Oak Trees are true.
Water is true.
The smile on a child’s face is true.
What “truth” is, beyond that, is something of a mystery. To me anyway.
We don’t actually “know” anything. What we have are models. Rough approximations of how the world works that have huge gaps in them. Gaps that we paper over with comforting but often very flimsy beliefs. Beliefs people would rather not examine.
When you say the word “beliefs” people automatically jump to “religious belief” but we hardly need to go that far to find examples. Something as prosaic as the general belief that voting matters in a democracy will do just fine. People really like that belief. Love it in fact. They have a mental model, a worldview, of how politics works and they quite like it. Politicians come up with platforms, deliver speeches, try to be charismatic, and then the people decide. It’s nice, simply, concise, and feels rather empowering. When you point out that nothing much seems to change to alter the course of a country no matter who is elected, they get rather angry. All of the really ugly machinations behind the scenes that actually determine policy, how the sausage gets made, we would rather not think about. Too unseemly. Also, we fear, perhaps rightly, too bloody. The comforting delusion will do fine, thank you.
That’s not to say the model isn’t useful. All models are. Models need not be a perfect representation of reality to provide us with utility. It is only when we do not recognize their limits, when we mistake the model for the real thing, the map for the actual territory, that we begin to run into trouble. All models are by definition incomplete. When the mental models a society is based on grow complex enough that they begin to run into contradictions, we start throwing up the wall paper. The beliefs. This isn’t bad really. It works for a good long while in fact. But eventually you’ve papered over so many holes that the walls holding up your house are more paper than they are solid. That’s a problem. Like a bit of patch covering a whole in the drywall, it does okay as long as you’re just looking at it from a distance.
Don’t press on it though.
It’s not very strong.
Collectively, what we in “The West” are going through right now is the “Don’t press on it” phase of our civilization. The latest one, anyway. The previous one happened during the so called “Enlightenment”, which, if we are honest, was but the final stage of the Protestant Reformation. This isn’t to say anything negative about, it’s just what it is. The worldview of Medieval Europe was, more or less, complete. Medieval Society and Medieval Christianity had an answer for every conceivable question you could ask. Should I get married? Should my wife and I have children? From where does the state derive its authority? What’s my role in the world? Do I have purpose? How can I better myself and my family? What’s right? What’s wrong?
The problem is a lot of those answers only looked good on paper. They were, in fact, only paper. Papered over holes. All the inconsistencies their civilization had encountered over the years, all the points at which their worldview didn’t match reality, they had papered over with various beliefs. Again, that’s okay. We paper over things all the time, home repair even today is about 50% somebody saying, “Well, just paint over it.” It just can’t last forever. Eventually the house starts to crumble and you’ve got to move out and build a new one. A new worldview. A new model of how the world works.
Terrence McKenna, the psychonaut who is dear to me for his intrinsic absurdity, used to say “belief is for children.” He was right. At least, he was right with regards to the working definition of the word “belief” that most people have knocking about inside their heads. Because, on the whole, most people define “belief” as “thinking something is so without evidence.” Or, even worse, “thinking something is so despite evidence.” This kind of belief is everywhere. Usually it is innocuous. Occasionally very destructive. People believed, without evidence (and even despite the evidence) that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 for example. They had to. The alternatives, that their government was incompetent at preventing or, worse, complicit in creating, an attack on their own soil was too big of a worldview hole to accept. Needed to be papered over. There are more recent examples of the same behavior. Let’s not speak of them here.
Such belief is for children. McKenna was correct. That sort of belief is nothing more than a shield to keep immature minds from encountering the actual world and being overwhelmed. A lot of Christianity functioned like this before the Enlightenment, a lot of it still does. You see it often in a certain category of middle-aged white woman who throws up her hands and sings “Jesus Take the Wheel” as she careens her life into a ditch. “Only God can judge me” she says, actively engaged in activities which she really ought be judged for. No different really than a man buying indulgences in the 1100s so he can keep pretending to be in good standing with God. Far too often religion in general, and Christianity in particular, has been used as nothing more than a shield, a barrier to keep people from having to deal with the really dark and nasty side of existence. Especially the really dark and nasty side of their own existence. The Enlightenment, and all that has followed, came largely saying something to the effect of, “Now look here. We’re tough. We call it like it is. Maybe there’s a God up there or maybe there isn’t but either way, he isn’t going to help you sunshine. Enough with all this fancy and mysticism. Face facts. No more papering over the harsh realities of life with your superstition. Use Reason.”
