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Dec. 20, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:38
565 Santa Christ

Myth, religion and superstition

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Time Text
Good evening, everybody.
I hope you are doing well.
It's Steph. It is quarter past six, just a little bit before, on December the 20th, 2006.
And it's a repeat.
I lost the podcast this morning.
I keep forgetting.
I shouldn't really complain about this.
It's a fairly obscure programming thing for the makers of a free piece of software like Audacity to have dealt with.
But I will tell you this, if you're working with Audacity, if you have a USB microphone because you want your hands free for a variety of reasons, you know, man's got a scratch.
If you are using Audacity in a USB microphone and...
You close down Audacity, open it back up, because you, you know, you finish, open it back up and don't have the USB microphone plugged in, some bad things occur, i.e.
a freeze. And then if you exit, it erases all of your files.
So, not to worry, I shall remember.
It's just that I like the other microphone, but especially for night driving, I prefer to have two hands free.
So, I'll go over what I was talking about this morning.
I thought it was an interesting topic, so I don't mind doing it again.
At least you only have to listen to it once.
So, Friday, I went to a dance show.
It was the Rockettes and their fabulous singing, dancing, elf and Santa and Rockettes show.
And it was all about the Christmas jollity surrounding the big chunky merry dude we know as Santa.
And it was a good show, I guess.
I certainly do recognize and respect that being a Rockette is a rather challenging thing to do.
And one of the many reasons I haven't auditioned is that it requires a fairly strong sense of rhythm and for you to be a woman almost exactly 5'8 or 5'9 tall.
And of course I'm not a woman.
So the show was interesting and singing in live theater I never find to be particularly good.
I don't know if it's the mics or the wireless or what, but it always just sounds a little buzzy or raspy.
So I thought the singing was okay.
The actors were all charming.
I find it It's odd to look at midgets and consider them to be funny.
I think they lead a rather difficult life, but we survived all of that.
The singing and the dancing was fine.
I find I space out in dance shows.
I can do about 20 minutes, and then I'm just like, woo, we're off to happy land, and doing other things with my brain.
I knew that this was coming, and it did to some degree spoil my enjoyment of the beginning of the show just a little bit.
Because I checked in the program and knew what the last third was about.
But from the merry, dancing, singing fantasy land of Santa's elves and reindeer and the North Pole and all this funny, funny mythology stuff, we whammo went straight over to a very serious exposition on the nativity of Christ and the life of Christ.
And I didn't know this before I sat down, But I'll give you sort of a brief synopsis of it, and then I'll tell you what I thought was just hilarious about it all.
So, when it switches to the nativity scene, or the life of Christ stuff, or the birth of Christ, I guess...
It all went sort of along the lines of the following.
So a screen came down in front of the stage, and on it was projected with this deep, sonorous-voiced announcer.
And he was born of an obscure father and an obscure mother in an obscure village.
And then he moved to another obscure village, where he worked in a carpentry shop until he was 30, And then he became an itinerant preacher.
And he wandered around preaching.
He never traveled more than 200 miles from the place of his birth.
And as he preached, for some reason, the tide of popular opinion began to turn against him.
And he was tried, and he was crucified and hung up between two thieves.
And as he died, the soldiers played dice and gambled for the last piece of his possessions, which was his robe.
And this and that and the other, right?
And they went on and on. And he has, for 2,000 years, been the most important.
Kings have come and gone, and empires have come and gone, but this man remains at the center of all that is deep and spiritual in the Western tradition and blah, blah, blah.
And naturally then, of course, they, you know, the star and the three wise men and the golden frankincense and myrrh and all of this sonorous voice and like really shrieky singers.
I don't know what it is about Christianity that brings out the, ah, sort of shrieky, you know, cattle prod up the butt kind of singing.
Hark the herald angels scream or something.
But I mean, that's not, I mean, all propaganda is overdone fundamentally.
And so they recreated the nativity scene, and they did it with sheep, and it was like live camels and so on.
