Everything Is F*cked(73)
18. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature. Hume writes that “all knowledge degenerates into probability; and this probability is greater or less, according to our experience of the veracity or deceitfulness of our understanding, and according to the simplicity or intricacy of the question” (1739, part 4, section 1).
19. A God Value is not the same thing as Blaise Pascal’s “God-shaped hole.” Pascal believed that because man’s desires were insatiable, only something infinite could ever satiate him—that infinite thing being God. A God Value is different in that it is simply the top of one’s value hierarchy. You might feel miserable and empty and still have a God Value. In fact, the cause of your misery and emptiness is likely your chosen God Value.
20. For further discussion on how superficial God Values such as money affect your life, see Mark Manson, “How We Judge Others Is How We Judge Ourselves,” MarkManson.net, January 9, 2014, https://markmanson.net/how-we-judge-others.
21. Like money or government or ethnicity, the “self” is also an arbitrary mental construct based on faith. There is no proof that your experience of “you” actually exists. It is merely the nexus of conscious experience, an interconnection of sense and sensibility. See Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 199–280.
22. There are a number of ways to describe unhealthy forms of attachment to another person, but I went with the term codependence because of its widespread mainstream usage. The word comes from Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).
Alcoholics noticed that in the same way that they were addicted to the bottle, their friends and family were seemingly addicted to supporting and caring for them in their addiction. The alcoholics were dependent on alcohol to feel good and normal, and these friends and family members who were “codependent,” as they used the alcoholics’ addiction to feel good and normal as well. Codependency has since found more widespread use—basically, anyone who becomes “addicted” to supporting or receiving validation from another person can be described as codependent.
Codependence is a strange form of worship, where you put a person on a pedestal and make him the center of your world, the basis of your thoughts and feelings, and the root of your self-esteem. In other words, you make the other person your God Value. This, unfortunately, leads to extremely destructive relationships. See Melody Beattie, Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Care for Yourself (Center City, MN: Hazelden Publishing, 1986); and Timmen L. Cermak, MD, Diagnosing and Treating CoDependence: A Guide for Professionals Who Work with Chemical Dependents, Their Spouses, and Children (Center City, MN: Hazelden Publishing, 1998).
23. See discussion of “Hume’s guillotine,” from note 33 in chapter 2.
24. The Black Death killed one hundred million to two hundred million people in Europe in the fourteenth century, reducing the population by anywhere from 30 to 60 percent.
25. This refers to the infamous Children’s Crusade of 1212. After multiple failed Crusades by Christians to retake the Holy Land from the Muslims, tens of thousands of children journeyed to Italy to volunteer to go to the Holy Land and convert Muslims peacefully. A charismatic leader promised the children that the sea would part once they reached the Mediterranean, allowing them to walk to Jerusalem on foot. Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Instead, merchant ships gathered up the children and took them across the sea to Tunisia, where most of them were sold into slavery.
26. Interestingly, you could say that money was invented as a way to tally and track moral gaps between people. We invented the concept of debt to justify our moral gaps—I did you this favor, so now you owe me something in return—and money was invented as a way of tracking and managing debt across a society. This is known as the “credit theory” of money, and it was first proposed by Alfred Mitchell Innes back in 1913, in a journal article titled “What Is Money?” For a nice overview of Mitchell Innes and the credit theory of money, see David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Updated and Expanded Edition (2011; repr. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2014), pp. 46–52. For an interesting discussion of the importance of debt in human society, see Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (Berkeley, CA: House of Anansi Press, 2007).
27. Okay, the ethnicities thing is a bit controversial. There are minor biological differences between populations with different ancestries, but differentiating among people based on those differences is also an arbitrary, faith-based construct. For instance, who is to say that all green-eyed people aren’t their own ethnicity? That’s right. Nobody. Yet, if some king had decided hundreds of years ago that green-eyed people were a different race that deserved to be treated terribly, we’d likely be mired in political issues around “eye-ism” today.
28. You know, like what I’m doing with this book.
29. It’s probably worth noting again that there’s a replicability crisis going on in the social sciences. Many of the major “findings” in psychology, economics, and even medicine are not able to be replicated consistently. So, even if we could easily handle the complexity of measuring human populations, it would still be incredibly difficult to find consistent, empirical evidence that one variable had an outweighed influence over another. See Yong, “Psychology’s Replication Crisis Is Running Out of Excuses.”
30. All my life, I’ve been fascinated by how athletes go from heroes to villains and back to heroes again. Tiger Woods, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, and Andre Agassi have all been demigods in people’s minds. Then, one unseemly revelation caused each to become a pariah. This relates back to what I said in chapter 3 about how the superiority/inferiority of the person can flip-flop easily because what remains the same is the magnitude of the moral gap. With someone like Kobe Bryant, whether he’s a hero or a villain, what remains the same is the intensity of our emotional reaction to him. And that intensity is caused by the size of the moral gap that is felt.