Sex and the Authentic Self

We’re most embarrassed about that which almost all of us most want to do: we’re most secretive about our sex lives. If you could force the bureaucrats in control of state secrets—those in charge of the contents of the lower levels of Area 51, the Top Secret vaults of CIA headquarters, the volumes of the Vatican Secret Archive—to expose to the world either those earth-shaking revelations or videos of their squalid private sex acts, they would be torn, at the least, and may well prefer to topple governments by releasing the state secrets. This fear of being caught in the naughty act may have evolved from animals’ preference to find a secluded spot to swap genes, to protect themselves from predators when they’re vulnerable. Of course, animals are much more open about having sex than are people, as farmers and zookeepers and birdwatchers can attest. Animals have little capacity for shame and those that can feel embarrassment have no special fear of being observed in flagrante delicto—unless their coupling upsets their dominance hierarchy and the pair is afraid of the alpha’s wrath. Those billions of us who live in private residences need no longer fear being mauled while sexually occupied; home invaders would be more interested in robbing us, and even when we’re naked and engrossed, we can easily arm ourselves by making use of our many technological extensions (a bat, an alarm clock, a shoe, etc). And the exposure of a sex tape poses no direct physical threat to the couple.

So the terror of releasing the details of our sex lives to the public is peculiarly human. With the exceptions of exhibitionists and porn stars, we prefer to keep private that which we most prize or long for, and we have no compelling practical reason for doing so. When a celebrity sex tape is stolen and the thief threatens to publish it on the internet, the agonized celebrity can spend millions in court to prevent the undermining of his or her public image. But why, in the first place, would that image be ruined by the leaking of a sex tape? Once again, if it’s a question of the participants’ identity, as in the case of adultery, the fear would be practical: the hypocrite, for example, may have cultivated an image of righteousness or of heterosexuality, and so wouldn’t want evidence to the contrary to become widely available. But there’s also a more general, underlying ambivalence about the sex act itself. We all cultivate a public image, an ideal version of ourselves: we prefer to be thought of as people with human rights, whereas sex would have us be animals. We prefer to think of ourselves as dignified moral agents, destined for immortality, whereas our sexual lust indicates we’re cosmically insignificant and headed towards extinction like any other phase of natural concatenations. That’s the existential dread of sex which only self-proclaimed people can suffer.

Compare that dread to the surprisingly-rational fear of choking on our vomit in response to our eating the flesh of dead animals. That ignominious fate we avoid by keeping ourselves in the dark about the gruesome treatment of livestock. The very word “livestock” is Orwellian in its smoothing over of the holocaust of objectification that occurs in all pens and cages torturing pigs, chickens, and the like. “Stock” is a supply of goods, meaning things owned, and “live” indicates something that isn’t just a thing or an object. The contradiction is palpable. Were we to tour a slaughterhouse and then be offered a free meal of steak or back ribs, I expect most of us would be overcome with nausea and would have to decline the cooked remains. Our ignorance is by design so that we can enjoy eating meat. Although the pleasures of sex far exceed gustatory ones, except perhaps for gluttons, that’s also by biological design, to distract all sexual creatures from the implications of sex’s physicality: our dignity is naturally a sham and is belied by our loving sex more than our purported gods. Moreover, asexual critics needn’t be lined up to spread this unpopular word. The hiddenness of our sex acts, which even the law typically makes mandatory, demonstrates that we already know that we’re wronged by our sex instinct, that by lusting after bodies, by yearning to fondle breasts, balls, or buttocks, to taste each other’s juices and to be penetrated or stroked in ways that would constitute the severest breaches of decency in public life, we are made into objects of ridicule, reduced to clowns by natural forces so that we exacerbate the absurdity that belongs to the physical aspect of all things.

Is there, however, a way to be sexual without forfeiting our intellectual integrity, let alone our existential authenticity? After all, the aesthetic burden of sex is that it’s utterly commonplace. Sexual reproduction is biologically creative, of course, but artistically unoriginal since we’re passive in our role as baby-makers; the hormones do all the work as our puppeteers. But we are exorbitantly creative in our adapting of the sex instinct to myriad purposes that supersede the reproductive function. We’ve even invented birth control mechanisms seemingly to usurp nature’s power over us. Haven’t we, then, made sex dignified by making it non-animalistic, by incorporating it into our more elevated pursuits? Let’s explore the possibilities of existentially viable forms of sexuality.  

Christianity and the Axial Age

Nominal Christians think of the life of Jesus as being paradoxical. According to the myths which are typically misread as historical narratives, Jesus was miraculously born to a virgin and when he came of age, the Holy Spirit descended on him in the form of a dove and he heard the voice of God bless him. Jesus grew up and taught a radical message of peace, performed numerous miracles, started a church that flourishes to this day, and was resurrected after his physical death. His life is supposed to represent a pivotal intersection between the supernatural heavens (which we know of now merely as places in outer space) and the fallen world of Earth. Christianity thus follows the patterns of deification and mythologization that are familiar not just to all historians, but to anyone who’s coped with the loss of a loved one by confabulating and concluding that the dearly departed was the greatest father, mother, husband or wife for whom anyone could have asked. When dealing with a horrific experience, we often enter tunnel vision; far from soberly accepting the statistical fact that none of us has everlasting significance, we glorify those in whom we’ve been emotionally invested, to avoid the awkwardness of having wasted our feelings on something so transient and ultimately inconsequential as another human life.