Okay. Fine.
The problem is that the new worldview we’ve built on that premise has now gone the other direction and papered over the beauties of life with a superstition all its own. So much so that it often claims those beauties are actually trash. Sometimes, it goes so far as to pretend they aren’t even there. Don’t believe me? Let’s look.
If you were raised in “The West”, the worldview you were handed, your mental model for how the universe works, undoubtedly goes something a little like this:
In the beginning there was an explosion. A big bang. Why it happened and how we’re not exactly sure but it did and that’s how the universe got here. All of space and time and matter and energy were sort of “spewed out” from this event. A great gigantic explosion in the vast recesses of the epochs of the past. After a long while, all that stuff that had been spewed out began to condense. It started collecting into large masses. Some of these masses got so big they self ignited due to the intensity of the gravity they were creating and we call these things stars. Those stars beause they were so hot and powerful, became giant furnaces of creation, and all the heavier more complex elements were created inside their boiling cauldrons. Other masses didn’t get quite so large and those just became planets instead. Most planets are fairly boring. Big empty rocks or balls of gas. But a few, with just the right conditions and just the right distance from a star of just the right size, are special. Those special planets, on one of which you happen to have been born, have the potential for something else to happen. They have the potential for Life.
You see your planet and the tiny fraction of others like it in the cosmos, has water. Water and air. And because they have water and air and aren’t constantly covered by lava from volcanoes or something, once, a long long time ago, lightning struck a pool of primordial soup. Thus, life was created. How this happened is, again, a mystery. Nobody really knows, but it must have happened this way or in some way similar to this because nobody has come up with a better story for how life could have started. Nonetheless, whatever was created in that soup wasn’t overly spectacular. It was a very very rudimentary form of life. A single celled organism or perhaps not even, perhaps something like a proto-organism. Regardless, whatever it was needed to eat and it needed to reproduce. How it was able to perform the shockingly complex tasks of taking in nutrition and making copies of itself after just being jolted into existence by a lightning strike, we are not sure. But again, never mind that for the moment. That thing, that life form, continued eating and reproducing, making more and more of itself. Overtime, some of these copies came out a little different, the offspring slightly “off” from their parents. Usually, this was bad. Almost all mutations are destructive to the organism that has them. But! On rare occasion this was good, and the mutated offspring had an advantage that allowed it to eat more and reproduce better than its cousins. Eventually, over the course of a very very long time, different offspring had different advantages that allowed them to thrive in slightly different environments. Speciation! Life on our planet began to get complex. Eventually one of those organisms would develop into something like a proto-primate. Something like a proto-you.
Now, these human like creatures were fascinating. They were highly intelligent but also often brutal. Their intellect and curiosity allowed them to do amazing things, like organize themselves into complex social structures and invent weapons and tools. Unfortunately, that same intelligence allowed them to do other things. Things not so good. They were smart but not smart enough to realize their own limitations. When their curiosity had a question they couldn’t answer, they were not disciplined enough to simply say, “I don’t know,” they had to make the answers up. Out of whole cloth if need be! They started explaining the motions of the heavens and the cycle of the seasons and human behavior in terms of gods and spirits. Ascribing agency where there was none. On the whole, this was oppressive. These beliefs they made up interfered with our previous animalistic freedom to do whatever we wanted. Now, all of a sudden, there were taboos. There were things which were right and things which were wrong, and the meanings of these things went beyond just “what feels good or what feels bad”, which is all the morality the animals use. No, now all of a sudden there were social conventions like property and gender and master and slave. All of a sudden having sex with anyone and anything might be somehow bad. All of a sudden there were power hierarchies, where there were none before. Really, the whole thing just became an excuse for the biggest and strongest people of the tribe to consolidate power and lord it over those beneath them. Unfortunately this state of affairs continued for a very, very long time.
