Rants Within the Undead God

____________________________________________________

Sixth Installment
Rants Within the Undead God
Sixth Installment

Benjamin Cain

RantsWithinTheUndeadGod.blogspot.ca
Copyright © 2014 Benjamin Cain
Chapters
____________________________________________________

Artificiality: The Miracle Hiding in Plain Sight 1

Ancient and Modern Enlightenment: from Noosphere to Technosphere 6

Morality, Living Art, and the Undead Muse 11

The Ironies of Modern Progress and Infantilization 17

Fame and the Comedy of False Gods 26

Stoicism and Cosmic Horror 32

Artistic Creativity: Angst’s Antidote and the Outsider’s Solace 39

Awake while Sleeping: DMT and Paradoxical Consciousness 47

Sexism and the Horror of Sex 54

Love or Disgust? A Christian debates a Misanthrope 59

Debate with YouTube Antinatalist, Inmendham 65

Answering Sam Harris’s Moral Landscape Challenge 88

Commiserating in the Undead God 90

 1

Artificiality: The Miracle Hiding in Plain Sight

____________________________________________________

What is the relationship between the natural and the supernatural, and how does that
relationship compare to the one between the natural and the artificial? I argue that philosophical
naturalism is consistent with the distinction between nature-as-wilderness and the artificial
microcosms we create, and that that distinction has religious, albeit atheistic implications.

Naturalism and Dualism

Philosophical naturalism is the generalization that everything is natural rather than supernatural.
Science determines what’s natural, so this philosophy amounts to saying that natural laws are
universal, that there are no real miracles in the sense of events that scientists couldn’t possibly
explain. The metaphysical generalization that all events themselves are intrinsically natural
quickly runs into pragmatic and epistemological issues. Scientists assume that the universe is a
united whole ordered by natural laws, but they do so for pragmatic reasons. They think there’s
no point in being defeatist, in presuming that some event is miraculous and beyond our
comprehension—especially since most previous doubts about the all-encompassing scope of
scientific methods of inquiry have proved wrong, which is to say that scientists have explained
more and more of the universe by assuming that the same natural laws apply everywhere.
Scientists are practical about this, because they’re not so interested in the philosophical issue of
naturalism in the first place. To them, naturalism is their business, not a matter for idle
speculation.

The question of the distinction between the natural and the supernatural also has an epistemic
component, having to do with the limits of our cognitive capacities. Arthur C. Clarke’s dictum
that sufficiently advanced technology will seem magical nicely illustrates this epistemic point.
We can assume that the universe is an ordered whole, a cosmos in the strict sense, but we may
not be clever enough to explain how all of the parts hang together, in which case the
metaphysical generalization is faith-based or speculative. Indeed, there are obvious naturalistic
reasons to doubt that the exapted rational powers of primates like us could comprehend
everything the universe can become or can do. Just because science has progressed for a few
centuries doesn’t mean science has no limits. In fact, even if science comes to explain
everything we encounter, science may still be limited, because science can have unknown
unknowns. Indeed, the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that this isn’t just
idle defeatism, since physicists themselves may have to posit an infinite number of universes
determined by different sets of laws. Those other universes will be unknown in that we can have
no direct contact with them. Moreover, this means that natural laws aren’t universal after all,
which leaves ontological room for unnatural realms (for universes different from ours), although
not for miracles in the sense of supernatural interventions in our natural universe.
 2

Descartes applied the theistic solution to the problem of whether anything is supernatural, by
positing mental substances alongside physical ones. Thus, we might say that fundamentally
there are two kinds of things so that scientific methods might work only for one of them. This is
metaphysical dualism, which philosophical naturalists reject. The naturalist says that minds are
natural, not supernatural, and that cognitive scientists (including neurobiologists and
psychologists) can explain mental phenomena. Dualists, meanwhile, redefine the supernatural
substance to push it further and further outside of the increasing subject matter of science, by
burying it in consciousness, for example. This is the god-of-the-gaps gambit of holding on to
less and less reasonable beliefs, by moving the goalposts. According to dualists, scientists can
explain the brain but not the conscious states that run on the brain in something like the way
that computer programs run on the computer’s hardware. Mysterians are epistemic dualists and
they say that consciousness itself is unnatural in that scientists will never satisfactorily explain
the first-personal, subjective essence of consciousness, since scientific methods work only
when scientists observe things objectively, from a third-personal standpoint.

But even if consciousness were unnatural, this would leave the mystery of how something
unnatural could interact with nature. Recent dualists talk about emergent properties, about
nature’s building more and more complex layers so that each layer has different patterns that
call for explanation in terms of an indispensible set of special laws. This sort of weaker dualist
concedes, though, that the fundamental level is physical, not mental, which allows this dualist to
call herself a metaphysical naturalist even as she holds to an epistemic kind of dualism, since
she says that different parts of nature will have to be explained in different, nonreducible terms.

Metaphysics as Myth for Ultrarationalists

Such are some of the compromises that philosophers have proposed to reconcile scientists’
amazing success in explaining the world in natural terms, with the intuition that scientific
methods nevertheless have limits, that personhood isn’t subject to such explanation. In any
case, I’m relatively uninterested in the metaphysical question of whether everything is natural.
This is because I have a deflationary view of metaphysics. I think that modern metaphysical
theses are scientistic substitutes for myths that appeal to modernists and postmodernists who
like to think they’re so intellectually advanced that they needn’t ground their worldview in mere
faith-based narratives. With the exception of much of the US, which has been infantilized by its
mass media, technologically-advanced civilizations tend to rigidly distinguish faith from reason
and to idolize those who seem perfectly rational. Thus, we prefer objective-sounding
philosophical memes instead of transparently-fictional narratives. We think we can begin the
search for knowledge rationally, by basing our beliefs on the evidence and by following logical
rules of inference, but that’s only because we presuppose our nonrational, scientistic
convictions.

For example, we presuppose the ideal of ultrarationality, even though the last century has
supplied us with many reasons to think that rationality isn’t the solution to all our problems. WWI
was eminently rational: the alliances were fulfilled to the letter and the war of attrition took into
account mainly the quantities of materiel rather than the horror of what the soldiers were doing.
Also, the technologies and economic systems that are threatening the ecosystem are supported
by science and mathematical reasoning. But there are prior, normative questions about how to
choose our collective goals. At best, reason tells us the facts, not the rightness of our
ultimate values and purposes. What’s needed in addition to raw intelligence is an inspiring
sort of character that uses reason in virtuous ways. The nobler, more enlightened, and tragically
heroic modernists should see the question of the ground of our beliefs as having an aesthetic
 3

answer, which means that we should evaluate our deepest philosophical or religious beliefs by
treating them as fictions. This is an esoteric perspective, which is suitable mostly to introverted,
creative, artistic folks who can appreciate the need for stories even though their inside-
information about how stories are created and told makes it harder for them to suspend their
disbelief and lose themselves in a story as if the story were something other than fictional.

Granted, metaphysical naturalism doesn’t sound at all like a traditional myth. What they have in
common, though, is that they’re overgeneralizations that satisfy our craving for ultimate,
absolute answers. For skeptical modern secularists who can’t take traditional myths seriously,
because they’ve adopted the science-centered ideal of ultrarationality, metaphysical
speculations serve the same role as anthropocentric metaphors and fairytales. Of course, the
ancient myths weren’t intended to be treated as protoscientific theories of the bare facts, since
there was rarely any such conception of the facts; instead, myths were phenomenological
expressions of how the world seemed from the perspective of those who were proud of their
culture. For the most part, postmodernists are no longer proud of modernity and so our
naturalistic speculations express our declining faith only indirectly, through the scientistic
runaround. Ultrarationalists like to think we’ve evolved past the primitive need for irrational faith
and so in place of the myths that would make plain the psychological and social implications of
our disenchantment with the world, we intellectual elites pretend that we take as fundamental
just the rational, science-centered generalizations which leave out the subjective, teleological,
and normative aspects of experience. As for the majority of secularists, who are unfamiliar with
philosophy or with science, they’re free to assimilate the myths purveyed by popular culture, and
those myths will serve various economic or political agendas.

Artificiality and the Miraculous

In any case, I prefer to think of the difference between the natural and the supernatural in terms
of the distinction between the wild and the artificial. The metaphysical and epistemological
meanings of “natural” are given above, in terms of natural laws, scientific methods, and so on.
But there’s another meaning of “natural,” one that identifies nature with the pristine wilderness,
with that part of the world that isn’t intelligently designed or engineered. Nature in this second
sense consists of everything that’s jungle-like. This isn’t to say that trees grow everywhere, even
in outer space; I’m speaking of the jungle in phenomenological terms, not geological ones. The
point is that most of the universe is literally untouched by anything with the sensation of touch
and is thus wild in the sense of being what I call undead. Most of the universe mindlessly
creates itself through evolution and complexification and that fact is responsible for what
we call natural evil, meaning the world’s indifference to our preferences. This evil emerges
in the ever-present luck factor in our lives, in the fact that death and extinction are indispensible
to organic evolution, and in the curse of reason which sets knowledge at odds with happiness.

Undead nature is opposed by the realm of the artificial, by the microcosms created by the
animals that manage to take some control over themselves and their environment. Artifacts are
those parts of the world that are indeed intelligently formed and chosen. For example, our cities
stand apart from the wilderness in that whereas the wilderness operates according to undead
natural laws and thus isn’t attuned to our ideals, cities work according to social regulations that
respect our welfare, since we design our artifacts to function in intended ways, and so since we
care about ourselves, our artificial worlds serve us. Thus, while Copernicus established that
we’re not central to the wilderness or to nature in the naturalist’s metaphysical sense, he didn’t
show that we’re insignificant in every world. There are evidently worlds within worlds, and
the more intelligent and self-centered creatures seem to create worlds to cater to their
 4

desires precisely because those creatures are meaningless and forlorn in the wider
world.

As to how the natural-supernatural distinction sits with the natural-artificial one, I think you could
embrace the latter sort of dualism and be either a philosophical (metaphysical or epistemic)
naturalist or a supernaturalist. If you’re a naturalist, you can still posit that nature is effectively an
undead god in that the universe mindlessly creates itself. Thus, you can think that nonliving
processes eventually became living ones and that these in turn produced the artificial worlds
within the broader, wholly undead and wild one. The natural transition from nonlife to life is still
poorly understood, but a naturalist can speak generally of emergent properties, self-organizing
systems, and transformations through evolution and complexification. As for the supernaturalist,
she can surmise that our power of creating artificial worlds derives from our similarity to the
divine creator of nature. The dichotomy between the natural wilderness and artificiality is
thus neutral with regard to the deeper question of whether everything is metaphysically
or epistemically natural. Personally, I prefer the naturalistic philosophy, but I’m happy to
entertain the theistic solution as long as we take care to update the theistic myths so that they
have a chance of cohering with the postmodern zeitgeist. Philipp Mainlander’s theology does
this admirably, by concluding that God is literally dead as a result of suicide. By contrast, the
traditional anthropocentric myths are now just embarrassingly anachronistic; certainly, they’ve
lost their aesthetic power, having long since become unbearable clichés.

But what’s intriguing here is the comparison of the supernatural with the artificial. Suppose we
adopt the naturalistic worldview so that we accept David Hume’s inductive reasoning against the
likelihood of miracles. That is to say, we prefer to turn to even the unlikeliest naturalistic
explanation of any event, as opposed to resorting to a supernatural pseudo-explanation,
because we put our trust in naturalistic, pragmatic principles. Nevertheless, the anomalousness
of artificiality in the greater cosmic wilderness is obvious. Even if there’s life elsewhere in the
universe, because life necessarily emerges under certain conditions, the abyss between nonlife
and life—and especially between the undead wilderness and the sentient creature who is
godlike at the center of her artificial world—is unlike the gap between any other natural orders.
Subatomic processes coalesce into molecules which in turn form nebulas and stars and
galaxies, and so on, and those are of course profound transformations. But however destructive
black holes or supernovas may be, there’s no process that negates nature so assuredly as the
creation of artificial worlds that replace the wilderness. We’re confined to one planet, unless we
figure out how to travel faster than light, but we can still postulate the special law of nature that,
all things being equal (i.e. abstracting from that planetary confinement which may or may not be
permanent), sentient creatures tend to transform their natural, wild environment into a
more preferable, artificial one.

The reason why the emergence of artificiality counts as a negation is that artifacts are
assigned functions by minds so that they work as intended, and minds are at least
unconsciously resentful about the natural world’s undeadness. We creators and users of
our actually anthropocentric worlds—of our languages, cultures, games, cities, nations,
infrastructures, and machines—aren’t just surprises in the natural order so that our behaviour
can’t be reductively explained in impersonal terms. No, we set ourselves in implacable
opposition to all parts of the universe that aren’t controlled by us, that don’t flatter our godlike
self-image and “function properly” as opposed to just happening as a matter of brute,
unintended fact. In this respect, crafty, self-centered creatures are like viruses—yet with the
power to rebuild not just other animals, but the nonliving parts of the world. We are undoers of
natural creation, but our Satanism is transformative rather than destructive or nihilistic. We’re
bent on reconstructing what natural forces have wrought, including our bodies.
 5

Thus, the dualism between nature-as-wilderness and the artificial microcosm is about a
transformation that happens by way of hostility. This means that although our creative
powers aren’t necessarily miraculous in the metaphysical or epistemic ways, those powers do
have religious significance. Indeed, the old creation myths should be read not so much as
anthropocentric projections onto the alien unknown, but as oblique references to what we
ourselves do and as premonitions of what we would eventually accomplish: the intelligent
design and creation of worlds. We are the gods we’ve been dreaming of and our deeds are
the miraculous interventions in the wilderness of undead events. Actions that produce
artifacts are supernatural in that they oppose and thus transcend nature-as-wilderness. Theistic
myths thus work like science fiction stories that speak directly of protagonists in a distant future,
to indirectly comment on what’s happening at present. The ancient pantheons and religious
creeds are effectively tools to help us understand our relative divinity in the lifeless universe. Of
course, those tools also lead us astray and we lose the forest for the trees; that is, we vulgarize
the theologies, literalizing the metaphors instead of seeing them as artworks that celebrate our
uniqueness as intelligent creators.

It’s well known that sometimes we become so familiar with what’s right in front of us that we
eventually fail to appreciate its importance. For thousands of years we’ve imagined heavens
and hells, transcendent realms of supernatural deities, while all along we’ve been busy
transcending nature-as-wilderness and adding an artificial domain to the cosmos. To preserve
our morality but also our hope that nature will be perfected in an end time, we’ve pretended that
we’re merely part of the natural order and that we must grovel before the true gods. But if
anything will finally bring nature in line with some idea of the Good, it will be creatures like us.
We have always been the wonder-workers. We marvel at nature’s creativity but we’re also
repelled by it, because natural forces and systems are robotic and zombielike, and thus they’re
amoral and neutral in their treatment of their most precious developments, the sentient
creatures. We are hardly saints, mind you, and we may even destroy all life because of our
arrogance and narrow-mindedness. But we have the potential to fulfill certain ideals whereas
undead nature has none—except indirectly, through beings like us.

And so this is how naturalists should think of miracles. We shouldn’t sneer at religions because
we’re beholden to an ultrarational ideal that is itself quite faith-based. That lack of self-
awareness on our part is unseemly and almost as embarrassing as the theist’s treatment of her
theological fictions as scientific statements of cold, hard fact. Instead, we should reconstruct the
old dualisms in terms of the divide between the wilderness and the artificial worlds we create.
Again, we are the godlike beings we’ve always had a sneaking suspicion might exist
somewhere. Therefore, we should wonder not just at our relative divinity and at the
anomalies of our creative acts, but at the undead cosmos that might just be destined to
undo itself through the wisdom of the sentient beings that dwell within it.
 6

Ancient and Modern Enlightenment: from Noosphere to

Technosphere
____________________________________________________

Enlightenment is elite cognition, the seeing past collective error and illusion to a hidden reality.
But the ancient idea of enlightenment differs greatly from the modern one and there may be a
further shift in the postmodern era. I’ll try to shed some light on enlightenment, by pursuing
these comparisons.

Ancient Enlightenment: Monism and Personification

Enlightenment in the ancient world was made possible by a falling away from our mythopoeic,
nomadic prehistory. In that Paleolithic period, symbolized by the wild Enkidu in the Epic of
Gilgamesh and by the biblical Adam in Eden, there was no enlightenment since everything was
thoroughly personified and so nothing could have been perceived as unfamiliar or alien to the
masses. The world was experienced as a noosphere, filled with mentality. Only after the rise of
sedentary civilization in the Neolithic Era, when farming replaced nomadic hunting in 10,000
BCE, which allowed for much larger populations, was there a loss of that enchanted mode of
experience which actually depended on a sort of blissful collective ignorance. As a population
increases, the so-called Law of Oligarchy takes hold, which means that social power must be
concentrated to avoid civilizational collapse. Dominance hierarchies are established and those
in the lower classes become envious of the stronger and more privileged members who are
sure to display their greater wealth and access to women with symbols of their higher status. By
doing so, each social class learns its boundaries so that the social structure won’t be
overridden, which would invite anarchy.

As Rousseau argued, civilization was the precondition of what we might call the sin of egoism.
Contrary to Rousseau, prehistoric life wasn’t utopian; at least, objectively, human life in the
Paleolithic Era was likely quite savage. But the ancients seemed to have an easier time
perceiving the world in magical terms, judging from the evidence of their religions and
extrapolating from what we know of children’s experience, given their similar dearth of content
to occupy their collective memory. Thus, even as they killed each other over trifles, the
prehistoric people would have interpreted such horror as profoundly meaningful. In any case, I
think Rousseau is right that civilization made possible a falling away from a kind of intrinsic
innocence. Specifically, the increased social specialization led to an epistemic inequality. As
food was stored and more and more people lived together, there was greater need for practical
knowledge in such areas as architecture, medicine, sanitation, and warfare. The elites became
decadent and alienated from nature, since they found themselves free to indulge their appetites
with artificial diversions, as specialists took care of the necessities of survival such as the
harvesting of food or the defense of the borders. These elites codified the myths that expressed
the population’s mores, but while the uneducated majority clung to their naïve, anthropocentric
 7

traditions, the cynical and self-absorbed elites more likely regarded the folk tales as
superstitions.

Here, then, was the origin of enlightenment as the opposite of wholesale ignorance—and this
was a normative dichotomy. Enlightenment was good and its opposite, mental darkness, was
bad. Whereas prior to civilization everyone was enlightened, in a sense, or at least everyone
deferred to the shaman’s interpretation of how the spiritual and material worlds are intermixed,
civilized people came to believe there’s a secret perspective which alone imparts the ultimate
truth, leaving the majority in relative ignorance. As for the content of the enlightened worldview
in the ancient world, this was informed by both the egoism and the cynicism that distinguished
the hierarchical civilization from the prehistoric past. The content thus had two elements:
monism and personification. On the one hand, reality was thought to be a unity, whereas the
world appeared to be a multiplicity. Enlightenment was the ability to see past the illusion of
change, to the underlying timeless interconnection between all events. Again, in the mythopoeic
world, there was no distinction between reality and appearance, because mental projections
were given equal weight with the material unfolding of events. The world was a magical place.
But the enlightened person had to recover a distorted memory of that childlike, mythopoeic
vision, as it were, by theorizing a unity beyond the disenchanted multiplicity that confronted the
civilized ancients.

On the other hand, ultimate reality was generally personified. So the absolute unity was called
God, equated with the self, and often compared to the particular human who actually ruled the
land. That is, the civilizational structure was projected onto the spirit world and the gods were
used as symbols to reassure the ancients that their social order was just. There was such
personification even in Buddhism, specifically in the Mahayana variety, according to which
Bodhisattvas are worshipped and Buddha nature is thought to take not just the inconceivable
and thus impersonal form, but ghostly or celestial as well as physical ones.

Ancient enlightenment thus had to reconcile the urge to personify, which was a remnant
of the mythopoeic experience that was exacerbated by the advent of egoism even among
the masses, and which the elites came to use for political purposes, with the world’s
alien, indifferent oneness. That theoretical oneness expressed especially the elites’ growing
alienation from nature and their nostalgia for the presumed innocence of the earlier, nomadic
period. Monism made egoism out to be preconditioned by ignorance, since if the world were
really an ultimate unity, the apparent self’s independence would be an illusion. But because
egoism had numerous social and economic causes, the enlightened worldview retained some
anthropomorphic projections onto the unity, to rationalize the nature of the civilized individual.
There were degrees of enlightenment, so that one or the other factor, impersonal metaphysical
unity or personification, predominated. For example, in the Eastern religions, the
anthropomorphisms were stripped away as the enlightened person was thought to experience a
transcendent unity, in a purified state of consciousness. Alternatively, the monotheistic Western
traditions generally took a personal deity to be the highest principle.