The Axial Age

Much of the historical context of Christianity was deliberately destroyed by the established churches. Those who rejected the party-line myths or whose deviant form of worship pointed to a larger earthly milieu were demonized and persecuted, their texts burned and their movements wiped out. Then the Church lost its autocratic power as a result of the Age of Reason which began with the Renaissance. And now we’re poised to see, indeed, that the contemporary enlightenment in Europe from the 14^th to the 17^th centuries CE wasn’t the first of its kind. It was indeed a re-birth, as indicated by the word “Renaissance,” which means Revival. The most illuminating part of the historical context of Christianity is what the philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Period. As he writes in The Origin and Goal of History, that was the uncanny “period around 500 B.C., in the spiritual process that occurred between 800 and 200 B.C. It is there that we meet with the most deepcut dividing line in history. Man, as we know him today, came into being.”

More specifically,

The most extraordinary events are concentrated in this period. Confucius and Lao-tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo-ti, Chuang-tse, Lieh-tsu and a host of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to skepticism, to materialism, sophism and nihilism; in Iran Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance, from Elijah, by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the philosophers—Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato—of the tragedians, Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India, and the West, without any one of these regions knowing of the others.

Jaspers describes what is new about this age in existential terms: “man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and of his limitations. He experiences the terror of the world and his own powerlessness. He asks radical questions. Face to face with the void he strives for liberation and redemption. By consciously recognizing his limits he sets himself the highest goals. He experiences absoluteness in the depths of selfhood and in the lucidity of transcendence.” The cause of these revolutions, says Jaspers, was “reflection. Consciousness became once more conscious of itself, thinking became its own object.”

So this ancient period of enlightenment was both spiritual and philosophical, and a word that encompasses both aspects is “existential.” We might compare, then, the two historical awakenings, the ancient Axial Age and the modern one, by noting that the latter leaves less room for spiritual, psychological or social growth, because its catalysts were advances mainly in technoscience, in an instrumental affair that only presupposes rather than justifies certain ideals. After the medieval Dark Age, reason was wedded not to the self-awareness of Byronic loners but to industrialists. (Romanticism was a movement of counter-Enlightenment in the early 1800s.) Instead of a mass flowering of spiritual insight, Europe and the Americas devised new forms of population control that were made possible by developments in economics and public relations. Instead of efficacious modern religions we had “ideologies” such as the Nazi or Communist utopias and the American Dream of Liberty.

That, though, makes for a larger point of similarity between the two periods of existential enlightenment. As Jaspers wrote,

The age that saw all these developments, which spanned several centuries, cannot be regarded as a simple upward movement. It was an age of simultaneous destruction and creation. No final consummation was attained. The highest potentialities of thought and practical expression realized in individuals did not become common property, because the majority of men were unable to follow in their footsteps. What began as freedom of motion finally became anarchy. When the age lost its creativeness, a process of dogmatic fixation and leveling-down took place in all three cultural realms. Out of a disorder that was growing intolerable arose a striving after new ties, through the re-establishment of enduring conditions.

Thus arose empires of conquest in China (Tsin Shu hwang-ti), India (Maurya dynasty), and the West (Hellenistic and Roman empires). “Everywhere the first outcome of the collapse was an order of technological and organizational planning.”

That which had collapsed as a result of rational enlightenment was the “Mythical Age, with its tranquility and self-evidence.” What the Frankforts call the mythopoeic naiveté of childhood innocence was suspended by the Axial Age of Doubt. Those prehistoric, that is, prehumanistic and regressive myths had codified prejudices and superstitions that had held together tribes and kingdoms since the end of the Paleolithic Era. Once the conventions were questioned, because of the dawning of hyperconsciousness, the multitudes could no longer take their existentially inauthentic modes of life for granted. At least, they had to defer to the newfangled spiritual and philosophical elites whose knowledge and experience were subversive and might have led to mass panic if the majority had had firsthand access to them. The Axial Age liberation was thus relatively short-lived, but there was a long-delayed aftershock after the Dark Age: the Rebirth of Reason, beginning in the 14^th C. And arguably, the creative spirit of that latter age has likewise left us in the last century, and we “postmodern” or “post-postmodern” relativists and cynics now absurdly wait for Godot, knowing that no mythical narrative can sooth us. 

Against Richard Carrier’s Case for Natural Morality

Richard Carrier is a prolific writer on ancient history, atheism, and naturalistic philosophy. I started reading him in the 1990s when he wrote articles for the early Secular Web. I especially enjoy his works on the ahistoricity of Jesus. However, his case for the reduction of morality to a kind of instrumentalism, for morality’s being “natural” and “scientific” because it’s a matter merely of learning how to get what we most want, is frustrating because it combines confusion with hubris. Still, various interesting issues crop up in his discussion, so a critique is in order.

