In a very real sense nothing matters.
In a very real sense nothing is “true.”
Look. I’ve been around the block a few times now and I’ve seen enough to know that most facts and theories are bullshit.
For example, when I was little dinosaurs didn’t have feathers. Now they do. Pluto was also a planet. Now it’s not. Back then doctors could give you stuff that made you immune to various diseases. Today such treatments only promise to lessen symptoms. Once upon a time America was founded in 1776. Now they claim it was actually 1619.
The list goes on.
When I became a Catholic, theologians vigorously defended The Death Penalty as a primordial teaching of the Church. Today the Pope has declared it inadmissible. In the 90s marriage was only between one man and one woman and society would crumble if it were ever otherwise. Today it is otherwise. Society hasn’t. There was a hole in the O-zone layer that was going to kill us and it didn’t. The Vice President told us New York would be underwater and it’s not. Bread’s good. Bread’s bad. Bread’s good again. Gluten allergies everywhere then all of them vanished overnight. Who knows? Adkins diet. Vegan. Carnivore. Still fat. Used to be there was this thing called “String Theory” that was very popular. The best minds in Science swore by it. Explained the whole universe they said. Turns out that it didn’t. Afghanistan had to be freed from the Taliban because they were evil and Islam was bad. Taliban still in power. Nobody cares now. Oh, and also Muslims good.
Facts shift constantly.
There is no stable ground.
If you’re looking for it… God help you.
Within living memory geologists assured us that tectonic shift was impossible, but they’ve now decided the exact reverse, that continents move all the time. Pangea. Gondwana. Mythical places. Nobody’s ever seen them and nobody ever will but this is the consensus. This is the “fact.” The fact about a place that objectively doesn’t exist. Milk does a body good. Wait, no it doesn’t. Also it comes from almonds. Masks don’t work, yes they do, no they don’t. Well okay they do for you but not really its for others except no it isn’t… but… it is. Columbus thought the Earth was flat. Textbooks said so. Oh but also everybody’s known about the globe since ancient Greece so it’s actually impossible he’d have thought that. How did they know about the globe? Not sure. Some guy put sticks in the ground I think. Newton was hit on the head with an apple. He wasn’t. Peak oil came and peak oil went and we all still drive cars. AIDS was going to kill everyone but instead it ended up only hanging around in Africa and nobody knows how this is possible. It also doesn’t matter. Biologists don’t have time for such question because they’ve forgotten what a woman is. World’s overpopulated. Wait. No. Actually we’re facing population collapse.
Nothing matters.
Nothing is actually true.
If you live long enough you’ll see “The Narrative” shift so many times that it will make your head spin. All the “facts”, all the theories, all the history, and all the opinions of experts who definitely can’t be questioned will change a hundred times over, never even once acknowledging that that means they were wrong every time before.
Nothing is true.
Tough pill to swallow.
To avoid swallowing it almost everybody does the same thing. They regress back into an ideology. Could be anything. Religion maybe. Or Science. Or Politics. Maybe they get super into cycling or into being a dog-mom. Who knows? Anything to provide a standard. A frame of reference against which things can be judged. Does X help the Republican Party? Is Y an orthodox belief? Is Z Scientific?
See, ideologies are rulers.
They’re metaphysical metersticks by which you judge ideas.
Take a relationship problem for instance. A person whose identity is based in “Logic” and “Science” will go read the literature and seek professional help. They’ll get their partner to accompany them to couples therapy. They’ll read “I Hear You” by Michael Sorenson. The words “Evidence-Based” and “Research-Backed” will mean a lot to them. They’ll go online and look for experts to tell them how to improve their emotional bonds.
And maybe this’ll work.
And maybe it won’t.
The thing is that to a large degree whether it works or not doesn’t much matter. The ideology, the meter-stick… at least gives you an orientation. A direction. It simultaneously tells you what is wrong and the steps to take to fix it. Whether it works or not is secondary. In the moment of crises, you just need directions. You just want to feel like there’s something productive you can do.
By contrast a religious person is likely to turn to prayer to fix their problems. They will meditate. They will pray. Alone in their bathroom with the fan running so no one can hear them speak, they’ll look up to the ceiling and ask God for guidance. They’ll implore heaven for their partner to have a change of heart. They’ll go talk to their pastor maybe or go on a weekend retreat.
Again. Maybe this works.
