Everything Is F*cked(74)
31. I have to give a shout-out to Yuval Noah Harari and his brilliant book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: HarperCollins, 2015) for the description of governments, financial institutions, and other social structures as mythic systems that exist thanks only to the shared beliefs of a population. Harari synthesized many of these ideas first, and I’m just riffing on him. The whole book is worth a read.
32. Pair bonding and reciprocal altruism are two evolutionary strategies that emerge in consciousness as emotional attachment.
33. The definition of “spiritual experience” I’m most fond of is that it’s a trans-egoic experience—meaning, your identity or sense of “self” transcends your body and consciousness and expands to include all perceived reality. Trans-egoic experiences can be achieved in a variety of ways: psychedelic drugs, intense meditation for long periods, and moments of extreme love and passion. In these heightened states, you can “meld” into your partner, feeling as though you are the same being, thus temporarily achieving a trans-egoic state. This “melding” with someone else (or the universe) is why spiritual experiences are often perceived as “love,” as they are both a surrendering of one’s ego-identity and unconditional acceptance of some greater entity. For a cool explanation of this kind of stuff based on Jungian psychology, see Ken Wilber, No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth (1979; repr. Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2001).
34. As countries industrialize, their religiosity drops precipitously. See Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, 2nd ed. (2004; repr. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 53–82.
35. René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (repr. 1978; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), pp. 23–30.
36. Similar to science being a religion in which we worship evidence, humanism could be seen as worshipping the “in-betweenism” of all people—that there are no inherently good or evil people. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it, “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
37. Sadly, these conspiracy theories are prominent in the United States today.
38. I’m being a bit dramatic, but human sacrifice did occur in pretty much every major ancient and prehistoric civilization we know of. See Nigel Davies, Human Sacrifice in History and Today (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1988).
39. For an interesting discussion of innate guilt and the role of human sacrifice, see Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil (New York: Freedom Press, 1985).
40. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, pp. 14–15.
41. Ibid., p. 18.
42. Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, pp. 23–29.
43. E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature (1978; repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 169–92.
44. Reasoning skills break down when one is confronted with emotionally charged issues (i.e., issues that touch our highest values). See Vladimíra ?avojová, Jakub ?rol, and Magdalena Adamus, “My Point Is Valid; Yours Is Not: My-Side Bias in Reasoning About Abortion,” Journal of Cognitive Psychology 30, no. 7 (2018): 656–69.
45. Actually, you may suck even more. Research shows that the more well informed and educated someone is, the more politically polarized his opinions. See T. Palfrey and K. Poole, “The Relationship Between Information, Ideology, and Voting Behavior,” American Journal of Political Science 31, no. 3 (1987): 511–30.
46. This idea was first published in F. T. Cloak Jr., “Is a Cultural Ethology Possible?” Human Ecology 3, no. 3 (1975): 161–82. For a less academic discussion, see Aaron Lynch, Thought Contagion: How Beliefs Spread Through Society (New York: Basic Books, 1996), pp. 97–134.
Chapter 5: Hope Is Fucked
1. Nietzsche first announced the death of God in 1882, in his book The Gay Science, but the quote is most famously associated with Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which was released in four parts from 1883 to 1885. After the third part, all publishers refused to have anything to do with the project, and Nietzsche therefore had to scrape together the money to publish the fourth part himself. That’s the book that sold fewer than forty copies. See Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018), pp. 256–60.
2. Everything spoken by Nietzsche in this chapter is an actual line lifted from his work. This one comes from F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (1887; repr. New York: Vintage Books, 1963), p. 92.
3. The story of Nietzsche with Meta in this chapter is loosely adapted from his summers with a handful of women (the others being Helen Zimmern and Resa von Schirnhofer) over 1886–87. See Julian Young, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 388–400.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (1890; repr. New York: Penguin Classics, 1979), p. 39.
5. Some anthropologists have gone so far as to call agriculture, because of its inevitable tendency to create inequality and social stratification, “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.” See Jared Diamond’s famous essay “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Discover, May 1987, http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race.
6. Nietzsche’s initial description of master and slave moralities comes from Beyond Good and Evil, pp. 204–37. He expounds on each morality fur ther in The Genealogy of Morality (1887). The second essay in The Genealogy of Morality (New York: Penguin Classics, 2014) is where I was first exposed to the concept of “the moral gap” discussed in chapter 3. In that essay, Nietzsche argues that each of our individual moralities is based on our sense of debt.