Vincent Trapinaud
In legend, the pact with the devil is a signature at midnight: a soul in exchange for power, a hidden price paid later. Book I of Les Fermiers turns that image around: the most widespread pact has no ritual, no signature and no belief; it requires only decisions. Millions of people cooperate with the system this way without knowing it, and the only way out is not to fight, but to stop betting.
What does a pact with the devil mean?
The word “pact” drags a whole imagery behind it: a quill dipped in blood, an elegant visitor who already knows your name. You trade something invisible, your soul, for something very visible: fortune, knowledge, a woman’s love, victory. And you always discover too late that the price was heavier than expected.
The figure is an old one. The Christian Middle Ages already told it in the legend of Theophilus, a cleric from Asia Minor who, removed from his office, gives himself to the devil to win it back, then repents and is rescued by the Virgin. In the thirteenth century Rutebeuf drew from it his Miracle of Theophilus. The pattern was set for centuries: a man wounded in his ambition, a go-between, a signature, a deferred price.
What strikes you, rereading these tales, is not the supernatural. It is the mechanics. The pact begins with an ordinary frustration, is sealed by a transaction that seems reasonable, and reveals its true cost only at the end. The devil of the legends snatches nothing: he offers, and the man accepts.
The Faustian bargain: what the Faust legend really tells
No figure has given the pact more flesh than Faust. Behind the character stands a real man, an itinerant astrologer and magician in early sixteenth-century Germany, known above all for his sulfurous reputation. In 1587, a Frankfurt printer published a Historia von D. Johann Fausten, the “chapbook” that fixed the legend: a scholar hungry for knowledge makes a pact with an infernal spirit, Mephistopheles, for twenty-four years, at the end of which he will be carried off.
Christopher Marlowe took it up a few years later in The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. His Faustus signs in his own blood and spends his last hour begging time to stand still. Then Goethe, in two parts published in 1808 and 1832, changed the nature of the contract: it is no longer a fixed-term lease but a wager. Faust will be lost only on the day when, fulfilled, he asks a moment to last. And in Goethe, against all expectation, Faust is saved in the end.
From these variations came the expression “Faustian bargain,” now part of everyday language: a deal in which you gain an immediate advantage by sacrificing something essential, whose price will be paid only later. The devil has vanished from the phrase; the structure has remained.
Three features recur in every version, and they are what interest the Farmers’ map:
- The exchange is gradual. You never go in all at once. There is curiosity, a first favor, a debt, then another.
- The price is deferred. What you receive is immediate; what you give is paid when it falls due, often after death.
- The information is asymmetric. Mephistopheles knows what a soul is worth. Faust does not, or does not want to know.
What book I calls a pact
Chapter 10 of Les Fermiers (The Farmers), the first book of a trilogy currently published in French, opens on this imagery the better to shed it: it is precisely this imagery, the author writes, that puts the concept beyond the reach of serious thought. A pact, in the sense the book uses, “has nothing spectacular about it.”
He defines it as a relationship of cooperation between a being incarnated in the physical layer and entities operating in the non-physical layers. A relationship in which each side has something to gain, built in stages, “often without the human party fully understanding, at the start, what it is committing to.” You recognize Faust’s three features: gradualness, deferred price, asymmetry.
The mechanics, according to the book, are simple. The Field Harvesters, the maintenance agents that book I places just above our layer, are not all-powerful. Their influence is “precise, limited, but real”: steering an encounter, easing a coincidence, amplifying an intuition, opening a door at the right moment. In exchange, they expect only one thing: active cooperation in the production of Ba-Honey, the energy of heavy emotions (fear, anger, despair, division) that the trilogy describes as the main resource of the harvest. The page on the Farmers’ universe gives the overall map.
And here is the sentence that shifts the whole problem:
If the pact requires neither ritual nor belief, then the question is no longer “who signed?” It becomes: which decisions, made by whom, produce the most heavy emotion in the greatest number of people? The pact stops being an event and becomes a function. And a function can be fulfilled by people who have never heard of any pact.
