While Katy Perry has popularized the self-empowerment ballad, I might substitute her part in the satanic identity for one of six dozen other purveyors of the ego anthem. The earliest is probably Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” though the example I lately gave my Paradise Lost students was Whitney Houston’s rendition of “Greatest Love of All.”

I come to you as a former devotee of popular culture.

In days of old, I worshipped love at the Top 40 altar and committed myself to memorizing lines of songs and dialogue from films in the same way pious Jews of old memorized Scripture. If I now speak cynically of popular culture, it is because I am a disillusioned lover. Cynicism always grows from the ashes of immolated confidence.

With such a purple introduction now out of the way, I should say I believe popular culture has lately taken a sharp turn toward the Satanic.

Having been taught about Satan by Dante, Milton, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, I know that demons are paradoxical beings, simultaneously crafty and bumbling. Dante’s devils are grotesque and juvenile; they fart like trumpets and molest the weak. Dante satirizes the foolishness of devils, as though to mock anyone as a fool who falls for their childish ploys. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, on the other hand, wrote clever devils who played the long game, laying traps and patiently waiting for their prey.

There is no better representation of the devil for our age, however, than the one conceived by John Milton. Milton’s devil is an eternal optimist, a plucky and self-confident fellow who cheers his friends by showing them how to make the best of a bad situation. As he is written in Paradise Lost, Milton’s Satan has accomplished absolutely nothing worth boasting about, but he boasts nonetheless. And what exactly does one boast about when he has done nothing which is worthy of boasting about? He boasts about being true to himself and living according to his own principles, that’s what.

The man who approaches Paradise Lost expecting to find the same Satan venerated by Scandinavian black metal bands and Anton LaVey will turn the final page of the poem and suffer sore disappointment. Milton’s Satan never kills anyone, neither does he rape, steal, or utter vulgarities. He does not kidnap children, establish cults, teach magic, participate in Halloween, or teach teenagers to play Led Zeppelin records backwards. He is not even terribly interested in conning others into such foul activities. Rather, one could triangulate the personality of Milton’s Satan using just three figures from popular culture: singer Katy Perry, fictional boss Michael Scott, and motivational speaker Tony Robbins.

While Katy Perry has popularized the self-empowerment ballad, I might substitute her part in the satanic identity for one of six dozen other purveyors of the ego anthem. The earliest is probably Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” though the example I lately gave my Paradise Lost students was Whitney Houston’s rendition of “Greatest Love of All,” which goes:

Everybody searching for a hero
People need someone to look up to
I never found anyone who fulfill my needs
A lonely place to be
And so I learned to depend on me…
I decided long ago
Never to walk in anyone’s shadow
If I fail, if I succeed
At least I’ll live as I believe
No matter what they take from me
They can’t take away my dignity…

Satan remarks something quite similar to his peers in Hell. “All is not lost,” he tells the other demons when they awake to their eternal tortures, for despite their loss of glory, they have nonetheless retained their “unconquerable will” and “the courage never to submit or yield.” In the same way that Whitney will not walk in “anyone’s shadow,” neither will Satan submit or yield to anyone. Whitney does not care whether the shadow is cast by a good man or an honorable woman, because all forms of submission are equally detestable, for submission diminishes the glory of the self. Likewise, Satan champions the fact his will cannot be conquered by anyone, regardless of how worthy or honorable anyone else is.

For both Whitney and Satan, meaning and fulfillment are only discoverable within the self, although, strangely enough, the self does not need to have accomplished anything meaningful at all in order to lay claim to such a lofty position. At no point in Paradise Lost or Whitney’s “Greatest Love of All” do Satan or Houston lay out a case for their greatness. Whitney “learned to depend on me,” although she offers no explanation as to why “me” can sustain such dependence. She even admits that depending on herself might lead to failure:

If I fail, if I succeed
At least I’ll live as I believe

The nature of this failure— financial failure, moral failure, liver failure— is unspecified, although the song brazenly suggests all three kinds of failure are acceptable provided the singer can claim, as she dies, that she lived as she believed. Of course, given that the singer— like Satan— never found “someone to look up”, we have only to conclude the beliefs she lived by were entirely self-derived.

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