And it wasn't Joseph lighting up a nice unfiltered Turkish special, but they really did talk in very deep and sonorous tones about the seriousness and the importance of the nativity, the birth of Christ, and so on.
Now, I have yet to take on Buddy Jesus.
We will. We will.
I'm just still gathering together some research for a full-out assault on the dewy-eyed hippie lad, but we'll get to him.
We will get to him.
And... What I noticed, or at least what I thought was funny, it's sad, of course.
Fundamentally, all fantasy is sad and broken, but it's funny in that any extremity of just insane hypocrisy or blindness has a funny side to it as well.
I've talked about the tragic side before, so I'll just talk about the side that I found funny.
So, for an hour, an hour and a quarter, maybe even an hour and a half, I can't remember, We are treated to a foolish, jolly, ridiculous mythology presentation.
Presentation mythology. Santa.
And then, suddenly, everything turns.
Everything changes. The Santa myth is ho-ho-ho, jolly fellow, gifts and reindeer making fun of Santa, and Santa's wife is drunk, and the elves are all falling over each other, and ha-ha-ha. And then, right, a much more fantastical mythology is presented with all seriousness.
The Santa story is presented as a humorous, funny, ha-ha, tongue-in-cheek kind of...
A tale that is clearly something that you're supposed to believe in because it's not even believe in, but just sort of regard as a fun piece of whimsy.
But then a much more fantastical tale, which is the son of God born in the crib, rises from the dead, heals the sick, and so on, right?
I mean, the... The Santa myth at least has some human motivation, and Santa is presented as a being or somebody who actually has tangible material existence, climbs down your chimney, eats your cookies, and so on.
Whereas, I mean, in the present, right, in the present, so you tell the kid about Santa, he came, he left, right, that's evidence, it's intangible, and Santa has motives, he likes...
Visiting children and giving them presents.
Maybe not the best motives.
Maybe, like most saints, he ended up as a priest.
But he has motives, right?
He likes to reward children for being good and punish them for being bad.
He gives them rewards on a sort of material basis, right?
So it's not like, hey, give me your money and I'll get you a place in this magical place called Xanadu slash Hobbiton slash Heaven.
It's not, be good and you'll get a train set or something like that.
You know, be good and X, you will get something tangible and material.
And not in the afterlife, but in the here and now, right?
So there's a kind of...
I mean, it's a bit of a warm-up for Christianity or for other kinds of religions, but at least there's a pleasing kind of materialism in the here and now, somebody who actually exists.
Of course, I mean, Santa really only violates physics and economics, right?
He's got no capital, can't pay anything, doesn't charge.
But... And of course, what is it the MIT guys say?
He would be subject to 60,000 g's of gravity accelerating between the houses, and would have to travel at 138,000 miles an hour, so he'd burn up on a comet hitting the planet, or hitting the atmosphere.
So he did just physics and economics, but there's some things that are a little bit more tangible.
Nobody drinks the wine in front of the statue of Santa, and that wine is supposed to turn into the blood of Santa that you guzzle down like a vampire, and you don't eat bread which turns into Santa's flesh that you chew down.
I mean, the transubstantiation mythology and so on.
Santa doesn't come back from the dead, Santa doesn't heal the sick and regrow limbs and so on.
And so Santa is a much more sensible mythological figure, much more around sort of Loki or the Greek mythology figures, Pan and so on, rather than this sort of stern, abstract, genocidal, cannibalistic, evil kind of god that Christianity is so addicted to and other kinds of religions.
So, to me, it's kind of funny, of course, that the much more believable myth is ha-ha, how silly, silly, silly, whereas the much more staggeringly weird and unbelievable and freaky myth...
Is portrayed as, you know, in all seriousness.
There's no sense of self-consciousness, no sense of hesitation, no sense...
Who's expecting the Rockettes to come up with an atheist Christmas?
But really in the audience.
I look around, everyone's sort of smiling beatifically and weirdly.
I may have saw somebody wipe away a tear.
Oh wait, that was me. For the race.