In continued in fact right up until around the 1700s, The Enlightenment, when, collectively, humanity’s intelligence increased enough to realize that all that was a load of rubbish. Collectively they began throwing off the chains of religion and monarchy and tradition so that they could be free again as they once were in the long ago on the African Savanna. They would reclaim Rousseau’s “noble savage” within themselves and be rid of all those oppressive taboos and chains which had for so long held them down. And boy! Was it a great idea!
From this newfound redemption back to the taboo-less age came a technological explosion and improvement of the quality of life unlike any the world had ever seen. The entire glove was connected with ships and trade and national borders began to break down, along with their old irrational prejudices. Antibiotics were invented. And planes. And motorcars. Eventually we even went to space! Can you believe it? We walked on the damn moon.
But…
But but but…
All is not well. No. For old instincts are still present in our population. Old tendencies. That part of our brains prone to taboo and power hierarchy and authority and superstition is still there. A kind of original sin still present within us, a lingering mind virus which threatens constantly to plunge us back into the dark ages of gods and spirits which restricted our freedom. We must be ever vigilant against such tendencies and fight against them, a task for which we have a myriad of weapons. Education, therapy, expert mediated social consensus, and so on. On a civilizational scale we call these safeguards against the shadow of the spirit-haunted past “Democracy”, and Democracy is our most sacred possession.
So sacred is it that we are morally obligated to spread it. At the point of a gun if necessary. And woe betide those nations who do not accept it. Those who cling to toxic beliefs about the past and threaten to overturn our Enlightenment values. And you little Johnny. You, little Suzy. You are entrusted with this great task. The spreading of democracy. An existential mission billions of years in the making.
And so, yeah, that’s why we have to blow up Ukraine to make sure the people there get gay marriage.
That’s literally the reason. It sounds absurd when so articulated but that is in fact where all the hysteria about “Defending Democracy” from “Autocrats” and “Theocracy” comes from. That’s the mythological basis for it. That’s the mythological basis for almost everything that the American Empire tries to do. In effect, what I’ve just described is the imperial religion. The worldview that animates the actions of the United States and all its vassals (e.g. NATO, NAFTA, etc).
Now of course, most people have never heard it articulated that fully. The worldview I’ve laid out above is seldom condensed down into a form that can be read in a few paragraphs like that. Nonetheless, broadly speaking, that is what people believe. In the aggregate, that worldview plays itself out with a precise and predictable logic. So much so that you can know, well ahead of time, whether any new public policy or law or foreign war will be accepted or not with near 100% accuracy. Does said policy make it appear we are sliding back to the cave man’s world of gods and taboos? Then it will be rejected. Does said policy seem to bring us closer to the animalistic state of “liberated” freedom we once enjoyed on the African Savanna before things like monogamy or private property were ever invented? Then it will be accepted. The Western World does not act arbitrarily. It is following an ethos derived from its founding myth.
And it IS a myth.
Note how much in that worldview I described is rooted in nothing more than belief. Nothing more than the say-so of someone in a position of authority. The big bang, the formation of stars, abiogenesis, the progression of simple organisms to complex ones, the history of human anthropology… all of this is an tiny set of confirmable facts papered over by great swatches of belief, hearsay, just-so stories, and conjecture. Nobody has ever seen life come from non-life. Nobody has ever seen a star from. Nobody was around to observe the big bang. The stories we make up about “cave men” change by the hour.
It’s mythology.
That’s all.
What’s more, note how clearly it is a mythology motivated by the desire to distance itself from its predecessor. Sure, there was a moment it all started, a “let there be light” moment, but there was no god involved. No purpose. It was just an giant accident. Sure there’s something like original sin, but it’s original instinct, the lizard brain that wants to go back to the dark ages. Note also how it is Reason, Intelligence, which saves man out of the darkness. The worldview you were given is reactionary. It was born from nothing more than an attempt to get out of the old house before it fell down.