The three levels of pacts described in book I
Book I distinguishes three levels of cooperation between human power and the entities of the system. Let us report them faithfully, following the rule the book sets for itself: describe a structure, not culprits.
First level: the unconscious cooperators
This is, the book says, “the most widespread” level. People in positions of influence, at every scale, amplify the production of Ba-Honey without knowing it, through decisions dictated by their own fear, their ambition, their need for control. The collective suffering that results is harvested. Book I sums it up in one line: “No one in this transaction signed anything. The system runs by itself.”
Second level: the half-conscious
The second level, according to the book, concerns people who know that non-physical layers exist and are inhabited, and who have learned to interact with them within ritual frameworks, without having the full map of the harvest. They know there is a contract; they don’t know exactly what they supply in return. Book I calls it the level “most dangerous for those who occupy it”: enough knowledge to be useful, not enough to understand what they are doing.
Third level: the conscious cooperators
The third level is “the rarest”: that of people who would have understood the whole mechanism and would deliberately choose to cooperate, because the advantages offered in the physical layer seem to them worth the price. To make it concrete, the book draws a functional portrait, explicitly fictional and “without naming anyone real,” which it calls the Grey Chancellor: an ambitious man drawn step by step into a pleasant and useful circle, tested at each stage, who discovers the full nature of the bargain when he has already invested too much to turn back. Faust without the brimstone.
The price the legend got right
On one point, book I agrees exactly with Marlowe’s Faustus: the bill comes after death. According to the Farmers’ map, a being who has devoted a life to maximizing collective suffering arrives in the intermediate layer with a dense, loaded structure, immediately recognizable, and therefore usable. The promise of a dominant survival, the system’s most powerful bait, is precisely what the pact cannot deliver. “The pact does not free. It binds more deeply.” On this passage from one layer to the next, see the article on death as a change of floor.
The book gives you no enemy to hate. It insists: this is not a conspiracy theory; it is a distributed, self-organizing system. The cooperators, even the conscious ones, do not steer it: they “surf its logic,” the way a surfer does not control the ocean.
“A farm needs no jailer”: cooperating without knowing it
The next chapter of book I goes down a step. After the discreet pacts of a few, it turns to “the vastest, most everyday and most visible form that cooperation with the system has ever taken”: the big platforms of the attention economy.
For the farm to work, not a single engineer needs to have heard of the Loosh, or even to be ill-intentioned. It is enough that they optimize a metric. You keep the version of the feed that raises engagement, and the machine discovers on its own that anger, fear and outrage hold people better than anything else. The book puts it in a formula: “The system did not need initiates. A dashboard was enough.”
Then it names those who built these machines: not Gnostics, but “unconscious cooperators—the first level of pacts, the most widespread, pushed to a scale that Steiner himself could not have conceived.” The details of this mechanism are in the article on social media, anxiety and anger.
Let us follow the logic to the end. An engagement machine produces nothing on its own: every anger it harvests, someone has felt. The first level of pacts does not stop with the people who make the decisions: it extends to those who carry them out without knowing it, which is to say, at one moment or another, every one of us. This is what book II, opening with a reminder of the first volume, condenses into a single image:
A farm needs no jailer when the livestock hold the bars themselves. The sentence is unsettling because it takes away the alibi. As long as the prison is kept by others, you can accuse them; when you yourself hold some of the bars, the question becomes intimate.
Book I finds the same intuition among the Gnostics: the Archons cannot force anything; they are “maintenance agents, not absolute jailers.” See the article devoted to the Archons and Gnosticism.
La Boétie and voluntary servitude: a five-century echo
Long before the trilogy, a young man from Périgord had asked the same question in a completely different register. Étienne de La Boétie, a future magistrate and friend of Montaigne, wrote his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude around the middle of the sixteenth century. He speaks there not of entities but of tyrants, and of a riddle that astounds him: how can a single man hold whole peoples under the yoke?
His answer is scandalously simple. The tyrant has only the power he is given. He has only two eyes, two hands, one body; everything else is lent to him by others. If he dominates, it is because he is served. La Boétie concludes that there is not even any need to fight him: it is enough to stop giving to him. Hence his most quoted line:
Why do people serve? Out of habit first, La Boétie answers: whoever is born into servitude takes it for their natural condition. Then through a chain of self-interested complicity, each servant of power holding others in turn, so that domination rests less on force than on a multitude of small consents.
