Buddha expressed that “Desire is the root cause of all evil.” I agree with his assessment, but I don’t think that is to say that desire exclusively leads to evil. Rather, I think that when you find evil, there is desire at its core. Desire for power, for money, for pleasure, for things which do not lead a person to light. Our natural man is filled with ungodly desires, and the adversary and his minions seek to tempt us through the same. Whether these desires come from within, or are imposed upon us in a way that only appears to come within (an interesting topic), the fact remains that these desires find place within us and they absolutely affect us.
On the other hand, the scriptures teach us that we should in fact desire and seek after certain things, things which will bless us both in this life and in the eternities. We are taught to seek after gifts, some of them earnestly (Matthew 6:33; D&C 46:7-9). We are taught to seek having our calling and election made sure (2 Peter 1:10), and to return into the presence of Christ (D&C 93:1; Ether 3:9-13; Abraham 2:12). These are good desires, and can lead us to true goodness.
But what if the quality of our desires isn’t sufficient to safeguard us against deception? What if it isn’t enough for us to desire good gifts? What if, as part of the process of laying hold onto the good gifts, we are also necessarily offered bad imitations to try and throw us off the scent, which we must discern and reject before we can receive the true gift?
Consider Adam in the temple drama. We are all to see ourselves represented in him. Once Adam was removed from the Garden and found himself in the lone and dreary world, he turned to God and sought communication from Him, in the form of true messengers. This is a good desire, Adam was doing right in this. But think about Adam at the altar. He petitioned repeatedly, not just once, perhaps alluding to time passing and the need for both patience and diligence in pursuing his desire. When Adam finally received a response, it was initially not from the Lord. It was the deceiver, specifically offering Adam a mockery of what Adam sought, a true messenger with a true message from heaven.
What if Adam allowed his desperation for a messenger to cloud his judgment, and he accepted Satan’s mockery without discernment? What if Adam failed to put in the due diligence and discover the deception, and simply bought the lie and sought to convince Eve to do the same? Would he have been open to the voice of the true messengers later telling him he’d been misled? Would he even allow the messengers to approach him?
THE DRUG OF DESIRE
Regardless of whether a desire is good or evil, desire itself has side effects. For example, desire fosters biases. We become biased toward believing and embracing things which support and manifest our desires, and rejecting things which disagree with or prevent our desires from being fulfilled. This is a vulnerability that requires acknowledgement for it to be addressed.
Desire also opens a back door for deception to creep in. Desire makes us more vulnerable to accept a lie as truth, or to accept something as being from God when it may not be, because we want it to be true or God-given. We may be deceived into buying an imitation—whether illegitimate (mockeries, pleasing lies, philosophies, etc.) or legitimate (types, rituals, symbols, etc.)—as the actuality, and stop seeking for the real thing. We might even forego the process of discerning a deception, ignoring the tiny alarm ringing out in the back of our minds.
It is on this backbone of desire that Satan's great tool of temptation is built. The whole idea behind a temptation is to bait a snare with something you desire. If you don’t desire a thing, then we would not consider it “tempting.” For a tempter to be successful at what they do, they must understand what their target desires, what YOU desire.
When Christ was tempted by Satan, it may not have been such an easily handled series of “temptations” as the scriptures make it sound. Satan may have in fact been well aware of the desires within Christ’s natural man, and spoken calculatingly and directly to those, rather than just spitballing and hoping something would stick. It may have wrenched at Christ’s very heartstrings to have to turn down what was offered and rebuke Satan with the necessary truths. If Christ never faced such a trial, how could He hope to understand and succor us when we face our own Siren songs?
UNBRIDLED DESIRE CAN CREATE AN ANTI-CHRIST
Others were not so successful in resisting Satan's calculated temptings. In the Book of Mormon, we have the story of Korihor the anti-Christ in Alma 30. Look at his confession in verses 52-53:
“And Korihor put forth his hand and wrote, saying: I know that I am dumb, for I cannot speak; and I know that nothing save it were the power of God could bring this upon me; yea, and I always knew that there was a God. But behold, the devil hath deceived me; for he appeared unto me in the form of an angel, and said unto me: Go and reclaim this people, for they have all gone astray after an unknown God. And he said unto me: There is no God; yea, and he taught me that which I should say. And I have taught his words; and I taught them because they were pleasing unto the carnal mind; and I taught them, even until I had much success, insomuch that I verily believed that they were true; and for this cause I withstood the truth, even until I have brought this great curse upon me.”
Like Adam, Korihor was approached by the devil in an effort to deceive. The message Korihor was given to relay was destructive, intended to frustrate the purposes of God. But to convince Korihor not to evaluate the toxicity of the message, the devil packaged it with things which were “pleasing unto [his] carnal mind.” He spoke to Korihor’s desires, as these things would not have been “pleasing” to him if he did not desire them.
Korihor essentially had a choice:
A) Allow himself to be bribed through his desires into buying and selling lies.
or
B) Discern the red flags in the message and reject the liar, but at the expense of losing the “pleasing” things he desired.
Korihor went with option A, allowing desire to shut down discernment which might have exposed that he was being deceived. No further reason is given for him buying the bullshit other than “because” the lies were “pleasing.” We don’t have to know exactly what his desires were to know they were his Achilles Heel.
Could we be susceptible to such a thing? Could a person desire God to be a certain way, or that His plan be a certain way, or desire to view themselves in a certain way, or desire some philosophy to be true; and then have a deceiver come to them, speaking precisely to those desires and simultaneously packaging them with toxic elements, thereby forcing the person to choose between accepting poison and losing the supposed fulfillment of their desires?
