Monday, August 25, 2014

Higher Morality and Satanic Rebellion against Nature

Most people are harmless but amoral: they don’t go out of their way to violate anyone’s rights, but their innocence isn’t particularly praiseworthy. This is because the masses are also unenlightened, meaning that they don’t think about morality or even realize that a real choice is possible between right and wrong. They lack the power needed to carry out that choice because they lack a higher self. Their behaviour is governed more by their emotions, hormones, and trained reflexes than by rational self-control or by an existential or religious leap of faith, the latter being the means of controlling our more animalistic side. The masses passively adopt their culture’s mores and so they’re domesticated, or “civilized,” to use the euphemism. They’re punished for their misbehavior and so they’re constrained mainly by fear. Had they an opportunity to benefit themselves at someone else’s expense, without fear of reprisal, they’d just as soon act out of greed or lust or even contempt for their victim’s weakness, as they would out of worry under normal circumstances.

Strictly speaking, the masses are thus more animalistic than personal. Personhood (or “spirituality,” if you prefer a clichéd term) is quite rare—even among so-called human beings. The essence of personhood is self-control and that requires self-knowledge which in turn is the product of introversion, of a process of rigorous self-exploration ending in the philosophical realization that we’re ultimately just artists creating ourselves and our environments merely for the sake of doing so, with no sane hope for a deeper purpose. We create because we’re natural beings and nature is the undead god, the mindless, inhumane maker of all things. If we’re reflective, we create ourselves: we add a personal level to our primitive impulses and beta training. We thus gain the dreadful power of existential choice: we must choose what to be and what to create; we must take a neo-Kierkegaardian leap of faith in some artistic vision, in some aesthetic ideal to guide our productive efforts. With autonomy comes angst, because the freest self is alone in the wilderness of undead forces, a speck of a tragically heroic mind amidst the wasteland and the zombie horde.

The human person gains some limited means of self-control precisely by acquiring self-knowledge: she familiarizes herself with her temperaments and forms a conceptual system of classifying them which allows her to manage the more robotic aspects of her inner world. Of course, she lacks metaphysical freedom, which is the performance of the miracle of opposing a natural chain of causes and effects, but her intensive self-awareness nevertheless makes her relatively autonomous. She can screen her impulses because she’s scrutinized them and she knows where to find them. But that freedom is more of a curse than a blessing. Her self-knowledge hurls her out of the world and into the cauldron of existential awareness: her higher self is alienated from everything else because self-control requires personal detachment. We can control our lower selves only if we’ve thought hard enough to create a higher, independent mind that can sometimes act on its own—especially when it confronts our existential predicament and makes a heroic choice to creatively overcome it. Even when a person, properly speaking, fails to control herself, by applying her authentic ideals in her conduct, she can honestly feel guilty on that account, whereas the guilt of most so-called people is programmed and groundless since they have little if any capacity for self-control in the first place.

If fear explains why the masses actually simulate morally right behaviour, why should we be moral? Should we act in some ways rather than others or is morality just a delusion? Those who have liberated themselves from natural and social powers face a foundational choice of what to do, but is one way of being human truly better than another? Is the difference between right and wrong real? Let’s look at some conventional answers to these questions.

God and Morality

The oldest answer is that God commands some ways of living and prohibits others. This theistic basis of morality must be divided into the polytheistic and monotheistic varieties. True polytheism, which excludes Hinduism, treats the gods as just very powerful persons who in turn are identified with what we now know are just natural processes. Thus, ancient Roman morality, for example, reduced to the fallacies of appealing to authority or to popularity. The idea was that we should behave as commanded by our favourite god, because we’ve devoted ourselves to that deity. But what justifies devotion to that god rather than to some other, or to one culture rather than a foreign one? And how do we know our one god is wise, especially if the gods’ abilities are supposed to surpass our understanding? Typically, the ancients followed their local, traditional gods because they were awed by their power, which was just the power of impersonal natural processes. But attributing those powers to divine goodness rather than to evil would have been arbitrary. Perhaps the wisest course for a superhuman being would have been to play with the lower creatures, namely with us, in which case polytheism provides little support for morality: following the commandment or the example of a despicable being would be likewise wrong. Polytheists thus face an acute form of what skeptical philosophers call the problem of the multiplicity of religions.