But... But there is really no consciousness of any kind of similarity between these two mythologies, right?
The one that is the far more unbelievable mythology is the one that is portrayed with all seriousness.
And Santa, you could even say, has had more luck in making children conform to virtue than Jesus has.
What the hell do the kids care about in Afterlife with Jesus?
What they want is a toy train set.
So as far as virtue goes, since the second, the sort of last act was all about the virtue, the spirituality or whatever, well, as far as that goes, I don't believe there's been a whole lot of wars about which versions of Santa are the right ones and what Santa's ethics are and who should obey which of Santa's decrees.
I don't think there are any Santa wars.
There are religious wars all over the place, but I don't think there's a lot of Santa schisms and splits.
There was no Santaquisition launched by Spain in the 16th century.
There's no elf burnings that occur when people are suspected of being Santa's elves.
So, a much more innocuous and pleasant and pagan, obviously pagan, kind of mythology.
That has brought some pleasure.
I mean, a lot of conformity and a lot of bullying from parents, but, you know, some pleasure to people and hasn't got millions of people killed.
And that one is portrayed as, oh, how silly, how jolly, how funny, how nonsensical.
This is a myth that we can look back with fondness as a silliness that we've outgrown.
But the much bigger and bloodier and more disastrous and unbelievable myth...
Oh, yeah, well, we don't believe in the guy who flies with reindeer.
But the guy who comes back from the dead, who is a living god, oh, that we're okay with.
That we believe in. The guy who gives you presents in the here and now.
Oh, what nonsense. What nonsense.
The guy who gives you presents in the, quote, afterlife in a completely unverified way.
Yeah, we're good with that.
We're good with that.
That's fine.
That's fine with us.
And this kind of stuff is just...
It's sad, and it's funny.
And... It really is just amazing how there's just no consciousness of this, right?
Imagine if you have a kid, right?
You have a kid, and that kid is like 14 years old and still waits up with milk and cookies to see Santa Claus, right?
I'm pretty sure as a parent you're going to be kind of disappointed in that, right?
So it's like, oh boy, I think we better take him to get tested because clearly this is not a good situation for a kid to still be believing in Santa Claus when he's 14 or maybe even 10 or maybe even 8.
And that would be a pretty sad thing to have to deal with as a parent.
Obviously, a kid would be developmentally handicapped and retarded in some manner, and so you would have to find some other methodology to try and deal with this problem and get him tested and so on.
However, if your child or your Christian parents and your child at the age of 14 stops believing in God, You're horrified.
You're appalled.
It's terrible.
It's just plain terrible.
And how bizarre is that?
The one myth which is far more believable and requires far less intelligence to overcome is considered to be okay.
But the other myth, which is far more unbelievable, sorry, it takes far less intelligence to pierce through the nonsense of Jesus Christ than it does to pierce through the nonsense of Santa Claus, right?
Santa Claus, physical tangible reality, you can do the physics, he's got prescribed behavior, he's doing stuff, he's bringing you toys, he's bringing you presents.
There's a negative hypothesis, right, which is that if you wake up all night, if you stay awake all night and you don't see Santa but you have presents the next day, then Santa didn't arrive.
And then there's the kids who say, well, what about all the stuff that's in the Santa Claus movie?
Well, what about the houses that don't have chimneys?
And what about people living in caves?
And all this kind of stuff, right? So there's negative test hypotheses, and then you start to think, as a kid, well, how could he get to all the houses?
And this and that, right? So that stuff, at least there's evidence for it, right?
Somebody eats the cookies, it's your dad or mom.
Somebody eats the cookies, and somebody drinks the milk.
And you get toys, right?
So there's evidence, right?
There's evidence for this Santa dude, right?
And so I guess part of you says, well, okay.
So there's evidence for it, and so we're going to go with evidence for it, but there's negative proofs against it, so I can reason it out.
But of course, with Jesus and gods and devils and gremlins and ghosts and hobgoblins and so on, there's no evidence at all.
There's no evidence at all.