Modern Enlightenment: Objectivity and Artificialization

The next epochal change was the birth of modern civilization in the European Renaissance and
Scientific Revolution, followed by the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. This
transition was marked by profound advances in investigative techniques, which presented the
educated upper classes with an altogether impersonal world. Instead of being horrified by this
new knowledge, modernists relished the opportunity to conquer a material world that has no
 8

prior rights or else they sought refuge in the halfway house of deism. In any case, modernists
were forced to reconceptualize the idea of enlightenment. Whereas the ancient kind posited a
metaphysical unity that was somehow both transcendent and personal, modernists eventually
eliminated personhood altogether, not just in metaphysics but in psychology. And so modern
enlightenment is an appreciation of the implications of thoroughgoing metaphysical
naturalism. The real world is still a hidden unity and scientists seek to uncover the causal
pattern that establishes that unity. Thus, the dichotomy between the reality of the hidden spirit
world and the illusion of mundane plurality in the spatiotemporal field of opposites became the
split between a rational understanding of nature’s impersonality, as confirmed by the impartiality
of cause and effect, and the naïve personification of anything, including ultimate reality or the
human self. Enlightened modernists are materialists who think that mind is an illusion and that
fundamental reality is bound to be alien to our sensibilities.

However, the conception of enlightenment as a matter of rationality, set off against the darkness
of superstition, can’t hold, because rationality is a personal matter which takes for granted the
illusion of the personal self. The modern myth of enlightenment as merely the courage to follow
the logic and the evidence where they lead can’t be the whole story of the great transition to the
modern period. Something else must have happened, not just a rise of rational neutrality, if
rationality itself is merely peripheral. Instead of seeing modern enlightenment in terms of the
symbol of the Light of Reason, and thus as a mental phenomenon, we should see it as
technological: modernists exited the Dark Age through their technological advances which
literally made the world brighter in the case of the commercial use of electricity. More broadly,
modern enlightenment is the expansion of the “Light” of Artificiality, which makes for a wealth of
historical data points. After all, what makes a dark age dark is the lack of lasting evidence of the
culture’s identity, due to massive illiteracy and the absence of durable technologies that tell the
tale. All of that changed with the printing press and the computer, for example. A Bright Age,
then, is bright with cultural information and the light rays should be thought of as being
transmitted especially to future historians.

Commercial light bulbs were patented in the late 19th C, although scientists studied electricity as
early as 1600 CE. The Age of Enlightenment is primarily an 18th C. period, so the world didn’t
literally become much brighter during the modern Enlightenment. However, the paradigmatic
rationality of Enlightenment intellectuals, especially that of Isaac Newton, led directly to the
Industrial Revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which included the invention of the
light bulb. So we should look at modern enlightenment as beginning with the myth of
rationality and giving way to wonder at the undeniable reality of recent technological
advance. First came the light of Reason, then scientists realized that personhood and thus
reason are illusory. But all along, the modern process was set in motion which replaced the
darkness of nature with the light of artificiality (with technological incarnations of culture which
endure and testify to our historical identity). Thus, modern enlightenment is only inchoately the
dichotomy between neutral (non-personifying) reason and ignorance; the real distinction is
between natural, pristine reality, which is dark and monstrous precisely because of its
impersonality, and the light we bring to the world by impressing our stamp into it—not
subjectively through mere theological interpretation or magical supposition, as in the mythopoeic
period, but through the inexorable, objective spread of modern technology.

What’s monumental about modernity isn’t that some white male Europeans learned to think
more rigorously, thanks to the scientific methods they invented. Of course, there are such
methods, but modern enlightenment shouldn’t be personalized. When you characterize the new
kind of enlightenment in that way, you’re left with incoherence since naturalism won’t support
naïve personification. Instead, modern enlightenment must be thought of as a great widening of
 9

perspective, so that instead of projecting our ego onto indifferent nature, we eliminate our ego
through existential encounters with nature’s monstrosity which humiliate us, doing away with our
pretensions. Left thusly vacated, the real world is free to flow through us, as it were. In this case,
the glory goes not to the great scientists, regardless of how exoteric modern history is told; the
scientific methods, for example, must be part of nature’s self-overcoming on our planet, due to a
shift from biological processes to artificial ones.

Scientific methods of thought are algorithms which presage the functions of high technology, as
in the computer. In other words, before mass technology there was massive regimentation of
intellectual life, whereas prior to the Scientific Revolution, social regimentation was confined to
the army, to government, farming, and the like, while the business of discovering the nature of
reality was still a free-wheeling affair. Ancient philosophy was mostly an artistic kind of
speculation, although there are protoscientific aspects of ancient Greek and Indian philosophies.
The Presocratics, for example, followed the logic of their hypotheses, however counterintuitive
those hypotheses may have been. But what made the Scientific Revolution so special,
objectively speaking, was a social transformation. Instead of being ruled mainly by biological
norms, such as by the instinct of preserving the genes through sexual reproduction, which were
thinly rationalized by the art of myth-making, a new dynamic was introduced: what Jacques Ellul
called the necessity of efficiency as a matter of technique.

All species employ techniques, because they’re adapted to their environment, but the Scientific
Revolution was the birth of an impersonal, regimented subculture of cognitive elites, one that’s
modeled more and more on the machines made possible by that cognitive labour. In place of
personification, mystification, or artistic speculation, there’s surrender to rational technique, to
algorithms, and to the other scientific methods (public and repeatable testing of hypotheses,
mathematical precision, and so on). It’s as though in depersonalizing ourselves, thanks to
skepticism, the disempowerment of the Catholic Church, and so forth, we allowed nature’s
impersonality to flow more easily through our social structures. Whereas hitherto, our bodies
were governed by evolutionary norms and our minds were consumed by myths and
illusions of personhood, which we projected onto nature so that we became doubly
deluded, modernists abandoned personification, which freed the mind to mimic what the
rest of the universe is doing, namely to flow in what I call an undead (impersonal but not
inert) fashion.

We still personify techniques when we think of them teleologically, as having a mentally

represented goal. However, even if there’s no divine mind desiring nature to end in some way,
natural processes do have ends, which is just to say that there are natural processes, as such,
or changes that have initial conditions, transitional periods, and probable points of termination.
The more we understand nature, the wider our field of vision until we think of everything as a
cosmic whole having a beginning (the Big Bang), a middle (evolution and complexification in
space and time), and an end state, such as the universe’s heat death. What we call the
scientific methods, then, or the more efficient modern techniques of rational thought, are
really—according to the enlightened modernist—an inflowing of some underlying natural
process besides biological evolution, one which begins with ultra-rational cognition and
continues with the elimination of the noosphere and with the transformation of the biosphere into
the technosphere.
 10

Counter-Enlightenment and the Return of Mythopoeic Reverie

As long as we’re depersonalizing enlightenment, we should note the Counter-Enlightenment
period which leads from the Romantics and other early critics of modern hyper-rationality to
postmodern relativism and general jadedness. I won’t attempt to adjudicate this debate here,
but I want to close by reflecting on whether the Counter-Enlightenment should be interpreted as
an omen indicating that modern enlightenment will itself be transformed. Again, if we ignore the
psychological and social levels of inquiry, since an enlightened modernist must regard them as
misleading, we can look at historical developments as stages of some larger process. Natural
selection explains the design of living bodies, but not the cultural shifts between elite forms of
cognition. From mythopoeic animism, to the middle ground of ancient mystical theism, to
modern naturalism, there’s a clear elimination of personhood from grand theories. Moreover,
there’s exponential progress in technical innovation, as modernists have come to divorce
rationality from artistic interpretation. Rather than seeing herself as similar to a shaman, in being
a wise person, healer, or hero for venturing into the unknown, an enlightened modernist is more
likely to think of herself as a glorified calculator. Modern cognition is hyper-rational in that logic
for us is demythologized, and the sciences are separate from the arts and from the humanities,
which means that scientific cognition is inhuman (objective and neutral). Science is thus the
indwelling of natural mechanisms, due to a breakdown in resistance from religious
delusions, resulting in the perfection of the artificial world. Modern geniuses are distorted
mirrors held up to undead nature, the reflected image being a technological bastardization of the
monstrous original.

And yet we may be witnessing here a cycle rather than a linear progression. Technology may
allow us to recover the mythopoeic union of object and subject, so that modern objectivity
overcomes itself through its technological progeny. After all, the artificial world caters to our
whims and so exacerbates egoism and the urge to personify. Whereas modern enlightenment
began with a vision of a lifeless, mechanical universe, the postmodern kind is much less arid
and austere. This is because postmodernists are immersed in an artificial world which
turns fantasies into realities on a minute-by-minute basis, thus perhaps fulfilling the
promise of mythopoeic speculation. For example, if you’re hungry, you may ask your
smartphone where the nearest restaurant is and that phone will speak to you; next, you’ll follow
the signs in your car which adjusts to your preferences in a hundred ways, and you’ll arrive at
the restaurant and be served without having to hunt or cook the animal yourself. The prehistoric
fantasy was that nature is alive. Modernists discovered that everything is at best undead and
certainly devoid of purpose or of mental, as opposed to biological, life. But perhaps
postmodernists are realizing that the world was undead whereas it’s now being imbued with
purpose and brought to nonbiological life by us through technology. Instead of mythologizing
the world, we postmodernists artificialize it, and whereas natural mechanisms train us to
be animals following evolutionary rhythms, artificial mechanisms may train us to be
something else entirely, such as infantilized consumers that recapture the prehistoric sense of
being at the world’s all-important center, thanks to our history of taming the hostile wilderness.
 11

Morality, Living Art, and the Undead Muse

________________________________________________

Moderns who are heirs to the science-centered way of looking at the world sometimes find
themselves wringing their hands about the lack of morality without God. Nietzsche feared that
after the masses came to lose the need for God, modern societies would become nihilistic.
More recently, liberal New Atheists assure agnostics and moderate theists that there’s no such
threat, that we can just lay aside the irrational beliefs in God, divine revelation, and miracles and
get on with enjoying our life. Christian apologists like William Lane Craig argue that morality
logically depends on theistic beliefs: atheists can be moral, but their goodness will be irrational
and gratuitous, as far as their philosophical assumptions are concerned. Were there no God, as
Dostoevsky said, everything would be permitted, so we would be smart to care more about
ourselves than others and to pursue our narrow self-interest even at other people’s expense,
because we’d live for only a handful of decades, with no reason to worry about our eternal
condition in an afterlife.

Atheistic Morality as a Farce

However any of those lines of argument turns out, those who have passed through the Age of
Reason without covering their eyes and ears and backlashing against the naturalistic worldview,
and who therefore think that traditional monotheism is now anachronistic, do have a serious
problem fitting morality into their way of living. There’s no need to consider the more abstruse
philosophical arguments that line up on either side of the issue, because it suffices to recognize
one indubitable fact. When people could take for granted that a personal God or divine
pantheon exists, because beliefs were generally driven by a naïve anthropocentrism that
was unchecked by the systematically impersonal scientific methods of investigation, the
human concern with morality had metaphysical standing. After all, the universe then was
God’s kingdom and everything was artificial and regulated by God’s intentions, just as we
assign purposes to nearly everything we create. After the rise of modern scientific naturalism,
the default view is that the universe isn’t artificial or governed by anyone; at the metaphysical
level, natural “laws” have replaced teleological functions or divine moral commandments. This
means that as scientists view the world, even the talk of natural “processes” or “mechanisms”
determined by natural “laws” is tainted by metaphors that bear traces of the obsolete,
personifying model of the ultimate stuff of reality. Natural events just happen. In the most
general, metaphysical terms, there is no good or bad in nature. As long as nature is no one’s
kingdom or artifact, but is instead a thoroughly impersonal domain that’s evolving and
complexifying for no reason, our concern with right and wrong is anomalous and without
metaphysical justification.

A short way of saying this is to say that atheistic morality is subjective rather than objective. An
atheist may be inclined to be nice to strangers, but were such a person to feel morally bound to
be nice, that would be a matter of emotion, instinct, or taste which could just as well go the other
 12

way. A nice atheist could be retrained to be selfish and cruel, and the atheist can give no grand
reason why one sort of character is better than another. All the nice atheist could say in her
defense is that she feels niceness is better than cruelty or that niceness is more useful to her
under some set of circumstances. Morality becomes an arbitrary matter of taste or else a
changeable psychological mechanism or a tool with more or less utility.

In the atheist’s big picture, morality means nothing because everything is fundamentally
physical and impersonal. Morality is part of the pointless evolution of life, with no deeper
grounding in the nature of the universe, whereas a monotheist is assured that our thoughts of
right and wrong have the greatest possible importance. God put those thoughts there and by
fulfilling some divine moral purpose, the whole universe redounds to God’s majesty. Indeed,
theism implies that there are no accidents, that everything happens for an ultimate, absolute
reason, and that our preoccupation with personal and social goods indicates that we belong to
the world in the same way as children who feel at home in their loving parents’ house. All of that
is dubious, at best, in the modern age. Instead of feeling pride in our way of life, we’re left with
the existential fear that our moral inclinations are absurd, that we either know too much about
the world’s godlessness, in which case we come to feel alienated from everything including
ourselves, or we distract ourselves with daydreams to play out our years as clowns pretending
to be happy.

For sociopolitical reasons, many atheistic naturalists want to downplay these unpleasant
implications. Atheists in the US and UK are on missions to defeat dangerous Christian and
Muslim extremists and to make the world safe for secular humanism. So if only for strategic
reasons, the last thing many atheists want is for their worldview to be linked to this kind of dark
existentialism—as it was once linked to communism in the US. Moreover, some of these
atheists are convinced that they should have no trouble being happy, because the existential
worries are overblown. Again, though, whatever compromises atheistic naturalists might devise
to justify their typically liberal values, there’s no gainsaying the difference between theistic and
naturalistic metaphysics: morality is much more secure in the former than in the latter.

As long as we think of the laws of right and wrong as chosen by some mind, as we
choose our society’s laws to civilize us and regulate our behaviour, morality will be
superfluous for the atheistic naturalist. Liberal values, for example, will be merely politically
correct, borrowed from the Judeo-Christian tradition, or derived from our evolved social
instincts. In any case, we could just as well choose a new set of social laws to govern our
interactions, which is what it means to say that morality is subjective. By contrast, natural laws
are unavoidable because they’re objective, which is to say that they’re chosen by no one but
forced on all physical things, including sentient creatures like us. Morality must then be a kind of
game. You could choose to play baseball or switch to hockey; likewise, you could choose to be
kind or switch to being belligerent. Of course, our character stands in the way of instantaneous
changes in our behaviour, should we choose to play some new moral game, but the fact that
someone has been trained to think highly of an ideal doesn’t make that ideal right. Even if our
character traits become so ingrained that we can’t apply a new morality, the point is that in the
naturalistic worldview, morality is up to us. Were we to choose to teach our children the opposite
of the Golden Rule, they would grow up to make more sociopathic moves, having learned that
they’re obliged to lie and scheme and overpower each other. And the universe would proceed
along its inhuman course, wholly indifferent to our new preferences.
 13

Moral Deeds as Inspiring Works of Art

All of which should induce a sense of existential vertigo, but this isn’t the final word on morality
for the disenchanted modernist. Morality can be construed as an aesthetic phenomenon. Moral
right can be thought of as a kind of beauty, badness as a kind of ugliness. When we judge our
actions right or wrong, we’re exercising artistic taste, because everything we do becomes a
work of art. The chief advantage of this way of thinking of morality is that it gives rightness and
wrongness unassailable foundations in naturalistic ontology. Precisely because the universe
isn’t created by a mind, from the science-centered perspective, nature itself must be the ultimate
creator. Natural forces create and reshape matter, evolving new and more complex forms.
Human morality is therefore at home in nature, after all, as long as morality is interpreted
as part of a creative process. Our moral aspirations guide the development of our kind,
shaping us as individuals and collectives. The conscience is like the muse that whispers into the
artist’s ear, inspiring her to surpass her previous artistic efforts. And so we create ourselves and
our societies, imitating the mindless systems that work all around us.

All organic processes double nature’s fundamental creativity in this way, as organisms erect
boundaries around their inner worlds so that their bodies might be free to evolve along the
biological and social paths, and even to reshape their environments with their traits or with tools
they construct to put more ingenious plans into effect. Human creators are especially aware,
rational, flexible, and audacious, but the point is that there’s this continuity from nature’s
impersonal transformations to living things’ internally-directed ones. The atheist does affirm that
nature is fundamentally physical and impersonal, so it turns out that minds aren’t needed to
create wonders. And if morality is a tool we use for our creative purposes, moralists needn’t feel
so alienated from the world, after all, because they’re in good company; in fact, the universe
would consist of so many art studios and museums, now showcasing the new products and
later clearing their walls for new works.

Does nature’s evident creativity really amount to artistry, though, so that human art standards
apply, say, to physical or chemical processes? Not exactly. Human artists have minds and the
natural systems in the rest of the universe don’t, so there’s at best an analogy here—but the
comparison is stronger than it might seem at first glance. Most of the artifacts we construct have
functions that we assign to them, but artworks are exceptional in often having the brute
uselessness that purely physical events seem to have. The artist creates because she feels
compelled to do so and regardless of whether the work pleases anyone, the work stands as a
creative expression. The universe feels nothing, but it nevertheless creates new phases of itself
as it’s compelled to by natural forces. Modern art is thought to be especially pointless in this
respect: the modern artist merely explores some artistic medium without any ulterior motive.
Likewise, matter, space, and energy seem to mindlessly explore their possibilities, perhaps
even realizing them all in the megaverse, bringing into being a vast multitude of configurations
from the subatomic level to the galactic and universal ones. Indeed, this similarity between
natural creativity and modern art may not be a coincidence, since the scientific discovery of
nature’s fundamental impersonality impacted Western cultures at large.

Still, we say artworks are good or bad, while it makes less sense to speak of a good or bad
atom, asteroid, or star. This is because our art has value that derives from our minds and
modernists are led to think there’s no mind behind natural as opposed to artificial creativity. So a
physical event isn’t identical to the creation of art; the two are only similar. But that’s enough to
overcome the atheist’s anxiety that human life is utterly anomalous and absurd in the grand
scheme. On the contrary, we’re merely more complex kinds of creators than the
 14

impersonal systems that have been working for billions of years throughout the cosmos.
We have minds and we put our reason, imagination, emotions, memories, and artistic vision to
use when deciding not just what to paint or write or sing, but how to live and how society should
be structured. Most of us are mediocre artists while a few are geniuses, and the natural
elements and forces are proto-artists whose works are nevertheless far more sublime than
anything we could hope to achieve.

But there’s more to the comparison. In fact, the very feature of atheistic naturalism that
threatens to subvert society by negating our moral principles, without which civilized life seems
impossible, has an aesthetic aspect. Naturalism, the modern philosophy that jeopardizes
morality, is science-centered, and scientists are quintessentially objective. Objectivity is our
ability to see things as they are in themselves rather than as how they seem merely to creatures
like us. Modern objectivity is precisely what leads to existential angst, because when we
look at something objectively we give up the human-centered perspective and so entertain the
thought that what we’re looking at is entirely indifferent towards us; objects are just the things
that carry on as they were, being forced by natural law to behave as they do, regardless of our
preferences. All of nature is objective in this respect, and so nothing we feel or do matters to the
world—as we understand when we’re in an objective frame of mind.

And yet scientific objectivity is very similar to the aesthetic perspective. Paintings, songs,
novels, and dances may have various uses, but as long as we’re evaluating them from an
instrumental point of view, reflecting on the utility of their results, we’re not thinking of them as
artworks. Indeed, an artwork is an art object, in that the art must be viewed as something
that’s uselessly complete in itself. Only when viewed without any interest on our part, when
the object is perceived as a microcosm or a sort of independent world that would carry on
without the viewer, does the object seem beautiful or ugly, and only then might we have that
intimation of the object’s sublimity, of its transcending everything else because of its self-
sufficiency.

So although there’s no artist at the root of nature, anything in nature can be aesthetically
interpreted and indeed that artistic appreciation of nature’s impersonal works requires
something like scientific objectivity. Thus, the very aspect of modernity that seems to
threaten morality ironically presents us with the makings of a naturalized account of
moral right and wrong. Morality is a kind of artistic excellence. Originality, then, should be a
chief virtue, derivativeness a sign of moral mediocrity. This means that the actions that best
distinguish us as members of our species have the highest moral worth, while those that blur
the line between our species and the others are morally unbecoming. In other words, the more
common and thus animalistic our behaviour, the less its moral worth. Evil, in this case, is
hideousness on account of some action’s egregious betrayal of our creative potential, such as a
subhuman action that flows directly from some primitive neural circuit without being screened by
the person’s more complex cognitive systems.

For example, our species is distinguished by our mentality, which is to say our ability to solve
our problems with abstract symbols as opposed to relying just on our physical bodies. Thus,
when someone loses his temper and kills a person for angering him, that’s an evil act not
because it violates any divine law, but because it’s artistically unworthy; the regressive loss of
temper represents a failure to fulfill our creative potential. Again, in so far as delusions blind us
to the truth, a delusory action puts us on all fours with the more ignorant and narrow-minded
animal species, which makes the action immoral on account of its unseemliness for us. In short,
immorality becomes a measure of dehumanization, while morality is artistic excellence, a
 15

commitment to live well by acting so as to compel others’ aesthetic appreciation of how our life
choices work literally as artworks.

Now, artistic beauty is very different from the sexual kind. Indeed, factual beauty or
handsomeness is a matter of the facial features’ averageness and thus of their unoriginality.
When we contemplate a beautiful face for sexual purposes, we’re thinking of its utility and thus
not of its artistic merit. In so far as every human face is unique and different from those of other
animals, all human faces have roughly the same aesthetic worth as mainly genetic creations.
We may turn our faces into more distinguished works of art by applying makeup or resorting to
plastic surgery, but should we do so for clichéd, subhuman purposes, we may spoil the millions
of years of organic work that’s led to our bone structure and arrangement of facial muscles and
skin cells.

But isn’t art a matter of arbitrary taste? The definition of postmodern art is indeed up for grabs,
but this is because the link between scientific objectivity and the aesthetic attitude may be
seeping into our popular cultures, even as those cultures distort our perception of that link.
We’re suddenly able to interpret anything in the world as an art object, just by following the
scientist’s lead, and that shocks us with the suspicion that art must be a trivial enterprise since
there’s so much of it. If mindless nature can produce works of art, surely any person can.
Meanwhile, some recent artworks of dubious apparent value sell for millions of dollars, so art
must be a fraud fit for pretentious elites who are fools for parting with their money. All of this
may be so, but it’s irrelevant to the fact that moral right and wrong can be metaphysically
justified by the very naturalistic picture that turns everything into impersonal objects and so
supposedly undermines our confidence in morality. Even if there are no divine commandments,
there’s evidently natural creativity, and morality is one tool we employ to create ourselves and
our social organizations, to distinguish us as self-sufficient microcosms that stand apart for our
originality and thus for our aesthetic glory.

So while the comparison of moral deeds with artworks may seem to trivialize rather than secure
the former, since traditional art now lacks gravitas, this is because the full implications of
atheistic naturalism haven’t yet sunk in. Postmodern art often fails to speak to the masses,
because the art world is currently backlashing against the capitalistic infantilization of those
same masses and lurching in the opposite direction, as it were, heading into pretentious
obscurantism, liberal snobbery, and a retreat to scholastic self-flattery. The scientific message
makes all of this a comedy, because the natural facts should be humbling and horrifying us,
before moving us to tragically heroic heights of creativity. The problem, then, is that our
postmodern artists are decadent: the mass-produced, corporate art world has infantilized us
with a flurry of dehumanizing ads and so our traditional artists are reacting to the modern
worldview’s dark side in childish ways, with little vision of how to make the best of our existential
situation.

Objectivity as our Curse and Salvation

Existential philosophers have long said that modernity is Faustian, that modernists have
effectively sold their soul for superficial control of the planet. Science has told us the truth of
nature and technology has empowered us to do almost whatever we want. But it’s hard to
decide what we want when our mental energy is drained by the horror of knowing that just
beyond the horizons of our artificial world that substitutes for the wilderness, the undead god’s
mechanisms and processes carry on to no humane end. No one other than us cares what we
want, and that sobering fact makes it hard for us to want anything at all. Thus, transnational
 16

corporations decide for us, persuading us to seek happiness through endless consumption,
which infantilizes us in the bargain. And morality becomes as hollow as postmodern art in the
face of the grim fundamental facts of modern naturalism: the real world is impersonal,
personhood being a transitory blossoming of undead creativity that will be eventually replaced
by something alien and monstrous, from our self-centered viewpoint. All seems lost, then.

But never underestimate the undead god’s capacity for ironic reversals of fortune! With a gestalt
switch of attitude, the gong that rings out our death knells sounds instead like a call to arms
against nature’s indifference. The world is full of proto-artists and our artistry is superior not
because of any greater magnificence of our works, since we can hardly create galaxies or
universes, but because our works can be aimed at the monstrosity of those uncannily self-
contained, natural systems. Our works include our lives as we’re guided by normative principles.
The undead god is our muse, except that she inspires us by providing a model of what not to
be. Instead of degrading ourselves with animalistic or infantile regressions, we should face the
dreadful truth and overcome it with a glad heart, knowing that objectivity is both our curse and
our salvation. We can see things as impersonal objects, but that very capacity presents
the world to us also as virtual art and that revelation bestows on us our noblest role.
We’re creators, too—only, we create with a vengeance.
 17

The Ironies of Modern Progress and Infantilization

____________________________________________________

It’s commonly observed that we tend to rationalize our flaws and failings, to avoid the pain of
cognitive dissonance, so that we all come to think of ourselves as fundamentally good persons
even though many of us must instead be bad if “good” is to have any contrastive meaning.
Societies, too, often exhibit pride which leads their chief representatives to embarrass
themselves by declaring that their nation is the greatest that’s ever been in history. Both the
ancients and the moderns did this, but it’s hard to deny the facts of modern technological
acceleration. Just in the last century, global and instant communications have been established,
intelligent machines run much of our infrastructure, robots have taken over many menial jobs,
the awesome power of nuclear weapons has been demonstrated, and humans have visited the
moon. We tend to think that the social impact of such uniquely powerful machines must be for
the better. We speak casually, therefore, of technological advance or progress.

The familiar criticism of technology is that it destroys at least as much as it creates, so that the
optimists tell only one side of the story. I’m not going to argue that neo-Luddite case here.
Instead, I’m interested in the source of our judgment about progress through technology.
Ironically, the more modern technology we see, the less reason we have to think there’s
any kind of progress at all. This is because modernists from Descartes and Galileo onward
have been compelled to distinguish between real and superficial properties, the former being
physical and quantitative and the latter being subjective and qualitative. Examples of the
superficial, “secondary” aspects are the contents of consciousness, but also symbolic meaning,
purpose, and moral value, which include the normative idea of progress. For the most part,
modernists think of subjective qualities as illusory, and because they devised scientific methods
of investigation that bypass personal impressions and biases, modernists acquired knowledge
of how natural processes actually work, which has enabled us to produce so much technology.
So it’s curious to hear so many of us still assuming that our societies are generally superior to
premodern ones, thanks in particular to our technological advantage. On the contrary, our
technology is arguably the sign of a cognitive development that renders such an assumption
vacuous.

Animism and Angst

One way of making sense of this apparent lack of social awareness is to point out that there are
always elites who understand their society better than do the masses. And we could add that
because the modern technological changes have happened so swiftly and have such staggering
implications, many people won’t catch up to them or will even pretend there are no such
consequences because they’re horrifying. But I think this makes for only part of the explanation.
The masses aren’t merely ignoring the materialistic implications of science or the bad omens
that technologies represent; instead, they have a commonsense conviction that technology
must be good because it improves our lives.
 18

In short, most citizens of modern, technologically-developed societies are pragmatic about

technology. If you asked them whether they think their societies are better than earlier ones,
they’d say yes and if you asked them why, they’d say that technology enables us to do what we
want more efficiently, which is to say that technology empowers us to achieve our goals. And it
turns out that this pragmatic attitude is more or less consistent with modern materialism. There’s
no appeal here to some transcendent ideal, but just an egocentric view of technologies as
useful tools. So our societies are more advanced than ancient ones because the ancients had
to work harder to achieve their goals, whereas modern technology makes our lives easier. Mind
you, this assumes that everyone in history has had some goals in common, and indeed our
instinctive, animalistic desires are universal in so far as they’re matters of biology. By contrast, if
all societies were alien and incommensurable to each other, national pride would be egregiously
irrational. And most people probably also assume that our universal desires ought to be
satisfied, because we have human rights, so that there’s moral force behind this social
progress.

The instincts to acquire shelter, food, sex, power, and prestige, however, seem to me likewise
insufficient to explain our incessant artificialization of nature. There’s another universal urge,
which we can think of as the existential one and this is the need to overcome our fear of the
ultimate natural truths. There are two ways of doing so, with authenticity or with inauthenticity,
which is to say with honour, integrity, and creativity or with delusions arising from a weak will.
(Again, this raises the question of whether even these values make sense in the naturalistic
picture, and I’ll come back to this at the end of this article.) Elsewhere, I talk about the ancient
worldviews as glorifying our penchant for personification. Prehistoric animists saw all of nature
as alive, partly because hardly anything at that time was redesigned and refashioned to suit
human interests and the predominant wilderness was full of plant and animal life. Also, the
ancients hadn’t learned to repress their childlike urge to vent the products of their imagination.
At that time, populations were sparse and there were no machines standing as solemn proofs of
objective facts; moreover, there wasn’t much historical information to humble the Paleolithic
peoples with knowledge of opposing views and thus to rein in their speculations. For such
reasons, those ancients must have confronted the world much as all children do—at least with
respect to their trust in their imagination.

More precisely, they didn’t confront the world at all. When a modern adult rises in the morning,
she leaves behind her irrational dreams and prides herself on believing that she controls her
waking hours with her autonomous and rational ego. By contrast, there’s no such divergence
between the child’s dream life and waking hours, since the child’s dreams spill into her playful
interpretations of everything that happens to her. To be sure, modern children have their
imagination tempered by the educational system that’s bursting at the seams with lessons from
history. But children generally have only a fuzzy distinction between subject and object. That
distinction becomes paramount after the technoscientific proofs of the world’s natural
impersonality. The world has always been impersonal and amoral, but only modernists have
every reason to believe as much and thus only we inheritors of that knowledge face the starkest
existential choice between personal authenticity and its opposite. The prehistoric protopeople,
who were still experimenting with their newly acquired excess brain power, faced no such
decision between intellectual integrity and flagrant self-deception. They didn’t choose to
personify the world, because they knew no different; instead, they projected their mental
creations onto the wilderness with childlike abandon and so distracted themselves from their
potential to understand the nature of the world’s apparent indifference. After all, in spite of the
relative abundance of the ancient environments, things didn’t always go the ancients’ way; they
 19

suffered and died like everyone else. Moreover, even early humans were much cleverer than
most other species.

Thus, the ancients weren’t so innocent or ignorant that they felt no fear, if only because few
animals are that helpless. But human fear differs from the reactionary animal kind, because ours
has an existential dimension due to the breadth of our categories and thus of our understanding.
Humans attach labels to so many things in the world not just because we’re curious, but
because we’re audacious and we have excess (redundant) brain capacity. Animals feel
immediate pain and perhaps even the alienness of the world beyond their home territory, but not
the profound horror of death’s inexorability or of the world’s undeadness, which is to say the fear
of nature’s way of developing (through complexification, natural selection, and the laws of
probability) without any normative reason. Animals don’t see the world for what it is, because
their vision and thus their concern are so narrow, whereas we’ve looked far out into the
macrocosmic and microcosmic magnitudes of the universe. We’ve found no reassuring Mind at
the bottom of anything, not even in our bodies. Our overactive brains compel us to care about
aspects of the world that are bad for our mental health, and so we’re liable to feel anxious. And
as I say, we cope with that anxiety in different ways.

Modernity and Infantilization

But how does this existentialism relate to the source of our myth of modern progress? Well, I
see a comparison between prehistoric, mythopoeic reverie and the modern consumer’s
infantilization. In each case, we have a lack of enlightenment, a retreat from rational neutrality,
and an intermixing of subject and object. I’ve discussed the mythopoeic worldview elsewhere,
so here I’ll just say that it amounts to thinking of the world as entirely enchanted and filled with
vitality. Again, the modern revolutions (science and capitalistic industry) have led to our
disenchantment with nature, because we’ve been forced to see the world as dead inside. That’s
why late modernists are at best pragmatic about progress. We must somehow express our
naïve pride in ourselves and in our self-destructive modern nations, because we prefer not to
suffer as alienated outsiders. But modernity’s ideal of ultrarationality makes absolutist and
xenophobic pride seem uncivilized—although American audiences are notorious for stooping to
that sort of savagery when they chant “USA! USA!” to quell disturbances in their proceedings. In
any case, we postmodern pragmatists think of progress as being relative to our interests.

Arguably, then, we should all be despairing, nihilistic antinatalists, cheering on our species’
extinction to spare us more horror from our accursed powers of reason, because of the atheistic
implications of science-led philosophical naturalism. But something funny happened along the
way to the postmodern now, which is that our high-tech environment has driven most of us to
revert to the mythopoeic trance. We, too, collapse the distinction between subject and object,
because we’re not surrounded by the wilderness that science has shown to be the “product” of
undead forces; instead, we’ve blocked out that world from our daily life and immersed ourselves
in our technosphere. That artificial world is at our beck and call: our technology is designed for
us and it answers to us a thousand times a day. Science has not yet shown us to be exactly as
impersonal as the lifeless universe and so we can take comfort in our amenities as we assume
that while there’s no spirit under any rock, there’s a mind behind every iPhone.

So while we’re aware of the scientist’s abstract concept of the physical object, we don’t typically
experience the world as including such absurdly remote quantities. Heidegger spoke of the
pragmatic stance as the instrumentalization of every object, in which case we can look at a rock
and see a potential tool, a “ready-to-hand” helper, not just an impersonal, undead and “given”
 20

object. (This is in contrast to objectification, in which we treat things only as “present-to-hand,”

or as submitting to scientific scrutiny. The latter seems to reduce to the former, though, since
objectification is still anthropocentric, in that the object is viewed not as a fully independent
noumenon, but as a subject of human explanation and that makes it a sort of tool. True
objectivity is the torment not of scientists but of those suffering from angst on account of their
experience of nature’s horrible indifference and undeadness. True objectivity is just angst, when
we despair that we can’t do anything with the world because we’re not at home in it and nature
marches on regardless. All other attitudes, roughly speaking, are pragmatic.) In any case, the
modern environment surpasses that instrumentalism with infantilization, because we late
modernists usually encounter actual artifacts, not just potential ones. The big cities, at least, are
almost entirely artificial places. Of course, everything in a city is also physical, on some level of
scientific explanation, but that’s irrelevant to how we interpret the world we experience. A city is
made up of artifacts and artifacts are objects whose functions extend the intentions of
some subjects. Thus, hypermodern places bridge the divide between subjects and
objects at the experiential level.

However, that’s only a precondition of infantilization. What is it for an adult to live as a child? To
answer this, we need standards of psychological adulthood and infancy. My idea of adulthood
derives from the modern myths of liberty and rational self-empowerment. Ours is a modern
world, albeit one infected with our postmodern self-doubts, so it’s fitting that we be judged
according to the standards set by modern European cultures. The modern individual, then, is
liberated by the Enlightenment’s break with the past, made free to pursue her self-interest.
Above all, this individual is rational since reason makes for her autonomy. Moreover, she’s
skeptical of authority and tradition, since the modern experience is of how ancient Church
teachings became dogmas that stifled the pursuit of more objective knowledge; indeed, the
Church demonized and persecuted those who posed untraditional questions. The modern adult
idolizes our hero, the Scientist, who relies on her critical faculties to uncover the truth, which is
to say that the modern adult should be expected to be fearlessly individualistic in her
assessments and tastes. Finally, this adult should be cosmopolitan—which is very different from
Catholic universalism, for example. The Catholic has a vision of everyone’s obligation to convert
to Catholicism, whereas the modernist appreciates everyone’s equal potential for self-
determination, and so the modernist is classically liberal in welcoming a wide variety of opinions
and lifestyles.

What, then, are the relevant characteristics of an infant? The infant is almost entirely dependent
on a higher power. A biological infant has no choice in the matter and her infancy is only a stage
in a process of maturation. Similarly, an infantile adult lacks autonomy and may be fed
information in the same way a biological infant is fed food. For example, a cult member who
defers to the charismatic leader in all matters of judgment is infantile with respect to that act of
self-surrender. Many premodern cultures have been likewise infantile and our notion of modern
progress compares the transition from that anti-modern version of maturity to the modern ideal
of the individual’s rational autonomy, with the baby’s growth into a more independent being.

That’s the theory, anyway. The reality is that modern science is wedded to industry which
applies our knowledge of nature, and the resulting artificial world infantilizes the masses. How
so? For starters, through the post-WWII capitalistic imperative to grow the economy through
hyper-consumption. Artificial demand is stimulated through propaganda, which is to say through
mostly irrational, associative advertising. The demand is artificial in that it’s manufactured by
corporations that have mastered the inhuman science of persuasion. That demand is met by
mass-produced supply, the products of which tend to be planned for obsolescence and thus
shoddier than they need to be.
 21

The familiar result is the rebranding of the two biologically normal social classes: the rich and
powerful alphas and everyone else (the following masses). Modern wealth is rationalized with
myths of self-determination and genius, since no credible appeal can be made now to the divine
right of kings. Mind you, the exception has been the creation of distinct middle classes which is
due to socialist policies in liberal parts of the world that challenge the social Darwinian cynicism
that’s implicit in capitalism. Maintaining a middle class in a capitalistic society, though, is a
Sisyphean task: it’s like pushing a boulder up a hill we’re doomed to have to keep reclimbing.
The middle class members are fattened like livestock awaiting slaughter by the predators that
are groomed by capitalistic institutions such as the elite business schools. And so the middle
class inevitably goes into debt and joins the poor, while the wealthy consolidate their power as
the ruling oligarchs, as has happened in Canada and the US.

The masses, then, are targeted by the propaganda arm of modern industry, while the wealthy
live in a more rarified world. For example, the wealthy tend not to watch television, they’re not in
the market for cheap, mass-produced merchandise, and they don’t even gullibly link their self-
worth to their hording of possessions in the crass materialistic fashion. No, the oligarchs who
come to power through the capitalistic competition have a much graver flaw: they’re as undead
as the rest of nature, which makes them fitting avatars of nature’s inhumanity. Those who are
obsessed with becoming very powerful or who are corrupted by their power tend to be
sociopathic, which means they lack the ability to care what others feel. For that reason, the
power elite are more like machines than people: they tend not to be idealistic and so associative
advertising won’t work on them, since that kind of advertising construes the consumption of a
material good as a means of fulfilling an archetypal desire. Of course, the relatively poor
masses are just the opposite: burdened by their conscience, they trust that our modern world
isn’t a horror show. Thus, they’re all-too ready to seek advice from advertisers on how to be
happy, even though advertisers are actually deeply cynical. The masses are thereby
indoctrinated into cultural materialism.

Workers in the service industry literally talk to the customer as if she were a baby, constantly
smiling and speaking in a lilting, sing-songy voice; telling the customer whatever she wants to
hear, because the customer is always right (just as Baby gets whatever it wants); working like a
dog to satisfy the customer as though the latter were the boss and the true adult in the room—
but she’s not. The real power elite don’t deal directly with lowly service providers, such as the
employees of the average mall. Their underlings do both their buying and their selling for them,
so that they needn’t mix with lower folk. This is why George H. W. Bush had never before seen
a grocery scanner. No, the service provider is the surrogate parent who is available around the
clock to service the consumer, just as a mother must be prepared at any moment to drop
everything and attend to Baby. The consumer is the baby—and a whining, selfish one she is at
that. That’s the unsettling truth obscured by the illusion of freedom in a consumption-driven
society. A consumer can choose which brand name to support out of the hundreds she surveys
in the department store, and that bewildering selection reassures her that she’s living the
modern dream. But just as the democratic privileges in an effective plutocracy are superficial
and structurally irrelevant, so too the consumer’s freedom of choice is belied by her lack of what
Isaiah Berlin calls positive freedom. Consumers have negative freedom in that they’re free from
coercion so that they can do whatever they want (as long as they don’t hurt anyone). But they
lack the positive freedom of being able to fulfill their potential.

In particular, consumers fail to live up to the above ideal of modern adulthood. Choosing which
brand of soft drink to buy, when you’ve been indoctrinated by a materialistic culture, is like an
infant preferring to receive milk from the left breast rather than the right. Obviously, the deeper
 22

choice is to prefer something other than limitless consumption, but that choice is anathema
because it’s bad for business. Still, in so far as we have the potential to be mature in the modern
sense, to be like those iconoclastic early modern scientists who overcame their Christian culture
by way of discovering for themselves how the real world works, we manic consumers have
fallen far short. Almost all of us are grossly immature, regardless of how old we are or whether
consumer-friendly psychologists pronounce us “normal.”

Now, you might think I’ve established, at best, not a one-way dependence of the masses on the
plutocrats, but a sort of sadomasochistic interdependence between them. After all, the
producers need consumers to buy their goods, just as a farmer needs to maintain his livestock
out of self-interest. Unfortunately, this isn’t so in the globalized world, since the predators of our
age have learned that they can express the nihilism at the heart of social Darwinian capitalism,
without reservation, just by draining one country of its resources at a time and then by taking
their business to a developing country when the previous host has expired, perhaps one day
returning as that prior host revivifies in something like the Spenglerian manner. Thus, while it’s
true that sellers need buyers, in general, it’s not the case that transnational sellers need any
particular country’s buyers, as long as some country somewhere includes willing and able
customers. But whereas the transnational sellers don’t need any particular consumers and the
consumers can choose between brands (even though companies tend to merge to avoid
competing, becoming monopolies or oligopolies), there’s asymmetry in the fact that the mass
consumer’s self-worth is attached to consumption and thus to the buyer-seller
relationship, whereas that’s not so for the wealthy producers.