As for the monotheistic foundations, which arose from the transformative process of monolatrism and which began with worship of Ahura Mazda, Aten (Akhenaten), Brahman/Atman, and Yahweh, these founder on the fact that the price of conceiving of God as universal or as fit for all cultures is that the deity is thereby depersonalized, as God becomes the ground of all beings. God’s commandments, then, are equivalent to laws of nature and so the theist loses the distinction between what should (but needn’t) be done and what must in the end be done. In Hinduism as in Zoroastrianism and Christianity, God’s will is regarded as inexorable even though at present human sin is permitted as a means of achieving some divine end: whether by way of reincarnation or judgment at the end of history, human choices play out in the eventual fulfillment of God’s plan, as humans are purified and allowed to take their place at God’s side or to realize their identity with God, or whatever. Tribal particularities end up characterizing God so as God becomes transcultural, he must be objectified and mystified. For example, Jews are forbidden to visually represent God, because theirs is a portable deity, fit for worship by outcasts and wanderers; Yahweh can’t be depicted as having any one form since that would suggest that God should be worshipped only under circumstances that are relevant to that form. A God who could be worshipped anywhere, by a homeless, interstitial people, mustn’t be identified with any culture, even if that God is thought to favour the Jews, and so the God of Judaism isn’t just “the Lord,” but something as abstract as “the Almighty.”

Take the divine prohibition of murder. If God were somehow the perfect being, presumably murder would indeed be wrong if God were to deem it such. But the exoteric theist then faces the classic problem of mysticism, which is the fact that esoterically speaking, the perfect being couldn’t be limited to deeming or commanding, let alone writing anything. The perfect being couldn’t literally be just a person, and as the monotheist’s God shades off into ultimate reality, what are metaphorically regarded as God’s messages are better understood as cosmic regularities, as the ways things ultimately are. Nothing is beyond God’s power, not even human freewill, and so the monotheist’s God can’t merely recommend some course of action—as though anyone has a choice whether to follow ultimate reality! Sinners may think they evade God’s grasp, whereas in the end times each will be awarded his or her due, according to this kind of religion, and none shall escape God’s wrath.

Reason and Morality

So exoteric religions provide no valid justification of morality, contrary to the usual blather. How about reason? Can we think our way to a basis for favouring one type of person over another? After what Nietzsche called the death of God, which was due largely to the rise of modern science, modernists took up the cause of finding an independent foundation of liberal values. Reason seemed the logical choice, since reason was discovered to be powerful enough to undo the Roman Catholic Church’s hold on the Western world and to uncover the natural truth of all things. Indeed, wasn’t Reason responsible for the technological progress of modern societies which applied scientific findings, and wasn’t morality implicit in that progress? Reason rearranges the social world for the better, by providing the techniques that make for an improved way of life, and so the right thing to do is surely to follow reason in all affairs. Thus, rationalists in this broad sense, from Bentham to Marx, proclaim that the choice of how to live is a technical one requiring merely the best instrument to ensure that we most efficiently get what we want. Morality is construed as the technique of achieving happiness, the fulfillment of our desires. Thus, utilitarians say we can use reason to calculate how to maximize happiness, by measuring the effects of our actions on others. For their part, Marxists said we can study history scientifically to discover the dynamic processes that work themselves out as class conflicts that render the victory of the working class majority inevitable. Kant one-upped these rationalists in his worship of reason, since he maintained that merely contemplating the human form of reason itself discloses how we ought to behave; for example, he thought the Golden Rule could be derived from the assumption that we’re autonomous, “self-legislating” beings who use reason to give structure to our experiences.

These modern moralities all founder, in turn, on the naturalistic fallacy. Even if reason could help us efficiently satisfy our desires, those desires would be mere natural facts. Are desires all equally good or perhaps morally neutral? Can’t evil people be just as instrumentally rational as saints? If anything, rational detachment lends itself to abusing people rather than to caring for them. The more we objectify each other, regarding others in statistical terms, the more cynical we become and the less emotional drive we have to help strangers. Indeed, the modern industrial revolutions were infamous for their abuses of women and children who worked as slaves in factories to enrich a handful of monopolists. All very efficient, in the ancient mold of the psychopathic ruler’s megamachine, but hardly a basis for morality. The predator’s exploitation of the herd by way of consolidating a dominance hierarchy for the genes’ benefit may be a form of life that typifies the animal kingdom, but the prevalence of that pattern doesn’t make it morally praiseworthy. Just because a way of life is predominant doesn’t make it better than some alternative. To presume otherwise is to commit the naturalistic fallacy of mistaking a fact for a value.

