Everything Is F*cked(26)

Evidence serves the interests of the God Value, not the other way around. The only loophole to this arrangement is when evidence itself becomes your God Value. The religion built around the worship of evidence is more commonly known as “science,” and it’s arguably the best thing we’ve ever done as a species. But we’ll get to science and its ramifications in the next chapter.

My point is that all values are faith-based beliefs. Therefore, all hope (and therefore, all religions) are also based on faith, faith that something can be important and valuable and right despite the fact that there will never be a way to verify it beyond all doubt.

For our purposes, I’ve defined three types of religions, each type based on a different kind of God Value:

Spiritual religions. Spiritual religions draw hope from supernatural beliefs, or belief in things that exist outside the physical or material realm. These religions look for a better future outside this world and this life. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, animism, and Greek mythology are examples of spiritual religions.

Ideological religions. Ideological religions draw hope from the natural world. They look for salvation and growth and develop faith-based beliefs regarding this world and this life. Examples include capitalism, communism, environmentalism, liberalism, fascism, and libertarianism.

Interpersonal religions. Interpersonal religions draw hope from other people in our lives. Examples of interpersonal religions include romantic love, children, sports heroes, political leaders, and celebrities.

Spiritual religions are high risk/high reward. They require, by far, the most skill and charisma to get going. But they also pay off the most in terms of follower loyalty and benefits. (I mean, have you seen the Vatican? Holy shit.) And if you build one really well, it’ll last way after you die.

Ideological religions play the religion formation game on “Normal Difficulty.” These religions take a lot of work and effort to create, but they’re fairly common. But because they’re so common, they run into a lot of competition for people’s hopes. They are often described as cultural “trends,” and indeed, few of them survive more than a few years or decades. Only the best last through multiple centuries.

Finally, interpersonal religions are playing the religion formation game on “Easy” mode. That’s because interpersonal religions are as common as people themselves. Pretty much all of us, at some point in our lives, completely surrender ourselves and our self-worth to another individual. The interpersonal religion is sometimes experienced as an adolescent, na?ve sort of love and it’s the type of shit that you have to suffer through before you can ever grow out of it.

Let’s start with spiritual religions, as they have the highest stakes and are arguably the most important religions in human history.


Spiritual Religions

From the pagan and animalistic rituals of early human cultures, to the pagan gods of antiquity, to the grandiose monotheistic religions that still exist today, the majority of human history has been dominated by a belief in supernatural forces and, most important, the hope that certain actions and beliefs in this life would lead to rewards and improvement in the next life.

This preoccupation with the next life developed because for most of human history, everything was completely fucked and 99 percent of the population had no hope of material or physical improvement in their lives. If you think things are bad today, just think about the plagues that wiped out a third of the population on an entire continent,24 or the wars that involved selling tens of thousands of children into slavery.25 In fact, things were so bad in the old days that the only way to keep everyone sane was by promising them hope in an afterlife. Old-school religion held the fabric of society together because it gave the masses a guarantee that their suffering was meaningful, that God was watching, and that they would be duly rewarded.

In case you haven’t noticed, spiritual religions are incredibly resilient. They last hundreds, if not thousands, of years. This is because supernatural beliefs can never be proven or disproven. Therefore, once a supernatural belief gets lodged as someone’s God Value, it’s nearly impossible to dislodge it.

Spiritual religions are also powerful because they often encourage hope through death, which has the nice side effect of making a lot of people willing to die for their unverifiable beliefs. Hard to compete with that.


Ideological Religions

Ideological religions generate hope by constructing networks of beliefs that certain actions will produce better outcomes in this life only if they are adopted by the population at large. Ideologies are usually “isms”: libertarianism, nationalism, materialism, racism, sexism, veganism, communism, capitalism, socialism, fascism, cynicism, skepticism, etc. Unlike spiritual religions, ideologies are verifiable to varying degrees. You can theoretically test to see whether a central bank makes a financial system more or less stable, whether democracy makes society fairer, whether education makes people hack one another to pieces less often, but at a certain point, most ideologies still rely on faith. There are two reasons for this. The first is that some things are just incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to test and verify. The other is that a lot of ideologies rely upon everyone in society having faith in the same thing.

For instance, you can’t scientifically prove that money is intrinsically valuable. But we all believe it is, so it is.26 You also can’t prove that national citizenship is a real thing, or even that most ethnicities exist.27 These are all socially constructed beliefs that we’ve all bought into, taken on faith.