Again, that’s because the more power you have, the more dehumanized you become, so that
the power elite can’t afford moral principles or a conscience or a vision of a better world. Those
who come to be in positions of great power become custodians of the social system (the
dominance hierarchy), and all such systems tend to have unequal power distributions so that
they can be efficiently managed. (To take a classic example, soviet communism failed largely
because its system had to waste so much energy on the pretense that its power wasn’t
centralized.) Centralized power naturally corrupts the leaders or else it attracts those who are
already corrupt or amoral. So powerful leaders are disproportionately inhuman, psychologically
speaking. (I take it this is the kernel of truth in David Icke’s conspiracy theory that our rulers are
secretly evil lizards from another dimension.) Although the oligarch may be inclined to consume
for her pleasure and indeed she obviously has many more material possessions than the
average consumer, the oligarch attaches no value to consumption, because she’s without
human feeling. She feels pleasure and pain like most animals, but she lacks complex, altruistic
emotions. Ironically, then, the more wealth and power you have, the fewer human rights you
ought to have.

In any case, to return to the childish consumer, the point is that consumption-driven capitalism
infantilizes the masses by establishing this asymmetric relationship between transnational
producer and the average buyer. Just as a biological baby is almost wholly dependent on its
guardian, the average consumer depends on the economic system that satisfies her craving for
more and more material goods. The wealthy consume because they’re predatory machines, like
viruses that are only semi-alive, but the masses consume because we’ve been misled into
believing that owning things makes us happy and we dearly want to be happy. We think wealth
and power liberate us, because with enough money we can buy whatever we want. But we
forget the essence of our modern ideal or else we’ve outgrown that ideal in our postmodern
phase. What makes the modern individual heroic is her independence, which is why our
prototypes (Copernicus, Galileo, Bruno, Darwin, Nietzsche) were modern especially because of
their socially subversive inquiries. We consumers aren’t nearly so modern or individualistic,
 23

regardless of our libertarian or pragmatic bluster. As consumers, we’re dependent on the mass
producers and on our material possessions themselves. We’re not autonomous iconoclasts,
we’re just politically correct followers. We don’t think for ourselves, but put our faith in the
contemptible balderdash of corporate propaganda. We haven’t the rationality even to laugh at
the foolish fallacies that are the bread and butter of associative ads. It doesn’t matter what we
say or write; if we enjoy consuming material goods, our subconscious has been colonized by
materialistic memes and so our working values are as shallow as they can be without being as
empty as those of the animalistic power elite. As consumers, we’re children playing at adult
dress-up; we’re cattle that make-believe we’re free just because we routinely choose from
among a preselected array of options.

So both technology and capitalism infantilize the masses. By doing our bidding and so making
us feel we’re of central importance in the artificial world, technology suppresses angst and
alienation. We therefore live not the modern dream but the ancient mythopoeic one—which is
also the child’s experience of playing in a magical place, regardless of where the child actually
happens to be. And capitalism turns us into consumers, first and foremost, and constant
consumption is the very name of the infant’s game, because the infant needs abundant fuel to
support her accelerated growth.

A third source of our existential immaturity is inherent in the myth of the modern hero. For many
years, this problem with modernism lay dormant because of the early modernists’ persistent
sexism, racism, and imperialism. Only white European males were thought of as proper
individuals. Their rationalism, however, implied egalitarianism since we’re all innately rational, to
some extent, and once the civil rights of women and minorities were recognized, there was a
perceptible decline in the manliness of the modern hero. No longer a bold rebel against dogmas
or a skeptical lover of the truth, the late-modern individual now is someone who must tolerate all
differences. Ours is a multicultural, global village and so we’re consigned to moral relativism and
forced to defer to politically correct conventions out of respect for each other’s right to our
opinions. Thus, bold originality, once regarded as heroic, is now considered boorish. Early
modernists loved to discuss ideas in Salons, but now even to broach a political or religious
subject in public is considered impolite, because you may offend someone.

Such rules of political correctness are like parents’ futile restrictions on their child’s thoughts and
actions. Western children are protected from coarse language and violence and nudity, because
postmodern parents labour under the illusion that their children will be infantile for their entire
lifespan, whereas we’re all primarily animals and so are bound to run up against the horrors of
natural life sooner or later. Compare these arbitrary strictures with the medieval Church’s laws
against heresy. In all three cases (taboos for infantilized adults, protectionist illusions for
children, and medieval Christian imperialism), the rules are uninspired as solutions to the
existential problem of how to face reality, but the Church went as far as to torture and kill on
behalf of its absurd notions. At most, postmodern parents may spank their child for saying a bad
word, while an adult who carries the albatross of the archaic ideal of the independent person
and so wishes to test the merit of her assumptions by attempting to engage others in a
conversation about ideas will only find herself alone and ignored at the party, inspecting the
plant in the corner of the room. Still, our postmodern mode of infantilization is fully degrading
despite the lack of severe consequences when we step out of bounds.

This is the ethic of care that’s implicit in modern individualism, which is at odds with the modern
hunt for the truth. Modernism was originally framed in the masculine terms of a conflict between
scientific truth and Christian dogmatic opinion, but now that everyone is recognized as an
autonomous, dignified modern person, feminine values have surged. And just as someone with
 24

a hammer sees everything else as a nail, a woman is inclined to see everyone else as a baby.
This is why, for example, young women who haven’t outgrown their motherly instincts overuse
the word “cute”: handbags are cute, as are small pets and even handsome men. This is also
why girls worship not tough, rugged male celebrities, but androgynous ones like Justin Bieber.
As conservative social critics observe, manliness is out of fashion. Even hair on a man’s chest is
perceived as revolting, let alone the hair on his back. Men’s bodies must be shorn of any such
symbol of their unruly desires, because men are obliged to fulfill women’s fantasy that men are
babies who need to be nurtured. Men must be innocent, not savage; they must be eternally
youthful and thus hairless, not battered and scarred by the heartless world; they must be doe-
eyed and cheerful, not grim, aloof and embittered. Men must be babies, not the manly heroes
celebrated by the early modernists, who brought Europe out of the relative Dark Age. Men have
been feminized, thanks ironically to the early modern ideal of personal autonomy through
reason. As for women themselves, those who must see themselves primarily as care-givers in
so far as they’re naturally inclined to infantilize men, they too become child-like, because “care”
is reflexive. And so modern women baby themselves, treating themselves to the spa, to the
latest fashions and accessories, to the inanities of daytime television, to the sentimental
fantasies of soap operas and romance novels, and to the platitudes of flattering, feel-good New
Age cults.

Ignorant Babies and Enlightened Aesthetes

Those are three sources of modern infantilization: technology, capitalism, and postmodern
culture. I submit, then, that the reason we can be so ignorant as to speak of
technoscientific progress, even though scientific theories entail naturalism which in turn
implies the unreality of normative values and the undeadness of all processes, is that we
lack self-knowledge because we’re infantile. We’re distracted by the games of possessing
and playing with our technotoys, because our artificial environment trains us to be babies. And
babies aren’t interested in ideas, let alone in terribly dispiriting philosophies such as naturalism
with its atheistic and dark existential implications. That’s why we can parrot the meme of
modern progress, because we’ve already swallowed a thousand corporate myths by the time
we’ve watched a year’s worth of materialistic ads on TV. What’s one more piece of foolishness
added to that pile?

If we were to look at the myth of progress, we’d see it derives from ancient theistic
apocalypticism and specifically from the Zoroastrian invention of the linear and teleological
arrow of historical time. The idea was that time would come to a cataclysmic end when God
would perfect the fallen world and defeat the forces of evil in a climactic battle. All prior events
are made meaningful in relation to that ultimate endpoint. In that teleological metaphysics, the
idea of real progress makes sense. But there’s no such teleology in naturalism, so there can be
no modern progress. At best, some scientific theory or piece of technology can meet with our
approval and allow us to achieve our personal goals more readily, but that subjective progress
loses its normative force. Mind you, that’s the only kind of progress that pragmatists are entitled
to affirm and yet there’s no real goodness in modernity if that’s all we mean by the word.

The titular ironies, then, are that the so-called technoscientific signs of modern progress are
indications rather of the superficiality or illusoriness of the very concept of social progress that
most people have in mind, despite their pragmatic attitude, and that the late great modernists
who are supposed to stand tall as the current leaders of humanity are instead largely infantilized
by modernity and so returned to the ancient Edenic daze.
 25

Here, finally, I’ve pointed out that there’s no real progress in nature, since nature is undead
rather than enchanted by personal qualities such as meaning or purpose, and yet I affirmed the
existential value of personal authenticity. I promised to return to this apparent contradiction. My
solution, as I’ve explained at length elsewhere, is to reduce normative evaluation to the
aesthetic kind. For example, I say intellectual integrity is better than self-delusion. But is that
judgment as superficial and subjective as a moral principle in light of philosophical naturalism?
Not if the goodness of personal integrity and more specifically of the coherence of your
worldview which drives your behaviour, is thought of as a kind of beauty. When we take up the
aesthetic perspective, all processes seem not just undead but artistically creative. Life itself
becomes art and our aesthetic duty is to avoid the ugliness of cliché and to strive for
ingenious and subversive originality in our actions.

Is the aesthetic attitude as arbitrary as a theistic interpretation of the world, given science-
centered naturalism? No, because aesthetics falls out of the objectification made possible by
scientific skepticism. We see something as an art object when we see it as complete in itself
and thus as useless and indifferent to our concerns, the opposite being a utilitarian or pragmatic
stance. And that’s precisely the essence of cosmicism, which is the darkest part of modern
wisdom. Natural things, as such, are complete in themselves, meaning that they exist and
develop for no human reason. That’s the horror of nature: the world doesn’t care about us, our
adaptability notwithstanding, and so we’re bound to be overwhelmed by natural forces and to
perish with just as little warning as we were given when nature evolved us in the first place. But
the point here is that the flipside of this horror is the awareness that nature is full of art! The
undeadness of things is also their sublime beauty or raw ugliness. When we recognize the
alienness and monstrosity of natural processes, because we’ve given up naïve
anthropocentrism, we’ve already adopted the aesthetic attitude. That’s because we’ve
declined to project our interests onto what are wholly impersonal things, and so we
objectify and aestheticize them with one and the same act of humility. The angst and the
horror we feel when we understand what nature really is and thus how impersonal we ourselves
are are also aesthetic reactions. Angst is the dawning of awe as we begin to fathom nature’s
monstrous scope, horror the awakening of pantheistic fear of the madness of the artist
responsible for so much wasted art. The aesthetic values which are also existential ones aren’t
merely subjective, because nature’s undead creativity is all-too real.
 26

Fame and the Comedy of False Gods

____________________________________________________

Before the objective mode of inquiry became a systematic method in the modern age, during
the Scientific Revolution, thanks especially to Isaac Newton, science was one with philosophy
and so even the less fanciful cosmologies, such as those of ancient Greece, India, or China,
were speculative and visionary. For example, the Pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus put
forward an argument for atomism based on philosophical reasoning which was more logical
than the folk religions that posited personal deities, but which still expressed what Kant would
have called our subjective, albeit universal cognitive forms. In any case, philosophical reasoning
isn’t the polar opposite of the sort of exoteric irrationality that you find in folk or mass religions.
This is because philosophy is partly a matter of interpretive art. As Spengler says in the
introduction to The Decline of the West, “the great questions are made great by the very fact
that unequivocal answers to them are so passionately demanded, so that it is as life-symbols
only that they possess significance” (XV, vol.1). However, after the Scientific Revolution and the
modern technological transformation of much of the planet, the choice between the systematic
assimilation of cold, hard facts and the subjective imposition of our biases onto those facts has
been made all the more stark. Thus, those who are informed about the modern world, who
understand that the reasons for such sweeping technological advances are the near-automation
and mass production of objective knowledge, inevitably judge the theistic alternative as archaic
and childish by comparison. Scientific understanding of nature is a booming business, whereas
theistic religion seems more like a giant con.

The Sin of Anthropocentrism

What, then, is the root folly of theism? I believe it’s anthropocentrism. We’re most familiar with
ourselves and so when we try to understand something foreign we do so by stretching our
experience and using our self-image as the foundation for analogies, almost as if we were
looking in a mirror. We do this both individually and collectively, and when our species as a
whole contemplates the apparently inhuman universe, we’re faced with the fact that expanding
our minds to encompass a thoroughly impersonal world is as disconcerting as the thought of our
personal death. In either case, we come up against the limit of ourselves, whereas we’re social
beings and thus we’re most comfortable in social worlds that revolve around us. In Breaking the
Spell, the philosopher Daniel Dennett explains how our innate skill in explaining each other’s
behaviour in psychological and social terms is overextended in theism or in animism, when we
personify all natural processes. But the Pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes saw the same
absurdity long ago, pointing out that if cattle or horses or lions had gods, they would worship
gods that look like them. This is the essence of anthropocentrism. What begins as an
evolutionary advantage and as a sustainable way of life for social mammals is abused
when the mammals learn to control themselves with language and reason, so that they
experiment freely with their traits and are then mesmerized by their fictions.
 27

Theists turn this around and say that the similarity between us and our gods is due to the fact
that the gods create us in their image and implant in us the ability to worship them for our
benefit. However, Occam’s razor compels us to discount this hypothesis. In the atheistic
scenario, we begin with our social instincts and we reason that those instincts can be abused,
leading to anthropomorphic metaphors that beguile us as they’re literalized over time. In the
theistic scenario, by contrast, an all-powerful, transcendent and thus nonhuman deity
presumably could create a great variety of creatures, but decides to create people that are
somehow especially similar to him, making them God’s children. Putting aside the incoherence
of assuming that God is both transcendent and yet especially similar to part of his creation, the
theistic scenario is much less probable, because we begin with God’s ability to create anything
at all and are left with the coincidence that we resemble God in our sentience and rationality. If
God could have created anything, why didn’t he create only things that are utterly unlike him? If
we say that God created us because he’s generous or because he wanted to be loved, we’re
just reaffirming the coincidence since we assume that God had such human qualities in the first
place. The fact is that a transcendent and all-powerful being would have absolutely nothing in
common with any part of “his” creation, in which case theism is tantamount to atheistic
mysticism. Such a deity might create an infinite variety of things, none of which would have a
special connection to God. But when the theist contends that God is partial to us, she assumes
that which is very unlikely, which is that we happen to be the part of the entire universe which is
(somehow, impossibly) godlike. The simpler scenario is that vain and terrified primates looked
out at the alien and hostile cosmos and personified its ultimate cause to feel less alienated.

The absurdity of theistic anthropocentrism comes fully into view in physics when we reach the
extent of our objective understanding of the universe’s alienness. At the deepest level there’s
chaotic quantum weirdness, not intelligent design. Spacetime and clumps of matter and energy
congeal out of the bizarre entanglements of subatomic entities that behave as either particles or
waves, depending on how they’re observed, so that those miniscule entities are objectively
incomplete—or else they congeal into all possible configurations in the megaverse of all
universes. In any case, to speak of an intelligent designer of such alien processes is to make
weasel words out of “intelligent” and “design.” As far as we can objectively tell, creation begins
not with any personal act, but with an impersonal chaos.

The sin of anthropocentric theism, then, is to fill that vacuum of our understanding with self-
references. This is akin to party-crashing, to injecting yourself into a situation where you’re
unwanted and where you have no business. Instead of reconciling ourselves to our cosmic
insignificance and thus to the cosmicist implications of philosophical naturalism, we
superimpose psychological and social images onto the freakish reality of undead physical
systems and processes—and even “system” and “process” are teleological anthropomorphisms
that belie the strangeness at the heart of nature. We have the opportunity to emerge from the
crucible of angst when we fundamentally selfish creatures learn we’re peripheral and
dispensable in the greater whole. We can endure the objective presentation of reality with some
degree of honour and tragic heroism. But most of us squander that opportunity and fall back on
lazy mental projections. Instead of looking hard at the monstrousness of the undead god,
we interpose our anthropocentric metaphors and so shield ourselves with a mirror to
sustain our solipsistic daydreams. For these reasons, theistic anthropocentrism is
understandable but disheartening.
 28

Fame and Idolatry

Atheists and agnostics might like to think that they’re free of those delusions, they’ve digested
the harsh truths of nature, and they’ve no need of the theistic sugar coating, thanks to their cast-
iron stomachs. That may be so, but it turns out that many so-called secularists subsequently
vomit up substitutionary delusions. One of these is the presumption that celebrities ought to be
worshipped. The idea of idolatry goes back to ancient Judaism and perhaps to Zoroastrianism
and Akhenaten’s monotheism. For example, when the Jews escaped from their captivity in
Egypt, according to the myth, they wandered in the desert and lost their faith in the transcendent
God that delivered them, succumbing to local cults and worshipping the idol of the golden calf.
An idol is a false god that satisfies an adulterated version of the theistic impulse. When we
worship an idol we hold as sacred something that’s manifestly not so and so we debase
ourselves.

Now, atheists and agnostics should know better than to worship people in place of God, but
knowing is only half the battle. Pascal’s wager notwithstanding, people don’t turn to religion as a
matter of objective risk assessment. We have an irrational, animalistic desire to submit to
masters or to rule the masses, depending on whether we’re meek betas or sociopathic alphas in
the dominance hierarchy. We fear the unpleasant philosophical truth, as I said, and so we
anthropomorphize the world. Pacifying the truth of nature as a whole requires theistic
abstractions, since we must posit an invisible, supernatural person. But of course, theists have
always had human rulers as models of what the absolute ruler of the universe might be like.
Now, we modernists are liberals in holding as inviolable everyone’s right to rational self-
determination, and so we don’t think of ourselves as ruled by anyone but us. We don’t have
kings or emperors, but elected representatives of the common will. As I’ve explain elsewhere,
free societies naturally degenerate into open or stealth oligarchies in which a minority rules,
after all, but short of a full-blown revolution, that minority will rule in secret and so they, too,
won’t serve as fitting idols for those secularists who have a hankering for substitute gods.

Thus, celebrities preen and prance to fill that niche, these being the famous individuals
celebrated in popular culture for their wealth and their often bogus deeds of heroism, as in the
primary case of Hollywood actors. Artists, actors, musicians, novelists, pundits, and even some
CEOs are effectively worshipped in modern societies. This means that modernists, who are
supposed to be egalitarian in their respect for everyone’s equal dignity as autonomous beings,
will nevertheless wait for hours to glimpse a celebrity, screaming with gleeful anticipation and
perhaps fainting when the fateful moment approaches, as though the idol worshipper were
Moses receiving the beatific vision of the transcendent source of everything. In theory, theists
are less likely to worship celebrities, although most Western monotheists are actually
behavioural atheists, merely paying lip service to some major religion for the social benefits. The
majority of celebrity-worshippers, then, are nontheists who know better.

Notice the comparable role of anthropocentrism. Just as the cosmos emerges from chaos, so
too does fame begin with the randomness of luck. However talented a highly successful person
may be and however hard she works, she’s necessarily lucky in many ways, because luck
determines most of our circumstances for good or ill. The horror of the impersonal reality of
nature alienates us and so we distract ourselves with theistic fairy tales. Likewise, the
randomness in life is itself an indicator of nature’s undeadness, and so to avoid deflating our
pride we become distracted with tales of the rich and the famous. In either case, we comfort
ourselves by pretending that we’re somehow objectively important, that the world at large owes
its existence to us.
 29

Indeed, this is the point of actually creating artificial worlds, comprised of ideas, symbols,
regulated activities, infrastructures, machines, and so forth. Whereas nature doesn’t actually
bow to us or to our image in the form of a personal deity, our microcosms do serve us, because
we assign them that function, and they serve especially the richest and most powerful among
us, including the celebrities who are just the most conspicuous models of the gods in modern,
putatively secular societies. When we worship celebrities, in turn, we substitute the higher social
class for the supernatural realm: just as Heaven supposedly transcends our material domain, so
too the gated abodes of celebrities transcend the suburbs and slums of the masses, like the
orbiting palace in the movie Elysium. And instead of reconciling ourselves to our roles in
nature’s inhumane systems, which are evident whenever chance determines what happens to
us, we hold up certain beautiful people as substitute gods, pretending that their success is due
solely to their personal triumphs rather than to the monstrous interventions of the undead god
(the zombielike creative power of natural forces and mechanisms). Again, we anthropomorphize
the world, shielding ourselves with a vision of our champions, of our beloved luminaries whom
we worship as gods to delay our reckoning with the one, true god which shuffles and decays all
around us.

The follies of theism are comical in that theism infantilizes us and so we have the spectacle of
adults who behave as clownish children. The comedic principle here is that the juxtaposition of
pride and sobriety, on the one hand, and silliness and instability, on the other, is humorous. This
is because a situation that illustrates that principle shows us the absurdity of our pretensions
and the function of humour is to sublimate the horror that’s caused by that absurdity. To be
sure, theists don’t mean to be foolish, but their sincerity is a necessary condition of the comedy
in which they nevertheless star. The comedy, as it were, is nature’s intervention in our artificial
microcosms, as in the cases of the randomness that partially determines success or failure in
our every venture, and of anthropocentrism itself.

Theism is based on fear and vanity and those are natural clichés, not creative inspirations that
heroically distinguish us from the more monstrous creator. When she posits a personal and
supernatural creator, the theist shows that she prefers to look at herself in the reflection of her
mind, instead of acknowledging the cosmicist upshot of philosophical naturalism, which is that
natural reality is fundamentally undead, that the ultimate cause is no person but the monstrous
abomination which physicists are busy quantifying. The theist personifies and thus whitewashes
alien nature, but the brush she uses to paint her pretty pictures is manufactured by none other
than the undead god. Fearing the implications of nature’s mindlessness is a valid starting point,
but vainly worshipping images of ourselves is an expression of the egoism that drives all
manner of primitive tribal conflicts. What’s comedic, then, is that nature ironically has the
last laugh even in the theist’s attempt to transcend the world by conceiving of the
supernatural. Our traditional religions’ gods and goddesses are so many indicators that theists
are being manipulated like puppets, that their blundering theologies are forgeries authored not
by artistic persons, let alone by actual gods, but by humdrum sociobiological processes of
mental projection and delusion.

Celebrity worship is also ridiculous. Pride in our accomplishments is one thing, but pretending
we have more control than we do and distracting ourselves with a ludicrous spectacle of quasi-
scapegoating is something else. Celebrities are quasi-scapegoats, filled in our imagination not
with our sins but with our greatness. Celebrities are allegedly our best and brightest, our most
beautiful and godlike representatives, and instead of hounding them to ritualistically rid
ourselves of sin, we worship them to praise the best in all of us. But what’s actually best in us
can never be thusly embodied or showcased. All celebrities are frauds, because chance is
 30

the sea in which we’re adrift. If you’re lucky enough to become rich and famous, so that your
hard work happens to pay off and your success is extravagantly rewarded, the noble response
to your fame begins with humility and ends in disgust—humility, so as not to underestimate
the behemoth under your feet that sends you hither and thither to cope with natural
circumstances, and disgust for the monstrousness of that power, after you’ve looked it square in
its alien eye.

Theism belittles the undead god by personifying the divine power, whereas that power is entirely
natural and thus fundamentally impersonal but nevertheless monstrously creative. By contrast,
a non-clownish hero who acts not as a puppet of natural forces but as an autonomous artist will
catch a whiff of the decay seeping even from within our artificial sanctuaries from the
wilderness. This hero will have no illusions about anyone’s earning the right to be treated as a
celebrity. No human brain could possibly perform enough computations or be responsible for
global changes to justify the relative wealth that celebrities or billionaires enjoy. We don’t all
deserve the same rewards or punishments, but no one has ever done enough to earn the
right to be treated as a god. The ultimate act of grace isn’t the Christian God’s offer of
salvation despite our meriting merely death; no, it’s the masochistic masses’ bestowing of
godhood status on a minority of undeserving mortals who are themselves equally playthings of
nature. Again, all celebrities are frauds; not one of them is solely or even largely responsible for
her privileged position. This is because we’re fundamentally animals and so our autonomy is
limited. When we’re not straining to determine our future, we’re objects rather than subjects and
our behaviour is objectively explainable in terms of broader causal relations.

The non-clown, which is to say the enlightened naturalist whose ever-vigilant taste in art
prevents her from stooping to clichéd behaviour, will be appalled by the imposture of celebrities.
She’ll look at the masses lining up for a famous actor’s signature and see only an accumulation
of beta folk, their acts of idolatry being signals that publicly establish the alpha’s supremacy.
She’ll read about the celebrity’s lavish lifestyle and see so much theft that goes unpunished,
because the riches are taken by the undead god over which there’s no higher power. Celebrities
and the sociopathic alphas in general are avatars of the true god which is the unfolding natural
plenum. Rather than defying nature in our limited and ultimately futile ways, they’re caught in
the tide and they mean to ride the wave as long as possible. Again, the nobler course is to at
least evince the requisite nausea in the Stoic manner, to acknowledge that they’re being used
as toys by the idiot god, that they’re being falsely worshipped by the infantilized masses, and
that they lack the artistic inspiration for a more ascetic renunciation. The least we can do is to
treat celebrities as ordinary people, to refrain from demeaning ourselves by worshipping
those pseudogods, and to keep our mind on the horror of the true god in the hope that
the necessity of that horror will be the mother of our invention.

Woe, then, to the secularists who know better, who become giddy at the thought that they might
one day be in close proximity to a famous person, who shriek with ecstasy at a rock concert, or
who defer to the authority of pundits without thinking the talking points through for themselves.
These acts of idolatry are utterly unbecoming. We can expect theists to falter in that way,
because their naked anthropocentrism makes them susceptible to all manner of fallacies and
deceits. But modern nontheists have less of an excuse. They should be sneering at the
grotesque circus of celebrity-worship right along with the farce of theistic religion. As for the
nontheistic celebrities themselves, instead of waving pleasantly at the adoring masses, they
should think of ways to elevate them by mocking their submissive instinct and by renouncing
their unearned godhood. Granted, as alpha mammals, celebrities will learn the ways of
sociopathy and come to despise the lowly masses, as they’re naturally spoiled by their undue
power. Again, falling into that role of the arrogant predator is a disheartening cliché. We can
 31

degrade ourselves by playing nature’s dehumanizing roles for us in her comedy of

ironies or we can be inspired by the greater aesthetic potential to play out our days as
tragic heroes who see the undead god for what it is and who choose to transcend it
where we can.
 32

Stoicism and Cosmic Horror

____________________________________________________

The stranger the postmodern Western world becomes, the more we might hear plaintive calls
for a return to Stoic level-headedness. Jon Stewart’s centrist political rally expressed a similar
sentiment. Centrists want our leaders to be at least halfway competent so they can “get stuff
done,” and that requires a rational set of priorities. Indeed, there are intriguing ideas in ancient
Stoicism, but I think they should be updated by existential and cosmicist interpretations of
philosophical naturalism.

Cynics and Stoics

Stoicism, founded by Zeno of Citium in the 4th C. BCE, was influenced by ancient Cynicism, so
I’ll begin by summarizing some relevant Cynic beliefs. Ancient Cynicism was a form of
asceticism, so you can see that it differs greatly from the modern meaning of “cynic.” The
Cynics agreed with Plato, Aristotle, and with Greek ethicists generally that happiness is the
primary good in life and that rationality is crucial to achieving it. But whereas most Greek
philosophers taught that a virtuous balance between reason and emotion was a means to
various practical ends, such as excellence in some profession, the Cynics believed that virtue
was its own reward and that worldly pursuits tended to corrupt the character, dull the critical
faculties, and mislead a person by distracting her with trivialities. Reason, the Cynics thought,
shows us clearly what is of ultimate importance, and that is the everlasting natural world. Along
with the much-later Romantics who rebelled against modern forms of decadence, the Cynics’
central distinction was between nature, which is to say the wilderness, and what we might think
of as artificiality, which is to say the arbitrary social convention that doesn’t correspond with any
natural reality.

Our moral duty, then, is to understand nature and to live as relatively wild creatures, not to be
misled by social expectations which are brought on by ignorance and delusion. The reason this
is our duty is that such an unburdened, ascetic life frees us from stress and from unrealistic,
unfulfillable desires, and thus makes for happiness in the sense of tranquility. Artificiality is the
root of evil (vice) and suffering, since when we become proud of so-called human progress we
form unnatural desires and set up unrealistic plans which nature is bound to frustrate. Wise
people live in accordance with nature; they use ascetic techniques of non-attachment to train
themselves to want only what will probably be provided, not to set themselves up for failure and
misery by living in a fantasy world. The Cynics were infamous, though, because far from merely
ignoring the phony world of popular culture, they openly ridiculed those attached to fantasies of
being supernatural masters of the world who owe nothing to nature because they occupy the
self-made artificial world we call civilization. Anyone who routinely condescends to the other
species, by assuming that humans have some right of dominion over the world because of our
innate greatness is a fool whom nature will punish. The Cynics acted like ravens sounding their
ominous warnings of the downfall that inevitably follows this popular sort of pride, mocking
 33

upstanding citizens who in turn regarded Cynics as deranged for living like beasts and
renouncing the fruits of social progress. Indeed, Cynics called themselves dogs, they owned no
possessions, and they might masturbate in public or otherwise demonstrate their contempt for
average people’s presumptions.

There are interesting comparisons between Cynicism, Daoism, and Buddhism, but I want to
focus on Stoicism. The Stoics agreed that we ought to be happy and that the way to achieve
that goal is to follow nature. Far from living like an animal, though, controlled by its instincts or
emotions, the Stoic agreed with rationalists like Plato that rationality is natural for our species.
Moreover, they thought that reason discovers that nature is a unified whole embodying a
steadily emerging rational order which they equated with the unfolding mind of a pantheistic
god. All of this they understood naturalistically, much as Einstein or Spinoza personified the
laws of nature. The Stoics divided nature into matter and energy, using fire as the metaphor for
energy, and they took energy to be the order in which change happens, the rational unfolding of
events that we explain in terms of natural laws or more circumstantial reasons. The cosmos,
then, is a rational place because the ordered world is the union of god’s mind and body. Just as
a sage’s mind and body are in harmony, so too nature is unified so that you won’t find miracles
or ontological anomalies in the world.

Like Cynicism, Stoicism is a form of asceticism, since the Stoic opposes most of what’s taken
for granted in civilized life. This is because most people have unwise priorities. Wisdom for us
requires that our desires be in accord with something like Stoic cosmology. The universe
develops regardless of what we think or do, because those changes happen for divine reasons
that are utterly indifferent to our preferences. For example, rain happens because of a natural
cycle, and it’s asinine to be troubled by that necessity. The Stoics agreed with the Cynics that
we should know our place as puny creatures within a much greater cosmic order. Moreover,
because the world is rationally ordered, it's the best of all possible worlds, so again we should
appreciate nature even if we can't always understand the reason why certain events happen.
We shouldn’t arrogantly oppose that order by dreaming of alternative worlds that we might not
only prefer but bring to pass with misdirected ingenuity. For example, if we wish to have a picnic
and it rains, a fool will curse the weather and whine and complain like a child that isn’t getting its
way, perhaps even praying to a deity to change the natural course of events, because the fool
doesn’t understand a person’s limited role in the greater scheme. Our goal shouldn’t be to get
whatever we want even if our desires are irrational. A rational person who wants a picnic will
desire that end only on the condition that nature, in effect, wills it to be so, so that if it rains, the
rational person will be unperturbed and resilient.

In fact, Stoics believed that the proof of a sage’s wisdom is her freedom from mental suffering, if
not necessarily from signs of physical pain. A sage should be self-sufficient, free from wants,
and therefore unaffected by any turmoil around her. She should suppress or eliminate her
emotions when they interfere with her rational submission to the natural order. This is because
our moral task is just to resign ourselves to natural law, since by doing so we concede
the majesty of God's mind. Wisdom, for the Stoics, is peace of mind that’s based on a
person’s training of her emotions to be in line with an austere, deterministic pantheism. The
sage practices virtue because she knows she can control only her inner self, while the rest of
nature carries on with its majestic and perfectly necessary cycles and transitions. Our focus
should thus be extremely narrow: we should care only about excellence in character and should
abhor only vice and delusion, all else being morally indifferent. Only our attitude towards the
world is morally relevant, since that's the extent of our freedom. All natural events, then,
meaning events caused by natural forces and circumstances as opposed to being willed by any
creature (other than god, metaphorically speaking), are irrelevant to the wise person’s
 34

happiness. Such a person would be equally happy having no possessions whatsoever and
living hip-deep in a swamp as she would owning everything in the world and lounging in a
tropical paradise. Those circumstances are irrelevant because they have nothing to do with us;
we aren’t responsible for them and so a wise person is one who learns not to become attached
to them.

Again, for the Stoic only virtue and vice, which are character traits, are morally relevant, so
wealth, health, pleasure, pain, and even life and death make no difference when it comes to
fulfilling our moral obligation to be happy through clear-headedness. Of course, a person has to
be alive to be virtuous or otherwise, but mere life in the biological sense, as part of the natural
continuum of material things, has its alien, amoral function in so far as the living body is a
quantity of matter shaped by divine reason. With respect to its role in the causal network that
unites everything in the universe, a living body is out of our control; for example, whether we’re
alive or unborn isn’t up to us. Therefore, a sage doesn’t become attached to her life, meaning
that she doesn’t care whether she naturally lives or dies since that’s a matter of fate. Only the
sliver of the world over which we have limited control, namely the quality of our mind and
personality is of primary interest to the sage; she lets the rest take care of itself.

Stoic non-attachment is usefully contrasted with Ayn Rand’s egoism. The egoist contends that
we deserve the material property that becomes privately owned by us as soon as we help
produce it by our labour. A Stoic would say that this egoism is based on a failure to appreciate
that nature is a unified whole. There is, then, what John Stuart Mill called the total cause of an
event, which is the real totality of contributing factors that produce the event. When offering an
explanation of some phenomenon, we typically focus on some of those factors because of our
limited interests, but metaphysically speaking that selection is arbitrary. So even if an
entrepreneur slaves over her company and feels entitled to its profits, a sage would understand
that in so far as we have causal power over material things like the computers that keep track of
the company’s records, the company’s brick buildings, or even the invention of the company’s
product, our bodies are only parts of the greater whole of nature that accomplishes those works.
Everything in the world directly or indirectly impacts everything else, so laying claim to part of
the whole is as embarrassingly wrongheaded as a child’s painting a blade of grass on the lawn
and then calling that grass hers, ignoring everything else that brought the grass into being. The
egoist’s folly here is rooted in a narrowness of vision which is the mark not just of ignorance but
of narcissism.

Originality and Satanic Rebellion

These ancient forms of asceticism have interesting assumptions and implications: naturalism,
the moral duty to be rational, pantheism, non-attachment to material things, nature’s amorality, a
sharp divide between the wise and the deluded masses, and even righteous ridicule of pop
culture. All of these are parts of the worldview I explore in RWUG, which draws especially on
existentialism and cosmicism, the latter being, in effect, the classification of naturalism as a
story in the horror genre, where naturalism is the philosophical summary of what scientists tells
us the world is like. But I think some of the assumptions of Cynicism and Stoicism are pretty
easily undercut. Putting aside the determinism-freewill debate, which impacts many other
worldviews, there’s a problem with the ancient Greek ascetic’s moral use of naturalism. The
ascetic, that is, both the Cynic and the Stoic—not to mention the Daoist and the Buddhist—want
to say that social conventions and artificialities generally lead us astray, whereas wise people
understand nature’s unity. Here, “nature” is understood as the wilderness in opposition to
artificiality. In the metaphysical sense, given by the philosophical naturalist, everything is
 35

natural, including artificialities, and in that broadest sense there’s no room for morality or for any
distinction between the sage and the fool. But the metaphysical characterization of nature is
relevant to how we should conceive of nature in the narrower, more anthropocentric
sense, as that part of the world that hasn’t (yet) been altered or, as the Stoic would have
it, distorted by limited creatures. (For the Stoic, all of nature is intelligently ordered, although
not by a supernatural, personal deity, but by the “fire” of energy which causes matter to divide
and develop in intelligible ways.)

Specifically, it’s not enough to say that nature unfolds in an orderly way, because we know that
this unfolding is the ultimate form of creation. Nature builds on itself, from subatomic fluctuations
to atomic bonds to complex chemical reactions to astrophysical bodies, like stars and planets, to
biological and social and technological processes. So if that’s what nature is doing in the
metaphysical sense and we’re part of that cosmic creation, it looks like the fool who
creates a fantasy world is acting in accordance with nature, after all. Nature evidently
creates people as instruments for creating worlds within that larger world. Metaphysical
naturalism, then, isn’t so easily turned into a weapon against the masses or into a rationalization
of the omega’s marginalization. The Stoic commits a non sequitur fallacy here, when she says
that nature is rational, so wisdom as opposed to folly amounts to being rational (following
nature) and avoiding distractions that make us irrational, such as virtually all cultural pastimes.
The problem with this argument is that we know that nature isn’t merely rational in the sense of
having intelligible patterns. The overall pattern is one of creativity through complexification and
evolution (developments in structure and in time). With that conception of nature in mind,
civilization looks quite natural. So the ascetic needs another way to justify her condemnation of
what most people would call worldly success.

I think existentialism comes to the ascetic’s rescue at this point. The problem with the
materialistic masses isn’t so much with what they do but with who they are. They’re existentially
inauthentic with respect to the organization of their inner worlds. They can’t help but behave as
natural creatures, since nature works through them as it works through everything; however,
their participation in civilizational creativity lacks heroic intentions, so that if we construe morality
as an aesthetic form of judgment, as we should when the patterns in questions are matters of
creativity, their outputs lack vision and are relatively unoriginal. Compared to what happens in
the nonliving parts of the universe, everything sentient creatures do is anomalous, but
compared to the works of enlightened and usually alienated geniuses, most people’s creative
efforts are uninspired and forgettable. As for their intentions, people on average fail to be
properly horrified by the mindlessness of nature’s “rational” creativity, and so they don’t proceed
with the needed gusto; they don’t perceive civilization as the tragic rebellion against nature that
it is; indeed, they don’t see our artificiality as a demonic mimicry of the wilderness’s undead
decay (unfolding).

Now, the Stoic thinks of morality solipsistically, as a judgment on the quality of our private world
that bears no relation to what’s happening in the rest of the universe. But philosophical
naturalism won’t support that dualism. The more compelling story is one which accounts for
human activity in that universal context. Whereas natural creations are undead simulations
of intelligent designs, given naturalistic pantheism, our creations are intelligent undoings
of those undead creations. Only somewhat hyperbolically, we can say, then, that all
participants in the civilizational subworld are satanists, in that far from respecting the natural
order, like those we modern sophisticates call primitives or savages, we collectively mean to
replace the wilderness, or the so-called wasteland, with a world that better glorifies us, that puts
us at its center. Have I gone too far with this discernment of what is effectively mass (atheistic)
Satanism in the enterprise of upholding the artificialities of civilization?
 36

Think again! Recall the biblical story of Satan, of the fallen angel who rebelled against God and
tries to undermine God’s Creation at every turn. As John Milton saw, Satan is a tragic hero
when viewed from a modern as opposed to a Christian perspective. When we assume that
human progress includes the triumph of artificiality and the concomitant elimination of the
wilderness, we internalize the satanic impulse so that we lose the capacity to loathe what we’ve
become. We are truly stuck between a rock and a hard place, between decadence and
enlightenment, where the former is a bastardized and unsustainable retreat to animalistic
bliss and the latter leads to a full-bore satanic onslaught against the divine natural order.

Of course, I’m not saying modern folks secretly worship a demonic creature. What happened is
that Christians demonized secular creativity, the Promethean drive towards
technoscientific progress which results in the civilizational subspace that displaces the
undead, monstrously self-creating cosmos. It goes without saying that neither God nor
Satan exists as a supernatural personage, but the Promethean, liberal-progressive aspect of the
fictional character, Satan, is a fitting symbol for the secular enterprise which took off thousands
of years ago. Now, the wiser Satanists may take comfort in knowing that the God against whom
they rebel with their “blasphemous” deviations from the pre-existing order is an undead monster
rather than any loving father figure or other such childish projection. Nevertheless, the natural
universe is divine, because its creativity is awe-inspiring and terrible to contemplate. Even the
Stoics had a sense of that horror when they speculated that the universe passes through a
cycle of unfolding, folding, and unfolding again infinitely many times, and always repeating
exactly the same deterministic pattern so that we have Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same.
Any such universe is itself an abomination and so the satanic rebel becomes a tragic hero.

But to return to the main point, about existentialism, the ascetic’s distinction between wisdom
and mass folly can be reconstructed even in the terms supplied by updated naturalism, if we
think of wise people as those who are the more authentic satanic rebels. Their authenticity
can be gauged aesthetically by the originality of their works, since originality is a sign of
a breakaway from undead nature’s regularities. By way of analogy, think of the totalitarian
Galactic Empire of the Star Wars universe, which imposes its rule of law on a diverse population
of intelligent species. Now think of the Rebel Alliance as an outbreak of liberty from that regime,
or less normatively, as an anomaly in the world order. As I say, nature creates both
constructively and destructively, by building on top of itself and by replacing the old with the
new, so that not even human originality is truly unnatural. But when done with the enlightened
perspective in mind, our replacements of natural landscapes with cityscapes, of biological
cycles with technological functions, and of the void with meaning are acts of rebellion. We mimic
nature’s creativity, but we do so demonically, perverting our evolutionary impulses to flatter our
self-image as godlike beings that transcend not just the animal kingdom but the whole cosmic
plenum that we regard as inferior to the artificial worlds we prefer to inhabit. Our greatest artistic
achievements may not be miracles, but they are certainly anomalies in the known universe,
whereas our mass behaviour is more animalistic and driven by evolutionary needs that serve
the status quo.

Asceticism and Alienation from Nature

One other facet of Stoicism interests me and that’s the idea of non-attachment to morally
indifferent material things. There’s a hint here of cosmicism. Recall H. P. Lovecraft’s
interpretation of atheistic naturalism, according to which anthropocentrism is utterly
wrongheaded since, far from being central to the universe so that our values are secured, we’re
 37

lost because of the lack of any absolute center or purpose, and our puniness likely contrasts
with the values of some mighty alien star-faring civilization. If values are subjective, then the
greater the species, the greater its values. We’re the greatest known species, but we’re not
likely the greatest in the universe; at least, there’s the potential for a much more powerful, long-
lived and experienced species in which case everything we cherish becomes worthless by
comparison with the alien interests. More important than whether such a superhuman species
exists is the fact that we can presently imagine one, and the mere possibility of such a species
taints our evaluations.

