Personalizing Ourselves: Science, Liberalism, and the Reality of Illusions

At the end of one of our discussions, Scott Bakker concludes, “To say there is no meaning in nature is just to say there is no meaning in us. The death of God is the death of Man. There is no objective subject or subjective object.” I’d like to analyze this conclusion, especially the second of those three sentences, and explore what it means to speak of the difference between natural reality and the illusions of purpose, normativity, and the personal self.

Science Undermines Liberalism

Scott’s provocative comparison of the death of God with the death of the human person should be especially troubling to liberal atheists. The theist, after all, denies that either of those individuals is dead, but the liberal atheist is in danger of inconsistency rather than just of being uninformed. This atheist believes that theologies are fairytales which beguiled our ancient ancestors but which no longer make sense, that when Europeans woke up in the modern age, they lost faith in their monotheistic traditions in just the way that when a child grows up, the adult is no longer interested in children’s stories. Thus, the fictional character called God died in our imagination and that’s all God ever was: a fantasy that captivated most people who ever lived, but that no longer serves as part of a powerful story for those who understand the importance of modern science. And yet, as John Gray argues in Black Mass, liberalism borrows its morality from monotheism. Liberals assume that each person has moral worth, because he or she is an end rather than a means, an independent individual or agent rather than another link in a causal chain, and thus a conscious, autonomous, and rational person rather than merely a machine or an animal.

Liberal institutions like capitalism and democracy assume as much. Capitalism depends on the assumption not that we’re just narrow-minded animals seeking our advantage over others, but that we’re rational in seeking that advantage, which is why capitalism is supposed to leave us not with the anarchic and chaotic state of nature, but with a merited distribution of goods. As rational creatures, we plan how best to use our skills to compete and so we implicitly sign a social contract in which we agree to live by certain rules that permit private ownership, and so on. Those who most cleverly play by the rules and put their talents to work earn the most rewards in this system, assuming the economy lives up to the ideals set out in capitalistic theory. Thus, the concept of rational self-interest is crucial to this sort of economy, but what if there are no such things as selves or rationality as they’re commonly understood? Again, democracy requires that citizens be worthy of self-governance, by being informed about their representatives and about how economies and political systems work, so that their votes make sense, and by being free to pursue happiness so that the voters leave the dreary business of politics to the professionals. But what if no one’s free and happiness isn’t ideal, after all, because nothing in nature is really good or bad?

What’s radical, then, about Scott’s attribution of the folk notions of selfhood to the brain’s native blindness to its inner workings isn’t just that Scott sets himself in opposition merely to some compromises in academic philosophy, to a discipline which doesn’t greatly interest most people. No, Scott’s interpretation of cognitive science conflicts also with the foundations of liberal, which is to say modern society. If academic philosophy went up in smoke, there would be no apocalypse, but if liberalism were widely viewed as bankrupt, there would be no bulwark against right-wing craziness, including religious fundamentalism, the backlash against science and rationality themselves. If rightwing or so-called conservative ideologues were to have the whole floor on which Western societies stand, I believe those ideologues would bring down modern civilization and we’d be faced with a neo-feudal Dark Age.

Toy Mandibles Empower Weak-Jawed Masses

Dateline: LOS ANGELES—There’s a hot new product that’s flying off the shelves. It’s called Gravitas Jaws and it consists of a crude plastic mandible bone that’s worn over your lower jaw like a beard, except that this piece of plastic has the power to force everyone to take you seriously for no good reason. Donna Kerplunker, CEO of Upstart Entertainment, which manufactures Gravitas Jaws, says her R&D department was inspired by female and male TV news anchors alike who typically have chiseled, square jaws, which studies show cast a magic spell on the television audience, forcing the viewers to take the anchors seriously even though the anchors are empty-headed egomaniacs that read from teleprompters and are neck-deep in the dehumanizing business of infotainment.