The echo is striking, but it has to be measured honestly. La Boétie speaks of a political, human power; book I, of an emotional harvest that, in its hypothesis, is not human. Yet the structure is the same: a domination that holds only through the participation of those it dominates, a participation that runs on habit more than on coercion, and a way out that does not consist in bringing down the master but in withdrawing what you used to give him.
How do you recognize your own small everyday pacts?
If the pact is a decision, anyone can spot some in their own day: small tacit exchanges in which you receive immediate relief for a deferred price. The Faustian structure, on the scale of an hour. A few signs, to observe without judging yourself.
Reacting before seeing
A headline outrages you and you share it without reading the article; a message hurts you and the reply goes out before a single breath. Something decided for you. The system, says book I, never harvests the information, only the reaction. The automatic conversion of a stimulus into emotion, with no witness, is the basic gesture of unconscious cooperation.
Feeding the machine while believing you fight it
This is the subtlest trap. As soon as a being understands they are being exploited and grows angry at the exploiters, they produce exactly what the system expects. “The feed loves criticism of the feed.” The fiery denunciation of anger algorithms thrives thanks to the anger algorithm.
If you catch yourself looking for culprits with an eagerness that wears you out, that is a pact. Not with a demon: with your own need for an enemy.
Every square on the board
Book I lists the possible attitudes toward revelations doled out drop by drop: believing, doubting, waiting, being outraged, giving up. Five opposite attitudes, five sources of production, down to resignation, “perfectly consumable.” No square is a losing one for the house. Recognizing yourself in one of them is not a fault: it is the first moment of lucidity.
Clinging to your bars
Book II describes an even more intimate pact: the one you make with your own suffering when it becomes an identity. The cynic clings to their cynicism, the anxious person to a vigilance they have renamed lucidity. This, the author writes, is the safest lock the Farm has ever fitted: making the livestock love their own bars, until they refuse to let anyone touch them. The first step, he suggests, lies in a tiny shift of language: moving from “I am anxious” to “there is some anxiety passing through me.”
A simple way to practice: in the evening, find a single moment in the day when you reacted mechanically. Without blaming yourself, ask what you received in that moment (relief, belonging, the feeling of being right) and what you gave (time, calm, attention, an anger that outlasted its object). You have just read the clauses of a small pact.
How do you get out of a pact? Stop betting rather than fighting
In the legends, a pact is broken by a dramatic stroke: Theophilus is saved by the Virgin, Goethe’s Faust by grace. The temptation, faced with the Farmers’ map, would be to imagine a break of the same kind: identify the system, denounce it, fight it.
Book I refuses that path, and for a precise reason. Every reaction to the system is a reaction it has already anticipated and priced in; the fight feeds what it attacks. Hence this image:
Stopping betting is not withdrawing from the world: indifference and retreat are stakes too. It means continuing to feel, to commit, to act, but without the emotion automatically turning into fuel. The book itself specifies that “it is not a victory over the system”: you don’t beat the farm, you don’t overturn the table. It is “more modest and more radical at once.” Book I calls this state the Third Honey, the cosmological name for lucid non-reaction.
Here, transposed, is La Boétie’s intuition: not bringing the master down, but withdrawing what you used to give him. What you withdraw is not only your obedience; it is the automatic part of your reaction. You can refuse, oppose, vote, protest, create; the question is where you do it from. From fear or rage, you are still betting. From presence, you no longer are.
Book I ends the chapter on pacts with this observation: the cooperators’ power rests entirely on the ignorance of those whose production they organize. A population that understands the mechanism does not necessarily produce less, not right away, “but differently.” And that difference, the author concludes, is the beginning of everything else.
The Faustian bargain presupposes a man who does not know what he is selling. The Farmers’ map, whether you take it as true or as a lens, at least lets you read the clauses. You are free to keep signing, or to put down the pen. Book I, Les Fermiers (in French), develops this whole mechanism in its third part.