So it takes far less intelligence to give up on God than it does to give up on Santa Claus.
Santa Claus, you've got to work some shit out.
Right? God, you've just got to say, oh, well, okay, this is a bunch of nonsense.
And so parents who are crushed at the lack of intelligence in their children, when those children continue to believe past the age of seven or six or what, five maybe, if those kids continue to believe in Santa Claus, that's a disaster for the parents.
They get worried. We should have figured this out by now.
I mean, it's a silly story.
But... If at the same time those kids give up on God, the parents are horrified.
Even though giving up on God is far easier than giving up on Santa Claus if you spend like five minutes thinking about it.
So I just find that stuff kind of funny.
People have a sort of fundamental inability to see the universality of myth.
And my friend John, there was a podcast, and he may show up on the show on Sunday.
There's a podcast that John was involved in when Christine and I have been a friend of mine for over 20 years.
He was talking with somebody who...
He was a Christian and they were talking about mythologies.
And the Christian was saying, you know, well, what I find really interesting is the Ragnarok myth of the Norse mythologies and how, you know, this warrior race has a final cataclysmic battle, which is what you'd expect from a warrior race.
But then at the end of it, after Ragnarok, there's a lot of peace and this and that and the other, right?
And... My friend John, you know, quite rightly said, yeah, that is very interesting stuff.
You know what I find completely interesting is the Christian mythology around Easter, right?
Around Jesus and so on, right?
The mythology that's this, and he started sort of going into it and pulling the Easter myth apart and this and that and the other, right?
And this guy got really upset.
He got offended. Like, you could see him just getting, like, his sphincter went bink, and he's like, oh my god.
And he's like, well, what are you talking about?
It's like, well, there's the North mythology, and now we're talking about the sort of Christian mythology.
And this guy was like, well, but, I mean, that's a little different, right?
I mean, that's more of a deep spiritual blah, blah, blah.
And it's like, no, no, no, no, no.
It's just another mythology. I mean, you might as well, I don't know, say that the Force in Star Wars is a deep spiritual experience, just another mythology.
But people, they get...
Sunk deep into the emotional symbols of their own nonsense.
And so they live in this metaphysics of language and emotional associations of the scar tissue of having been lied to.
The Stockholm Syndrome of falsehood, bullying and control from their authority figures.
And they just sink into this and it becomes their world and everything that is foreign just looks completely ridiculous.
And so, when you're outside that nonsense, when you're actually in touch with reality, in a sort of pretty fundamental way, so I'm sitting there in this show, going like, well, they're mocking the Santa thing in a light-hearted kind of way, and then they're very serious about a much more deranged thing.
It's literally like watching somebody be skeptical about the motives of advertisers.
And then go out and be totally, well, you know, you have to recognize that there's self-interest, you have to recognize that they're paid to do this, you have to recognize this, you have to recognize that.
And then goes out to hunt for leprechauns and their pots of gold.
Well, deconstructing advertising is much harder than not believing in leprechauns, right?
So, it is just very funny.
It's very funny. You see this a little bit in The Daily Show, right?
The Daily Show is a wonderful institution in many ways, because this really is the first generation that has grown up, those kids who watch The Daily Show, the younger people who watch The Daily Show.
They're the first kids who've grown up with a strong skepticism towards authority since, I gotta say, pretty much the late Enlightenment.
John Stewart and Voltaire sort of run along the same categorization, right?
They run along the same continuum of satirical, constantly puncturing the vanity of power by comparing statements that are obviously just designed to manipulate in the moment and yet are portrayed as eternal principles, right?
That's one thing that authority always does, is it claims eternal principles and then continually betrays those principles for the expediency of the moment, for gaining control of power, getting something they want in the moment.
And The Daily Show, of course, among all of the media outside of the internet, is the only media that I know of, other than Colbert's spin-off, I guess, the only media that actively is skeptical towards the pronouncements of authority, and it's just wonderful. I mean, of course, he's a sycophant to the political people who come into his chair, and I almost never watch the interviews, but...