“We’ve come up with something very special here,” Ms. Kerplunker said in an exclusive interview with RWUG Magazine. “Why let the phonies on TV have all the power and all the fun? Take the power back! Mesmerize your neighbours! It’s a riot what a fake lower jawbone can do.”

Ms. Kerplunker demonstrated the power of her product, by trying on the Gravitas Jaws. She turned to a group of average Americans and told them some extravagant falsehoods, such as “The sky is green. Two plus two equals five. And American cable news improves society by helping to ensure that the public is made up of skeptical, well-informed citizens who deserve to govern themselves.” Surprisingly, none of the viewers scoffed at any of that balderdash and all of them spontaneously declared that were Ms. Kerplunker to lead them into battle, they’d gladly die to preserve her honour.

Linda Lobsterapple, a sociologist at Perdue University, has published widely on the correlation between bony, protruding jaws and gravitas. She explains gravitas as a person’s perceived authority which intimidates others and compels them to defer to the authority figure. “Gravitas itself is best thought of as a force that acts through certain embodiments or symbols of it. Two of the most powerful such symbols are the archetypal hero’s lantern jaws and prominent chin. Traditionally, only manly men with those facial features were admired. But now, after the feminist revolutions, women too can become famous if they possess those traits. Think of the actresses Olivia Wilde, Reese Witherspoon, Claire Danes, Minnie Driver, Jodie Foster, Rosario Dawson, Jennifer Garner, Rachel McAdams, or Angelina Jolie. Or the female news anchors Ashleigh Banfield, Amy Robach, Megyn Kelly, Melissa Theuriau, or Susan Hendricks.”

Dr. Lobsterapple says this symbol of gravitas is a sign of strength and part of the innate, stereotypical image of the heroic leader which is embedded in our subconscious. “The symbol works on an unconscious level, so there’s little we can do to resist it. I’m not surprised to learn about the Gravitas Jaws. A colleague of mine has a weak jawline, but whenever he displeases his wife he remedies the situation by donning a Halloween mask of Arnold Schwarzenegger and intoning in a deep voice, ‘Forget whatever I did. Now go and fix me a sandwich!’ Usually, she protests that he’s being ridiculous—even as she complies with his demand! The power of this symbol is staggering.”

Promise for Baldness Cure Causes Social Rifts

Dateline: NEW YORK—A team of doctors from the Columbia Medical Center succeeded in generating new human hair growth, which promises a cure for baldness. “We’re within sight of the cure,” said one of the lead scientists. “Of course, you have to be a hawk to see it; certainly, no one within our lifetime or that of our children’s children will see the cure, since the clinical trial period to test the results from every conceivable angle will take approximately five centuries.”

Bald men responded to the news by rioting in droves, breaking into scientific labs and demanding that “the beady-eyed scientists produce the cure immediately already,” because bald men “are sick of being pariahs,” as one of them put it in the midst of a hostage situation. Holding a gun to a medical researcher’s head, which happened also to be bald, the irate bald man exclaimed to no one in particular, “Think of what I could do with a full head of hair! Think of how much time I’ve lost being a bald nobody.” Whereupon the kneeling researcher replied, “I’m bald too, you asshole!”

In fact, the scientific community is divided about whether to go through its usual shenanigans of taking centuries before the scientists fulfill their Hippocratic Oath and disseminate the cure, as opposed to artificially driving up demand, jockeying to improve their careers, and obliging the labyrinthine bureaucracies that oversee the clinical trials. Most scientists aren’t just males; they’re bald and nerdy ones, many of whom join the bald nonscientists, their “bald brothers in arms,” as a balding scientist said, in clamoring for the new treatment.

But the corporate elites that own the drug and treatment companies and that pay the scientists’ salaries are rarely bald. Partly, this is because they can afford the current state-of-the-art treatments for hair loss, but it’s also because they’re gifted with the precious bloodlines that account both for their preternatural health and for their sociopathic drive to succeed regardless of the cost to others.

