Millions of Christian Americans recite this phrase from the Lord’s Prayer every day: “(L)ead us not into temptation.” But, we, as Americans in all walks of life, are going to be tempted to buy things we don’t need, and to consume and shop until we drop — today and tomorrow and into eternity. The business of temptation, pursued even as a college subject in “marketing major,” is so virulent that few of us, in spite of the prayer, are going to survive the day without being victimized by temptation. Our nation’s economic life depends on it.
There are two kinds of people in American today: A clever minority who tempts (“tempters”) and the gullible majority who are tempted (“temptees”). The tug of war goes on around the clock between the two groups, making up the beating hearts on Wall Street, the ardent prayers on Madison Avenue, and the living fantasies in every American consumer’s wishful thinking. Tempters try to score big with new tricks and techniques; temptees try to survive the day without being fooled by one of those tempters that lurk everywhere. One of the most difficult daily trials in life in America is resisting the temptation of our strong desire with our weak self-discipline. Most Americans most of the time live as prisoners of temptation in a society where self-discipline is too weak to stand up to the forces of temptation’s deviltry and its rising consumer traps.
In America’s virulent consumer society, this “inner temptation” of what you always want is intensely multiplied by the algorithm of “outer temptation,” the seduction of your consumer heart from your corporate America’s temptation machine. Everywhere you turn in America, someone is trying to sell you something that you neither want, nor can afford. In a nation that does everything to make your spending easy but your good sense difficult, this is an ongoing Hell on Earth! It’s like being on a diet for your dear life but being surrounded by sights and smells of cooking all the time!
America is unquestionably the best temptation nation the world has ever seen, very clever with the technique of temptation — probably the cleverest tempter since the devil at the Garden of Eden. The very best and brightest among us are at this very moment engaged in the business of tempting their gullible brothers and sisters one way of another. In our uniquely isolated existences, lacking in neighbors and tribal support groups in a “nation of strangers,” we are uniquely vulnerable to such forces of temptation in a society where we are solitary and unconnected.
In the temptation business, as a rule, we don’t succeed with the truth. We must deploy deception, and the deception that’s legal in America is advertisement. America’s annual expenditure on advertisement matches the expenditure of the top-10 advertising nations of the world combined, including China that has five times America’s population. Advertisement is a fictional one-way push about a product or an idea, which means life in consumer America is mostly made up of fictitious thoughts and feelings. Unquestionably, as the most advertising nation in the world, we are also the most fantasy-driven and deception-engineered nation in the history of intelligent life. Notice that things that are true — like your mother’s love for you — are never advertised.
Every day in America, temptation is all that is on TV, on the internet, on the supermarket shelves, at the department stores, on the billboards, and all the chapters and verses in the gospel of the good life. Everywhere in America someone is trying to tempt someone, and is trying to test out the new technique of deception. We hear that close to 60% of all deceptive political donations that are refunded are from senior citizens; the young millennial-type Americans simply assume that virtually all messages they receive are scams, frauds and fakeries and virtually all businesses are liars. For most Americans, who may not be as cynical, it’s an exhausting struggle just trying to survive the tempters by distinguishing truth from deception.
Every time we see, smell, hear, touch or feel something that calls our attention, it is likely to be someone’s attempt to con and cheat us. Everything that gives us joy, sadness, excitement, or disappointment — the whole range of our emotional life and death in America — is likely to be a manufactured “human interest” angle. No society before America, no human being before today’s American, has ever been surrounded by such waves and variations of deception and temptation. It is deception that enlivens our emotional life, and it is upon our death that temptation finally stops its assault on us (unless it’s tempting the survivors with a more expensive funeral and casket).
Who is our own devil in America today that tempts us so persistently, so effectively, so relentlessly? The Bible tells us that the devil showed Jesus in the wilderness “all the kingdoms of the world,” and said, “I shall give to you all this power and glory. All this will be yours, if you worship me.” Jesus refused the offer. Capitalism has been promising all this to us for generations, who have not only accepted the offer but have also created universities and doctors to best serve the devil’s temptation business, calling their services “economics,” “MBAs,” “marketing,” and so on.
Our good government can protect us from the clever economics professors and lying businessmen. But in America, the government and corporate world are in cahoots in the temptation alliance, almost competing as to who is better at it — government or corporations, and we, the citizens, caught between the two tempting institutions of power over us, must fend for ourselves.
How did the God-chosen new nation, believed to be the “City on a Hill,” become such a hellish playground for the devil?
Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield.