Social Lies: Love, Power and Manipulation

n the absence of nutritional knowledge, human beings tend to eat what tastes good in the moment.

In the absence of philosophical wisdom, human beings tend to become mere “anxiety avoidance machines.”

Let us look at a few examples of this in various fields, before we see the enormously destructive impact this has on people’s personal relationships

Religion and Anxiety

Religious mysticism, or superstition, is almost always driven by a fear of the unknown.

If we look at the example of epilepsy

, we can see that the incomprehensible foaming and thrashing behaviour exhibited by epileptics during an attack can create great anxiety in others.

What on earth is happening? Why is it happening? Could this happen to

Whenever we are confronted by something that we do not understand, we can either roll up our sleeves and begin the hard work of striving to understand it – a work that will doubtless remain uncompleted in our lifetime – or we can simply make up an explanation that gets rid not of our ignorance, but of our

anxiety

Clearly, sacrificing a goat in no way affects whether or not the rains will come. However, if you can

convince

yourself that sacrificing a goat can indeed control the rain, the brutal ritual allows you to live with less anxiety, because you have “done something” to control your environment.

The Pitfalls of Mythology

Unfortunately, every moral illusion we create for the sake of immediate anxiety avoidance tends to harden into cultish dogmatism.

If we end up convincing ourselves that slaughtering the goat controls the rains, we are usually the one who slaughters the goat. All too often, our ability to spin comforting fantasies and kill animals becomes our profession. Our livelihood then becomes based on lies

When this occurs – when the priestly class emerges – our greatest enemy then becomes scepticism and rational curiosity. Since we make our living by lying, anyone who starts objectively looking for the truth threatens our livelihood, our sense of virtue

, and our position in the community.

If it becomes revealed that we have just made up our answers to prey upon others – and that we have provided only the

illusion

of security and control, to the great detriment of the community – then we are also likely to be attacked in retaliation, or banished from our community as liars and con men. We will be revealed to our children as shallow and manipulative thieves, and will be cast out into the wilderness, subject to all the whims of nature, beasts and men.

This is why mythologizing is so elementally destructive. Whenever you create a group of people who profit from lies

and violence – the church and the state, respectively – you create a hardened caste whose self-interest can only be maintained through brutality and a willingness to attack virtue.

Mythology always becomes cancer

Mythology and the Appearance of Control

Mythologizing, then, masks anxiety by creating the

appearance

of control.

Like any drug, this temporarily reduces anxiety

in the moment, while continually escalating it in the long run.

Mythologizing is in essence the creation of an

unsubstantiated link between cause and effect

. Why does Bob have epilepsy? Why, because he is

possessed by a demon!

Naturally, since this supposed

“cause and effect” is entirely illusory, it cannot rest on its own empirical merits, but must be aggressively inflicted and defended through propaganda and force.

There is no

“Church of Gravity,” which drags young children into Sunday school to repeat to them over and over that gravity exists, that gravity is real, that gravity has an effect on matter – and that the children will be sent to hell for disbelieving in gravity. Similarly, there are no “Temples of the Hot Stoves” which strive over and over to inculcate the belief in children that a hot stove will burn them if they touch it.

The reason for this, of course, is that children

have direct empirical perceptions of gravity and heat – the cause-and-effect is very immediate, very testable, very powerful, perfectly consistent, and so perfectly real.

It is only when the cause-and-effect is

imaginary

that moral and physical aggression need to be deployed against anyone who questions it.

Statism and Anxiety

The mythology around “the state” in many ways exceeds – particularly in the modern world – the mythology that surrounds superstitious religiosity.

The question:

how can human society be organized?

is not answered by the state, any more than the question

where did the world come from?

is answered by religion.

If a man says,

“My wife loves me,” and then locks her in the basement and threatens to shoot her if she tries to escape, do we believe him?

“theory” cannot be considered “proven” if all it does is shoot anyone who disagrees with it.

In fact, any theory which requires violent defense is by any rational standard of proof utterly wrong or false to begin with.

Thus the thesis that “a state is required to organize society,” is demonstrably false, because it is not in fact a thesis at all, but rather a

violently aggressive dogma

Shooting those who disagree with you does not make you right, but rather proves that your position is wrong, corrupt

and evil.

The State and Society

Since the state uses compulsion to “organize” society, it repudiates the very concept of “society,” just as rape repudiates the very concept of “love making,” and robbery repudiates the concept of “property.”

Using

“the state” to answer the question of how society should be organized is morally identical to using kidnapping and imprisonment to answer the question of how to get someone to “love” you.

It is the mere

illusion

of an answer, rather than a real answer – and like all illusory answers, not only is it brutal in the extreme, but it also actively prevents the pursuit of true answers.

The False Answers of Statism

When people ask, “How should children be educated?” – the answer, inevitably, is:

we should educate them through the state

This is not an answer at all.

We may as well answer the question

how should people get married?

with the answer:

we should force them to cohabitate at gunpoint

However, the moment that force is used, voluntary descriptions must be abandoned.

If I steal your wallet at gunpoint, I cannot logically call the transfer of money “charity.”

If we force people to get

“married,” it is not

marriage

, but rather

institutionalized rape

If we force children

to get “educated,” it is not

education

but rather

institutionalized indoctrination

In the same way, if we bully

, force, manipulate or threaten children to get them to believe in God, what results is not

belief

, but frightened conformity, which can also be termed brain-rape or brainwashing.

And the same is true of love