The consistency of instrumental rationality with evil is contrary to Kohlberg’s famous theory of the stages of moral development, according to which the highest stage is the one at which we settle moral issues using abstract reasoning and universal ethical principles. Kohlberg’s point was that the highest morality requires a move beyond egoism, to empathy: we can use reason to gain an objective perspective on how to act, one not tied to any particular set of interests and thus one not biased in anyone’s favour. However, even if this Kantian approach to morality were thus capable of showing us the most logical course of conduct, this course mustn’t be confused with the best one. Logic reveals only implications, which are necessary or probable connections between statements that in turn correspond to facts. Just because an autonomous person can control herself equally as well as you can yourself doesn’t mean you ought to treat her as you would treat yourself. At most, reason demonstrates your similarity with respect to your autonomy, but similar things as opposed to identical ones are necessarily different, so perhaps your differences would warrant a double standard. And reason couldn't easily demonstrate the irrelevance of those differences having to do with culture, history, gender, class, and so forth, without presupposing reason’s supreme importance. Even if reason demonstrated two people’s fundamental identity, as in Hindu mysticism, implying that everyone should be treated in the same way, this wouldn’t entail morality since perhaps the best course would be for the one ultimate Self, Atman, to abuse itself, in which case evil would be more logical than compassion.

What of the ancient naturalism of Aristotle, according to which morality is about following our natural function so that we can flourish? This naturalistic ethics works with misplaced teleology. The idea is that living things aren’t just aimless mechanisms, since we have “final causes,” or objective purposes, and if we succeed in those terms we’ll be happy and we’ll have done what we ought to have done. But contrary to Aristotle, there are no such purposes in nature because, once again, nature is undead. True, there are ends in the world, in that natural processes will come to a final point in time, but it will never have been their inherent purpose to have reached that point. Natural processes are indeed aimless, contrary to our personifications of natural forces. In so far as we’re embodied animals, we’re creations doomed to be destroyed like everything else. If anything, nature is like an artist who refuses to sell out: she creates art just for art’s sake, with no separate end in view—not even that of beholding her masterpieces; as soon as she finishes one work, she’s off to produce another. That’s how natural forces and materials operate, give or take the personification.

There are plenty of end points, because the indifferent, impartial cosmos destroys everything it creates, but there are no so-called final causes, no inherently intended states such that reaching them can be considered objectively or naturally ideal. Living bodies are machines except that the final stage of their algorithmic developments has never been envisioned or welcomed by anyone—except perhaps by the organisms themselves. We’re just like physical objects except that the continuity of our whole forms depends on intricate relationships between our parts, so that we can speak roughly of how our parts have “jobs” to do if they’re to sustain our whole bodies. We have, then, only simulated functions, just as natural selection only simulates the process of intelligent design and just as the meek masses only simulate morality, because they lack the self-control for their behaviour to merit a moral evaluation. So once again, the Aristotelian naturalist faces the naturalistic fallacy. Perhaps doing what we do best will naturally make us happy and successful, but that fact doesn’t entail the goodness of that terminal point. Causality doesn’t require teleology, after all, so there are no objective purposes; instead, there are the undead god’s infernal simulation of creative vitality and the guarantee of decay, both of which are utterly pointless from the genuine naturalistic perspective.

Art and Morality

None of that bodes well for morality. Strictly speaking, talk of morality is now archaic since it rests on obsolete theism or deism. Morality is rather a human creation. We create social laws in our efforts to improve on nature. We are the only gods there have ever been (short of intelligent extraterrestrial creatures), in that we alone are mindful of our works. With language and culture and our curious self-exploration, we create ourselves along with our worlds within the world and we conceive of ideals in our visions of how the world could and should be. The justifications of this kind of morality are subjective, although morality is also part of an objective process. As I said, the exoteric ideals of being selfless and happy through domestication and consumption of material “goods” are based on noble lies that reinforce the dominance hierarchy, by rationalizing the evils committed by the alpha males who are our predatory and psychopathic rulers. So much is a matter merely of genetics and sociology.