Again. Maybe it doesn’t.
Again. It truly doesn’t matter.
For someone who is hurting, anything, absolutely anything, is better than feeling Lost. Having no direction. No ideology. No measuring stick by which to tell how off the mark you are and what you need to do to fix it. Ideologies keep you from feeling hopeless. They say, “you’re off by just this much, and if you just pray a little harder or science a little more or work a bit extra…”
They’re Spiritual Rulers. Guideposts. Metaphysical Yardsticks. An ideology is a system of philosophical feet and philosophical inches. Ideologies are things to help you Judge.
The only issue is that, just like a real meterstick, the measurements on them are entirely arbitrary.
I hope I’m making my point.
Building Cathedrals
Most of the time the arbitrary nature of our metersticks isn’t a problem. Lots of things are arbitrary. That’s okay. Language for example. There’s no reason that the sounds “brother” or “house” have to signify the things they do. Somewhere, sometime, somebody just decided to make them that way. Language is arbitrary.
That’s fine.
In exactly the same way, there’s also no reason that an inch has to be as long as it is nor that a gram has to weigh as much as it weighs. Likewise a dollar need not be made of a hundred cents nor an hour out of sixty minutes, and nowhere is it a law of physics that the start of every sentence needs to be capitalized. see? i don’t have to. you can read this fine without me bothering to hit the shift key.
Almost all of our social world is arbitrarily defined. Trees and birds and such aren’t I guess but just about everything else is. All of it, almost 100%, is an arbitrary meterstick.
Again, that’s okay.
You know, so long as everyone agrees about the meterstick we’re going to use.
Medieval people built fantastic things. Castles, cathedrals… all of it without any sort of universal standard. Back then the International Bureau of Weights and Measures didn’t exist and the length of a centimeter was not well-defined in the scientific literature in terms of the speed of light. No. Instead, the foreman in charge of a job would simply bring a stick of a certain length with him on site. Unique to each job and unique to each foreman, this stick would be “the meter” or “the yard” for everything done on that project. In some cases he would likewise bring with him a weight, and this would count as the local “pound.” So long as everyone working on the cathedral agreed to use those that stick and that weight as their reference measures, everything would come out fine. All would be in proportion. A “half-meter” called for in the plans would match up with the “half-meter” cut by the carpenter and the “half-meter” allowed for by the architect. The fact that a cathedral in France might have a radically different “meter” than a cathedral in Spain? Made no difference. As long as everyone working on a specific job was clear which standard was being used, everything would work. Joists would meet, corners would be square, and plumb lines would hang straight.
The Building would stand True.
But if everyone was using something different… well…
That wouldn’t work.
If the masons had a different meter from the carpenters who had a different meter from the tile-layers who had a different meter from the roofers… nothing is going to Square. It won’t stand True. The building, if it stands at all, will be lopsided and crooked. The walls will be drafty and the roof will leak. That beautiful glass window planned for over the alter just won’t fit. Rather than standing and being admired for centuries your work is much more likely to be reduced to a pile of rubble. One of those countless little churches dotting the English countryside now forgotten and grown over with moss.
That’s where we are now. Culture. Society.
We’re trying to build with different meter-sticks.
Fake Forevers
When a culture has gone on for a long time, all those little arbitrary decisions made at the beginning start to feel a lot less arbitrary. You know, your mouth sounds for “alligator” or “pie” or “apron” start to sound like the only reasonable ones, and people using other mouth sounds for the same thing start to seem like they’re babbling. Like they’re dimwits or idiots just mouthing “bar-bar-bar-bar-bar.” They start to sound like barbarians. Weirdos. And then you learn that they also have a different code of ethics. That they think that marrying their daughters off at eleven is okay and that bodies ought to be burned rather than buried. Suddenly the Weirdos start to seem evil. You even notice that sometimes the Evil Weirdos tolerate the women of their tribe walking around with their breasts uncovered. On top of everything else, the Evil Weirdos are lewd.
At least that’s what you’ll think.
See, if A Standard was put in place a few hundred years or more before you were born, then to you, a child growing up with it, that standard feels as though it’s been there Forever. Like it’s more a law of nature than an arbitrary choice. It never occurs to you therefore that your customs might be as equally ridiculous as those of the Lewd Evil Weirdo Barbarians. In fact any suggestion of such would probably seem outlandish. Perhaps even heretical. After enough time has passed, arbitrary yardsticks become “God’s Truth” to us, on par with the law of gravity or two and two making four.