This part where he actually has the freedom to some degree of freedom to speak his mind and to point out, well, last year they said this, and this year they're saying this, don't you get?
That you're just being manipulated, which is the fundamental thing around a lot of what The Daily Show does.
And also the perspective from overseas, the perspective from those not wrapped up in our propaganda is also just delicious and very wonderful.
And he's doing a lot of good, right?
I think he's doing a lot of bad in some ways in that he's still a statist and he's still, you know, Doesn't ever question the foundations of government, but at least he's pointing out the endless moralizing and hypocrisies that occur in the political process.
And that's great, right?
That's just wonderful. Because it allows people to start viewing their own mythologies, right?
To start viewing your own culture's mythologies as mythology is really the height of wisdom, in my opinion.
And I'm not saying I'm there yet.
I'm just going to plug it away, but One of the deepest wisdoms in the world is when you can look at your own culture and see it as culture.
When you can look at Christianity and see it as as bizarre a mythology as Poseidon worship or as Mithraism or of many blue-armed Vishnuism.
When you can look at Borat and see your own culture.
As everyone says, oh my god, how silly, right?
How nonsensical it is that Borat goes and demands the tears of a gypsy to break a curse.
But Catholics line up to drink the blood and eat the flesh of their god in order to gain entrance to heaven.
Far more bizarre.
At least gypsies are real.
At least tears are real. At least he's not expecting tears to turn into doves.
So when you can look at the mythologies that are in your own culture, the culture you grew up in, and see them for what they are, I mean, that's real freedom.
That's real freedom. To claw your way out, and it literally is a process of clawing your way out, of the fantasies and propagandism bullshit that we're all dumped into as children.
To claw your way back to a harder and clearer kind of reality.
To see the mythologies that are in your environment as mythologies.
It's just wonderful. It's just wonderful.
That really is a very fundamental act of freedom.
It's a fundamental state of freedom and a very fundamental state of wisdom.
And it's fundamentally offensive to just about everyone.
Which is fine.
Which is fine.
We just move the race forward bit by bit.
We are the genes by which the race evolves.
the random genes who do not believe the nonsense in the body politic.
And the way that you can begin to The last thing that I'll say about this...
The way that you can begin to parse this stuff out...
I hate to use a word that Tony Snow has used in the past ten years...
Is...
You can look at...
You can look at the words that are used to describe other cultures...
And you can extract the logic behind why those words are applicable and then apply them to, where relevant, your own culture.
What a terrible way of putting something simple.
I do apologize.
Oh, also apologize to a listener.
A huge apology that goes out to a listener.
And I forgot to mention this.
I did mention... No, I forgot to mention this morning.
Sorry. A listener who wrote me the question about, yeah, was I going with an argument from authority?
I absolutely let loose, which I think was appropriate to some of the people on the board at the time, not many, but this gentleman got quite offended, and quite rightly so, because he thought I was talking about him and how I've earned his trust and so on, and I do apologize for that.
I've sent him an apology by email, but absolutely wanted to apologize on air as well.
I should have been much more clear.
of different sources, but not that he, you know, sort of questioning his honor and integrity, he quite rightly sent me an angry email, which I completely respect and is exactly right.
It's the right thing to do if somebody attacks your honor, right?
I mean, so I do apologize for that.
So when you look at something like, you know, certain religious statements that sort of float around within your own culture, right?
If you look at the word superstition, right?
The word superstition, great song.
The word superstition...
Is applied to, you know, the, I don't know, Aztecs and the Mayans and people who spit over twice or hang a horseshoe upside down over their doorframe and this kind of stuff.
Oh, it's very superstitious, right?
Well, superstition is the belief in spiritual or unseen forces that aren't real, right?
Superstition is a word that has pretty negative connotations.
I mean, nobody says, oh, you're very superstitious, that's like a good thing.
And yet, the word religion doesn't seem to have the same connotations, right?
Right, the word psychoses, which is to hear voices and believe in things that aren't there, has a pretty negative connotation, right?