But there’s a deeper moral question, the esoteric one faced by the awakened souls who tend to be social outsiders, disenchanted with much conventional wisdom. The awakened few know that, metaphysically speaking, there are only undead, fundamentally chaotic creations and destructions. Conventional morality which alludes to God’s will or to rational progress sustains one creation: the naturally selected mammalian dominance hierarchy with the Pharaoh-like kleptocrats sitting atop the megamachine of enslaved beta labourers. The esoteric moral question, then, is just whether there’s some more appealing social arrangement, from the aesthetic point of view. Can we create something more inspiring in purely artistic terms? In so far as morality sustains the most natural and thus clichéd social structures, morality's part of an undead and thus horrific process of simulated dynamism leading to nowhere and to oblivion. Conventional, materialistic or theistic morality goes with the undead flow of mindless forces and elements, such as with the genes and proteins that build our animalistic reflexes and biases. By contrast, tragically heroic moralists will be opposed to that monstrosity since they’ll aim to be original. The highest morality is thus satanic in that our loftiest goal should be to undo the natural world and to recreate it to fulfill our artistic potential.

The demonization of that Gnostic, Promethean figure, the so-called devil Satan, is so much propaganda on behalf of the monstrous natural order. The fictional character Satan combines the chaos and insanity of countercultural Dionysus with the progressive humanism of Prometheus. Satan’s mission is to undo the established order, supposedly because of his jealousy of God’s power. Of course, there’s no such God, so satanic jealousy would be absurd. Instead, there’s the undead god of the natural order which carries the seed of its undoing, as it creates sentient beings who, far from being jealous are just appalled by their creator’s monstrosity and are artistically inspired to recreate the world to suit some alternative vision. Thus the chaos and the fear of the unknown represented by Dionysus; by his wine, which psychedelically challenges our personas and our conventional wisdom; and by the hysteria of his followers (maenads, witches, etc) whose frenzies signify the energy needed to replace the established order with an original artwork. And thus the tragic heroism of Prometheus, whom Zeus tortured for setting humanity on the path of technoscientific progress and whom the Christian God will smite for his tempting of us to depart from the divine plan—which is just the “plan” of naturally undead decay. Indeed, the aesthetic project of building an inspiring alternative to the natural order is a tragic one since nature will surely win in the end, destroying all our works so that we might as well never have labored on them. But the tragic hero who nevertheless symbolizes our highest calling has been relentlessly demonized by Christians, who absurdly associate Satan with nature (with carnality, predation, etc.) even though their triune God is nothing but the undead god which is self-creating nature. And it’s Satan, the rebel against the established order, who represents the potential for transcendence through progressive artificiality. There is no other escape from the horror of undead processes than by immersing ourselves in our unnatural worlds which are so many ephemeral works of art.

The satanic challenge to natural reality is also esoterically the moral path. Morality is about doing what should be done even if it’s not what regularly happens. There are natural facts and then there are moral standards which call for emergent ways of being and which are thus virtually supernatural. The moral task is to create the world which nature itself can’t create without becoming artificial. Our job as highly self-conscious creatures is, first, to understand that the established natural order is a monstrosity which ought to be undone on purely aesthetic grounds, because nature’s tendency to destroy everything it creates is grotesque and clichéd; and second, to conceive of a supernaturalthat is, an artificialalternative and to put that vision into practice. Thus, if dominance hierarchies, oligarchies, and megamachines are the norms, the moral task must be the aesthetic one of being more original, of avoiding those clichés and finding an alternative way to live that emboldens us with its freshness and with the audacity of its counterfactual vision. If we tend to be animalistic in so far as we’re undead machines, our higher calling is to cobble together a nobler self to gain some self-control and deeper awareness so that we can renounce primitive activities and partake of a less monstrous way of life.

15 comments:

  1. But the problem is I am still not seeing how you can derive "right and wrong" or "morality" from this thought exercise. This seems.....arbitrary?

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    1. There's no such derivation here. There's a replacement of morality with aesthetics. More specifically, there's exoteric and esoteric or higher morality, the latter being entirely aesthetic (originality vs cliche, artistic inspiration and vision, etc). Lower morality is the conventional, anachronistic way of speaking that functions as ideological in Marx's sense; it's a kind of training to be domesticated and to fit into a dominance hierarchy that ends up mocking the beta conventions by contradicting them in the subcriminally psychopathic behaviour at the top.

