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citizen, it needs the majority’s support. In the same way, the drug trade cannot survive on a single person’s iTunes collection—my collection hardly supports a single rock star party, much less the assassination of a prosecutor (the price of which I’m only guessing at). These acts only have moral weight when added together. However, the fact that we get something when we add them all up suggests that there’s something there to begin with. Zero multiplied a million times neither supplies a war nor a drug trade.

“Complicity” then appears to be a real part of our moral discussions—it fits right between innocence and responsibility (probably closer to innocence). So, we have a theoretical reason to believe in complicity. We will also have a practical reason if acknowledging our complicity is necessary to correct some wrongs in our lives.

Restraining Lucifer with Some Courtesy, Sympathy, and Taste

Complicity also helps us to see the need for changing our wrong ways. Even small bad acts can add up to very serious wrongdoings. Citizens of countries engaged in unjust wars almost routinely support those wars. Those wars can lead to millions of civilians perishing, along with the needless suffering of soldiers who are merely following orders.

We need a concept for assessing these actions because we need to stop them. Because no matter how good we are at avoiding the big evils (how many of us have gone all week without committing murder, torture, or grand larceny?), we all—every single one of us—have problems of complicity. We could not make that point without a concept of complicity. We would not be able to say that:

Just as every cop is a criminal

And all the sinners saints

As heads is tails

Just call me Lucifer

’Cause I’m in need of some restraint.

The concept of complicity enables us to break down these seeming contradictions at the beginning of this stanza—even Lucifer’s call for his own restraint appears to be morally confusing. Most of us may be genuinely good people in terms of the big evils, and there may be little to hold us responsible for, but we all have wrongdoings that we are complicit in.

All this makes “Sympathy for the Devil” a most politically and morally significant song for The Stones. It flies in the face of claims that Mick Jagger and The Stones don’t have any deeper political awareness. Instead, a song that relates the dangers of complicity through a tale woven by Lucifer shows a clear depth that is usually reserved for the likes of Bob Dylan, John Lennon, or Bob Marley. But it would not be sufficient to merely point out the problem: we also need a solution.

Fortunately, “Sympathy” offers one. The end of the previous stanza points to the biggest reason why we need the ethical concept: Lucifer is in need of some restraint. We don’t need to query whether The Stones, or Jagger in particular, believe in Lucifer, or in any religion. Lucifer is a metaphor for the collective evils that all of us create or enable when we are complicit with wrongdoing. In that very real sense, we cannot restrain the wrongdoing that Lucifer represents unless we fight against our own complicity.

That is exactly what the song implores us to do in the very next stanza:

So if you meet me

Have some courtesy

Have some sympathy, and some taste.

Use all your well-learned politesse

Or I’ll lay your soul to waste, um yeah.

We can use courtesy, sympathy, and taste to better discern instances of complicity. Much of being moral is easy: few of us struggle to resist stealing a car, for example. The hard part is watching our everyday actions, however small, and figuring out where we might be contributing to larger wrongs. Wherever we find such complicity, we must fight against it. For, if we don’t—if we allow ourselves to be complicit in grave wrongdoings—then Lucifer really will lay our souls to waste.

15

The Most Dangerous Rock’n’Roll Band in the World

SETH VANNATTA

When I was in the third grade, my neighbor’s mother told me that rock’n’roll was the devil’s music. My rock band of choice at the time,