Everything Is F*cked(35)

Now, you didn’t have to wait until death to improve your lot. You could improve it here and now. And this implied all sorts of wonderful things. Freedom, for one: How were you going to choose to grow today? But also responsibility: because you could now control your own destiny, you had to take responsibility for that destiny. And of course, equality: because if a big patriarchal God isn’t dictating who deserves what, that must mean that either no one deserves anything or everyone deserves everything.

These were concepts that had never been voiced before. With the prospect of so much growth and change in this life, people no longer relied on spiritual beliefs about the next life to give them hope. Instead, they began to invent and rely upon the ideological religions of their time.

This changed everything. Church doctrines softened. People stayed home on Sundays. Monarchs conceded power to their subjects. Philosophers began to openly question God—and somehow weren’t burned alive for doing so. It was a golden age for human thought and progress. And incredibly, the progress begun in that age has only accelerated and continues to accelerate to this day.

The scientific revolution eroded the dominance of spiritual religions and made way for the dominance of ideological religions. And this is what concerned Nietzsche. Because for all of the progress and wealth and tangible benefits that ideological religions produce, they lack something that spiritual religions do not: infallibility.

Once believed in, a supernatural deity is impervious to worldly affairs. Your town could burn down. Your mother could make a million dollars and then lose it all again. You could watch wars and diseases come and go. None of these experiences directly contradicts a belief in a deity, because supernatural entities are evidence-proof. And while atheists see this as a bug, it can also be a feature. The robustness of spiritual religions means that the shit could hit the proverbial fan, and your psychological stability would remain intact. Hope can be preserved because God is always preserved.13

Not so with ideologies. If you spend a decade of your life lobbying for certain governmental reform, and then that reform leads to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, that’s on you. That piece of hope that sustained you for years is shattered. Your identity, destroyed. Hello darkness, my old friend.

Ideologies, because they’re constantly challenged, changed, proven, and then disproven, offer scant psychological stability upon which to build one’s hope. And when the ideological foundation of our belief systems and value hierarchies is shaken, it throws us into the maw of the Uncomfortable Truth.

Nietzsche was on top of this before anybody else. He warned of the coming existential malaise that technological growth would bring upon the world. In fact, this was the whole point of his “God is dead” proclamation.

“God is dead” was not some obnoxious atheistic gloating, as it is usually interpreted today. No. It was a lament, a warning, a cry for help. Who are we to determine the meaning and significance of our own existence? Who are we to decide what is good and right in the world? How can we bear this burden?

Nietzsche, understanding that existence is inherently chaotic and unknowable, believed that we were not psychologically equipped to handle the task of explaining our cosmic significance. He saw the spate of ideological religions that spewed forth in the Enlightenment’s wake (democracy, nationalism, communism, socialism, colonialism, etc.) as merely postponing the inevitable existential crisis of mankind. And he hated them all. He found democracy to be na?ve, nationalism stupid, communism appalling, colonialism offensive.14

Because, in a kind of backward Buddhist way, Nietzsche believed that any worldly attachment—to gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, or history—was a mirage, a make-believe faith-based construct designed to suspend us high over the chasm of the Uncomfortable Truth by a thin rope of meaning. And ultimately, he believed that all these constructs were destined to conflict with one another and cause far more violence than they solved.15

Nietzsche predicted coming conflicts between the ideologies built on master and slave moralities.16 He believed that these conflicts would wreak greater destruction upon the world than anything else seen in human history. He predicted that this destruction would not be limited to national borders or different ethnic groups. It would transcend all borders; it would transcend country and people. Because these conflicts, these wars, would not be for God. They would be between gods.

And the gods would be us.


Pandora’s Box

In Greek mythology, the world started out with only men.17 Everyone drank a lot and didn’t do any work. It was one big, everlasting frat party. The ancient Greeks called this “paradise.” But if you ask me, it sounds like a special kind of hell.

The gods, recognizing that this was a fairly boring state of affairs, decided to spice up the situation a bit. They wanted to create a companion for mankind, someone who would command the men’s attention, someone who would introduce complication and uncertainty to the easy life of shotgunning beer cans and playing foosball all night.

So, they decided to create the first woman.

For this project, every one of the major gods helped out. Aphro dite gave her beauty. Athena gave her wisdom. Hera gave her the ability to create a family. Hermes gave her charismatic speech. On and on, the gods installed gifts and talents and intrigues into woman like apps in a new iPhone.

The result was Pandora.

The gods sent Pandora to earth to introduce competition and sex and babies and arguments about the toilet seat. But the gods did something else, too: they sent her with a box. It was a beautiful box, embossed in gold and covered in intricate and delicate designs. The gods told Pandora to give the box to men, but also instructed her that it could never be opened.