Don Bangsalot, CEO of Hoarding Enterprises, which is currently beginning clinical trials for the new baldness treatment, confessed in a candid interview with Suckup Magazine that he’s in favour of “the epic waiting time for baldies.” Granted,” he said, “we stand to make billions of dollars with this cure, since the demand is incalculable. But that’s the point: there are hundreds of millions of bald men out there, so do I want that many more competitors for the attention of hot women? No, the plight of bald undesirables benefits me, because those losers are taken out of the running for the superior females. The relatively few men who are born with the more desirable genes or who can afford to keep our bodies in tip-top shape have the field to ourselves and we’d prefer to keep it that way.”

Women, too, are torn about the prospect for a cure for baldness. “I’d love for my balding husband to have his head of hair restored,” said one woman. “I still remember when we were young and I used to run my hand through his wavy locks. But aren’t women supposed to be the phonies when it comes to outward appearances? I mean, we’re the ones who put up a false front with makeup, hair extensions, breast implants, and misleading garments. We’ve been fooling men for hundreds of years, hiding our bodies' imperfections. Even Cleopatra wore makeup! Now bald men are going to try to kid a kidder and be feminized phonies as well? They’re going to buy their hair from squirrelly chemists in lab coats? Sometimes I think feminists have gone too far in fighting for equality between the sexes.”

Decadence, Enlightenment, and the Great Story

Decadence is a curious concept. The word derives from the French decadere, which means “to fall away.” In English, the word means the falling into an inferior condition, as in deterioration or decay, moral degeneration or unrestrained self-indulgence. When you think of decadence, you likely think of an aristocrat like Marie Antoinette who lived in luxury while the masses starved. In a broader context, however, there’s an unexpected connection between decadence and enlightenment, between immorality and existential authenticity or spiritual perfection.

The Freedom to Play

To see this, consider some ancient history. Tens of thousands of years before the invention of writing, humans were hunter-gatherers, living off of wild plants and animals and thus having to move constantly as the seasons changed or as the herds migrated. Then came the Neolithic, Agricultural Revolution, about 12,000 years ago, after which most people lived off of domesticated animals, which allowed the Neolithic people to form denser populations and to settle into sedentary communities. In mythical terms, that revolution marked our banishment from Eden. Early hunter-gatherers were one with nature; regardless of their cleverness or durability, they lacked the culture and the artificial environment to train them to think in stylized, abstract ways, to become what we think of as people as opposed to animals. Psychologically and socially, early foragers were protohumans, members merely of another species of predator hunting along with falcons, alligators, saber-toothed cats and the like. When they struck upon agriculture, our ancient ancestors became much more self-sustaining and thus resistant to many pressures of life in the wild. They produced surpluses of food, which gave them free time, which in turn allowed them to play without any pressing evolutionary motive. That is, in many species of mammal, both the young and the adults entertain themselves either to practice their survival skills or to form social bonds, but agriculture introduced true idleness, the luxury of freedom that comes with a sedentary lifestyle. That freedom was both a blessing and a curse.

You can think of freedom as independence, as the power to do what you want, or you can think of it as alienation, as being untethered from life-sustaining processes. In fact, our liberation from many of our animalistic burdens has both that advantage and that disadvantage. When our Neolithic ancestors learned how to master the land and pliable species, they acquired greater safety in numbers and the larger groups developed more elaborate cultures and fortifications which acted as artificial worlds, sealing off the newly-minted people from the wilderness and encouraging the myths that would develop, of our supernatural status as children of gods destined ourselves to be deified. In short, Neolithic people became very powerful and instead of having to direct all their energies to accomplishing the primitive tasks needed to survive in the wild, the sedentary folk could use their power in arbitrary, unrealistic pursuits that made sense only to cultural insiders. For example, they could spend decades constructing gigantic pyramids as tombs to transport spirits into the afterlife or they could build elaborate temples and sacrifice virgins on the altar to please deities in the sky. Animals know of no such follies, because they’re too busy working hard to withstand the pressures of the wilderness that buffet them from one moment to the next; animals lack the freedom to stop and think about what’s really happening around them. The Neolithic people thus became both outsiders and insiders. Eden was barred to them, as they used technology—language, myths, social infrastructure, architecture—to personify themselves, transforming themselves from animalistic protohumans into godlike humans. But they became insiders with respect to their newly-regulated societies and to the fantasy-worlds they imagined and saw all around them as meaningful overlays that were anchored to their art, jewelry, buildings, stories, and other such symbols.

