Everything Is F*cked(75)
7. Haidt, The Righteous Mind, pp. 182–89.
8. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 189–200.
9. It’s interesting that most polytheistic religions haven’t had this obsession with conversion that the monotheistic religions have had. The Greeks and Romans were more than happy to let the indigenous cultures follow their own beliefs. It wasn’t until slave morality that the religious Crusades began. This is probably because a slave morality religion cannot abide cultures that hold different beliefs. Slave moralities require the world to be equal—and to be equal, you cannot be different. Therefore, those other cultures had to be converted. This is the paradoxical tyranny of any extremist left-wing belief system. When equality becomes one’s God Value, differences in belief cannot be abided. And the only way to destroy difference in belief is through totalitarianism.
10. See Pinker, Enlightenment Now, pp. 7–28.
11. My biggest qualm with Pinker’s book is that he conflates the scientific revolution with the philosophical Enlightenment. The scientific revolution predates the Enlightenment and is independent of the latter’s humanistic beliefs. This is why I make a point of stressing that science, and not necessarily Enlightenment ideologies, is the best thing to have happened in human history.
12. Estimates of GDP per capita growth done by author with data from Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 2006, p. 30.
13. There is evidence suggesting that populations become more religious immediately after natural disasters. See Jeanet Sinding Bentzen, “Acts of God? Religiosity and Natural Disasters Across Subnational World Districts,” University of Copenhagen Department of Economics Discussion Paper No. 15-06, 2015, http://web.econ.ku.dk/bentzen/ActsofGodBentzen.pdf.
14. There’s no written record of Nietzsche’s thoughts on communism, but he surely must have been aware of it. And given his disgust for slave morality in general, he almost certainly loathed it. His beliefs in this regard have long been mistaken for being a precursor to Nazism. But Nietzsche hated the German nationalism burgeoning during his lifetime and had a falling out with a number of friends and family (most notably Wagner) because of it.
Nietzsche’s own sister and brother-in-law were ardent nationalists and anti-Semites. He found both beliefs to be stupid and offensive, and said as much to them. In fact, his globalist view of the world was rare and radical at the time. He strictly believed in the value of a person’s deeds, nothing else—no system, no race, no nationality. When his sister told him that she and her husband were moving to Paraguay to start a New Germania, where people could breed a society from pure German blood, he is said to have laughed in her face so hard that she didn’t speak to him again for years.
It’s tragic, then (and ironic), that his work would be co-opted and warped by Nazi ideology after his death. Sue Prideaux gives a stirring account of how his philosophy came to be corrupted, and the slow, fifty-year rehabilitation it went through to get the reading it deserves. See Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!, pp. 346–81.
15. Buddhist philosophy would describe these cycles of hope creation and destruction as samsara, which is generated and perpetuated due to our attachments to worldly, impermanent values. The Buddha taught that the fundamental nature of our psychology is dukkha, a concept loosely translated as “craving.” He warned that human cravings can never be satiated, and that we generate suffering in our constant quest to fulfill those cravings. The idea of relinquishing hope is very much in line with the Buddhist idea of reaching nirvana, or letting go of all psychological attachments or cravings.
16. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, pp. 96–104.
17. The Pandora’s Box myth, as told in this section, comes from Hesiod’s Work and Days, lines 560–612.
18. This is kind of a joke, but also kind of not. For the horrific origins of matrimony in the ancient world, see Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 70–86.
19. Apparently, the Greek word Hesiod used for “hope” could also be translated as “deceptive expectation.” Thus, there has always been a less popular, pessimistic interpretation of the myth based on the idea that hope can also lead to destruction. See Franco Montanari, Antonios Rengakos, and Christos Tsagalis, Brill’s Companion to Hesiod (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Publishers, 2009), p. 77.
20. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, pp. 37–38.
21. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (1882; repr. New York: Vintage Books, 1974), §341: 273–74.
22. The beginning of his rant about God being dead comes from the “Madman” section of ibid., §125: 181–82.
23. This “impassioned and lengthy” speech to cows near Lake Silvaplana actually happened, according to Meta von Salis. It was possibly one of Nietz sche’s first episodes of psychosis, which began to surface around this time. See Young, Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 432.
24. The rest of Nietzsche’s lines in this chapter come from Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (1883; repr. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), p. 43. “[H]e is an overture to something greater” is my own interpretation of Nietzsche’s idea of the übermensch, or “superman.” The original text reads, “[H]e is a going-across,” where there “going-across” is a metaphor for man’s evolution into becoming the übermensch—that is, into something greater.