One of the few APs on my mission that I sincerely looked up to and genuinely respected, casually mentioned to me on exchanges one day that he was a diehard Nine Inch Nails fan–which of course surprised me at the time, for all the usual reasons why someone endlessly lectured on the evils of “R-rated” entertainment throughout the ‘90s would have been surprised. Yet that revelation still was not enough to get me to check out NIN nor take them more seriously after my mission homecoming (no, not even after I lost the last of my hang-ups on swearing). Even as one with great nostalgic affection for EARLY-‘90S ALTERNATIVE like myself, NIN never quite clicked with me personally.

Partly that was because I simply didn’t get their lyrics: call me vanilla, but I didn’t understand why on God’s green earth someone would feel tempted to submit to a bully. Because that seemed to be the overwhelming theme of their music, you see. Just a cursory overview of the band’s biggest hits displayed what I thought was an inordinate obsession with people voluntarily choosing to serve their oppressors, e.g. “Happiness in Slavery,” “The Hand That Feeds,” and even their very first single “Head Like A Hole”, with its snarling chorus of “Bow down before the one you serve/You’re gonna get what you deserve”, and etc.

And yes, yes, Trent Reznor was ultimately trying to pump the listener to not submit to their oppressors (“I’d rather die/Than give you control!” he equally snarls on “Head Like a Hole”; just as he also urges his listeners, Elvis Costello-like, to bite the “hand that feeds,” to “get up off your knees”). But unlike, say, fellow ‘90s mainstays Rage Against the Machine—or other protest rockers like The Clash, or Dead Kennedys, or Fugazi, or The Avengers, or a million others besides—Reznor appears to operate under the assumption that sometimes your oppression is not just forced on you by coup or compulsion or conquest or even by your complicity; no, sometimes you willfully submit to the cruelties of your oppressors, and that of your own free-will and choice.

And that’s what ultimately baffled me about NIN’s music: getting shoved around by a bully I fully understood (I had attended middle school, after all), but willfully serving your oppressors—and that not in the misguided hopes that maybe they’ll let you join the cool kids so you can get in some bullying of your own, but for the actual pleasure of being degraded and controlled yourself—was frankly alien to me.

(It was the same bafflement I felt at that old ‘80s hit “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”: “Some of them want to use you,” I totally got, but “Some of them want to be used by you” I had no experience with; “Some of them want to abuse you,” I fully understood, but “Some of them want to be abused by you” frankly sounded like a fairy tale to me.)

Much of this was of course sheer naivety on my part; as a BYUI alumni myself who had openly chaffed at all the thousand petty restrictions of the Dress & Grooming standards and the Honor Code so-called, it wasn’t till clear till grad school that I learned about BDSM, and how a not-insignificant subset of the general population actually gets off on getting dominated and and degraded; but even then, my working assumption for the longest time was that this will-to-humiliation was just a fringe sexual fetish, not a widespread human tendency. (I worked in the Men’s Locker-Room at Rexburg, and rest assured: absolutely no one got off by being humiliatingly told that they had to go back to their dorms and change into pants if they wanted to be checked out a pair of shorts.) And though I have learned in my maturity to not kink-shame, it was nevertheless a kink I did not share, not even privately; hence, though I could maybe respect Trent Reznor’s musicianship (I especially admired his collaborations with David Bowie), I still didn’t feel like he had anything to say to me.

But nowadays I take stock of, say, the two-thirds of all the military servicemen who voted for the man who is on record calling them all “suckers and losers”; and the majority of conservative women–the exact same ones who righteously abhorred that philanderer Bill Clinton–who all dutifully and repeatedly voted for a serial-adulterer and confirmed rapist; as well as the 50% of Hispanic voters who enthusiastically voted for the man who called them all “a poison on the lifeblood of our nation” (not to mention “rapists and criminals” by a man who is himself a rapist and a criminal), who had openly and explicitly stated his intention to “de-naturalize” and deport even the “legal” ones; and the blue-collar working-class voters who voted for the man who has now raised taxes on the poor while slashing them for the rich—twice–and all the other people with car payments who furiously defend online all those billionaires who have clearly stated their intentions to automate their jobs with “AI” and let them starve in the streets. “You knew what I was when you picked me up,” warned Elder Harbertson in an old seminary video, yet some sick compulsion still drove these voters to fall to their knees and pick him up anyways, again and again and again. I recall my roommates and I back in 2011 baffled as to why half of Venezuela actually sincerely mourned the death of Hugo Chavez, a tin-pot dictator who objectively cratered their economy, civil liberties, and rule-of-law, and made life empirically worse for all of them. I don’t wonder anymore.

From whence arises this complete lack of self-respect, this desire for one’s own oppression, this widespread human inclination to kiss the boot that stomps your face and thank it for the privilege–and why is it found among all nations, cultures, and creeds? Why, when George Orwell warned in 1984 that the future is a boot stomping on a man’s face forever, did that turn out to appeal to a distressingly large swath of the population? Why was Trent Reznor proven exactly right to rage so frightfully against this very widespread human tendency? It’s bad enough when the rich and powerful try to force their will upon us, but what of all those who beg for it?

But then I remember Moses 4:3 in our own Pearl of Great Price, which reminds us that: “Wherefore, because that Satan rebelled against me, and sought to destroy the agency of man, which I, the Lord God, had given him, and also, that I should give unto him mine own power, by the power of mine Only Begotten, I caused that he should be cast down”. That is, Satan sought to destroy our agency and control us directly—yet what is more curious, a third of the hosts of Heaven still opted to follow him.

And I recall too how it is a core part of LDS theology that the one-third hosts of Heaven who followed Lucifer were in fact pre-mortal Spirit children who were henceforth barred from gaining a physical body in this mortal probation—but still they were still our spiritual brothers and sisters. That is, this tendency to seek the comfort of being controlled over the responsibility of our own agency is a primeval human failing that predates this mortal probation.

The “fence-sitters in the War in Heaven” folk-doctrine was an especially heinous attempt to justify the Church’s wholly unjustifiable Black Priesthood ban, and the Brethren have rightfully and repeatedly disavowed it. Yet there are days when I wonder if there isn’t still a germ of truth to it—not that it was Black people who were “less valiant” in the pre-existence or any putrid nonsense like that, but rather that anyone and everyone in this life who finds themselves yearning not just to oppress others but to be oppressed themselves, are displaying the same fatal weakness that tempted a third of the hosts of heaven to follow after the one who sought to destroy the agency of man.

This is the same fatal weakness that Trent Reznor, unknowingly endowed with the spirit of prophecy, has spent his career preaching against; and perhaps explains why one of the most faithful and Christlike APs I knew on my mission was such a huge Nine Inch Nails fan.