Everything Is F*cked(72)
46. Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality, pp. 114–15.
47. Or, as military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously put it, “War is the continuation of politics by other means.”
48. Real Isaac Newton’s Laws of Motion also sat collecting dust for about twenty years before he dug them out and showed them to anyone.
Chapter 4: How to Make All Your Dreams Come True
1. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896; repr. New York: Dover Publications, 2002), p. 14.
2. Jonathan Haidt calls this phenomenon the “hive hypothesis.” See Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), pp. 261–70.
3. Le Bon, The Crowd, pp. 24–29.
4. Barry Schwartz and Andrew Ward, “Doing Better but Feeling Worse: The Paradox of Choice,” in P. Alex Linley and Stephen Joseph, Positive Psychology in Practice (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2004), pp. 86–103.
5. Adolescent brains continue to develop well into their twenties, particularly the parts of the brain responsible for executive functioning. See S. B. Johnson, R. W. Blum, and J. N. Giedd, “Adolescent Maturity and the Brain: The Promise and Pitfalls of Neuroscience Research in Adolescent Health Policy,” Journal of Adolescent Health: Official Publication of the Society for Adolescent Medicine 45, no. 3 (2009): 216–21.
6. S. Choudhury, S. J. Blakemore, and T. Charman, “Social Cognitive Development During Adolescence,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 1, no. 3 (2006): 165–74.
7. This work in identity definition is the most important project of adolescents and young adults. See Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1963), pp. 261–65.
8. My guess is that people like LaRouche aren’t consciously exploitative. It’s more likely that LaRouche himself was psychologically stuck at an adolescent level of maturity and therefore pursued adolescent causes and appealed to other lost adolescents. See chapter 6.
9. The dialogue here is approximate based on my recollection. It was fifteen years ago, so obviously I don’t remember exactly what was said.
10. I decided to look up where Sagan said this, and it turns out that, like most quotes found on the internet, someone else had said it, and fifty years before Sagan. Professor Walter Kotschnig was apparently the first one to be published saying it, in 1940. See https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/04/13 open-mind.
11. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Harper Perennial, 1951), pp. 3–11.
12. Ibid., pp. 16–21.
13. Ibid., pp. 26–45.
14. What’s interesting about Jesus is that the historical record implies that he likely began as a political extremist, attempting to lead an uprising against the Roman Empire’s occupation of Israel. It was after his death that his ideological religion was transmuted into a more spiritual religion. See Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Random House Books, 2013).
15. This notion comes from Karl Popper’s ideas about falsifiability. Popper, building on the work of David Hume, basically said that no matter how many times something has happened in the past, it can never logically be proven that it will happen again in the future. Even though the sun has risen in the east and set in the west every day for thousands of years and no one has ever had a contrary experience, this does not prove that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. All it does is tell us the overwhelming probability of the sun rising in the east.
Popper argued that the only empirical truth we can ever know is not via experimentation but, rather, falsifiability. Nothing can ever be proven. Things can only be disproven. Therefore, even something as mundane and obvious as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west is still believed on some degree of faith, even though it is almost entirely certain always to happen.
Popper’s ideas are important because they logically demonstrate that even scientific facts rely on some modicum of faith. You can do an experiment a million times and get the same result every time, but that does not prove it will happen the million and first time. At some point, we choose to rely on the belief that it will continue to happen once its results are so statistically significant that it’d be insane not to believe them.
For more on Popper’s ideas about falsification, see Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959; repr. New York: Routledge Classics, 1992). What I find interesting is that mental illnesses that induce delusions, hallucinations, and such may, fundamentally, be dysfunctions of faith. Most of us take it for granted that the sun will rise in the east and that things fall to the ground at a certain rate and that we’re not just going to float away because gravity decided to take a coffee break. But a mind that struggles to build and maintain faith in anything would potentially be tortured by these possibilities all the time, thus making it go mad.
16. Faith also assumes that your shit is real and that you aren’t just a brain in a vat merely imagining all your sense perceptions—a favorite trope of philosophers. For a fun dive into whether you can ever actually know if anything exists, check out René Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy.
17. The word atheist can signify a number of things. Here, I’m simply making the point that we all must buy into beliefs and values based on faith, even if they’re not supernatural beliefs and values. See John Gray, Seven Types of Atheism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018).