By way of providing some background, I should say that there are three paramount theories in moral philosophy: deontology (we ought to do our duty, because the form of action is most important), consequentialism (we ought to act in the way that has the best results), and virtue ethics (we ought to be the best kind of person). Carrier thinks that although philosophers have been debating these theories for centuries, all three views are the same. They reduce to each other and what emerges is instrumentalism, a reduction of moral imperatives to “hypothetical” or conditional ones. So the meaning of “Thou shalt not commit murder” is clarified when we translate it into a conditional imperative that makes reference to the means needed to achieve a desire, such as “If you want to stay out of jail or have self-respect or avoid being killed in return (or insert some other desire here; generally it’s ‘If you want to be happy…’), then you shouldn’t kill an innocent person.” For me, the question whether the three leading moral theories are in conflict is a tempest in a teapot, since I think naturalism has more radical implications for morality, which I’ll come to in the last section below.

But let’s look closer at Carrier’s argument as it’s formulated in his blog’s article on why moral imperatives are a posteriori and natural, meaning why they’re empirical like all other purely factual statements. Carrier’s opponents are two kinds of moral realists who both maintain that moral statements are true or false as opposed to being, say, nonrational expressions of feelings. There’s the theist who trusts that morality is supernatural in that it derives from God, and then there’s the atheist who thinks morality is non-natural in the same way that qualia or normativity in general are, in that their elucidation is beyond the purview of scientific methods, but not beyond philosophical ones. Carrier is aghast because his brand of atheism gives no quarter to theism, and his secular humanism is progressive so he’s opposed to defeatism with respect to the mission to solve all mysteries in the world. Contrary to Nietzsche, the sky isn’t falling just because God, the traditional guarantor of morality, is fictitious; liberal values are secured by reason, not faith. And instead of declaring that some parts of the world are incomprehensible, we should be methodical in our naturalism: we should assume that everything is naturally explainable until proven otherwise. In particular, morality is both real and natural, Carrier says, because it’s about the possibility that some actions are better or worse at achieving our best desires. Those desires are the ones we care about most and the ones we would have were we presented with all the relevant information bearing on ourselves and the world, and were we to think logically about what we most want out of life.

What’s Natural?

Carrier pontificates about how this or that is obviously “natural” in that it’s a part of the scientifically-explainable universe. For example, social properties are just as natural as quarks and sodium, he says, since sociology reduces to physics via psychology, neurology, and chemistry. The greater complexity of social systems is no matter, since sodium is likewise ‘more complex than “just quarks in motion,” which is why sodium is different from uranium, for example, even though both are just “quarks in motion.”’  

There are at least two problems with this. First, although he grants that “brains interacting in social systems behave in ways that reflect the structure and behavior of the social system,” he doesn’t grasp that a scientific model has implicit meanings, or connotations, as well as explicit ones (denotations). It doesn’t matter if minds are nothing but brains, if the sets of symbols needed to explain the two orders are incommensurable. A social system may be metaphysically nothing but “atoms in motion,” but there is no sense of “motion” that explains both what atoms and societies do, without palpable equivocation. The word “motion” is defined differently in sociology and in physics. For example, a particle’s velocity is not like a political party’s motion to pass a bill. And reducibility applies to theories, not to the things to which the theories refer irrespective of how they may be understood using different languages or conceptual frameworks like sociology or physics. So denotatively or extensionally, that is with respect to the immediate reference of words, the meanings of “society” and “huge group of atoms” may be identical, but that doesn’t mean there’s a single, coherent set of concepts for explaining what societies and atoms do as seen from different orders of magnitude. Implicitly or intensionally, that is with respect to the words’ indirect meanings in virtue of their relation to background concepts, sociology isn’t reducible to physics, because the full meanings of the terms used to explain what happens in a society as such don’t translate into psychology or neurology or chemistry or physics. Only the extensions or the referents are assumed to be ultimately the same, regardless of our inability to explain without gaps how their identity manifests in the different levels of behaviour. The behaviours perceived from different vantage points, such as those of an appalled American voter witnessing her country’s cultural descent into madness, and of a blurry-eyed scientist staring at a computer screen at CERN, are not at all the same in that they’re not explainable by means of any single coherent set of symbols. You need at least two theoretical discourses to be able to predict what will happen at those levels of being. 

Stultified by Reason: the Vision of Heartless Nature

Art by Jim Kazanjian

It’s often said that the scientific way of thinking is counterintuitive. Worse, the mathematical analysis of nature is alien and incomprehensible to those of us who haven’t mastered that language or who aren’t in the habit of thinking within the bounds of an austere standard of precision. Scientific knowledge is hard to acquire not just because there have been so many discoveries in the last several centuries, that delving into even a fraction of modern knowledge overloads the human memory capacity. On top of that and more importantly, the math-centered form of scientific thinking is estranged from the heuristics that make up our innate logic that’s responsible for our intuitive, snap decisions. Those genetically-preprogrammed cognitive rules give us a head-start in the harsh business of surviving but also blind us to the nature of cosmic reality. Our on-board techniques for coming to grips with the world are suitable for reading each other’s minds and climbing social ladders, as well as for interpreting useful terrestrial rhythms such as the cycles of night and day and the four seasons, but not for fathoming chaos, quantum mechanics, or dimensions beyond space and time. Early modern scientists made a heroic effort, based in part on the antisocial leanings of geniuses like Isaac Newton, to develop an inhuman method equal to the task of modeling the remote universe that’s perfectly indifferent to the emergence of life.