But they’re not.
They’re Fake Forevers and today’s orthodoxy is merely yesterday’s heretical compromise. One of the reasons that the world seems increasingly hostile and unhinged today is because a lot of people are being forced to grapple with that.
A lot of people are being forced to grapple with the simple fact that most of what they believed was never actually True.
It was just… true.
True enough to get by with so long as everyone else agreed to play by the same rules.
When what you believe is no longer shared by the majority of people around you however, well, then everything starts getting squirrelly. When you wake up one day and find yourself in a multi-cultural milieu, a hyper-connected world with free-flowing information and constant exposure to all kinds of different opinions…
Suddenly it seems like everybody’s playing with a different yardstick…
And people don’t know what to do.
When faith in your ideology and culture is shaken, when all the holes in it become very obvious and can no longer be papered over…
Well, then you have a choice. You’ve come once again to The Tree of Knowledge and you can choose to embrace it or reject it.
There are pros and cons to each.
Forks in the Road
Let’s take religion for example:
Say you live in an era of profound change and all the smoke people have been blowing up your ass about “the plain truth of the Bible” or “the unchanging faith” suddenly seems utterly ridiculous. Happens. You know maybe you’re an Eastern Orthodox Christian and you’ve been told your whole life that you belong to “the Faith of the Apostles” and the “Unchanged Religion” with 2000 years of history. And then for whatever reason you turn twenty and make the stupid mistake of actually going and reading the early church fathers. “Woah!” You say to yourself in your college dorm room. “The Early Church was actually profoundly against Iconography and Religious Images. … Huh.”
What then?
What’s your move come Sunday when you walk into liturgy and everyone expects you to bow and kiss an icon and tells you that “it’s always been this way?”
Or maybe you’re a good Catholic who bought into the whole spiel about “The Deposit of the Faith” or “The Rock of Peter” who nonetheless watched with his own eyes (as I did) the pope participate in an idol worshiping ceremony on Vatican grounds.
Perhaps instead you’re a Protestant. One who suddenly has a Muslim neighbor and discovers that they’re actually kinder people than a lot of the Evangelicals he knows. You know, those people who supposedly had The Holy Spirit.
Well?
What then?
I use religious examples because I’m most familiar with them but it is the same everywhere. Democrats who “Believe Women” but expect you to vote for a rapist. Experts who tell you to “Trust the Science” while every other landmark study is revealed to be unrepeatable, if not outright fraud. As it happens, every ideology is arbitrary and therefore to some degree false and full of holes. Poke around too much and you will see that. Look too hard at your beliefs and they will come apart.
And what’s your game plan for when it does?
Well, as I already said there are two choices, embrace that uncertainty or reject it, and I will go ahead and tell you right now that the safe move is to and reject it. To Double down. Deny the evidence of your own eyes and lie, obfuscate, and reframe until you can pretend that you never saw the seams in your belief system. Pretend. Fake it till you make it. Retreat into a kind of fundamentalism which is unable to accept change. “The Science has always said that boys could become girls.” “The Church has always held that the Pope is infallible.” “Democracy has always meant voting for a rapist…” And then, next week, when The Narrative changes again… just go with it and forget everything you just said. Reject consistency and become water. Become formless. When the consensus shifts you do too. Go with the flow. Words don’t matter and you accept that so hard that you forget it. Dive into your ideology so deep that you can’t even smell your own farts.
This is the smart move and I mean that unironically. There is no happiness to be found in honesty or self-consistency. As Solomon said, “For in much wisdom is much Grief: and he that increases knowledge increases Sorrow.”
To put that in America: “Learning is a Bitch and Ignorance is Bliss.”