It's a fundamental breakdown of reality processing within the mind.
Psychoses is pretty negative, right?
I guess you could say. Faith...
Welcome to my show!
There were religious maniacs beating themselves and throwing themselves on the ground and shrieking and catawalling and so on.
And we go, my God, that's just freaky.
That's psychotic.
Well... Why?
Well, because it's a break with reality.
They're believing in things that aren't there and so on.
Go to a Baptist thing.
Look at the guys hopping around in the Borat movie, right?
Then he goes to the Pentecostal thing.
So... When we look at the exact same behaviors that we grew up with, which have particular labels associated with them, faith, religion, spirituality, stained glass, priest, all the things that we grew up with, which have stately and noble emotional connotations, right? This is the propaganda, right?
But when you see the same behavior manifested in different clothing in some other place or in a different language, some other place in the world in a different language, suddenly it looks weird, right?
It looks just completely freaky.
When we think back about the moral defenses of slavery, not just those in the Bible.
Actually, the Bible morally commands.
Christ morally commands people.
Matthew, is it Matthew? Number one, the first guy.
Mark. Mark forces people to...
says that slaves must obey their martyrs, masters, and Christian masters most of all.
When we look back on the spiritual defenses or the moral defenses of slavery, it seems kind of weird, right?
It seems like it's bizarre.
The reasoning just doesn't make any sense.
When you look back on the hatred towards Jews that's sort of in the anti-Semitic literature throughout Christendom for about 1,500 years, actually close to 2,000 now, It all just seems, you know, and Luther calls Jews maggots and pestilences and pustules and so on, right?
I mean, it all just seems kind of psychotic, right?
But it is very hard to not look at exactly the same praise that is heaped upon modern religion and people of faith and people of virtue and also that is heaped upon the soldiers and also that is heaped upon the state, right?
And taxation is a necessary and noble thing that people need to pay because it's their duty and so on, right?
When you read back and say, well, it's your Christian duty to obey your master as a slave, I mean, we look back and go, isn't that bizarre?
A completely freaky idea.
And how transparently ethics is being used to prop up and support the economically exploitive social structure.
How clear that is.
When we look back on Prohibition, right?
Liquor, bathtub gin, speakeasies, and so on.
Just bizarre. You look back on the tracks about liquor is the devil's sweat or whatever it is.
I don't know what they say. But when you look back on that stuff, it does look kind of...
It all looks just very, very strange, right?
Now, it is a scary place, as we say, taking our cue from Buddy Jim, out here on the perimeter where there are no stars.
It is a very chilly and can be a very lonely place to look at the culture that you live in and to feel as strange and to feel as genuinely and legitimately freaky.
Or that your culture is freaky in the way that looking at other cultures doing bizarre things is freaky.
When you can look at your own culture and see it for what it is, which is exactly as bizarre as it looks to other people, that fundamentally is around empathizing with others as well, right?
So... When other people look at our cultures, a lot of the stuff that we do is just completely bizarre.
When you can see that and really grasp it, then you really are a lot closer to objectivity.
You really are a lot closer to the truth.
And yeah, it is freaky, right?
When Kepler or Copernicus first looked up and realized that the world was hurtling around the sun, it was pretty disorienting to them, right?
And thanks so much to the people on the board who are trying to give me more than three scientific metaphors.
I really appreciate it.
I will do my best to deploy the one about gases expanding when heated.
I certainly know a lot about expanding hot air, so I think it should be able to stick in my mind fairly well.
But when you can laugh at Santa Claus and laugh at Jesus the Magnificent, coming back from the dead, eat my flesh guy...
When you realize that the dragons in a Harry Potter movie, the CGI things, are far more substantial and real than the gods and the governments we worship.
And when you look at the moral bile and filth pouring forth out of just about everyone's mouth in your own culture, with absolute earnestness, just as everyone in every other goddamn culture speaks the same bullshit, slavery subjugation, with earnestness and with a feeling that all is right in the world, in the world of these words.