We fall in love with each other, losing ourselves in emotional bonds to the point that we risk being blackmailed as we strip off our clothes and carry out sex acts that are banned in public spaces to preserve our presumed dignity. That’s the extent of our preference for the familiar social world. How alien, then, must be any form of cognition that encompasses the ocean beyond the puddle that we call home! How alienated from our native feelings and biases must we become even to entertain the antihuman thought that the entire saga of our historical comings and goings is peripheral to universal reality! And what madness must we court to study the undead shuffling of natural processes, to deprive ourselves of the comfort of trotting out our myopic metaphors that are so many gauche shout-outs to our brothers and sisters in the ‘hood of humanity!

Anthropocentrism: the Myth for Human Happiness

Anthropocentrism is our original sin. It begins with the clueless egoism burning in the tiny heart of every child, passing into the fragile pride of each toddler who’s indignant whenever he or she is told “No.” We all enter the wide world unable even to form the conception that anything could be other than ourselves. Everything from Mother’s milk to Mother herself and the toys we play with are thought of as parts of our craving. We demand this or that and we receive it as a matter of parental necessity or else we throw a tantrum. In effect, as children we perceive every event as being miraculous, because we don’t separate cause and effect in our imagination: everything happens in the orbit of our self-centered expectations. Even after we pass the trials of teen disenchantment, when puberty compels us to long for the Other, in a morass of lusts and other hormonal intoxications, when we grow into independent adults, we still rely on those childish habits of thought. We carry our self-centeredness with us in the theistic delusions of our exoteric religions, when we live with the knowledge of our certain death by spellbinding each other in our collective hypnosis, daydreaming that physical death is illusory because the spirit lives on for eternity in the House of the Lord. With our cities’ light pollution that blots out the far-flung heavens, we facilitate the illusion that the world revolves around us, as though by enveloping ourselves at night in those electric screens we were telling each other, “Keep moving, keep consuming; there’s nothing to see here”—no infinite void all around terra firma, for example, which likely surpasses even scientific understanding so that all our preconceptions about the worth of what we’re doing would eventually be laughed off as so many naive fairytales if only they could be remembered across the generations. Instead, the vain, wishful narratives that contextualize our lives, in which we’re invariably the starring attractions, will pass into obscurity, nullified by the outer void after the curtain call on our species and on our epoch. 

Gnostic Themes in American Politics

Events are sometimes grand enough to take on a mythic resonance that can be discerned even by those preoccupied by profane matters. The Great Recession and its aftermath have been such events, and a myth that captures those moments and their paradoxes is the Gnostic Hymn of the Pearl. As I explain elsewhere, what we learned from the bursting of the housing bubble is that Western economies are dominated by feckless supervillains who retain their godlike plutocratic privileges even though they don’t deserve to be worshiped by the herds of little people. The American and European bankers led deregulation of the financial markets in 1990s (via lobbying, the revolving door, etc), orchestrated the real estate fraud through financial scheming, won a no-strings-attached, one-sided bailout through their capture of Obama’s economics team, and subsequently pushed through austerity measures to further squeeze the middle classes (via their think tanks' ideological capture of the neoliberals in government). Those bankers thus demonstrated that the Western political and economic systems are corrupt in that they no longer serve the interests of the majority of Western citizens. European countries such as Greece, Italy, and Portugal revolted against their political Parties’ handling of the European debt crisis.

But nowhere are the mythic proportions of the scandal more apparent than in the American presidential campaigns. In both Parties, the establishment is faced with insurgencies from political outsiders. Despite the fact that the US leads the Western world in its enthrallment to market logic, creating what Guy Debord called the society of the spectacle, a society in which false realities or images rule by commodifying every aspect of social life, that forlorn nation appears to be the site of a progressive revolution. Whereas ordinarily the multitudes are blind to the corruption that’s become so pervasive it’s been normalized, so that far from fighting for their political rights, they cheer on figures who promise indirectly to further entrench the oppressive social systems, as explained by Thomas Frank, American Democrats and Republicans have now struck upon a populist language that can’t easily be coopted by the deep state. This is the language based on the dichotomies of insiders and outsiders, and of the corrupt establishment and the promise of renewal by radically transforming the social systems. On the left, the solution is democratic socialism, on the right it’s nativism, theocracy, or fascism.