Hardline Atheists Condemn Sleep and Sex as Irrational

Dateline: SPRINGFIELD, MI—Speaking jointly at a press conference after coming to a unanimous decision at this year’s Skepticon, held at Missouri State University, representatives of the New Atheist movement condemned sleep and sex for being irrational.

“Religious faith is clearly unreasonable,” said author Sam Harris, “but so are your unconscious dreams and so is your sex life. If we’re going to survive the coming technological advances, we’ve got to smarten up and cut all ties to our primitive ancestry. We’ve got to become posthuman.” Asked how Harris handles his biological needs for sleep and sex, he told reporters that he expects we’ll soon develop the technology to allow the brain to cope without the input of the irrational subconscious and with a permanent state of insomnia. Until then, he said rationalists should keep a journal of their dreams and “berate and flagellate” themselves each morning if the dreams they recall having had “descend into the fantastic.”

“As for sex,” biologist Richard Dawkins cut in, “it helps to be British. Puritanical prudishness and the effeteness following the decline of your country’s empire go a long way to making you sufficiently embarrassed about sex’s animalistic aspects to learn how to repress your wayward lusts.” Reminded that Dawkins has written about the need to appreciate nature’s beauty, he said that poetry and a sense of wonder are alright “as long as one employs the deflationary technique of understatement and keeps a stiff upper lip.”

The biologist PZ Myers pointed out that the problem isn’t just irrationality; it’s when irrationality becomes dangerous. “People kill for God, but they also kill for sex,” he said. “Families break apart due to affairs. When we’re overcome by sex hormones we may not wear protection and so we transmit diseases. Moreover, we set a terrible example, hiding our degrading sex life, keeping that skeleton in the closet even as we rightly ridicule religious folks for their lunacy.” Our unconscious biases, too, he said, “drive us to all manner of counterproductive prejudices. We mustn’t allow our unconscious to rear its ugly head, not even in our dreams.”

Biologist Jerry Coyne added that we can maintain the human population using artificial insemination, “to avoid the follies of romance and sexual play.” He said that as a child he loved to dream he was Superman and he could fly just by holding out his arms. But when he learned we can fly only with airplanes or the like, he “condemned that dream as a piece of foolishness.” Dawkins went further, saying we should punish our kids when they “indulge in games of pretense. Faith-heads abuse their children by teaching them nonsense,” he said, “and we rationalists must do the opposite, teaching them reason and science; else there shan’t be a counterweight to religious superstition and we’ll be on the brink of extinction.”

Historian Richard Carrier told a story of how a little girl approached him at Skepticon, holding a ball of aluminum foil and calling it the moon. “I told her it’s not the moon and that if she tried to hold up the moon it would crush her flatter than a pancake. The girl ran off crying and I relished each and every one of those tears, because they signaled her growing disenchantment with the world. We can’t afford to be irrational anymore; technological advances have raised the stakes too high.”

Philosopher Daniel Dennett reported that he’s working on a device to alert him when someone nearby is entering REM sleep, during which time the person “would be expected to have begun spoiling her rational mindset with a foolish dream.” He warned that he intends to drive around at night, to locate “the offenders against Reason,” and to blast his car horn “to set things right.” Dennett then proudly showcased the new logo for New Atheism. It features a stylized drawing of a man, holding a hammer in each hand and smashing his heart with one hand and his genitals with the other.