      So what's right or wrong in higher morality? There's really no such distinction, strictly speaking, since the difference between qualities in art isn't so black and white. (This is why art teachers have trouble grading the students' work.) Nevertheless, aesthetic value isn't entirely subjective or just a matter of arbitrary taste. It depends on what truly disgusts or inspires you. The ultimate distinction between originality and cliche (aesthetic right and wrong) is folded into the satanic/Promethean rebellion against the established order, and thus into the artificiality vs nature and animalistic vs ascetic dichotomies.

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  2. Had they an opportunity to benefit themselves at someone else’s expense, without fear of reprisal, they’d just as soon act out of greed or lust or even contempt for their victim’s weakness, as they would out of worry under normal circumstances.
    Unless there's some actual physical measurement of what change, if any, the self knowledge mentioned has made, it sounds like just another justification method for the above.

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  3. Interesting piece, although I would point out that in many ways you are still holding to Christian notions, which, if I am reading you right, no longer need apply. Morality need not necessarily equate with 'serving others', the usual baseline of all ethical thought. One may not like it, but one has to be prepared to face the possibility of arriving at a Nietzschean style of living where the strong use the weak to serve their own ends in a natural aristocracy. Nietzsche found this attractive, as well as aesthetically satisfying.

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    1. My ideal is artistic creativity/originality, based on a grim determination to fight against the decay of the undead god (against natural cliches such as the regularity of death). I don't say that we should strive to be altruists. On the contrary, I endorse a limited kind of asceticism, or withdrawal from conventional life. So far from helping others, we might do well to shun them, the better to judge unenlightened folks objectively and to appreciate the comical aspect of their delusions.

      I like some of what Nietzsche says, but not all. I go with what I consider to be the spirit of his views, but power alone shouldn't be our highest ideal. Nature has ultimate power over all sentient creatures, so it would be hard to be proud given that sort of nature worship. I agree with pantheism, but also with Schopenhauer and Eastern religions, which say that nature-as-god is an abomination.

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  4. And and to appreciate the comical aspect of their delusion .......

    How can one move from being irritated by the unenlightened folks to appreciation ?

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    1. Oh, that's not so contradictory. The anti-philosophical, unenlightened folks don't "irritate"me, though. On the contrary, as I might discuss in my next article, the overriding emotion here is pity. Pity and disgust are foundational for me, and there's more than enough cause for both in everything, including in the behaviour of enlightened individuals. It's the undead god in all things that should arouse us to feel pity and disgust virtually all the time, depending on which aspect confronts us.

      Anyway, the appreciation is for the comedy, although this is a mixed blessing, to say the least. Take the worst tragedy and you can still turn it around and make light of it, as comedians tell us.

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    2. So you might say you pity the fool? ;)

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  5. You've really been on a roll with the last few post Ben. This is deep, esoteric work, I'm enjoying it. How do you feel about schadenfreude? For years I struggled with it, but have recently begun to embrace it. It's one of the few things I disagree with Schopenhauer on. As opposed to being depressed/sad about the state of the world, human delusion etc. I make a joke of it. I now point and laugh Nelson Muntz style, when people step in the traps nature has laid for them. You talk a lot about rebelling against nature, which I agree with. Wouldn't committing suicide at some point in ones life be the ultimate rebellion? After all, it's nature who will call the shots on how we die otherwise.

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    1. I talk about comedy and suicide in other articles (links below). I think schadenfreude is respectable as long as we're laughing not because we think we're superior, but because we pity and are disgusted by the undead aspect in all things. We should laugh at other people's expense not because we condescend to those victims, but because we appreciate the tragic aspect of life and see indications of it nearly everywhere we turn. We shouldn't hesitate to laugh at ourselves too.

      Suicide might foil the genes' attempt to reproduce, but that's short-term thinking. If everyone were to kill themselves, nature would be deprived of our sentience, but we'd be deprived of our rebel force. So the question is which has the highest value, the termination of life or the continuation of resentment and renunciation.

      Thanks for reading, by the way!

      http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2013/11/enlightenment-and-suicide.html

      http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.com/2012/08/comedy-and-existential-cosmicism.html

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  6. As an adult I have long admired Kierkegaard, for the grace in his contrariness and his sense of knowing when to retreat from the masses. But my admiration for him increased more when I heard on Radio 3 on the bicentenary of his birth (I think.... ) that one of the fuels for him writing about his leaps of faith was very strong coffee in the mornings, prior to setting off into his writings.