As summarized by the Wikipedia article, the Hymn of the Pearl, found in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, ‘tells the story of a boy, “the son of the king of kings”, who is sent to Egypt to retrieve a pearl from a serpent. During the quest, he is seduced by Egyptians and forgets his origin and his family. However, a letter is sent from the king of kings to remind him of his past. When the boy receives the letter, he remembers his mission, retrieves the pearl and returns.’ In the ancient Jewish context, Egypt stood for corruption, so the Egyptian seducers are the demonic archons who serve as prison wardens, distracting us with sinful pleasures so that we’ll lose our chance of enlightenment or gnosis. The Hymn is an allegory, the point being that we’re all like that boy, lost in a profane world; we’ve forgotten our true calling and our authentic ideals and must be reminded by an outsider. In Gnostic systems, there’s often a transcendent redeemer emanating from the ineffable ground of being, a prophetic saviour who informs us that we’re in the ultimate bad news/good news situation: we’re imprisoned in the fallen natural universe so that even our bodies lead us astray, but there’s a perfect, more real world beyond which is our true home, and we can return to it by taking various mystical or ascetic steps.

The Gnostic Connotations of the 2016 Democratic Campaigns

In the American presidential election, there are likewise outsiders and insiders, transcendent redeemers and archons, angels of the Demiurge. Let’s begin with the Democrats. Bernie Sanders’ entrance to the American mass media narrative was delayed for months, because the corporate media, which serve up the cultural spectacle, what Marx called the ideological superstructure that explains away injustices in the economy, are of course part of the establishment. The media establishment defends the status quo, putting systems before people, whereas the predominant social systems are typically Trojan horses for natural hierarchies and cycles, and people have the anomalous potential to transcend or subvert natural processes. So Hillary Clinton was touted as a shoe-in for the Democratic nominee, and the “free” world’s so-called leading nation was poised to welcome another political dynasty. But Sanders was supported by a grass-roots movement, fuelled in part by disappointment with Obama who had campaigned as a transformative, Rooseveltian figure but had governed as a centrist, having evidently fallen under the archons’ spell. Obama thus stands for John the Baptist, Sanders for the Christ-like real deal, for the true, incorruptible redeemer who will separate the wheat from the chaff, washing away the Egyptian seducers, like Moses at the Red Sea. Having become too popular to ignore, the corporate centers of infotainment ended their media blackout, opting for the standard framing devices of a horse race or a boxing match between equals. In any case, Bernie Sanders is still manifestly the outsider, the old, Jewish socialist who takes no money from Wall Street and promises specific radical changes, such as universal health care and education paid for by a tax on Wall Street speculation so that Wall Street can return the favour and bail out the middle class. 

Teen Angst and the Omega Mentality

Romantic and Rationalist histories from the early modern period in Europe sometimes compared the stages of our collective phylogeny with those of each individual’s growth. These comparisons were mirror images of each other, because the Romantic assumed that the past is better than the future, whereas the Rationalist drew the opposite conclusion. So Rousseau, for example, maintained that children are inherently innocent and that the first humans were admirably childlike, uncorrupted by the antihuman conventions of mass society. By contrast, Auguste Comte assumed that reason is the driving force of progress and that the “positive,” fact-based scientific thinking of the contemporary Age of Reason was thus an improvement on the ancient stages of what he called more theological and metaphysical cultures. Naturally, the growth from the temper-tantrum-throwing child to the rational adult would likewise be one of progressive maturation.

These analyses tend to oversimplify. For one thing, children are far from innocent. Of course, legally they can’t be held accountable for their actions, but ethically they’re tyrannical. True, their selfish impulse to jealously guard their private property is reinforced by their parents in capitalistic societies, who swell their egos, while more egalitarian societies might not impose such materialism on those impressionable minds. But the child’s desire for tyranny is instinctive. Children are inherently racist and ruthless in preserving class distinctions. Bullies arise from an early age, as do followers and ostracized outsiders. Those who are different from the in-group norm are excluded, due to our instinctive fear of the unknown. Moreover, children naturally resort to violence to get their way. Likewise, the positivist oversimplifies by running together scientific and technological progress, on the one hand, with broader social progress, on the other.

But there is a sound basis for some such analysis that compares the evolutions of groups and of individuals. As Spengler pointed out, societies begin, develop, and end—just as our species as a whole had a beginning (or more than one beginning in our now-extinct fellow human species, such as the Neanderthals), is currently dominating the planet, and will inevitably go extinct, possibly by transitioning into some other species. Likewise, each individual is born before it grows, lives, and dies. Moreover, the early period in either case is marked by ignorance due to a lack of collective experience and memory, while the middle and late periods are oppositely characterized. Memories accumulate so that the adult can’t play with the same carefree abandon as the child, because the adult knows, for example, how the play would be perceived by jaded adult observers and is afraid of being embarrassed. Of course, some adults are more carefree than others, but even the most spontaneous and lighthearted ones will seem inauthentic and irresponsible, because unlike children, they ought to know better. Finally, the counterintuitiveness of objective, scientific methods of inquiry entails that these methods would have had to be relatively late historical factors, because they had to be discovered by trial and error; in particular, modern reason had to be defined in opposition to centuries of religious faith. And the technological power that follows from advances in empirical knowledge corresponds to the adult’s greater autonomy, as language and the cerebral cortex gradually assert their control on the brain’s emotive and other hardwired circuits. The upshot is that advanced industrial societies are freer than premodern ones, even if that freedom is tainted by the modern’s tragic understanding that a child’s fictions diverge from natural reality.