Now, Stoics say most of the world is beyond our control and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise;
moreover, our emotions should reflect that rational judgment, so we should let nature take its
course without any resentment. Asceticism, then, is supposed to be rational and thus moral
because it demonstrates what we might think of as properly directed fear, namely fear of the
pantheistic god; we’re meant to fear the cosmic energy that organizes all matter and that’s why
we shouldn’t pretend we can control it. Becoming emotionally attached to material things or
natural processes is as audacious as praying for rain, given determinism. Self-centered
emotions are disgraceful and blasphemous even if we think of divinity as identical with natural
creativity. The wise person may admire the goings-on in the uncultivated landscape, but won’t
presume that natural cycles ought to serve her will.

In any case, the emergence of artificiality as a quasi-miracle indicates that the Stoic call for
asceticism may be moot. We secularists become attached not to the wilderness but to
material things of our making which extend our minds and bodies and thus our control
over the external world. Stoic philosophy seems ill-matched against the attractions of
consumerism and pragmatism, because the Stoics don’t capture the horror of the naturalist’s
god, and so Stoic asceticism would seem all the more mystifying to modern secularists.
Withdrawing from the progressive personification of the world through the spread of technology,
social regulations, and fictions should be motivated by a religious conviction, because this is an
extreme life choice.

Therefore, the Stoic’s determinism should be fortified by the cosmicist’s mysterianism, by the
open-mindedness of the humiliated naturalist who learns the horrible truth of our position in the
world. It’s not that anything goes when we realize how small we are in the greater scheme; but
underlying the best scientific theories should be pantheistic angst—a loathing for what I’ve
called the codes of cosmic creation, for the divine creative power’s undeadness, for the fact that
a universe in which we’re a replaceable cog in a larger machine that’s indifferent not just to us
but to all of its operations is a monstrosity. Ascetic non-attachment, then, becomes an
expression of disgust and of fear of contamination by that which is dreadfully holy. So
we have satanic relishing of artistic achievement for its relative unnaturalness and ascetic
loathing of the zombie forces that animate all natural phenomena. That’s how I see Stoicism
fitting into an unembarassing postmodern religion.

The Stoic will say that far from being disgusted with nature, we should submit to the divinity in
the world, rather like a Daoist or a Muslim, since a rational, which is to say, intelligible world is
the best of all possible ones. But that just doesn't follow. Whether a world is best is a normative
judgment which is at least partly subjective. We know that people can be instrumentally rational,
efficient, and logical while also being evil, as in the case of Nazis or psychopaths. So just
because everything in nature happens for a reason, given the omnipresence of natural law and
the impossibility of a miracle, doesn't mean this world will meet with our approval, given our
ideals. We don't know the ultimate reason for natural creativity, so the mystery remains: what
will the end product be? What is nature busy creating until everything is gathered back into the
 38

primordial state? Even were we to discover the answer, there's no guarantee we would share
God's interests or his taste. Just because we have the capacity to reason doesn't mean we
share God's values. So for us to say that nature is ultimately good is vacuous. All we can say is
that nature would be perfectly good according to God's point of view. And this is actually what
Stoics tend to say, with Spinoza. But they add that our moral or aesthetic judgments are less
perfect than God's, because they're limited by our interests. But this again doesn't follow,
because all normative judgments are limited in that way, including God's. Seeing the world from
a purely rational standpoint, with no interests, character, or experience to affect your judgment
would lead to precisely no normative evaluation of anything. You wouldn't even perceive any
mathematical beauty in the world, since aesthetic qualities are likewise subjective and
dependent on a particular perspective.

The upshot of this is that I find the Stoic's talk of automatic submission to God/Nature
distasteful, not to mention overly hasty. If we resign ourselves to the necessity of natural law
and then add our personal approval of natural phenomena, even though we're not familiar with
all of God's intentions, to say the least, we may be like the Jews who went along with the Nazi
plan, getting on the train to the concentration camp, and failing to entertain the suspicion that
what was happening to them was in fact the worst of all possible situations. In any case, as I
said, we prefer the artificial worlds we create to the more directly God-made one we find. We
can say that nature builds artificial worlds through us and so in this sense we're still submitting
to natural law. But what we're really doing is submitting to the natural impulse to recreate things,
to be disgusted, in effect, with the old and to be sufficiently original to create something new.
When sentient creatures take part in this sort of transformation, this looks to me more like
rebellion than submission.
 39

Artistic Creativity: Angst’s Antidote and the Outsider’s Solace

____________________________________________________

What is the nature of great art? Take, for example, the art of writing. Commonsense tells us that
writing in general is the sharing of thoughts and that both thinking and writing are uses of
language to get at the truth or to achieve some other practical aim. Nonfiction writers put
sentences together in meaningful ways to model some reality, while fiction writers tell stories to
explore ideas and psychological hypotheses. Rational writers put together arguments while
emotional writers try to manipulate the reader’s attitude. Whereas thinking is private and
speaking is a very limited way of making thoughts public, writing can produce a permanent
record. All of which assumes that a writer should be concerned mainly with such mundane tasks
as choosing the right words and tone of rhetoric, following an argument’s logic and avoiding
fallacies, and so forth. Indeed, these are necessary skills if you want to write well, but the
essence of arguably the most influential kind of writing is nowhere to be found in this account.
So I’ll try to explain here the function of great art in general, although I’ll focus on what I’ll call
prophetic writings, which include the philosophical, religious, and literary kinds.

Artistic Inspiration as Daemonic Possession

First, though, here’s how I think the commonsense view came about. In the ancient world,
writing was relatively rare, because writing was done by hand and there was no mass-produced
paper. Much Bronze Age writing was controlled by the government, as in ancient Egypt in which
only an upper class of scribes was taught to read and write. There were mainly three kinds of
ancient writing: records were kept for business purposes, engravings and the ancient
equivalents of signs were used to maintain the power of the ruling elite, and stories were told
and arguments were made in the service of prophetic or religious ideas. The third kind of writing
is quite different from the other two, more mundane kinds. After the printing press and the
computer, writing has become so commonplace that most people think all writing is utilitarian.
This is because most people have no prophetic or religious aptitude: all they can do is record
daily events or use writing to achieve some short-term goal, as with the grocery list; apply the
rules of rationality to persuade the reader that certain statements are reliable; or use rhetoric as
a tool in power games. People have thus lost sight of the most important kind of writing,
because writing as a medium has been cheapened by its overuse. More specifically, we’ve
forgotten the nature of what I’ll call prophetic writing and have even trivialized scripture by
literalizing it, as though the alleged truth of a myth like one in the Bible were of the same type as
that of a record of some commonplace business transaction.

We can get a sense of what’s been lost if we analyze certain words that described the sort of
charismatic figure that used to inspire prophetic writing, beginning with the very word
“inspiration.” According to Dictionary.com, that word originally meant “the immediate influence of
God or a god.” The word “genius” referred to the “guardian deity or spirit which watches over
each person from birth.” A prophet was one who had the “gift of interpreting the will of the gods.”
 40

A vision was “something seen in the imagination or in the supernatural.” Before the word was
generalized after the Puritans’ influence, “enthusiasm” meant “inspired, possessed by a god.”

The common thread here is the idea of being possessed by a higher power and turned into a
messenger, so that what I’m calling prophetic writing, which as we’ll see encompasses
philosophical, religious, and artistic or fictional writing, is revelatory. The multigenre author Dan
Simmons makes much of this higher kind of writing, although he pompously takes the myths
associated with prophecy rather literally. The key idea for him, as he says in his fourteenth
installment on how to write, is that a great writer must find her daemon that dwells perpetually in
what Yeats calls a condition of fire. “Daemon” is the original Greek word for “muse.” Christians
demonized the daemon and replaced the daemon, that is, the external entity that’s supposed to
possess and inspire a great writer, with the tamer source of inspiration, the muse or guardian
angel.

In either case, the possessor is an intermediary between the supernatural and natural worlds. In
Plato’s “Symposium,” for example, love itself is one such intermediary daemon. For Dan
Simmons, this means that the great writer must suffer, because she must cooperate with the
daemon, which entails submitting to the daemon’s alien practices. Moreover, inspiration comes
and goes, some writers never find their daemon or find themselves possessed for only a short
while, and most importantly, being possessed is a terrifying ordeal: because the daemon
resides in fire, the writer must land herself in that same condition if she’s to submit to this outer
source of creativity. Of course, the condition of fire is just a symbol of artistic obsessiveness, of
the all-consuming feeling of inspiration that produces great art while often making the artist’s life
a shambles. Simmons lists some great American writers who suffered greatly for their art,
including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Hart Crane, Sylvia Plath,
Virginia Woolf, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson.

Dan Simmons speaks of the possessed artist as being tried by kenosis and askesis. Kenosis is
an emptying out, in this case an emptying of the old self to make room not just for the daemon
but for the daemon’s ability to be anything by way of the imagination. That is, the emptied writer
is like a method actor who lives as the characters she plays, so that the actor herself becomes
an empty shell. (This stereotype is satirized by the Robert Downey Jr. character in the movie
Tropic Thunder.) “Askesis” is at the root of the word ascetic, but for the Greeks the word meant
any kind of discipline or practice. With respect to writing, Simmons says the practice in question
is the observation of every detail of your experience, so that you’re constantly standing outside
yourself and taking notes, asking questions about motivations and so forth. The ancient Greeks
were more optimistic about discipline than the Christians, because the Greeks didn’t see the
world as a fallen place; they were naturalists whereas Christians are metaphysical dualists. So
discipline for the Greeks was a way of achieving self-control and of avoiding the character
extremes (vices), for the sake of being a proper citizen, that is, a productive and responsible
moral agent.

The dualistic Christians looked down on worldly disciplines because they demonized natural
forces, so the only valid discipline was the monk’s spiritual kind, which entailed the renouncing
of worldly cares. In Christianity, daemons are evil creatures that live in hell, a place which the
Christian traditionally pictures as either a realm of unquenchable flames that serve as
supernatural instruments of torture, or as an outer darkness, far from God. Here, we see the
demonizing of artistic creativity and of prophetic writing, which is quite convenient for Christians,
considering the fact that, judging from the universality of the creative person’s feeling of being
possessed, their charismatic leader could have described his divine inspiration in terms of being
inflamed along with his daemon. Moreover, regardless of whether Jesus existed as an historical
 41

figure, the symbol of Jesus is of the intermediary between the divine and mortal realms, which
makes Jesus himself a daemon. In any case, the Christian view only distorts the artistic
experience without erasing it altogether. The point is that the creation of art and more
specifically of prophetic writing (of philosophy, scripture, or literary fiction) happens through the
artist’s suffering. The artist suffers because whatever it is, the daemon acts like an alien
creature with its own agenda which likely involves abusing the artist, since the daemon is
indifferent to her parochial, earthly needs. The partnership between artist and daemon is hardly
an equal one.

Introversion, Horror, and Inspiration

But what exactly is a daemon? I think Jung took an important step when he interpreted this sort
of religious idea as having symbolic importance, because the idea expresses some universal
aspect of human life. In this respect, the daemon may be an archetypal or primordial image
which therefore resonates because it expresses a fundamental human truth, such as that of
what it feels like to create with inspiration. But why would the artist feel as if she were in thrall to
an inhuman intelligence? My naturalistic answer begins with the fact that the mind is divided into
parts, because the mind is a process happening within the brain and the brain evolved in layers
and modules, or subsystems. What great artists excel at doing is employing the generic parts of
their mind, such as the faculties of imagination, emotion, and even reason. Thus, the great artist
is usually introverted, meaning that she’s used to exploring the recesses of her mind.
Scrutinizing the external world, including what people wear and how they talk or react is needed
to lend prophetic writing verisimilitude. For example, Jesus’s parables picked up on concrete
details of his listeners’ daily practices. But great writing consists of more than just a list of such
details. The writer needs a theory or at least a hypothesis, conjecture, or speculation to interpret
the world she so carefully observes. A great writer offers an original interpretation, which she
acquires from interior reflection, brooding, and other introverted pastimes. This is why great
artists tend to create in solitude; for example, it’s why Jesus is said to have wondered in the
wilderness for a long time—because introverted self-reflection is known to be a prerequisite for
inspired art.

This introverted practice of inspecting the regions of your mind builds up the virtue of a certain
kind of humility. To be sure, artists can be great egotists and extroverted people can be too
busy engaging with things other than themselves to become megalomaniacs. Still, introversion
makes for a type of humility, namely for one born from an experience of horror. What happens is
that the introvert learns to detach from most of her mental processes and to identify with a more
and more rarified version of her, that is, with the introspective observer of her memories,
emotions, and logical trains of thought. And so the introvert becomes a pitifully small and fragile
thing; no longer is she the same as any part of her mind which can become an object of
thought, but she’s an ever more removed and theoretical subject of her self-consciousness.
When inspiration strikes, then, the introverted artist experiences her creativity as having
an alien origin, because the vision of the finished work flows from those faculties from
which she’s learned to disassociate. She becomes alienated from most of her mind and
so those objectified faculties become monstrous, alien sources of information for her to
analyze.

The daemon, then, is some part of the self which the isolated introvert perceives as foreign.
Artistic inspiration, therefore, is a case of mild schizophrenia. The artist talks to herself and
listens for the inner voice to guide her. Each mind is filled with voices, that is, with thoughts, but
while the extrovert identifies with all of them, because she doesn’t often stop to analyze them,
 42

dividing her mind into parts, the introvert objectifies all the parts of her mind that show up as
contents of introspective awareness. So whereas the extrovert goes with the flow of her
thoughts and uses them to deal with exterior things, the introvert doesn’t take those thoughts for
granted, but receives them as data to be inspected. Again, this is because the introvert has
personally identified with only the narrowest self, which is that sliver of consciousness
that can’t observe itself. And because one of her mental subsystems is the one responsible
for social interaction, which works by interpreting our behaviour in everyday psychological
terms, the introvert personifies the creative parts of herself, interpreting the core of her that
receives and works with the ideas as being possessed by the monstrous engines of inspiration.

What makes the creative parts of her mind monstrous? I think the essence of the horror is
defined by the hypothesis of the uncanny valley, as found in research on artificial intelligence.
The hypothesis is that when something is almost exactly the same as a person, but is
nevertheless still slightly yet apparently different, the comparison is revolting. For example, if a
robot looks and moves quite like a human, but has jarringly too-perfect skin or hair, the observer
is disgusted mainly by the implications that there’s a trick afoot and that human personhood is
evidently something capable of being so nearly simulated by that which isn’t, after all, a person.
The observer fears unconsciously, at least, that there are no human people after all, that we’re
always fooled when we personify each other and ourselves, and that mental qualities are only
ever faked. In this way, the uncanny valley generates an existential crisis. And so the introvert
who’s learned to objectify her mind, to divide it into observable parts, perceives the observed
parts as uncannily like herself. This is because in a more extroverted mood she’d broaden her
mind, as it were, identifying with those parts without bothering to over-analyze them. Yet she
knows those observed parts are foreign, because here she is, being a mere sliver of self-
awareness, a ghostly observer that can never see itself but that can drift from one part of her
mind to the next. This is the root of the introvert’s and of the artist’s terrible humility. This sort of
person is horrified by the parts of her mind that are objectified through the process of
introversion with which she passes the time spent being alone for extended periods. She’s
horrified by the knowledge that so much of her mind is apparently not herself, so that she’s left
with the fear that maybe she has no self, that there’s just one last subsystem in her brain
performing some trick of self-awareness, generating the illusion of an immaterial personal
essence. The causes of that fear she experiences as alien and she’s liable to demonize them.

Take the daemon of love, for example. Most people with a healthy dose of extroversion will
enjoy the ride of the love hormones, going with the feelings instead of walling herself off in some
higher part of her mind and observing the feelings as though they were foreign to her. But
introverts with artistic sensibilities—and especially those I’m calling prophetic writers—are never
so at home in their skin; instead, they’re always questioning themselves. After an existential
awakening to the horror of being alive in nature, the introvert/artist/great writer may experience
love as madness, as an affliction that carries the disturbing revelation that we can’t die because
we were never alive, that there is no self who loves nor any beloved self, but only processes
that generate those illusions.

What, then, is the primary cause of the artist’s suffering? It’s just the horror that attends a
creative person’s flashes of insight. The horror experienced after prolonged introspection, due to
introversion, alienates the artist from all her perceivable parts and that in turn compels others to
ostracize her. She’ll be disgusted by the fictitiousness of all psychological and social
phenomena, and so she’ll have great difficulty socializing or behaving in customary ways. At
best, she’ll be eccentric, at worst a deranged, misanthropic recluse. The artist suffers because
her creativity comes at the cost of her inner self-exploration, which results in her soul’s
diminution and in a sort of claustrophobia: the introverted self is hardly any of the inner voices
 43

she hears, since she’s a mere fleeting pinnacle of self-awareness, rising above the objectified
mental contents. The true recluse hides not just in some building or room but in a tenuous
singularity of consciousness which seems to witness her thoughts.

The inspired artist suffers, then, first from her existential terror which follows from her
introversion and mental discipline, and second, from the social effects of her inner
discoveries. Just as she feels alienated from most of herself, others feel alienated from anyone
who will seem to lack the confidence that comes actually from ignorance, which is to say, from
extroversion. She will be anathema, because she won’t easily trust in popular opinion; she’ll
doubt conventional wisdom, because she’s been horrified by the possibility that minds and
societies are like so many sandcastles that are easily washed away. The brain is a wonderful,
sturdy organ, ensconced in the skull and protected by the blood-brain moat, but the
hallucinations of the ego and of many commonsense convictions falter as soon as we learn to
perform that first ascetic act: renouncing the mind through introspective analysis and
identification with the so-called higher self. In the extroverted world, introverts are pariahs and
wet blankets, and creative artists are just those that acquire visions through introverted habits.
And here we find a likely coincidental but still apt comparison with the Christian’s metaphor of
hell as an outer darkness. The introverted artist is indeed left outside the world in no place at all,
because she’s dissociated from everything and practically dematerialized, through excessive
self-analysis.

Before I turn to prophetic writing more specifically, I want to address one more general question,
which has to do with the source of the artist’s creativity. Merely to introspect a lot isn’t the same
as being in the grip of inspiration which feels like daemonic possession. No, creativity derives
from the objectivity afforded by alienation. Artists are outsiders and so they have fresh
perspectives on social behaviour which extroverted insiders take for granted. Artists are forced
to stand apart from normal interactions, because their self-loathing makes them off-putting. Yet
their being shunned has a silver lining, which is that they can stop and see what others are too
busy being immersed in to notice. Great artists have original interpretations because they feel
distant from the perceivable world; artists are estranged from themselves and thenceforward
from nearly everything else, and so they develop a strange worldview, one that reflects their
detached and skewed vantage point. The feeling of being caught up in inspiration begins with
the necessity to discover a remedy for the existential trauma, that is, for the horror caused by
the inner uncanny valley. The remedy is the creation of some art, some expression of an odd
way of looking at the world that’s informed by the artist’s idiosyncratic experiences with which
she’s all-too familiar, since she curates a virtual museum housing her mental representations of
them.

Prophetic Writing and the Existential Crisis

The above goes some way towards explaining artistic creativity in general. What, then, is
prophetic as opposed to utilitarian writing? Prophetic writing is inspired and visionary,
because it’s motivated not by mundane interests, but by the need to resolve the
existential crisis. Necessity is the mother of invention, so the greater the need, the greater the
incentive to create. The word “prophecy” has come to mean merely the trick of predicting the
distant future, the trick being that if you issue enough prophecies or if you line up enough
prophets, some are bound to get lucky. (Alternatively, there’s the technique that’s based on the
game of twenty questions, which is well-satirized in the South Park episode about the charlatan
John Edward.) In any case, as I’ve pointed out, the word originally meant the broader gift of
interpreting the will of the gods. Prophets, then, were comparable to shamans, who evidently
 44

grew bored with the daemons they perceived with their waking mind and so they sought
psychedelic states of consciousness, through entheogens, fasting, or rhythmic dancing and
chanting. Christians are wont to boast that prophecy ended with their charismatic leader, Jesus
of Nazareth, while Muslims hold that Muhammad was the last prophet. Of course, since the
theistic interpretation of prophecy is merely a vulgarity in the modern context, prophecy as a
psychological and existential phenomenon has continued into our postmodern era.

Visionary artists are the secular prophets. Their prophecy has nothing to do with predicting
the future or with contacting supernatural beings. Instead, as I’ve tried to explain, they make the
best of their introversion and of their resulting alienation, by construing their analyzed thoughts
as alien and distant from their true selves. That uncanny valley horrifies and prompts them to
invent a resolution by means of some ingenious interpretation of the world. With respect to the
artists who choose to speak or to write their revelations, they’ll likely say that their most
satisfying work seems to flow through them, as if they were possessed by a daemon or muse.
There is no alien supernatural intelligence responsible for any human art, but there is that part
of the artist’s mind that’s experienced as foreign through introspection.

