Everything Is F*cked(25)
Jim Jones built his following by recruiting the homeless and marginalized minorities with a socialist message minced with his own (demented) take on Christianity. Hell, what am I saying? Jesus Christ did the same damn thing.14 Buddha, too. Moses—you get the idea. Religious leaders preach to the poor and downtrodden and enslaved, telling them that they deserve the kingdom of heaven—basically, an open “fuck you” to the corrupt elites of the day. It’s a message that’s easy to get behind.
Today, appealing to the hopeless is easier than ever before. All you need is a social media account: start posting extreme and crazy shit, and let the algorithm do the rest. The crazier and more extreme your posts, the more attention you’ll garner, and the more the hopeless will flock to you like flies to cow shit. It’s not hard at all.
But you can’t just go online and say anything. No, you must have a (semi-)coherent message. You must have a vision. Because it’s easy to get people riled up and angry about nothing—the news media have created a whole business model out of it. But to have hope, people need to feel that they are a part of some greater movement, that they are about to join the winning side of history.
And, for that, you must give them faith.
HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGION
Step Two: Choose Your Faith
We all must have faith in something. Without faith, there is no hope.
Nonreligious people bristle at the word faith, but having faith is inevitable. Evidence and science are based on past experience. Hope is based on future experience. And you must always rely on some degree of faith that something will occur again in the future.15 You pay your mortgage because you have faith that money is real, and credit is real, and a bank taking all your shit is real.16 You tell your kids to do their homework because you have faith that their education is important, that it will lead them to their becoming happier, healthier adults. You have faith that happiness exists and is possible. You have faith that living longer is worth it, so you strive to stay safe and healthy. You have faith that love matters, that your job matters, that any of this matters.
So, there’s no such thing as an atheist. Well, sorta. Depends what you mean by “atheist.”17 My point is that we must all believe, on faith, that something is important. Even if you’re a nihilist, you are believing, on faith, that nothing is more important than anything else.
So, in the end, it’s all faith.18
The important question, then, is: Faith in what? What do we choose to believe?
Whatever our Feeling Brain adopts as its highest value, this tippy top of our value hierarchy becomes the lens through which we interpret all other values. Let’s call this highest value the “God Value.”19 Some people’s God Value is money. These people view all other things (family, love, prestige, politics) through the prism of money. Their family will love them only if they make enough money. They will be respected only if they have money. All conflict, frustration, jealousy, anxiety—everything boils down to money.20
Other people’s God Value is love. They view all other values through the prism of love—they’re against conflict in all its forms, they’re against anything that separates or divides others.
Obviously, many people adopt Jesus Christ, or Muhammad, or the Buddha, as their God Value. They then interpret everything they experience through the prism of that spiritual leader’s teachings.
Some people’s God Value is themselves—or, rather, their own pleasure and empowerment. This is narcissism: the religion of self-aggrandizement.21 These people place their faith in their own superiority and deservedness.
Other people’s God Value is another person. This is often called “codependence.”22 These people derive all hope from their connection with another individual and sacrifice themselves and their own interests for that individual. They then base all their behavior, decisions, and beliefs on what they think will please that other person—their own little personal God. This typically leads to really fucked-up relationships with—you guessed it—narcissists. After all, the narcissist’s God Value is himself, and the codependent’s God Value is fixing and saving the narcissist. So, it kind of works out in a really sick and fucked-up way. (But not really.)
All religions must start with a faith-based God Value. Doesn’t matter what it is. Worshipping cats, believing in lower taxes, never letting your kids leave the house—whatever it is, it is a faith-based value that this one thing will produce the best future reality, and therefore gives the most hope. We then organize our lives, and all other values, around that value. We look for activities that enact that faith, ideas that support it, and most important, communities that share it.
It’s around now that some of the more scientifically minded readers start raising their hands and pointing out that there are these things called facts and there is ample evidence to demonstrate that facts exist, and we don’t need to have faith to know that some things are real.
Fair enough. But here’s the thing about evidence: it changes nothing. Evidence belongs to the Thinking Brain, whereas values are decided by the Feeling Brain. You cannot verify values. They are, by definition, subjective and arbitrary. Therefore, you can argue about facts until you’re blue in the face, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter—people interpret the significance of their experiences through their values.23
If a meteorite hit a town and killed half the people, the über-traditional religious person would look at the event and say that it happened because the town was full of sinners. The atheist would look at it and say that it was proof there is no God (another faith-based belief, by the way), as how could a benevolent, all-powerful being let such an awful thing happen? A hedonist would look at it and decide that it was even more reason to party, since we could all die at any moment. And a capitalist would look at it and start thinking about how to invest in meteorite-defense technologies.