When you realize that Christianity looks as freaky to Islam as Islam looks to Christians, and that both look to an atheist, when you can surmount and climb out of this foggy vat of filth that is emotionally latent propaganda, Then you really are a philosopher, I think.
And again, I'm still working on this.
But you really are. You really have achieved a kind of wisdom.
This is what, I think, in a way, Plato was getting at with this metaphor of the caves.
You don't want to look at the words that have been developed by others.
And you don't want to end up echoing the emotional manipulations that are put out by others.
You don't want the word spiritual, which has this sort of fine and refined meaning.
You don't want to use the word spiritual.
You want to use the accurate word.
Psychotic superstition.
A phrase. That's not a word.
Although it should be one word. P.S. Psychotic superstition, or just superstition, or just psychoses.
Christianity is a mythology.
Belief that a mythology is true...
It's psychotic. It's like believing that you're Napoleon, and really, really believing that you're Napoleon, to the point where you'll kill people who disagree that you're Napoleon.
Or, what if you just cut everyone out of your life who doesn't agree with the bizarre belief that you're Napoleon?
Would that be psychotic?
Well, this is what religious people do, right?
Anybody who knows, who's been around religious people knows, you take one foot out of that stinking scum-infested pond of ignorance, and nobody will talk to you again.
Oh, the brothers in Christ will just flush you down the toilet like yesterday's dead goldfish.
So... This is what they do.
Now, of course, I know people are going to say, well, Steph, you say, talk to people who are irrational and get those people out of your life and so on.
Yes, but what we talk about here is testable and logical and it's not psychotic, right?
So it's a little bit different, right?
So that, it's an interesting exercise.
Just pick the myths, right?
Pick the myths. How bizarre does the House of Saud look to you, the 5,000 princes and so on, and that social structure, how bizarre does that look to you?
How is the House of Representatives, the House of Congress, the Parliament, the Prime Minister, the President, whatever, how is that less bizarre?
How is any of that less bizarre?
When you look at people twisting and painting themselves for different rituals, for different religions, how is that any more bizarre than the nonsense that goes on in Christian church?
When you look back, and they will look back at this, I swear to you, they will look back at this time in slack-jawed wonder at how many insane things we believed.
In our culture, in this triumph of Western rationalism, this culture, this democracy, they will look back on us as bizarre, self-blinded sheep, eating our own eyeballs and saying we can see through time.
It is just going to be so bizarre.
It is going to be one of the most bizarre cultures, because at least to look back on in the future.
Because at least the cultures in the past, you know, I don't know, some poor slave doesn't even know how to read, it's been told all of his stuff by his priests and so on.
We have access to all the information in the world, all the alternate theories in the world.
We have the greatest access to the antidotes to propaganda, which is other people's propaganda, right?
I mean, that's how you kill your own propaganda temptations, is you look at other people's propaganda about you and recognize that it's absolutely as true as your propaganda about theirs.
It's a good oppositional thing, right?
And we have access to all of this information.
There are no great mysteries.
There's not really that much left that's bizarre and hard to figure out.
Everything's like, you know, two Google clicks away, the truth.
You just have to refine it a little, I guess, and wade through it with some theory and some methodology.
But... When you can get to that place where you look upon the beliefs of the people around you with slack-jawed wonder as to how completely bizarre human beings are in their ability to mouth complete inanities, self-contradictory nonsense with absolute complete and total earnestness,
Then you get a sense of just how broken people are, just how much wreckage there is floating around, how much human detritus is left smashed up by the collisions with authority we all have as children, how much wreckage is left on the beach from these shipwrecks of souls.
Then you, it's a painful thing to look at, but it does help make the world make a little bit more sense.
And last but not least, my God, I got a lovely donation today, and a lovely donation last night, and I absolutely can't tell you what it does for me in terms of motivation and appreciation.
It is just absolutely fantastic.
I just massively, massively appreciate it.
And it absolutely makes my day, and makes the whole thing worthwhile.
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