Okay. Fair.
But now this house is starting to fall down too.
The holes in the logic of our new mythology can no longer be papered over. The logic of “free love” has now rejected the idea that there are even two sexes to do the loving. The logic of materialism has rejected the idea that meaning can even exist. The logic of Reason is now openly beginning to argue than 2 + 2 might really equal 5.
Nothing to be done about. This is just what happens. You can’t salvage the worldview currently sinking. All worldviews have to fall apart eventually because the weight of all the things they’ve papered over eventually gets too great. All worldviews are models. And all models are only approximations.
You might be tempted to say, “Well then, sod off with your worldviews. If they’re all wrong I don’t need one.”
Okay. Try it.
You won’t last ten seconds. If you think you don’t have a worldview it’s only because you’ve so internalized it that you don’t even notice it anymore. Like a fish who doesn’t realize he’s surrounded by water.
The human mind requires completeness. It needs answers to the big questions. Who am I? Where am I? What am I for? What’s life all about? And so on. Without such answers, you just drift. Eventually you just commit suicide. For a while the Enlightenment worldview could provide answers. Answers good enough to get by with.
But it can’t anymore.
Which is why people are so vigorously defending them against people who point out the obvious.
“This doesn’t make sense.”
“REEEEEE!!!! CANCEL HIM! NAZI! NAZI! HE HATES MINORITIES! BIGOT! SOMETHINGPHOBE! CLIMATE DENIER!”
And so forth and so on.
People need a worldview.
You can’t take theirs away without offering them another one. It’s like trying to kick somebody out of their house without giving them somewhere else to go. “The building is no longer safe,” you may say. “The roof is about to collapse.” Okay. Sure. But life is hard and the world is cold and a leaky roof is better than none at all against the infinite blackness of the night sky.
That’s why I write.
I call this blog a “worldview repair service” because that’s the goal. Slowly, post after post, I’m trying to give you an alternative model of the cosmos. It’s a Sisyphean task maybe. We’ll see if I’m successful.
But, I do know that you need a new one. I know you mental model of the world needs a serious update. I know that if you are like most people today you are depressed and anxious and scared. I know that whether you have ever voiced it or not you have internalized all of the implication of the worldview you were handed. The worldview that says you are an accident, that nothing exists on purpose, that there is no such thing as intrinsic meaning.
I know you’re not having children because why would you? What’s the point? Another flesh robot? Another bag of meat doomed to die? Pass. And I know that you are incapable of joy because, well… what would that even mean? The best our society can offer as a substitute is entertainment. Fleeting laughs and hollow distractions. I know that you are afraid of everything and in constant anxiety because you believe you are nothing but your physical body and anything at any moment could hurt or kill it and you will die and go back into the nothingness from which you came. I know that you believe your life is nothing but a brief flash of light between two eternal darknesses, a fleeting instant between the nursery and the crematorium. I know you have difficulty loving or even believing that love exists. What would love be anyway? Chemicals. Nothing but chemicals in the brain.
It’s no way to live.
I’m not interested in fighting the culture war because I want to “win.” I’m interested in fighting the culture war because long ago men threw the baby out with the bathwater. I believe that I can make Christianity make sense to you. I can show you how to believe it. Believe it in a way that isn’t just for children. Maybe, just maybe, I can show you how to love.
That’s where the word “Belief” comes from after all.
It comes from an old Germanic word for love and desire. A word for erotic passion.
In the words of Jesus, “Do not be afraid, only believe.”
… “only Love.”
Omnia vincit amor.
Where Wokeness Comes From
This is great. Thanks. This is like something Moldbug wanted to write 15 years ago if only he was Christian, not autistic, and had a competent editor.
I thought the quote from Terrence was spot on. Jesus said it better "unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." and lao Tzu said "He who is in harmony with the Tao is like a newborn child" Terrence thinks truth is measurement. Christianity says truth is relationship. The adult sees the world as something to consume the child sees the world as something to play with.