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    1. Hmm, I'm not much of a coffee drinker myself, although I appreciate the taste and I like coffee beer. I just don't feel the need to drink coffee in the morning (because I never got addicted to it). I don't know much about Kierkegaard's biography, but I believe he was repelled by Hegel's great success and so he developed an anti-Hegelian philosophy. He was also evidently motivated by the stories about Jesus and so naturally he would have been appalled by the majority of actual Christian institutions and behaviours.

      Kierkegaard goes quite wrong, though, in elevating religious faith above ethical and aesthetic perspectives. He falls into the theistic trap of thinking God is infinite. Instead, God is natural and thus horrendously finite. God is nature, and nature creates right in front of us, all the time. Creativity is the highest value, so the aesthetic perspective rules.

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  7. Hi, i dont understand much the part of your kholberg`s critique. You say that "do to others what you would like to be done to yourself" is not valid because people are different?
    But woudnt that be enough? i mean,sure there woudnt be a morally perfect society if everyone did that , but it would be very good.
    And also, wouldnt it be enough if we had a society like the venus project says, in wich people are educated not to be self deluded and to have fulfilled lives (doing what they like/love)

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    1. The point about universal moral principles is that imperatives are supposed to follow from rationality: we see that we're similar and that's supposed to imply that we ought to be nice to others if we're nice to ourselves. Even if the is/ought gap were overcome in this way, which it's not, there would still be the problem that similarity also entails differences. So it would be a matter of degree. Are we similar enough to justify the adoption of a single standard in our treatment of ourselves and others? Or do the obvious differences between characters, genders, social classes, and cultures require multiple standards? And what if we're not nice to ourselves? What if we loathe ourselves? The Golden Rule then implies we should loathe others. The upshot is that universal moral principles, which say we should treat everyone the same, are fallacious. Rational abstraction by itself provides no basis for morality.

      I don't know much about the Venus Project, but I've seen one of the Zeitgeist movies. I like the idea of educating ourselves so we become less self-deluded. But my goal isn't just to fulfill my desires. Instead, I think we need some degree of ascetic withdrawal and renunciation, to accommodate our understanding of the tragic aspects of natural life. Knowing that life is limited and then scrambling to have a rich, full life is ignoble, unbecoming, and degrading. That kind of fulfillment isn't aesthetically uplifting; instead, it's absurd in the way illustrated by Shelley's poem "Ozymandias." The problem with education is that reason is accursed. The more you know, and the deeper you get into philosophy, the less happy you're capable of being. That's just one part of the tragedy of sentience in the undead god that is the natural universe.

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  8. Well, Joseph, there are descriptive and prescriptive theses about nature running through the writings on my blog. The description is clear, but the prescription is more complicated and I'm still working it out.

    As a matter of fact, history can be interpreted largely as a conflict between our species with nature. We conflict with the natural environment because we want to control it to increase the chance of our survival. Ultimately, we do so because the world isn't as we'd prefer it to be, so we make a better world. Then the question is whether we're right to do so. Are we arrogant and foolish in thinking we're godlike creators? Just because we have the technological capacity doesn't mean we're wise enough to pick the best ideals or models for our artificial worlds.

    Dark pantheism would be something like Schopenhauer's view, I take it. If you're asking whether I think nature should be worshiped, I'd say certainly not in a traditional sense of worship. But nature's isn't just horrifying. The scale of natural creativity is inhuman, but that's the same as saying it's sublime, meaning that it surpasses our comprehension and so we could easily revere that creativity. Natural forces would be great powers we should fear, and fear is central to monotheistic faith. Nature is impersonal, though, so the worship of nature shouldn't be interpreted as social. It's a question of confronting a monstrosity that terrifies us and mocks our conceits, while also inspiring our creative endeavours.

    I'd say I'm closer to Lovecraft's cosmicism than to pantheism if the latter is thought of as a New Agey deference to nature. Again, the descriptive thesis is that nature inspires us by showing us what _not_ to do. We shouldn't be as mindless and indifferent as nature (nature's avatars are psychopaths), so we go as far as to mythologize our psychological and spiritual powers, to differentiate us from the animals and from natural processes. We create ourselves and our artificial worlds in our struggle against nature's godlessness (against the lack of purpose and meaning we find in the objective explanations of nature).

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