Everything Is F*cked(30)

Finally, in interpersonal religions, sacrificing oneself generates a sense of romance and loyalty. (Think about marriage: I mean, you stand at an altar and promise to give your life to this other person.) We all struggle with the sense that we deserve to be loved. Even if your parents were awesome, you sometimes wonder, wow, why me? What did I do to deserve this? Interpersonal religions have all sorts of rituals and sacrifices designed to make people feel they deserve to be loved. Rings, gifts, anniversaries, wiping the piss off the floor when I miss the toilet—it’s the little things that add up to one big thing. You’re welcome, honey.





HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGION


Step Five: Promise Heaven, Deliver Hell


If you’ve made it this far in starting your own religion it means you’ve assembled a nice group of hopeless people desperately avoiding the Uncomfortable Truth by studying a bunch of bullshit you’ve made up, ignoring their friends, and telling their families to fuck off.

Now it’s time to get serious.

The beauty of a religion is that the more you promise your followers salvation, enlightenment, world peace, perfect happiness, or whatever, the more they will fail to live up to that promise. And the more they fail to live up to that promise, the more they’ll blame themselves and feel guilty. And the more they blame themselves and feel guilty, the more they’ll do whatever you tell them to do to make up for it.

Some people might call this the cycle of psychological abuse. But let’s not allow such terms to ruin our fun.

Pyramid schemes do this really well. You give a scumbag some money for a bunch of products you don’t want or need and then you spend the next three months desperately trying to get other people to sign up for the scheme under you and also buy and sell products nobody wants or needs.

And it doesn’t work.

Then, instead of recognizing the obvious (the product is one big scam selling a scam to a scam to sell more scams), you blame yourself—because, look, the guy at the top of the pyramid has a Ferrari! And you want a Ferrari. So, clearly the problem must be you, right?

Fortunately, that guy with the Ferrari has graciously agreed to put on a seminar to help you sell more crap nobody wants to people who will then try to sell more crap nobody wants to more people who will sell it . . . and so on.

And at said seminar, most of the time is spent psyching you up with music and chants and creating an us-versus-them dichotomy (“Winners never give up! Losers believe it won’t work for them!”), and you come away from the seminar really motivated and pumped, but still with no idea how to sell anything, especially crap nobody wants. And instead of getting pissed off at the money-based religion you’ve bought into, you get pissed off at yourself. You blame yourself for failing to live up to your God Value, regardless of how ill-advised that God Value is.

You can see this same cycle of desperation play out in all sorts of other areas. Fitness and diet plans, political activism, self-help seminars, financial planning, visiting your grandmother on a holiday—the message is always the same: the more you do it, the more you’re told you need to do it to finally experience the satisfaction you’ve been promised. Yet that satisfaction never comes.

Look, time out for a second. Let me be the one to break the bad news to you: human pain is like a game of Whac-A-Mole. Every time you knock down one kind of pain, another one pops up. And the faster you whack them, the faster they come back.

The pain may get better, it may change shape, it may be less catastrophic each time. But it will always be there. It’s part of us.40

It is us.

A lot of religious spokespeople out there make a lot of money claiming they can beat the pain of the Whac-A-Mole game for you, once and for all. But the truth is that there is no end to the pain moles. The faster you hit them, the faster they come back. And that’s how all the douche canoes in the religion game stay in business so long: instead of admitting that the game is rigged, that our human nature is fundamentally designed to generate pain, they blame you for not winning the game. Or, worse, they blame some nebulous “them.” If we could just get rid of “them,” we’d all stop suffering. Pinky swear.41 But that doesn’t work, either. That just transfers the pain from one population to another, and amplifies it.

Because, seriously, if someone really could solve all your problems, they’d go out of business by next Tuesday (or get voted out of office next week). Leaders need their followers to be perpetually dissatisfied; it’s good for the leadership business. If everything were perfect and great, there’d be no reason to follow anybody. No religion will ever make you feel blissful and peaceful all the time. No country will ever feel completely fair and safe. No political philosophy will solve everyone’s problems all the time. True equality can never be achieved; someone somewhere will always be screwed over. True freedom doesn’t really exist because we all must sacrifice some autonomy for stability. No one, no matter how much you love them or they love you, will ever absolve that internal guilt you feel simply for existing. It’s all fucked. Everything is fucked. It always has been and always will be. There are no solutions, only stopgap measures, only incremental improvements, only slightly better forms of fuckedness than others. And it’s time we stop running from that and, instead, embrace it.42

This is our fucked-up world. And we’re the fucked-up ones in it.