Mind you, any writer can write a stream of consciousness, spilling her thoughts onto the page
without editing them, but only a great writer’s barely edited stream of thoughts would be worth
reading. The difference is that the great writer’s mind has been broken by introverted self-
analysis and rebuilt with a vision that resolves her existential crisis, so that when her mental
faculties have their say, their word is likely original and incisive rather than trite and incoherent.
Weak artists tell people what they want to hear, because their minds are full of unanalyzed
memes and taboos and noble lies that serve the interest mainly of protecting some dominance
hierarchy. The modern artist, beginning with the likes of Miguel de Cervantes (author of Don
Quixote) and Shakespeare, strives to be a genius with an inner vision she feels compelled to
share, because she lives in her head.

Strong artists, then, ignore or doubt received wisdom because they’re led by that ghostly self
within which will defer all the less to other people, because that self has already skewered all
her own thoughts, feelings, memories, attitudes, and character traits. If the artist has
demolished even herself through introspection, she’s not likely to credit the products of other
people’s cognitive habits. Weak artists are relatively extroverted: they live in the external world
and haven’t met the daemons within or been confronted with existential horror. Thus, no fire has
been lit under their creative efforts. They write for money or for fame. By contrast, prophetic
writers are possessed by an original vision of what the world is like; moreover, they’re more or
less ascetic, because their introversion likely impoverishes them, and so they’ll stay true to their
vision since they’ll be met with few distractions from it.

Utilitarian writing, then, is the product of existential inauthenticity, meaning that it’s motivated by
something other than the need to address the horror of discovering the self’s insubstantiality. Of
course, even great writers can write for humdrum purposes, as long as they’re not constantly
afflicted by their vision. Just as most mystic can’t permanently sustain their feeling of
everything’s oneness, a prophetic writer will now and again be distracted by comparatively trivial
matters, however secluded she may be. But instead of thinking of prophecy as an
interpretation of some supernatural will, we should think of it as a sublimation of
existential horror, caused by the introverted self’s alienation from the contents of her
mind.

I’d include philosophy, religion, and the fine arts, including literary writing, as potentially
prophetic. Granted, modern scientists, too, have been regarded as interpreters of divine
 45

revelation, Isaac Newton being the best example. But this view of the scientist as a semi-artistic
or religious figure has been rendered quaint by the banishment of teleology or deism from the
scientist’s picture of nature. As for philosophy, the academic Western kind is largely uninspired
and scholastic, but existential or otherwise possessed philosophers like Nietzsche and
Wittgenstein were certainly prophetic in the above respect. Philosophers differ from modern
scientists in that philosophers make due with speculations to address important nonscientific
questions, especially prescriptive ones which call for some conviction about something’s
sacredness, to provide guidance. Typically, the unreflective masses are guided by overt myths,
while the cognitive elites take direction from a metaphysical system, or at least from some set of
coherent and abstract principles. But a metaphysical system is what postmodernists call a
metanarrative, a story with abstract rather than concrete characters that nevertheless serves
our childish need to be at home throughout the world. And such a system is mythical in being a
preposterous exaggeration of what we can hope to know as factual. This is because the system
features speculative generalizations that are simply impudent unless proffered self-consciously
as works of art, on the basis of something like the cosmicist insight that life isn’t at all central to
the cosmos. So the elites feel at home in the indifferent and utterly inhuman cosmos as long as
they have their maps (scientific theories) and their quasi-myths (philosophical metanarratives).

Religious prophecy is closely connected to the philosophical kind, since both deal with stories
that cater to our childish longings. Ultimately, all of the great religions’ myths derive from the
psychedelic experiences deciphered by ancient shamanic traditions. Shamans were the
introverted artists of their day. Modern artists, too, use drugs such as cannabis and alcohol to
intensify their estrangement from the world and to further skew their perspective in the hope that
they’ll hit on a remedy for their angst. Theists get carried away with their personifications and
demonizations, but their myths often have psychological validity, because their underlying cause
is just the introversion that leads to the existential crisis and to the search for creative options. In
the modern era, religious myths are unfashionable in certain elite circles and so philosophical
myths are preferable, because modern philosophy is written in a scientistic language that avoids
the grosser fallacies common in theistic religions.

Literary writing, too, is comparable to scripture, the main difference being that the former deals
explicitly with profane rather than sacred matters. Literature works out solutions to the
existential crisis indirectly by representing the writer’s preoccupations using characters placed in
imaginary scenarios. Of course, haughty authors will be the first to protest that no great novel is
a mere litany of the author’s more or less disguised opinions, with characters that are no better
than puppets. But the main difference between great and mediocre literature is merely that a
great author is more skilled at disguising the fact that she’s writing in response to her existential
crisis. And so a great author can write well-rounded characters and realistic dialogue, and can
handle complex plots and avoid preaching the ideas that make up her vision. But in so far as
great art is inspired in the way I’ve laid out, a literary author will have a vision and she’ll write to
explore it, if not necessarily to indoctrinate her readers.

So far I’ve tried to show that artists hope that their art can redress their existential suffering,
which is the suffering that’s brought on by their knowledge of what we fundamentally are. But
art has another, often unintended consequence, which is the subversion of the
unenlightened masses’ delusions. In dealing with her traumatic self-discovery, the great artist
tells a tale in a jarringly original voice, albeit one that’s hoarse from overuse and from the effects
of the artist’s destitution. Art that’s true to the vision seen by eyes that regard nowhere as home
won’t likely be reconcilable with the conventions that ignore any such foundational trauma. So
the more great art is understood, the more the masses have to worry, although society has
numerous defense mechanisms to keep its power hierarchies intact.
 46

One such defense, in effect, is the use of digitization which trivializes art and thus deprives
artists of their mystique. Modern technology has the potential to end meaningful art even as the
technosphere mass produces the existentially useless sort of art. And yet technology
exacerbates the existential crisis, by making us more aware of our materialistic basis and of the
world’s impersonality. As I argue elsewhere, the technosphere may ironically be one giant
solution to the existential crisis, since postmodern technology seems to make angst impossible
for the multitude, by infantilizing the consumer in an artificial world that’s at her beck and call,
and thus by fulfilling the mythopoeic dream of a world that intermixes subjects and objects at all
levels. Still, the technosphere would then be a colossal work of kitsch, like an endless Dan
Brown novel or Justin Bieber song or YouTube video about a cute cat. Great art that addresses
the profound truth in an intellectually responsible way may have to go underground as the
technosphere re-enchants the world by replacing nature, the cause of existential horror, with
mass-produced distractions.
 47

Awake while Sleeping: DMT and Paradoxical Consciousness

____________________________________________________

Scientists often come to understand how something works, indirectly, by studying how it fails.
Normal, waking consciousness is perhaps the strangest known phenomenon, but I recently had
an abnormal experience that sheds some light on our subjective nature. Hyperbolically
speaking, I stumbled into a state of living death, which is to say that I became conscious of the
unconscious inner space, while in deep sleep.

Hitchhiking on Delta Brain Waves: A Tale of Living Death

My ordeal lasted for about a week, three or four months ago, and it was preceded by omens,
figuratively speaking. The omens were changes in the phosphenes in my hypnagogic state
between waking and dreaming. Phosphenes are the patterns of lights you see when your eyes
are closed, such as when you’re falling asleep. Usually, I’d see various flashing, interlocking
shapes and so forth, but I began to notice what looked like the ends of tendrils or tentacles in
the phosphenes, which led me to imagine tunnels. Eventually, I started focusing on those
tentacles, mentally identifying with them, and they sort of washed over my mind’s eye and I was
sucked into a mindspace filled with a different order of phosphenes. I can’t recall the exact
differences, because to end the ordeal I’m about to describe I had to try to forget about all of this
and relearn how to relax at night so I could get back to normal sleep. But I recall thinking that
the phosphenes looked more organic and pulsating, as if I could see the base of my brain in
them. More alarmingly, I could feel my heart beating much louder and slower, and it wasn’t just
that I was getting nervous; instead, it was as if my consciousness were being shunted to my
cardiovascular system so that while my mind was visually swimming in strange phosphenes,
aurally I was awash in the sounds of blood flow. It sounded like I was underwater or in a womb.
And there was an ascending high-pitched noise that must have corresponded to the change in
blood pressure.

The overriding problem was that, far from falling deeper into a state of unconsciousness, my
conscious self was fully awake and growing more anxious, because I felt forced to explore this
new inner state. Sometimes, I’d fall out of this state and back into normal, albeit groggy
conscious awareness. But I began also to go deeper into this new way of sleeping. The
phosphenes became more remote and washed out, my heart beat slower and louder, and I’d
reach plateaus that cycled back and forth so that it seemed as if I were consciously
experiencing the shift of brave waves. There would be a realignment of the phosphenes and a
change in my heart rate, and then I’d hang out on that level for some minutes, perhaps rising to
the previous one or descending to the next one.

I’ve since forgotten some of the details of those early stages, but what I remember most is the
final and most terrifying plateau, which I now believe was the shift to the delta brain wave. There
was a mental pinching sensation, as if my conscious self were being squeezed through a
 48

narrow opening, and then it felt like I was falling slowly, back and forth like a feather, until I
reached rock bottom which was a place of total darkness. My heart beat felt far away or like it
had almost stopped and it was as if I were trapped in my brain’s closet, with the lights turned out
and the door locked. At first I resisted this last transition, because I’m claustrophobic and I had
no idea what was happening at the time. But because I wanted to sleep, I learned to let the
change happen, by imagining I were indeed a feather or a rowboat that could rock from side to
side until it landed safely. I resorted to mantras to distract myself. I can’t remember exactly the
words I used, but I kept verbally reassuring myself that I’d be safe.

You see, in this last stage I lost the power of imagination, because the phosphenes disappeared
so I had no materials to work with—although eventually I think I came to see faint traces of them
in the darkness. Everything grew very dark and only the thinnest, most ghostly sliver of my
conscious self was left. Over and over, I recited the mantras throughout this confinement, to
comfort but also to distract me from the horror of what was happening. Sometimes, I would think
I’d reached the final plateau only to find that there was a deeper, more enveloping darkness. It
felt like I’d entered a coma, which was terrifying, needless to say. And I remember verifying I
was still somehow awake, by telling myself to move my finger against the bed sheet, and as I
moved my finger I felt the sensation even while my mind was trapped in that dark place. After a
matter of minutes, I seemed to rise and fall back into my body; phosphenes rushed in and I was
back on the previous mental plateau.

But I’d cycle through the levels, eventually reaching that darkest stage several times per night. It
was like I was on a rollercoaster, going from one level to the next, up and down. The darkest
plateau became less horrifying as I learned that I could indeed re-emerge from it. The first time I
landed in the darkness each night was the longest, and each time was progressively shorter
until I was there for what felt like only seconds. After the rollercoaster, I had a window of
opportunity during which I could have relaxing dreams, when I regained some control over my
imagination. But if I didn’t allow myself to be distracted just right by the phosphenes, what
happened instead was that the mental lights became static, as if I were looking at noise on a
blank movie screen. And I’d have to lie there in bed for another hour or so, with a head ache
and without having had anything like a relaxing night of sleep.

I took two kinds of sleeping aids during this week-long ordeal: valerian root and
Diphenhydramine Hydrochloride. They helped relax me at night, but didn’t prevent the
physiological changes. I remember vividly that the DH made the pulsating phosphenes brighter
and accelerated the transitions, so that it felt like I was rocketing from one to the next at
breakneck speed and if I successfully resisted a transition, it was as if I’d slammed into a brick
wall.

There are two reasons I call this an ordeal. First, I didn’t sleep well, so that during the day I was
far from rested. On the contrary, I suffered heart palpitations and shortness of breath, and
strangely, several days into the week, if I so much as looked at a computer or TV screen that
was turned on, I fell instantly into some state of sleep. Something about the artificial light just
temporarily shut off my waking mind, so that I was constantly on the verge of falling asleep
during the day. Second, as tired as I was, I came to dread going to sleep at night. And here I
want to reiterate the strangest part of this experience: throughout that week or so I never fell into
complete unconsciousness, which means I had literally about seven days of unbroken
memories, including all the memories of what was happening to me at night (many of the details
of which I’ve since forgotten). What I’m saying is that whereas I’d used to slip into
unconsciousness after being distracted by the phosphenes or by the voices you hear while
falling asleep, and then to wake hours later having forgotten exactly what I was just dreaming,
 49

so that there was a break in my stream of consciousness, now there was no such break. My
conscious self, which is to say my inner voice which I identify as the subject of my
experiences, was lucid the entire time it transitioned from one state of sleep or of so-
called subconsciousness to the next. This was grueling, riding that mental rollercoaster that
had no off-ramp.

I went to see a sleep therapist and he said I should take the natural sleep aids and see a
therapist to treat my anxiety. He also said it’s normal for the heart to beat slower during sleep,
but you’re not supposed to focus on that or normally be able to perceive the difference. I
switched to the sleep aid of melatonin but didn’t bother seeing another therapist, since the
doctor’s insistence that anxiety was exacerbating my abnormal sleep already reassured me.
Instead, I learned to regain my normal night’s sleep by ignoring the tentacle-like phosphenes. At
first, I’d just rest in bed throughout the night rather than fall sleep, violently resisting the new
transitions by throwing up a mental barrier. Days later, I’d formed this new habit, the melatonin
reset my biological clock, as it were, and I started sleeping better. But even now I dare not think
of those tentacles while trying to sleep, for fear of summoning them.

Again, at the time I had little idea of what was happening. I still don’t know what caused it, but
the facts that I cycled from one plateau to the next and that they changed in duration through
the night led me to associate them with the alpha, theta, and delta brain waves. I read online
that this is the normal sleep cycle which leads to REM sleep and then back into the cycle. I
looked up “delta wave” on Wikipedia and learned that “In Advaita Vedanta, deep dreamless
sleep is considered the highest state of consciousness. If one can stay aware/conscious while in
deepest dreamless sleep, s/he can reach a deep meditative state (known as jagrat sushupti).
This notion of paradoxical consciousness may be linked to high cortical activity which happens
during the delta-sleep.”

Also, there’s something called “yoga nidra” or yogi sleep, which is the lucid dreaming practiced
by yogis who can control their states of consciousness with certain techniques. According to
Wikipedia, in 1971 Swami Rama was hooked up to an EEG “while he progressively relaxed his
entire physical, mental and emotional structure through the practice of yoga nidra.” In the final
stage, “the swami entered the state of (usually unconscious) deep sleep, as verified by the
emergence of the characteristic pattern of slow rhythm delta waves. However, he remained
perfectly aware throughout the entire experimental period. He later recalled the various events
which had occurred in the laboratory during the experiment, including all the questions that one
of the scientists had asked him during the period of deep delta wave sleep, while his body lay
snoring quietly.”

Now, I am no swami, but it seems I stumbled onto something like this ability, quite by accident.
And far from a spiritual gift, it was a nightmare I’m glad I overcame.

Paradoxical Consciousness and the DMT Flash

So much for my strange tale. I assure you I’ve given an honest account of what happened to
me. I know it sounds bizarre and I may well have misinterpreted the events or misremembered
some of the details as I just described them. But there are facts to which I’d swear on pain of
death: again, for several days in a row, three or four months ago, I never lost consciousness
and instead experienced abnormal physiological changes, including the slowing of the heart
rhythm and the phosphenes and the cycles and, worst of all, the inner darkness and sense of
imprisonment and lockdown.
 50

I wanted to write about this sooner, but it’s taken me this long to think of a useful interpretation
of the ordeal. And then it came to me: there are intriguing similarities between the
“rollercoaster,” as I experienced it, and the hallucinogenic trip on DMT, as related by the
psychedelic expert Terence McKenna. I’ve never taken DMT or psilocybin mushrooms, but I’ve
listened to literally dozens of McKenna lectures and group discussions on the internet, from
beginning to end.

Here are some regularities of the psychedelic experience he described numerous times. To
begin, you smoke a sufficiently large dose of the drug and then you lie down and eventually
close your eyes. You feel anesthesia and arousal at the same time, and all the colours in the
room become much brighter and crisper than usual. You feel something mighty welling up in
you, there’s a noise like cellophane being scrunched up which gets louder and louder, and
there’s an increase in blood pressure so that you feel as if you’re underwater. You encounter
what looks like a shifting red and orange chrysanthemum. Then there’s the feeling of passing
through a membrane and you’re propelled into a place which feels for all the world like it’s
somewhere underground or under a dome. You feel your heart beating and your blood pumping
and you’re still perfectly lucid, but you’ve been transported to what looks like an alien playpen
made of glowing crystalline structures, with strange small creatures that rush out to greet you.
These are the “self-transforming machine elves” or gnomes, as McKenna famously called them,
and they speak in an alien language which seems to create miraculous objects out of thin air.
The vision ends after only fifteen minutes and while you start to forget the bizarre details,
evidently you can carry some memories of the vision with you.

One of the most important elements of the experience, for McKenna, which he emphasized
many times, is that in some ways DMT isn’t a mind-altering drug at all, because it leaves your
ego, your intellect, and your personal subjectivity intact. This is why it feels like you’re being
transported somewhere else. Obviously, this aspect of the DMT trip is common to lucid
dreaming and to whatever version of that paradoxical consciousness I’d stumbled into. You
remain consciously aware even as you’re diverted to a strange place. And in both cases you
can remember what happened, although since the DMT trip is much stranger and richer,
remembering it must be harder. Also, McKenna emphasizes that when you arrive at DMT
hyperspace, it feels like you’re underground. Likewise, the shift to delta wave sleep, as I believe
I experienced it, is associated with a distinct feeling of falling. Again, there’s a rocking back and
forth and then a feeling of landing and of being trapped. There’s no wall or dome, because the
phosphenes have vanished and you’re plunged into darkness, but again the impression of
sinking is consistent with feeling like you’ve travelled underground.

And there’s more to the comparison: in both cases, there’s a disquieting slowness of the heart
rate. The timing of the crackling of cellophane sound corresponds to that of the high-pitched
noise that marks the beginning of the shunting of consciousness to whatever autonomic system
I came to inhabit at night. The glowing crystalline walls of the alien playpen or circus seem like
boosted phosphenes and the more organic phosphenes, which I likened to flashes of the
cerebellum at the base of the brain, could be taken for a chrysanthemum: the cerebellum has a
rib-like structure, the flower has many thin petals, and in both cases there’s a stem.
(Incidentally, I now suspect the tentacles or the flower petals are just impressions of the veins
and pupil of the eyeball, caused by reflected light on the back of the eyelid. My left eye is
dominant over my right one and the tentacles seemed to appear on the left side of my inner field
of view. Also, behind the phosphenes I see at night now, I can catch glimpses of a phosphene-
like impression of my eye, and again it's mostly just my left eye that shows up. You can imagine
how an abstract light picture of your eye could be mistaken for one of tentacles or a flower.
 51

Then again, the so-called tentacles that actually did the trick of shunting my consciousness
were much more "alive" and active than what I see now at night.) Moreover, the bursting-
through-the-membrane sensation sounds like the squeezing into the delta wave stage of
paradoxical consciousness. Again, as I experienced, it, the squeezing is like a stripping away of
most of your mental faculties so that only your ghostly remnant is left in the coma state.

Of course, the obvious differences between the experiences are the lack of alien visitors during
my accidental resistance to unconsciousness and the lack of any deep meaning associated with
the unusual impressions. All of that—the machine elves, the crystalline structures, the brighter
and crisper colours, and so on—must be attributed to the brain’s processing of excess DMT. As
I said, even the mere sleep aid I took enhanced the phosphenes. So I submit that the two
experiences are structurally the same, although some of their contents differ, as
accounted for by the presence or absence of the hallucinogenic drug. Perhaps the brain
treats the excess DMT as a poison and so your consciousness retreats to the coma state until
the effect wears off and it’s safe for you to reemerge—except that in the meantime, the DMT
adds to the phosphenes and spills into the darkness, filling it with mental projections or perhaps
with a feeling of cosmic unity, as in Jagrat-Sushupti, the yogi’s mystical vision of the union of
subject and object. (Again, I believe I saw dim phosphenes even in the delta stage of the sleep
cycle, but perhaps that only signified that I was drifting out of that stage.) Set and setting are
also factors here: when you haven’t smoked DMT and are merely trying to sleep, you’re not in
the mood for mystical, paradoxical consciousness.

In any case, Martin Wall powerfully interprets the machine elves and the rest as mental
projections specifically in McKenna’s case. That interpretation is supported by the revelation
from an early draft of Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, by Terence McKenna’s brother
Dennis, the revelation being that Terence didn’t take powerful hallucinogens much after having
had a bad mushroom trip in the late 1980s. Dennis makes the same point as Wall, which is that
McKenna evidently didn’t get past the conscience test in his experience with the entheogen
DMT. Reportedly, if you take enough of these hallucinogens, you eventually get past the weird
visions and confront your ego which you then judge like God. Only if you’re ethically pure do you
proceed to the mystical vision of the world’s unity. According to Wall and Dennis McKenna,
Terence’s ego and intellect got in the way of his psychedelic experience. As Wall says, the
machine elves kept begging Terence not to give into astonishment, but to sing along with them
and Terence apparently never did so. If the machine elves were projections of his ego, this
might have been a self-imposed test of his ability to relinquish his role as intellectual observer
and to live in the now, as a Daoist would say.