God Decays has arrived!

My first novel, God Decays, is now available as a paperback from CreateSpace, which is Amazon’s self-publishing company. The book is also available from Amazon and from Amazon Europe (search for "God Decays" in the European site of your choice).

For some reason, I get higher royalties if the book is purchased from the CreateSpace page as opposed to Amazon itself. So if you’re interested in buying the book and you’d like more of the money to go to me, you’d want to buy it from CreateSpace.

I’m very proud of this novel. I wrote the first draft in 4 or 5 months and it was so much fun. But this novel is only the beginning of at least a 4-volume series I have planned. The scope is going to be epic.

The image at the left, of that zombie standing in front of a galaxy/halo was meant to be included in the book. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the resolution to work. (Microsoft Word or some other program kept lowering the resolution, so the printed copy looked fuzzy.) So there's the picture. I'll have to figure out the resolution issues for the next book so I can include more art in it.

Here are the first several chapters of the book, minus the snazzy formatting and fonts. Warning: God Decays falls within the horror genre, so there’s some gore in it as well as coarse language.

Update Schedule

Regular readers of RWUG might want to know how I plan to keep updating this blog. I’m aiming to post an article every Monday or perhaps Tuesday and a satirical report, such as the new one below on Pope Francis, every Thursday. That’s the new schedule. And the purpose of the Onion-style, satirical news reports is to add some comedy to these philosophical rants. I've got some other plans as well...

Oh, and my novel God Decays should be out in just a day or two.

Cheers!

Pope Francis's Superficial Christlikeness is Miraculous, Observers Say

Dateline: VATICAN—Experts agree that Pope Francis has made a concerted effort to change people’s impression of the Catholic Church, by adopting a less ostentatious style of public relations, leading non-Christians and Christians alike to be astonished that a Christian in the modern age would dare to be even superficially Christlike.

Instead of staying in the papal apartments in the Apostolic Palace, the pope lives in a guesthouse, he wears simpler vestments than his predecessors, he drives in a 30-year old, nonfortified, used Renault instead of the traditional Popemobile, he carries his own luggage, he meets people from his front door rather than from a balcony, he washed the feet of criminal offenders, and he took the name Francis in honour of the saint who devoted himself to humility and the poor.

All of which has perplexed observers of the Church. “Granted, these are only symbolic gestures,” said Spanish Catholic Carlos Fandangle, “and no one in their right mind expects this or any other pope to push for big changes in Church doctrine. But who could dream that a Christian nowadays would take even a single baby step towards acting like Jesus! It’s just baffling.”

According to a Church historian, Joey Frogbottom, “Pope Francis’s superficial acts of humility are mystifying to millions of people who are used to seeing Christians utterly betray the obvious spirit of Jesus’s message as it’s presented in the Gospels. After two thousand years of the churches’ betrayals and compromises with secular empires, seeing a Christian today act even a little like Jesus is akin to witnessing an alien from another galaxy landing on Earth and going about its bizarre activities. It’s hard to process what we’re seeing with Pope Francis’s signs of humility, because those signs of Christian life are so rare among Christians.”

Hubert Hornswaggler, an American who identifies as an atheist, admits that Pope Francis’s behaviour has forced him to take a second look at the Church. “Living in the US,” he said, “I’m used to seeing Christians trample Jesus’s teachings like they were written on toilet paper. I mean, it’s like Christians hear what Jesus said people should do—give up riches and thoughts of vengeance, sex, and family, and dedicate yourself entirely to God as if, you know, you actually believed that this God exists—but they just decide to do the opposite and still call themselves Christian. But now here comes Pope Francis and he makes me think it’s possible for a Christian not to be so thoroughly anti-Christian. It’s almost a miracle.”

