal our dispositions, reveal them unto the devil’s despair, for we have become dispositionally conformed to Christ, and were the devil to tempt us, he would find himself once more in the desert, facing his Eternal Foe. It is at this point, in the lives of the saints, that the demons cease “tempting” in any crafty sense, and begin attacking, for they are thugs and tyrants, and when they cannot discover how to move one of the saints they either flee in fear or hit in rage, to little effect.
But if we may make a demon’s work easier, then I think it is undoubtedly true that the basic design of social media, and the usage it promotes, does so. Social media tempts us to speak. I mean this quite literally. Facebook tempts, asking, “What’s on your mind, Marc?” Such a trial, by which I am pushed to reveal my hidden mind is necessary for Facebook to reveal my inner disposition, a revelation that is ultimately sold as a guide for politicians and producers to “know” what products and beliefs and news I am most likely to buy. The demons have no need for money, but the desire for money has led Facebook to assuage the need of the demons, that is, to stir man into needless self-revelation, when “what’s on his mind” is otherwise known only to God. Twitter asks: “What’s happening?” a question which inspires a whole abyss of undirected self-revelation. And the utility of Twitter’s temptation, from the demonic perspective, is simply that the demon does not know “what’s happening” within the human heart, and Twitter helpfully tempts us to reveal it.
Of course, I am using these prompts as exemplars—the real weight of temptation does not come from these didactic invitations to divulge ourselves to an unknown crowd, but through the entire addicting design of social media and, increasingly, our internet society as a whole. Speech is praised, speech is mandated, speech is therapy and salvation; comment is encouraged, reaction begged for, and everywhere the law is: express yourself! And as much as social media becomes an addiction in its users, it is already a necessity in its owners—if we do not speak through their medium, their wealth fails, their empire crumbles, and, probably, the economy with it. They tempt us to speak as an economy built on consumerism tempts us to buy: if we don’t, in either case, recession, depression, and disaster ensue. In this sense, their desperate goals are not identical with the demons, and while we have no sympathy for the devil, we may squeeze out a bit for our tyrants: having made the world rely on Google and Amazon, they are as much slaves to its continual success as we.
But there is a similarity between the princes of the earth and the prince of the air, and it is not an idle one. Even as we might cut our billionaires some slack for at least aiming at profits and not directly our destruction, only a babbling fool could believe that we are not being destroyed, as what little remains of our owned skills and communal capacities is traded over for rented conveniences accessible by devices that spew a steady stream of revenue from our buzzing and beeping pockets to the heavy and clinking pockets of Bezos, Zuck, and Gates. The idea that humanity flourishes in a world run by smartphones is laughable in the extreme and should be resoundingly mocked by whatever sensible people are left. Because their temptations tend us, like all fools, towards addictions, slavish demotions, and the personal and generational loss of property, Aquinas argues that our billionaires are images of Satan in a rather strong sense:
The devil ... always tempts in order to hurt by urging men into sin. In this sense it is said to be his proper office to tempt; for though at times man tempts thus, he does this as a minister of the devil” (114, a. 2).
There are three ways in which social media, and its owners, ministers to the devil. The first, we have said: it does his work of tempting. The second has been implied: of these temptations, a great portion of them do not merely work to provide the Tempter with his immediate goal of knowledge, but his ultimate goal of human sin. We are tempted to particular acts of vanity, gossip, lust, and wrath, to name but an obvious few of sins to which regular logging in is a near occasion. And the third way is structural. The centralization of constant, temptation-induced, human self-revelation into a regularized, organized, codified, and recorded database simply must make it easier for demons to survey the results of these temptations, easier to know the unfathomable thoughts and dispositions such temptations reveal, even as social media makes such knowledge more easily available for those who act as the devil’s ministers. As argued, the angelic power is awesome, but it is not omnipresent, and it is no more a stretch to argue that the mechanized collection of our prattle would allow them to discern our vicious dispositions with greater ease than it is to argue that this collection provides the same service to human advertisers—which it does.
Propriety, silence, prudence, wisdom, and more hilariously, the simple act of not using social media takes on a more exalted role in our age of free and constant speech. For, if keeping a guard over one’s tongue resists the power of evil men who would buy and sell our dispositions and thoughts for profit, how much more is a spiritual piece of duct-tape, restraining the voice, necessary to resist the power of those who would use the revelations of our secret life unto our perdition? If human silence and inscrutability befuddles the propagandists, how much more necessary is it to confound those to whom the propagandist is but minister and slave? May God grant us all the grace, and St. Michael extend his protection.