This starting point implies, at best, that early and late historical periods have some childlike and adult tendencies, respectively. There are further complications, however, such as that ancient adults must have been less childlike than their children or else our species would hardly have been able to endure. Moreover, instrumental improvements to technology can evidently infantilize rather than liberate us; more specifically, they liberate in the negative rather than the positive sense, meaning that they allow us to satisfy our desires without helping us determine what we should desire in the first place, so that the users of technology can regress rather than mature. To gain some insight from the forgoing comparison, then, we need to add another dimension to the analysis. Sociologically, the stages of personal growth are curiously correlated with the three main classes of any social species’ dominance hierarchy. The tyrannical child, lacking the ability to censor her impulses, corresponds to the sociopathic alpha predator, while the responsible adult matches up with the beta follower of alpha-written or approved social conventions, and the angst-driven teen bears a remarkable similarity to the marginalized omega who is last to receive the group’s bounties. 

Cosmic Horror for Clever Animals is available now on Amazon!

The paperback edition of this blog’s central articles is available now on Amazon and Createspace. The book’s called Cosmic Horror for Clever Animals, it’s 774 pages, and it includes an index as well as an introduction and a short story that haven’t appeared anywhere else. Here’s the description from the back:

“Most times and places are lifeless. In a miniscule fraction of the vast outer reaches of time and space, life evolved and one out of millions of those species accidentally discovered the means to survey the cosmic vistas, to understand its nature and role in the universe. What awaits the prophets, mystics, artists, and other outsiders who face up to the humiliating truth is horror, a precondition of enlightenment.

“This dark existential philosophy, first formulated in the modern West by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and H.P. Lovecraft among others, clashes not just with the grotesque exoteric delusions of mainstream religions, but with the secular bromides of liberal humanism, New Atheist boosterism, and materialistic consumer culture.

“Anthologizing the central articles from the blog, Rants Within the Undead God, Cosmic Horror for Clever Animals lays out what is effectively the hidden, naturalistic wisdom of our species, explores the social conflict between the enlightened few and the less honourable many, and shows that there is a silver lining: not the option of collective suicide, contrary to nihilists, anarchists, and antinatalists, but the aesthetic perspective which allows us to perceive the tragic greatness of the best life. When we fulfill our godlike potential, we stand against the abomination of nature, replacing the nightmarish wilderness with our artificial refuges.”

Here are the links to purchase the book from American Amazon, European Amazon, and Createspace. (For some reason, buying a book on Createspace gives the author twice the royalties.)

Cheers!

The Secret History of Enlightened Animals

I have an article up at Scott Bakker's website, called The Secret History of Enlightened Animals. It puts into the full existential context my earlier discussions of hypersocialization and artificialization. 

Some other RWUG news: I'm working on a massive paperback edition of this blog's essential writings. It will be available on Amazon and divided into several sections: Cosmic Horror, Theistic Idols, Atheism and the True God, The Outsider, The Aesthetic Dimension, and The Farcical Society. The book will be over 700 pages and will include an introduction, an index, and a Lovecraftian short story I wrote before I started this blog, containing the kernel of the idea of nature as the undead deity. 

Republicans Vanish in Puffs of Smoke when called Evil

Dateline: WASHINGTON, D.C.—Democrats are rejoicing after the Republican population has shrunk by nearly two thirds because its opponents have discovered a technique for making the conservatives literally disappear.

Hugh Bloomfeld, the technique’s originator, recalls his Eureka moment. “My right-wing sister dragged me to a Donald Trump speech,” he said, “and I remember hearing all this xenophobia and crass jingoism. Trump was demagoguing and pandering like a politician’s supposed to, but he was doing much worse than that.” 

After the event, Bloomfeld went home and pondered what Trump and his supporters were saying. “Trump was, like, calling himself the best and hating on everyone else: everyone who wasn’t like him. And he wasn’t just hating with words. He was promising to annihilate everyone else, to crush and ruin them. Then it dawned on me. I thought, ‘Isn’t that just plain…evil?’”

Over Christmas dinner, Bloomfeld sat across from his conservative sister who was doomed to be the first victim of this revolutionary new weapon in the American culture war. “She was spouting the most awful bigotry,” Bloomfeld recalled, though tears. “She was blind to America’s many faults, heaping demonizations onto everyone else. It was so childishly narrow-minded, so nakedly callous and coarse and maniacal and egotistical and greedy and boorish and unfair and malicious and troglodytic and repulsive and inveterate and deranged and bellicose and obscene and hateful and cold-blooded and arrogant and narcissistic and immoral—I just broke down and said, ‘Stop it, Sally! You’re being evil.’”

Instantly, Sally Bloomfeld disappeared in a puff of smoke. “I couldn’t believe it at first,” said Hugh. “I thought it was some kind of twisted magic trick. But she was gone—just gone, like Rumpelstiltskin.”

