“Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth death.” — James 1:14–15
The Machine Runs on You
The Machine — the system that chews through men, cultures, and landscapes — is not powered by oil, coal, or electricity. It runs on lust.
Not just sexual lust, though that’s a favored current. But the whole raging appetite for more. More status. More control. More novelty. More comfort. More of what will never satisfy.
Lust is the hidden engine room. The part you’re never supposed to see. The Machine doesn’t care what you lust after, whether it’s an augmented body, a promotion, a rush of chemical pleasure, or a set of numbers in your account, so long as you keep reaching for it. Because every time you do, you lean forward into the harness and pull its weight further down the road.
The Hook in the Flesh
Lust works because it disguises itself as freedom. You think you’re chasing something you chose. But lust doesn’t let go. It hooks into the soft meat and drives you in circles until you can’t remember what you were before it bit down.
A soldier can get addicted to the war as easily as a teenager gets hooked on a glowing screen. The fight and the feed are the same to the Machine. Both keep the circuits humming. Both keep the soul from asking why.
The ancient elders understood this. They carved lust into their myths as sirens, lamia, and man-eating giants. Faces beautiful enough to lower your guard, and jaws strong enough to keep you forever.
The Transfer of Power
Every lust transaction is a power transfer. You feed the Machine, and the Machine feeds on you. It doesn’t just take your strength; it rewires your instincts.
Soon you can’t tell the difference between wanting something and worshipping it. That’s when you’ve become a battery pack, humming away in the dark, powering the very system that keeps you chained.
The Counter-Economy
There’s only one way to starve the Machine: cut off its power source.
That means refusing to let your hunger be harvested. Naming the lust for what it is. Dragging it into the open before God. It means breaking the pattern where desire is answered by indulgence, and replacing it with a different pattern: desire answered by discipline, self-offering, and service.
In the old language of the Church, this is repentance, but not a hand-wringing apology. It’s full about-face, a refusal to feed the beast one more drop of your life.