Everything Is F*cked(31)
HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGION
Step Six: Prophet for Profit!
So, this is it. You’ve come to the end. You have your religion, and it’s time to reap all its benefits. Now that you’ve got your little following giving you their money and cutting your grass, you can finally have everything you’ve ever wished for!
Want a dozen sex slaves? Just say the word. Make up scripture. Tell your followers that “Stage Six of Manatee Enlightenment” can only be found in the Prophet’s orgasms.
Want a huge piece of land out in the middle of nowhere? Just tell your followers that only you can build paradise for them and it needs to be really far away—oh, and by the way, they need to pay for it.
Want power and prestige? Tell your followers to vote you into office or, even better, overthrow the government with violence. If you do your job well, they should be willing to give up their lives for you.
The opportunities really are endless.
No more loneliness. No more relationship problems. No more financial woes. You can fulfill your wildest dreams. You just have to trample on the hopes and dreams of thousands of other people to get there.
Yes, my friend, you’ve worked hard for this. Therefore, you deserve all the benefits without any meddlesome social concerns or pedantic arguments about ethics and whatnot. Because that’s what you get to do when you start your own religion: You get to decide what is ethical. You get to decide what is right. And you get to decide who is righteous.
Maybe this whole “start a religion” thing makes you squirm. Well, I hate to break it to you, but you’re already in one. Whether you realize or not, you’ve adopted some group’s beliefs and values, you participate in the rituals and offer up the sacrifices, you draw the us-versus-them lines and intellectually isolate yourself. This is what we all do. Religious beliefs and their constituent tribal behaviors are a fundamental part of our nature.43 It’s impossible not to adopt them. If you think you’re above religion, that you use logic and reason, I’m sorry to say, you’re wrong: you are one of us.44 If you think you’re well informed and highly educated, you’re not: you still suck.45
We all must have faith in something. We must find value somewhere. It’s how we psychologically survive and thrive. It’s how we find hope. And even if you have a vision for a better future, it’s too hard to go it alone. To realize any dream, we need support networks, for both emotional and logistical reasons. It takes an army. Literally.
It’s our value hierarchies—as expressed through the stories of religion, and shared among thousands or millions—that attract, organize, and propel human systems forward in a sort of Darwinian competition. Religions compete in the world for resources, and the religions that tend to win out are those whose value hierarchies make the most efficient use of labor and capital. And as it wins out, more and more people adopt the winning religion’s value hierarchy, as it has demonstrated the most value to individuals in the population. These victorious religions then stabilize and become the foundation for culture.46
But here’s the problem: Every time a religion succeeds, every time it spreads its message far and wide and comes to dominate a huge swath of human emotion and endeavor, its values change. The religion’s God Value no longer comprises the principles that inspired the religion in the first place. Its God Value slowly shifts and becomes the preservation of the religion itself: not to lose what it has gained.
And this is where the corruption begins. When the original values that defined the religion, the movement, the revolution, get tossed aside for the sake of maintaining the status quo, this is narcissism at an organizational level. This is how you go from Jesus to the Crusades, from Marxism to the gulags, from a wedding chapel to divorce court. This corruption of the religion’s original values rots away at the religion’s following, thus leading to the rising up of newer, reactionary religions that eventually conquer the original one. Then the whole process begins again.
In this sense, success is in many ways far more precarious than failure. First, because the more you gain the more you have to lose, and second, because the more you have to lose, the harder it is to maintain hope. But more important, because by experiencing our hopes, we lose them. We see that our beautiful visions for a perfect future are not so perfect, that our dreams and aspirations are themselves riddled with unexpected flaws and unforeseen sacrifices.
Because the only thing that can ever truly destroy a dream is to have it come true.
Chapter 5
Hope Is Fucked
In the late nineteenth century, during a mild and glorious summer in the Swiss Alps, a hermetic philosopher, a self-anointed dynamite of mind and spirit, metaphorically came down off his mountaintop and, with his own money, published a book. The book was his gift to mankind, a gift that stood boldly upon the doorstep of the modern world and announced the words that would make the philosopher famous long after his death.
It announced, “God is dead!”—and more. It announced that the echoes of this death would be the harbinger of a new and dangerous age that would challenge us all.
The philosopher spoke these words as a warning. He spoke as a watchman. He spoke for us all.
Yet, the book sold fewer than forty copies.1
Meta von Salis woke before dawn to light the fire to boil water for the philosopher’s tea. She fetched ice to cool the blankets for his achy joints. She gathered bones from yesterday’s dinner to begin stewing a broth that would settle his stomach. She hand-washed his soiled linens. And soon, he would need his hair cropped and his mustache trimmed, and she realized she had forgotten to fetch a new razor.