News spread of Bloomfeld’s accidental discovery. While Bloomfeld hadn’t intended to send his hapless sister to some netherworld by calling her by her true name, liberals were quick to apply the technique in earnest. Entire Trump, Cruz, and other Tea Party rallies disappeared in billowing clouds of smoke, having been surrounded by liberals shouting 'You’re evil!’ into megaphones.

Claire Feminista attended one such anti-Republican incursion. “Some libertarian crackpot was on the stage,” she reminisced. “Some social Darwinian who was saying the sick and the poor should be left to die because that’s what ‘The Market’ wants. And the Tea Partiers were cheering like they were drunk on rage. We closed in with our megaphones. One by one the offenders disappeared into thin air. You couldn’t see them through the fog. Some of the evil ones tried to flee, but we hunted them down with our megaphones and applied the bald truth to their faces. They vanished too. We left none unidentified.”

Mengyao Zyu, physicist at Caltech, led a team of researchers to study the phenomenon. Describing his experiment, Zyu said, “We wanted to see whether the Republicans are somehow transformed into smoke or the smoke merely signals that they’d been teleported somewhere by the utterance of the magic word.”

Zyu’s team lured Fox-watching Republicans to his laboratory by offering them memorabilia signed by their favourite right-wing demagogue. “They came in droves,” he said. “We called them evil and at first nothing happened. My colleague, Marcus Wannabanger, noticed that the Republicans were fixated on the memorabilia. He asked one of the test subjects, an old blue collar fellow, to look him in the eyes for a moment. ‘Did you know that you’re flat-out evil?’ he asked him. And the old man vanished on the spot. So we determined that if you want them to disappear, you have to look them in the eyes when you call them what they are. 

“The smoke itself is mysterious,” he continued. “It issues forth in prodigious quantities. We had to clear the building after a mass truth-telling. We had a hundred subjects in there clamoring for Fiorina T-shirts, Sean Hannity pens, and George W. Bush mugs. We asked them to look at us and then we pointed out that their beliefs make them crazy evil. We were choking in the fog left by their departure from this plane of existence.”

The researchers went on to discover that because the abundant smoke nevertheless possesses less mass than the Republicans, the law of the conservation of mass dictates that the individuals aren’t turned into the smoke. “We don’t know where they go,” Zyu concedes. “What we do know is that many people are just glad they’re no longer here.”

When Republicans first learned of their vulnerability, many refused to believe it. Conservative pundits continued to appear on CNN and Fox News, defying their liberal counterparts to call them evil and maintaining that the rumor of their liability to be whisked away in such a fashion is a socialist conspiracy. Each of the true believers was never seen again. Curiously, Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck were impervious to the truth-telling. Eventually, they admitted they had been acting as performers all along and had been “in it just to sell books,” as O’Reilly put it.

Donald Trump’s departure was an epic event. “My polls are higher than ever before,” he boasted at his last rally. “I apologize for nothing!”

“Yeah, that’s because you’re a straight-up evil clown,” shouted Todd Donahue, a Democrat who had sneaked into the rally. Mr. Trump vanished in a puff of smoke, leaving behind his peculiar hair on the stage. Trump’s buildings themselves also disappeared, leaving gaping holes in the New York cityscape. One architect responded, “Glad they’re gone. They were monstrosities too.”

According to political scientists, the hardcore Republicans were incapable of surviving the intervention precisely because they were what people were finally saying they were. “They can’t apologize or change their ways,” said one. “They’re too macho and their pride’s on the line. They couldn’t see the truth for themselves because they lived in the Fox News bubble. They hated everyone but themselves, they couldn’t empathize, so they couldn’t even pick up a book written by someone with an opposite viewpoint.”

Bewildered by the loss of their conservative heroes, some Republicans went on rampages, shooting up liberal areas of the country before police could bring their new weapon to bear. The officers merely applied the E-word and saved their bullets as well as the city the cost of imprisoning those who were evidently evil.

Other Republicans opted for a more underhanded stratagem, pretending to have converted to the more modern, liberal perspective. Frank Tankman, a lifelong conservative, piled his collection of firearms onto his lawn and dynamited them. “See?” he shouted to liberal onlookers. “I don’t love guns anymore. I love people. Give me a baby to hold! Bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. I love everyone equally. I’m one of you liberal do-gooders now.”

A child, Sarah Toddle, was the first to spy the machinegun tucked beneath his shirt. Sarah’s mother reported that her daughter tugged on her dress, pointed to the concealed gun and asked, “Is he still evil, Mommy?”

“Only one way to find out,” Mrs. Toddle answered.

Asked why he was still carrying the flashy, over-killing firearm, Mr. Tankman answered, “Just for squirrels and varmints and such.” The crowd challenged him, accusing him of belonging to the same sort of death cult as the jihadist terrorists. “I don’t love death and destruction,” he hollered. “Well, maybe when the End Times come it will be pretty sweet. I mean, it will be just like in the movies: cities on fire, the godless masses on their knees, ravaged by demons.”

When Mr. Tankman began drooling in anticipation, Mrs. Toddle nodded at Sarah and encouraged her to call the man by his true name. “You’re an evil scallywag,” said Sarah to his face, drawing the appellation from her favourite picture book. Frank Tankman dematerialized, the smoke settling like fog in the twilight.