Listen. The Best Life… I will give it to you now so that you will know. I’m offering you The Blue Pill. TAKE IT. Neo took the red one and had to go live in a sewer wearing a burlap sack. Do you want to live in a sewer wearing a burlap sack? No? Then for God’s sake listen to me. Happiness is not found in thinking. It’s found in being Hot, Popular, and Rich. It’s found in Bimbo-maxing. That’s it. Working out in the gym and reading self-help books by Tony Robbins will make you way more happy than going to church or praying or reading philosophy. That’s just the reality. This blog is a Worldview Repair Service. It exists for those unfortunate souls who already made the wrong choice and took the red pill and are now trying to manage the fall out. If that’s not you, if you’re still a person with an intact ideology, if you know good and damn-well that all the problems of this world are due to Republicans or Gays or Free Market Capitalism or Protestants, then I’m begging you to please stop reading and forget any of this was ever said. Stop. Go no further. Turn around. Persist in your current ideological delusion with all its faults and learn to ignore them. You will be happier. Go get a tan and a job working in finance. Reject Reality. Spike your hair and get really good at tennis and find somebody hot that’s into you. That’s the path to happiness. IT IS. Don’t listen to the religious people who tell you it’s not. Misery loves company and all those pious people are just trying to drag you down to their level. Get you worried about the state of your soul and your mortality. NO! Go to Miami and lay on the beach. Focus on being beautiful and don’t think about anything beyond where your next Mai Tai is going to come from.
Okay?
That’s where you find happiness.
Got it?
Alright…
You’ve been warned. If you’re still here then I will assume you’re already broken. You already took the red pill and saw through the matrix of your own delusions. You noticed the fakeness of the world and were either unwilling or unable to deny the evidence of your eyes and have, unfortunately, acquired Wisdom.
What now?
Well yet again we have two choices. There are always two choices. The first fork in the road was red pill or blue pill and you, you poor bastard, chose the red. Now we come to fork number two. The fork that happens after you realize that nothing matters and that nothing is true. Okay. Well, now you get to decide if you’re going to lean into that Nihilism or if you’re going to try and become a Hero.
The first is easiest to explain.
Leaning into Nihilism means embracing the fact that almost everything is arbitrary and almost everything is a lie. Morality? You say, “Who says?” Custom? You say, “Who cares?” Honesty? “Why bother?” Loyalty? “No thank you.” Manipulating others? “Why not?”
People who take this path become wildly successful. They run banks. Governments. Fortune 500 companies and Hedge Funds. They’re the sort of people who spend millions of dollars trying to gaslight the populace into thinking that using Roundup is safe or that smoking is actually good for you. They’re the folks who try to sneak innocuous looking sentences into the terms of service that say they get to spy on everything you own. They’re the people who put toxic fillers into food to get a one-dollar advantage in the market and never for a moment think about the fact that they’re probably making children sick. When confronted, these people just lie. When the opportunity presents, these people just steal. They are psychopaths and CEOs and prime ministers and congressmen. They have an enormous advantage over all those who took the blue pill because the person still bounded by ideology simply can’t imagine that anyone else could be that evil. They’re wolves. Wolves amongst sheep.
And these sorts of people get ahead.
Now, there are levels here. You don’t have to be a full-blown sociopath to walk the path of Nihilism. You can be a mild one. You’ll still out-compete the normies by a mile, bounded as they are by their ethics and their standards. You don’t have to poison children or pollute the oceans if that’s distasteful to you or if hiding bodies sounds too stressful. You can simply be the lower sort of Nihilist who just lies and manipulates. The kind of person that just uses other people like pawns. You’re still going to win because you don’t care about things like honor or truth because you, correctly, have learned such things are fake.
That’s path number one. It’s Luciferianism. It is, actually, how people become Satanists.
Look.
Satan is a lot of things but he’s no dummy. The arguments he presents are sound. When your worldview falls apart and you see the arbitrary nature of things… His point of view can make a lot of sense. When he whispers to you that all that stuff was a lie anyway so why not just look out for number one… you might be apt to listen.
The angels did.
One-third of them.
Beings vastly more intelligent than we are… creatures already in Heaven, who had the beatific vision and who were with God, were convinced to follow Satan. Don’t for a moment think that you can’t be. Because Satan’s argument isn’t dumb. Much of Reality truly is arbitrary and can be molded and remade however you want. You know, if you’re willing to transgress the morality which you’ve recently noticed was fake anyway.
So why not do so?
Why The Hell Not?
That’s the path of the Nihilist. Lots of people take it. God bless them. I hope they find whatever it is they’re looking for.
And then there’s path number two. Path number two is harder.
Not only harder, it’s also completely unrewarding. There’s no reason to pursue it and nobody will care if you do. There is no worldly recognition on this path and no one will laud you. Probably not even one human being will even ever say “thanks.” You will not be respected. You will be laughed at and you will be scorned. You will not have success and you will fall behind in almost every conceivable metric of social status. You will not pass Go. You will not collect two hundred dollars.
