Faustian Bargain

Full Title or Meme

Faustian Bargain, a pact whereby a person trades something of supreme moral or spiritual importance, such as personal values or the soul, for some worldly or material benefit, such as knowledge, power, or riches.

Context

Staring out as a deal with the devil, the tale’s strict theological obsessions have been supplanted by a more general interest in the temptation of knowledge itself.

Where do We Go from Here?

In a book review of Ed Simon's book

Today, Hell is here, inside us; it is not elsewhere. We’re all Faustians now. These days, Simon argues, in an excoriating, eloquent final chapter, we write our contracts not in blood but in silicon—both figuratively, insofar as we sign away our identities and privacies for all the short-term benefits of material ease, and literally, whenever we scroll rapidly through one of those unreadable online contracts, eager only to assent. Somewhere out there in the ether, the ghost in the machine hears our weak little mouse clicks and pricks up his horns.