Democrats now easily win their elections in what remains a two-party system, but there are indications that the millions of eligible Americans who don’t vote expect the unrivalled Democrats to succumb to the temptation of forming a tyranny. “When that happens,” says one who is religious in his nonvoting, “we’ll be ready with the truth-telling E-word.”

Sole Survivor of a Flurry of Mass Shootings Opposes Firearms Regulation

Even as the rate of all other gun-related crimes had been decreasing in the United States for decades, the rate of mass shootings had steadily increased as gun show loopholes were found to circumvent bans on assault rifles, mental health centers were defunded by the government, and the NRA captured both political parties. Experts on television declared that the solution to massacres in movie theaters was to add more guns to theaters; to slaughters in malls, it was to add more guns to malls; and to school shootings, it was to add more guns to schools. Soon enough, the United States was overflowing with guns.

And Americans were angry, very angry, because their political system was corrupt and unresponsive to the plight of the middle class and the poor. Both parties had catered to the wealthy business elites in exchange for their campaign contributions and for cushy jobs in the private sector. The combination of mass resentment and rage together with millions upon millions of state-of-the-art firearms boded ill for the nation’s survival.

In 2017, Texas alone sustained 362 mass shootings. The survivors fled the state, leaving it barren, but there was no escape. New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and all the other southern states erupted in gunfire as the mentally deranged, the marginalized, and the dispossessed as well as the jihadist terrorists vented their frustrations by spraying bullets in crowded places. Militarized police forces were deployed and demonized by fear-mongering right-wingers who awaited the prophesied End of Days. Militias went to war against the police, eventually leaving the southern states desolate and bereft of human inhabitants.

Liberal lawmakers took the loss of the southern half of their country as an opportunity to push for mild gun control laws, but they were ousted from office by NRA-backed candidates who merely had to call the liberals “communists” to win popular support even as the voters were cut down by hooligans’ gunfire soon after they left the U.S. Capitol.

Again, the survivors fled to the north, but the northerners found they had to arm themselves or be shot to pieces by the traumatized southerners. Through 2019 the mass shootings continued and looked increasingly like a civil war.

By 2020, the U.S. population dropped to around 100,000 proud, patriotic Americans.

Before the government fell, Congress again debated whether to regulate the shrunken gun industry that was still pumping out firearms and selling them to the beleaguered remnants of American civilization. Congress decided against halting the nation’s impending collapse, insisting that the Founders had been rabid anarchists who intended for the country to resemble not fattened, spoiled Middle America but something like the Wild West which had truly been the land of the free and the home of the brave.

As one Republican representative said, “The Founding Fathers upheld everyone’s right to bear arms for the purpose of stocking a militia. A militia has to be powerful enough to take down the government if the government should fail to uphold the law. Therefore, every American citizen has the right to carry even weapons of mass destruction to keep the government in check.”

Cosmopolitan Americans abroad rushed home to attempt to salvage their nation, but were picked off by gunfire soon after they stepped off the tarmac.

Canada and Mexico, too, moved into American territory and were promptly blasted en masse by Americans boasting the latest in military hardware. Thereafter, foreigners kept their distance.

When survivors in Montana realized that the government had neglected in their last firearms bill to allow for the sale of newly-designed magazines capable of carrying 400 rounds of ammunition, they nuked Washington D.C., rendering the country lawless.

In 2021, after a series of further mass shootings, there were only twelve Americans left alive. Six of the survivors engaged in a Mexican standoff over a dispute about who spilled beer on the shoe of whom. All six pulled their triggers and died in a hail of bullets.

The remaining five Americans deemed it wise to spread themselves out across the land to keep alive the American Dream. One, however, Howard Derringer, was mentally ill and hunted down the others, executing them with an assortment of submachine guns until only two Americans remained: Derringer and a former bus driver named Mark McEwan.

Before Derringer could locate and shoot McEwan, Derringer succumbed to an unknown ailment in 2023.

Mark McEwan was the sole survivor of American freedom. A peaceable man, McEwan allowed foreigners to observe his actions without launching a crazed assault on them.

He spent the bulk of his time agonizing over whether to impose restrictions on the use of firearms. One day, standing before a mirror, he gave a speech to himself.

“I speak to you today as president of this great nation,” he said, “having just voted for myself last week. I speak to you also as someone who is terribly thirsty. There’s no water for miles. Aside from that, I feel it’s incumbent on me to take up the issue of arms control. There’s no NRA anymore, so passing a ban on assault rifles would be feasible. I could throw all the long guns I see into a river. 

“But as the last American, I also feel I have a duty to honour the American spirit. For that reason, I’ve decided not to control the use of firearms. Instead, I’ll shoot this sonuvabitch, blowing my brains out with a Colt M4 carbine. Let the blessed guns inherit the earth.”

With the loss of Mark McEwan and of the United States, China became the world’s largest gun manufacturer. In 2025, China annexed what had hitherto been the American heartland, honouring those previous generations of brave American souls who had eked out a living under the constant threat of being shot like a Third World dog in the streets, by turning that territory into a giant gun manufacturing facility.