Everything Is F*cked(23)
Truth and salvation and everlasting happiness. It’s all yours. It’s coming to you. Are you ready?
HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGION
An Introduction to a Proven System That Will Help You Achieve Everlasting Bliss and Eternal Salvation!
(OR YOUR MONEY BACK)
Welcome, and congratulations on taking the first step to making all your dreams come true! By the end of this course you will have solved all your life’s problems. You will live a life of abundance and freedom. You will be surrounded by adoring friends and loved ones. Guaranteed!*
It’s so simple, anyone can do it. No education or certification required. All you need is an internet connection and a functioning keyboard, and you, too, can create your very own religion.
Yes, you heard me right. You, too, can start your very own religion—TODAY—and begin reaping the benefits of the thousands of mindlessly devoted followers who will lavish on you unconditional adoration, financial gifts, and more social media likes than you know what to do with.
In this so-simple-anyone-can-do-it six-step program, we will cover:
Belief systems. Do you want your religion to be spiritual or secular? Past-focused or future-focused? Do you want it to be violent or nonviolent? These are all important questions, but don’t worry, only I have the answers.
How to find your first followers. And more important: what do you want your followers to be? Rich? Poor? Male? Female? Vegan? I have the inside scoop!
Rituals, rituals, rituals! Eat this. Stand there. Recite that. Bow and kneel and clap your hands! Do the hokey pokey and turn yourself around! That’s what it’s all about! The most enjoyable part of religion is coming up with dumb stuff that you all agree somehow means something. I will provide you with a complete guide to developing the hippest, coolest rituals on the block. All the kids will be talking about it—mainly because they’ll be forced to.
How to choose a scapegoat. No religion is complete without a common enemy upon which to project one’s inner turmoil. Life is messy, but why deal with your problems when you can just blame somebody else for them? That’s right, you’ll discover the best way to choose an evil boogeyman (or boogeywoman!) and how to convince your followers to hate him/her. Nothing unites us like hating the same enemy. Get your assault rifles ready!
And finally, how to make money. Why start a religion if you don’t profit from it? My guide will give you all the nitty-gritty details on how to milk the most out of your followers. Whether you’re into money, fame, political power, or blood orgies, I’ve got you covered!
Look, we all need communities to build hope. And we all need hope to not go utterly fucking insane and start snorting bath salts. Religions are the basis for that communal hope. And we’re going to learn how to build them from scratch.
Religions are a beautiful thing. When you get enough people together with the same values, they behave in ways they never would when alone. Their hope amplifies in a sort of network effect, and the social validation of being part of a group hijacks their Thinking Brains and lets their Feeling Brains run wild.1
Religions bring groups of people together to mutually validate one another and make one another feel important. It’s a big silent agreement that if we all come together under some shared purpose, we will feel important and worthy, and the Uncomfortable Truth will be just that much farther away.2
This is hugely satisfying psychologically. People just lose their shit! And best of all, they become highly suggestible. Paradoxically, it’s only in a group environment that the individual has no control, that he gains the perception of perfect self-control.
The danger of this immediate access to the Feeling Brain, though, is that large groups of people tend to do highly impulsive and irrational shit. So, on the one hand, people get to feel whole, like they’re understood and loved. On the other hand, they sometimes transform into murderous, angry mobs.3
This guide will take you through the details of establishing your own religion so you can reap the benefits of thousands of suggestible followers. Let’s get started.
HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGION
Step One: Sell Hope to the Hopeless
I’ll never forget the first time someone told me I had blood on my hands. I remember it as if it were yesterday.
It was 2005, a sunny, crisp morning in Boston, Massachusetts. I was a university student then and walking to class, minding my own business, when I saw a group of kids holding up pictures of the 9/11 terrorist attacks with captions that read, “America Deserved It.”
Now, I don’t consider myself the most patriotic person by any stretch of the imagination, but it seems to me that anyone holding such a sign in broad daylight immediately becomes a highly punchable person.
I stopped and engaged the kids, asking what they were doing. They had a little table set up with a smattering of pamphlets on top. One had Dick Cheney with devil’s horns drawn on him and the words “Mass Murderer” written beneath. Another had George W. Bush with a Hitler mustache.
The students were part of the LaRouche Youth Movement, a group started by the far-left ideologue Lyndon LaRouche in New Hampshire. His acolytes would spend countless hours standing around college campuses in the Northeast, handing out flyers and pamphlets to susceptible college kids. And when I came upon them, it took me all of ten seconds to figure out what they actually were: a religion.