Hey, don’t blame me. I told you to stop and go get a tan.
Because path number two is the path of the Hero. It’s saying “I can’t prove any of this, and it may not even make sense… but I choose to love anyway.”
Why?
You don’t know. You will never know.
You can’t prove that your way is better, or that it is more true, or that God commanded it, or that The Church has always said it. No. You’ve seen the truth in Lucifer’s argument and no longer have the luxury of such certainties. All yardsticks are arbitrary. All customs. All morals. In some sense The Ten Commandments could have been anything. Any god you pick will talk to you about the same, which is to say, seemingly not at all. Can you even prove Jesus said the things he said? How do you know? You have no proof. You weren’t there and even if you had been memory is faulty. You have nothing. You have less than that.
Lucifer’s argument makes sense.
And you know it.
And yet you choose to Love. To deny self, to deny selfish gain, to deny taking advantage of others for your own good. Not because your ideology demands it but… just because. Normies obey the laws and customs out of fear of punishment or, worse, because they actually believe it’s all real. But you don’t have that anymore. You’ve realized, correctly, that your decision to participate in the world and play by its rules is as arbitrary as the punctuation marks in the English Language&^
Yet still you chose it.
That’s why Saint Paul said Faith is the Substance of things hoped for and the Evidence of things not seen. Because doing that… choosing Love just for the sake of it… is itself the proof that it is real. It is itself the Justification of God. It is saying, “I choose this as Good, arbitrarily, for its own sake, and not for anything it can give me.” It is a purely selfless choice. A choice as selfless and arbitrary as God’s when he chose to make the world. It’s saying “I choose Love… Because.”
Because why?
Because I do.
Because I Am.
Because I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.
To be in this position and to make this choice is to embody God. Like Love itself it is irrational. It doesn’t make sense. It is a choice where the only possible end is pain and heartbreak and a choice that absolutely no one will care that you made.
But you do it anyway.
That’s the second choice. The path of the Hero.
Again though, please listen to me and just go get your teethed whitened and have a boob job. I promise you you’ll have a better life.
But, if you already messed that up, that’s why I’m here.
That’s the sales pitch for this blog. This is a Worldview Repair Service for broken souls who accidentally got too wise.
Amor Vincit Omnia. Love really is going to win, and you don’t have to be afraid.
Many years ago I was arguing rings around a devout Christian girl. We were walking along and she, frustrated, decided to pull me into a church we were passing to have the pastor out argue me. We went into the pastor’s office and we sat down. I was suddenly rendered near speechless, all my fine rational arguments dissolved in the presence of what I know now was the Spirit of Truth without any apologetic arguments being presented to me.The pastor had yet to say anything and was puzzled, I just got up and walked out.The young lady apologized for what happened and I said everything was fine. I was strangely at peace. A few weeks later kneeling I confessed Jesus as Lord and Savior in my room at the eastern meditation center I was living in. In the middle of the prayer my eyes flew open in surprise at the sudden face to face closeness of God and I exclaimed, “God is at peace with me!”
A few years ago I had the opposite experience, an evil, utterly intelligent presence came and I knew that all my rational arguments for the truth of Christ could be reduced to dust by that being, the words of the counter arguments to Christ were crouched at the doorway of my mind, words taken from the knowledge of this world present in my mind, yet I felt death waiting for me in acceptance of and surrender to those arguments unlike the peaceful life that came with the Spirit of Truth.
My primal apologetic argument - when you look at what is around us in the end death is always king - with the possible/probable exception of the resurrection and resurrection presence of Jesus, what I call the Grand Anomaly, so in this casino of life I am placing on my chips on that, with the Holy Spirit in me being the earnest money or guarantee. Truth is trans rational, beyond the wisdom of this world and is a person, the Living God, not conceptual.
Dammit Yoshi you did it again haha, took the words right out of my mouth and gave me more and better ones. Love how you approach the yardstick example - think it’s much more intuitive than the classical bluster I got handed down to me (as much as it’s saying the same thing).
Have you ever put time into Lewis’s space trilogy? I just finished Perelandra and the more I think about it, the more the whole thing feels like exactly the journey you’re talking about. Nothing matters, just love. Thanks for all you write!