However, Ralph Reed, the eternally-young American Christian activist, criticizes the pope for his effrontery. “Only Jesus can be Jesus,” he said. “We’re afflicted with original sin and we shouldn’t pretend we can do any good. When we appear to do good, that’s only God acting through us. God deserves all the credit. That’s why we should give in to sin and embrace the savage policies of the Republican Party, so that we can finally ruin our world and force God to show Himself and fix everything. Pope Francis is giving us false hope and that’s an outrage. The last thing a Christian should do is try to emulate Jesus.”

American preacher and reputed prosperity theologian, Joel Osteen, agrees with that criticism. “God wants us to be happy on Earth, not just in Heaven,” he said, “but God knows we’re imperfect creatures. Happiness now requires that we submit to our flaws rather than pretend to be perfect like Jesus. Real Christians appreciate that the New Testament is irrelevant and that the teachings we should be following look a lot like some of the libertarian ones in the Satanic Bible. Christians should try to be as selfish and deceitful as possible, because that’s how flawed creatures like us can best be happy here and now.”

The Problem of Evil and the Role of Omega Spirituality

The theological problem of evil or of unnecessary suffering in the world is one of the oldest problems with theistic belief, finding its first logical expression in the West over two thousand years ago, in the Epicurean Paradox. That theological problem is also clearly insoluble, because it’s rooted in the nature of ideals. An ideal is counterfactual, since the point of having an ideal is to improve some actual situation by changing it to more closely resemble the ideal. The monotheistic God is thought of as the highest ideal, as both the ideal subject and object. Whatever we think of as most perfect (if anything), that becomes our divinity. In polytheistic systems, gods represent perfection in their spheres of operation, so that the god of wind is considered to be the primary source of that phenomenon and to have absolute control over it. All such natural powers, together with supernatural ones we can barely imagine such as the power to create the whole universe are combined in the idea of the monotheistic God. But by merely having such an ideal in mind, we condemn our religion to being badly flawed as long as we distinguish that ideal from the present natural reality, since nature must then necessarily be a letdown in comparison. The problem of evil isn’t just about the Nazis or baby animals being eaten in the wild. These are just some obvious examples of the more universal conflict between ideality and reality. We form ideals because we’re unsatisfied with something and we’d like it to better reflect the imagined possibility. But as soon as this conflict arises, so too does the question of why the world isn’t already more ideal. Why does that conflict exist? Why isn’t the world already perfect to obviate the need to imagine God? Why isn’t God all that there is? Why, instead, would God have created an imperfect world? Ideals versus reality: that’s the basis of the problem of evil.

Here’s a particularly chilling example of this problem. A month or so ago in a zoo in eastern China, a mother elephant stepped on her baby. Zookeepers treated the calf’s injuries and returned him to his mother, whereupon she again stomped on him. The zookeepers then permanently separated the two, realizing that the mother was rejecting her baby and indeed trying to kill him. The calf then reportedly cried inconsolably for five hours straight, because he couldn’t bear to be apart from his mother, not understanding that his mother wanted him dead. The story ends happily enough, with the zookeepers adopting the baby elephant, but the facts of the case are still horrifying. Infanticide among animals happens when the parents are held captive in zoos or in sanctuaries, because they lack role models and don’t know how to raise their babies, but baby-killing also happens in the wild. The evolutionary reason is that because the environment in which many animals live is harsh rather than idyllic, a parent faces something like Sophie’s choice: she has more than one baby, using one or more as backups, and as soon as circumstances reveal one to be the strongest, she focuses on raising that one and abandons or kills the others. She kills them either to end their doomed life quickly and mercifully or to make life easier for her favourite offspring, eliminating some competition for the limited resources.

So that’s why this sort of thing happens. But just consider the horror for a moment. After all, the baby elephant is unaware of any of those reasons. He instinctively loves his mother and wouldn’t have time to blame her for stomping him to death, because before he could realize that something is amiss, he’d be dead. In many species, the evolutionary reason for the baby’s unconditional love of its mother is also clear: if the baby can’t care for itself, the baby depends on the mother and the love bond ensures that the baby will stay near its protector and will do as it’s told. What’s so heartbreaking about this incident in the zoo is that something as innocent and pitiful as a baby’s love for its mother should be so inconsequential in light of certain natural necessities. We have a naïve ideal of how family life should be and then we learn that nature includes this sort of twisted family dynamic. Instead of caring for her helpless baby, the mother makes a cold calculation, born out of the sort of pragmatism you seem to need to survive for long in the wild. The environment’s inhospitality grinds down parents that aren’t born with evil intentions; presumably, this mother elephant would prefer not to kill her young, but she knows no other way to fulfill her survival instincts. And all the while, the precious baby elephant is kept in the dark. How many baby elephants, monkeys, pandas, and young members of many other mammalian species have expected their mother to care for them only to be taught a shocking evolutionary lesson, to be beaten to death by the one they most trusted! How many such deaths have gone unrecorded?

Man with Tourette Syndrome Makes Fools of us all

Dateline: CLEVELAND—Horace Tabernacle is a 43-year old man with Tourette Syndrome, who displays a variety of vocal and motor tics, including the most infamous tic: for no apparent reason, he frequently shouts profanity in public, like the N-word or the C-word, horrifying bystanders and sometimes causing riots that have to be quelled by police. In fact, chaos seems to swirl around Horace like tornado winds around the eye of the storm.

For example, this RWUG reporter accompanied Horace as he visited the supermarket to shop for vegetables. Stopping at the avocados, Horace pointed at the dark-hued vegetables and shouted, “Those are the niggers. See? Right there, niggers! Niggers!” Some of the patrons within earshot appeared deeply offended. They scowled or shook their head. Parents covered their children’s ears and steered them away from Horace, realizing instantly that he was mentally unstable. Other shoppers were enraged rather than just embarrassed that the decorum set by Muzak had been upset by Horace’s outburst. An African-American woman picked up an avocado and launched it at Horace’s head, shouting “Who are you calling a nigger, you cracker!” Rubbing his head with one hand, he waived the woman off with the other, saying “Not you, not you, you’re a cunt.” A scuffle ensued which had to be broken up by security guards, who threw Horace out of the supermarket.

“That happens to me all the time,” he said later in an interview about his experience with the disorder. “I try to control the tics, but normal people don’t understand that it’s impossible. They go crazy when I’m around; I think they get crazier even than me. People should know I never use the power words as insults. Why would I? The insults wouldn’t even make sense half of the time. No, I shout them for the joy of it. Some words or phrases I love because they sound funny, like ‘bouillabaisse,’ ‘Come off it, soffit!’ or ‘tackleberry richenbacker.’ When I’m showering or waiting in line somewhere, I might say one or more of those silly phrases over and over, like a mantra. I know they sound strange, but chanting them comforts me. They’re tics, like itches that feel good when they’re scratched.”

Other words, however, Horace likes to shout because of their raw and somewhat mystifying power. “The N-word and the C-word aren’t fun to say just because of how they sound when their letters are pronounced. But I know the impact their meanings have on ordinary folks who are just trying to go about their business. It’s like those words are volcanoes and I delight in watching the explosions; people’s reaction to them is sublime. It’s like my irrationality is contagious, like everyone still believes in the magic power of words even though we’re all supposed to be modern.”

Psychiatrist Alfred Shiksamonger theorizes that the conventions of political correctness help civilize average citizens of technologically advanced societies, by forcing us to repress our “mythopoeic instincts.” We have the same faith in magic and spirits as our ancient ancestors did, he said, but the “hyperrationality of modern machines” drives us to compete on their level. “We civilized adults sacrifice the animal within to beat machines at their game; we adapt to the new niche, repressing ourselves to fit in and not stand out. Our personas are programmed.”