However that may be, what I take from this isn’t that the whole DMT flash is imaginary or that it
has no spiritual significance. But I do think many ingredients of the trip are physiological and
that I accidentally tapped into them, as I’ve described. Somehow, DMT adds content and
meaning to something like the shunting of consciousness I experienced while asleep. I
called it a living death and this isn’t entirely figurative; instead, I’m alluding to the Haitian Vodou
concept of the zombie, as reported by Wade Davis. According to his controversial account, a
shaman appears to resurrect a dead person and enslave him, using a concoction that includes
tetrodotoxin and the hallucinogen Datura. What interests me about this is that the zombie is
supposedly created by faking a person’s death with the neurotoxin, which causes paralysis and
cardiac arrhythmia, among other effects which could be mistaken for signs of death, but which
leaves the person’s conscious mind untouched. So there’s a connection between yogi sleep, the
DMT trip, and the concept of a zombie’s undeadness.
 52

The Strange Physicality of Consciousness

I’m left with one other nagging question, though: What could consciousness be such that it
could be so manipulated, so sidetracked and diminished and confined? Rick Strassman, the
psychiatrist who tested DMT on humans, conjectures in DMT: The Spirit Molecule that the brain
is receiver of signals, like a television, and that consciousness changes depending on the
signal. Turn the channel and you get a different signal and even a different world. Perhaps a
receiver’s tuning could be compared with some of the manipulation of consciousness I
experienced: what we’d have is a demodulation and a weakening or strengthening of the
consciousness waves, depending on which signals the brain has evolved to prefer. A TV shuts
out noise and searches for expected radio signals as you change channels. Maybe the
paradoxical consciousness during the delta stage of sleep amounts to a rerouted and weakened
signal, caused by the signal’s being received slightly outside of the designated slot. I don’t know
enough about either TVs or brains to properly assess this comparison, although one problem
with it is obvious: the mystery of the transmitter of the consciousness wave.

Putting the TV analogy aside, you do get the sense that consciousness is somehow physical
when you experience such mental manipulations. The imagination may play a role, but the
phosphenes are certainly physiological and the entrapping of lucid consciousness by the
shunting and especially in the coma state is involuntary and thus mechanical. Somehow, it’s
possible for your personal self to shift to a different part of your brain, which allows you to be
more closely attuned to certain autonomic systems and to ride the theta and delta brain waves,
as it were. However, all was not involuntary. As I said, the departure began with a choice to
summon and to inspect the strange phosphenes, those tentacles which might well have been
manifestations (petals) of the chrysanthemum perceived in the DMT flash. So if consciousness
is an odd sort of physical thing that can evidently be stripped and confined, it’s also apparently
in control of certain mechanisms when it’s in its waking glory.

Still, if I accidentally was left awake to explore where consciousness “goes” when the sleeper
drifts into unconsciousness, I wonder why we’re not more bothered by the fact that
consciousness does indeed normally come and go. Mind you, strictly speaking, consciousness
doesn’t normally go anywhere when the sleeper slips into deep sleep. That’s the point of the
unusualness of my experience: I felt my consciousness going into those places, but normally we
don’t do so, because normally consciousness dissolves as we’re distracted by the hypnagogic
interim. Normally, after that dissolution, the sleeper’s mind has been reduced to the cycling
between organic phosphenes and the void traversed by delta brain waves. Then a modicum of
consciousness periodically reassembles itself to play during REM sleep and the process
repeats itself until the sleeper awakens and is too relaxed or groggy to be troubled by that gap
in consciousness and memory. Consciousness is physical not just because it can
somehow be squeezed into the normally unconscious space, as I discovered, but
because it’s normally severed at night, perhaps to spare us the ordeal I suffered. I don’t
understand how something physical can have the subjective aspects of consciousness,
although the ghostliness of electrical brain waves helps us intuit how this could be so;
remember that matter contains particles but also waves and waves can be more invisible, like
consciousness.

But just as a social outsider can look at society more objectively than can someone who’s
immersed in the culture, I found that the disjointed experience of being conscious in a place
that’s usually out of bounds made for another level of alienation. Psychedelic drugs combine the
 53

unsettling manipulation of consciousness with all manner of distracting visions and even with a
religious experience of unity or love that can counter that alienation. Likewise, at night we’re
supposed to let ourselves be distracted by the flashing lights on the back of our eyelids; that
way, we’ll be rewarded with restful sleep. If we tinker too much with our mind, as I did with mine
that week, we may find ourselves lost and alone like children in the forbidden woods.
 54

Sexism and the Horror of Sex

____________________________________________________

Standup comedians make much of their living by poking fun at the battle between the sexes.
The audience laughs in lieu of thanking the comedian for providing an excuse to disavow the
liberal convention of overlooking the manifest cultural differences between the sexes. The
comedy often becomes sexist in that the comedian exaggerates the differences between the
social roles of men and women, but those differences are real.

The Mystery of Sexism

Nevertheless, the battle of the sexes is mysterious. Sure, some individuals are worse than
others, but a collective demonization of women by men and then a counter-demonization of
men by women, after feminism, can hardly be justified. There’s a cold war between
heterosexual men and women, so that each group has stereotypes of the other, driving each to
oppress the other or at least to fantasize about doing so. To be sure, I’m not saying this culture
war is entirely inexplicable. Historically, men have tended to oppress women, because men are
more aggressive or arrogant; at any rate, men have had more control over the levers of culture
and so their stereotypes of women became more widespread, which created a vicious cycle in
which men used those stereotypes to justify keeping women as slaves, and women internalized
the prejudice, adapted to that cultural environment, and played such degrading conventional
roles as the virgin, whore, or crone. But after the modern revolutions, women could define
themselves as persons having an equal status with men, which gave women the rights to be
educated and to enter the workforce. Now, partly for economic reasons (specifically
globalization and the loss of manufacturing jobs due to increasing competition with machines),
but also because modern women have more influence over the dissemination of cultural myths,
it’s masculine men who are persona non grata in Western, liberal cultures; whereas women
were once universally objectified by men, men are now being feminized, emasculated, and
duncified in popular culture so that the effeminate gay male has almost replaced the traditional
masculine hero.

Again, power and cultural influence explain much of this demonization. But there’s a mystery
here, too, which is that we should expect heterosexual men and women to have bonded over
what’s typically regarded as the greatest experience in life, that being romantic love culminating
in sexual intercourse. How could men or women stand to see each other collectively belittled
when sexual tension underlies virtually all of their dealings with each other? Shouldn’t the
memory or the prospect of sex make those in power ashamed of demonizing the weaker sex,
whichever either happens to be? After all, if heterosexual men rule, tend to look down on
women, and yet want to have sex with women, what does that make those men? And if women
rule, buy products popularized by ads that portray men as buffoons, and yet women are
sexually attracted to competent, masculine men, what does that say about women? Why do
men and women sabotage themselves by denigrating the object of their greatest
 55

affection? Sexism seems self-defeating, as is strikingly apparent in the ultra-conservative

Middle East in which many women are so brutally objectified that they become asexual, such as
when they’re forced to wear burkas. In that case, archaic religious memes explain why men with
the same sexual lusts as anyone else would repress them and prevent women from tempting
them by displaying their enticing body parts. Still, this only pushes the mystery back a step,
since then we must ask what drove Muslim men to accept such a sexist religion in the first place
in spite of their shared sexual experience with women. How could they have been convinced to
condemn their sexuality with such thoroughness, overriding their powerful sexual instinct?

This is the mystery of the war between the sexes. How could heterosexual men and women
be made to openly loathe each other in general, despite their bonding over what’s
supposed to be the greatest experience, the fulfillment of the meaning of life, and so on,
namely the experience of romantic love as expressed especially in the sex act? The
solution is that the sexual experience is the source of the conflict, because sex is
misrepresented by the cultural happy-talk about it. Of course, sex is exciting and fun and
physically pleasurable; just about everyone desires sex more than anything else. But sex is
also an existential horror which forces us to confront our embodiment, mortality,
animalism, and underlying impersonality, not to mention nature’s mindlessness and thus
the subversive implications of atheistic naturalism. The sex instinct is so powerful that we
can’t help but celebrate sex in popular culture. But we do so only by showcasing sex in the
abstract or meaningless sex between objectified or glorified actors. Our personal sex lives are
shameful things that must be kept secret. If you deny this, back up your denial by posting to the
internet the details of your sex acts, including your real identity and recordings of your deeds so
the public can judge for itself. No, the bond between romantic partners is very much like that
between partners in crime: only the sexual partner knows the humiliating nonsense the pair of
them gets up to in the bedroom, even if it’s just the look of the person’s face during orgasm, and
each partner holds the power of blackmail over the other. I’ve discussed this at length
elsewhere, so I won’t belabor the point.

What I want to point out now is that sexism corroborates that rather surprising conclusion about
sex, which is that however great sex may be in short-sighted hedonic terms, sex is also
traumatic for everyone. Most animals have no existential crises, but we’re cursed with them by
our knowledge which subverts our hopes and dreams. It’s because sex is a secret horror and
heterosexuals are forced to bond over that experience, that as soon as men or women
acquire the cultural megaphone, they broadcast their insults against the opposing side.
Why? Because each gender reminds the other of that shared horror and of sex’s unsettling
philosophical implications. Because whenever we feel sexual lust, we’re partly disgusted and
ashamed and we scapegoat the object of our lusts to keep our fragile ego intact.

Feminism and the Emasculation of Modern Men

Men’s objectification of women is well-known and has been comprehensively analyzed by the
philosopher Martha Nussbaum. So let’s look closer at women’s sexist attitude towards men.
Women don’t have nearly the same physical power over men that men have historically had
over women. Moreover, for hormonal or practical reasons having to do with the necessity of
raising infants, women may not be as aggressive, territorial, or cold-hearted as men, on
average. That is, women generally become motherly as they nurse their babies. Traditionally,
men have defined themselves more as hunters, warriors, or leaders than as fathers. And a
mother is tenderhearted, nurturing, cooperative, and so forth. Thus, even after women obtained
their civil liberties, women are still in no position to enslave men. And yet women’s sexist
 56

fantasies are on display in every culture in which profit-seeking companies are forced to
compete for the attention of female consumers. Notoriously, those fantasies are incoherent. For
example, romance novels are filled with masculine heroes who attest to women’s innate sexual
preferences, which is to say that those novels exist for evolutionary reasons, that women crave
strong, confident and capable men to protect them while they raise their infants. And yet women
also long to punish men for the centuries of misogyny. Thus, popular culture overflows also with
crude portrayals of men as dunces, bunglers, or immature losers, as in Judd Apatow movies. In
Western advertisements over the last couple of decades, women almost always have the last
word while men are the butt of the jokes. The female character just smiles and shakes her head
as her husband makes a fool of himself.

Again, you see the contradiction here which sets up the mystery: women are sexually attracted
to X (masculine men), but some of their fantasies feature the negation of X (emasculated men),
given that the pop cultural duncification wouldn’t exist were women not susceptible to it; and the
paradox is resolved when we appreciate the two-sidedness of sex, which is at the root of this
conflict. Evolution designs women to want certain men, but women are people, not merely
animals, and so they become horrified by everything touched by nature’s undead hand, namely
by the sex act, by their sexual desires and by the objects of those desires. Thus, as soon as
women get a chance to air their existential grievance and to bend the cultural noosphere to their
will, they punish themselves and the indifferent natural processes by reveling in a fantasy world
in which their sexuality is frustrated, in which men are cretins rather than the barrel-chested,
lantern-jawed adventurers that women instinctively long for. This is a case, then, of women’s
self-loathing, which explains the contradiction in their sexual fantasies.

Curiously, the romantic comedy movie often features both sorts of men and since this sort of
movie is usually formulaic, its dramatic tension consists merely in the question of whether the
heroine will end up with the conventional hero or with the unconventional hero. As feminism has
become more commonplace, the unconventional hero tends to win out. See, for example, The
Wedding Crashers, in which Owen Wilson plays the unconventional hero (his nose is bulbous
and he’s funnier than he is physically powerful), while Bradley Cooper plays the conventional
one who is eventually demonized as a corporate villain, a sexist cheat, and a spoiled bully. The
heroine chooses the former only after he publicly humiliates himself by admitting what a cad
he’s been, crashing weddings to pick up women. In fact, the Owen Wilson character stands
between the conventional romantic hero (the alpha male)—who’s vilified in this case—and a trio
of creepy or emasculated male characters. There’s the somewhat metrosexual Vince Vaughan
character who earns his masculinity only at the end when he punches out the Cooper villain;
there’s the disgusting Will Farrell character who miraculously quenches his enormous libido by
seducing vulnerable women while living with his mother; and there’s the heroine’s Golem-like,
closeted gay brother. This movie, then, deals with the conflict between the female viewer’s
interests, by settling on the compromise embodied by the Wilson character.

The Big Bang Theory provides another example. This popular TV show is only superficially
about geek culture; really, it’s about the conflict between women’s sexual desires and their
existential disgust with those desires, which the show resolves by slowly transforming the
repulsive male characters into masculine romantic partners. The show works as a bait and
switch trick, luring male viewers in with the promise of a celebration of omega male
independence, since the show features four nerdy, emotionally stunted male characters, and
then springing the sentimental feminine values on the viewer by romantically pairing most of the
nerds with a strong female character (and working its way up to pairing off the fourth,
metrosexual nerd). So the cluelessness of the four nerds allows female viewers to vent their
disgust with men and thus with sex, using the Penny character for that vicarious purpose, and
 57

trains the male viewers to be less masculine. Meanwhile, the nerds’ slow transformation into
more masculine men caters to women’s instinctive preference, which persists despite feminism.
Other, less successful romantic comedies land too squarely on one side or the other,
demonstrating their anti-feminist, conservative leanings by awarding the heroine with the
traditional male hero, which ensures her status as a second-class citizen, or afflicting her with
an antihero or an omega male, in which case the movie loses its status as a romantic comedy.

You could go on and on, tracking feminism’s impact on popular culture and studying the
ingenious techniques used to tie the mass entertainments into knots so that the producers can
ingratiate themselves with the self-loathing female consumer. I’ll discuss just one other
example, which is the popularity of gay culture. (The word “gay” is a vacuous euphemism, but
“homosexual” sounds too clinical and every other term is fraught with peril, thanks to the
apparent presumption that gay people are so fragile they’ll break into a thousand pieces if you
try to apply a category to them. So I’ll skirt the issue with the rest of them and resort to the
politically correct euphemism.) While gay people’s civil rights didn’t follow from the feminist
revolution, the prominence of gay people in popular culture exacerbates the feminization of
heterosexual men. This has given birth to a new male orientation, to the so-called metrosexual
which I take it is similar to the bisexual except that the metrosexual is sexually attracted only to
women while pretending otherwise by means of gay-friendly affectations.

Again, this medial style provides a compromise which mitigates women’s self-loathing due to
their cognitive dissonance. What’s happened is just that there are more gay celebrities now than
before, and since popular culture infantilizes the consumer, some men have taken to imitating
gay people the way babies imitate their authority figures. These heterosexuals pretend to be
gay with respect to their choices in fashion and entertainment. (Another example of such
infantilization is the way some heterosexual men submit to the fashion industry’s ideal of female
beauty, which seems the handiwork of the self-indulgent gay male designers who prefer to work
with female models that look like teenage boys.) This imitation of effeminate men hardly appeals
to either heterosexual men or women, as such, given their inherent sexual preferences, but the
metrosexual thwarts those preferences just half-heartedly enough to allow women to vent their
disgust with the obligatory rigmarole of sexual interactions. Women can obey their feminist
imperatives and avoid degrading themselves by lusting after dominant males, by engaging with
heterosexual men who disguise themselves as gays but who can still dominate the pseudo-
feminists in the bedroom. Metrosexuals afford these modern women the chance to symbolically
flagellate themselves for having the anti-feminist cravings in the first place, while still delivering
the evolutionary goods. Inner female conflict resolved!

Now, you might be wondering whether men are as similarly ambivalent about sex as women.
Yes, both sexes project their contempt for their bodies and for the undead processes that lead
those bodies to act as instruments for producing another generation of bio-puppets. But, as I
said, men have had the advantage of literally enslaving women for centuries all over the world.
Men therefore haven’t had to tip-toe around their fantasy of expressing their hostility towards the
forces of sexuality; they’ve codified that fantasy in their society’s laws. In traditional societies,
husbands own their wives because they regard their women as subhuman. But this
dehumanization is just the fulfillment of men’s misdirected fantasy of rebelling against nature.
Being rational, self-aware creatures (in addition to being bio-puppets much of the time), men are
properly horrified by their animalistic instincts which they overcome through rational and
linguistic self-control. But because their self-control is limited and their existential reaction to the
world is too distressing to follow for long, they still partake of sex. They too, then, loathe
themselves and scapegoat women by dehumanizing them while pretending to be supernatural
elites. However, because men actually enslave women, men needn’t fight the battle between
 58

the sexes so indirectly, with mere ideological weapons. Men express their sexual instincts by
physically dominating women, while their misogyny expresses their incomplete enlightenment,
that is, their low-grade horror for sexuality in general.

By contrast, women can’t physically enslave men, which is why there are no known
matriarchies, and so women must hope that at least some men ignore the ideological triumph of
feminism and secretly retain their masculine characteristics while still serving as women’s
scapegoats. That is, since women can’t feminize men by force or literally emasculate them,
women have only ideologies at their disposal which can indeed train men to be less manly;
however, a complete feminist triumph would be counterproductive, since women’s evolved
sexual preference for alpha males would then go unfulfilled. Thus, women are forced to play a
double game, teasing men with their new cultural power and enjoying the way men are forced to
grovel and humiliate themselves in the climate of political correctness, fostered by liberalism,
while also wanting to take it all back and longing for a return of macho men. In either case,
sexism is a type of mental projection for the purpose of scapegoating, based on what I’d
call partial enlightenment. Full enlightenment would lead a person to renounce sexuality as a
horrific cliché. Hardly anyone is fully enlightened, and so instead of owning up to the fact that we
loathe ourselves because we know we’re playthings of the undead god which is the mindlessly
changing cosmos, we play cheap tricks and exchange insults based on gross stereotypes. We
don’t confront the true reason for this ancient conflict between men and women, because we
prefer to think of sex as a gift that makes life worth living. Instead, sex is sugar-coated poison.
And again, if you doubt that, tell the world about your sex life and leave no stone unturned.
 59

Love or Disgust? A Christian debates a Misanthrope

____________________________________________________

Standing on a downtown street corner was a new monastic Christian named Jason, who wore a
sort of monk’s robe with a large hood, long dreadlocks, and glasses. Beside Jason was a crude
sign saying “Jesus was homeless.” Jason bid passersby a good morning, most of whom ignored
him completely, but when one fellow crossed his path—a balding man in shabby clothes—the
fellow smiled and Jason asked, “Why are you smiling, friend?”
“I just thought you were staging some sort of postmodern play or performance art, since
you look like a medieval monk or something.”
“I’m just a Christian.”
“Yeah, I can tell that from your sign, but you’re not what someone would expect from a
Christian nowadays.”
“No, I’m not. I agree completely. I should be more specific and identify myself as a new
monastic Christian. It’s a Christian movement dedicated to getting at the essence of Jesus’s
message and making it relevant to the modern world.”

Authentic Christianity
“What’s that essence?”
“To love fellow people as much as you love yourself.”
“Alright and how is that relevant today?”
“Well, Jesus’s message is relevant in that it’s radical in our egoistic societies. After
modern science and capitalism and democracy, not to mention the flawed examples set by most
Western churches, it’s subversive to speak of the moral imperative to love each other as
companions in this fallen world. Instead, we’re taught to look out mainly for ourselves, to
compete and horde possessions like dragons, to fight and kill, to divide and conquer. Jesus’s
message amounts to radical egalitarianism and socialism. If practiced, it would set the modern
world on fire.”
“Are you saying the Church should be a humanistic, communist enterprise? Aren’t
Christians supposed to glorify Jesus and recognize that they can’t do anything right themselves,
that we’ve just got to grovel now and wait for Jesus to return to fix the world, because of our
tendency to corrupt everything?”
“Ha ha! No, that’s the ‘conservative Christian’ distortion of Jesus’s message. You’ll hear
it from these so-called evangelical Christians who are in bed with the most anti-spiritual
libertarians and crony capitalists you’ll ever want to meet. They say we’ve got to idolize the
Bible, follow its every letter, and worship Jesus. I do think Jesus was divine, but God didn’t
make me a simpleton. I happen to know about the political and theological divisions between
the early Christian sects which led to the canonization of scripture.
“The Bible is a political document, you know. The Gnostics and the Jewish Christians
under James became marginalized and the winners got to write Church history to rationalize
their compromise with the Roman Empire. The Gnostics taught individual empowerment
 60

through the divine power within each of us, while the universalists wanted to establish a global
version of Judaism for the gentiles, under a power hierarchy headed by a Caesar-like pope with
absolute authority through the Holy Spirit. And so they interpreted Paul’s letters, forged some
others, and selected some interpolated gospel narratives to support those ambitions.
“By the time you reach modern Christianity, you’re talking about grotesque political
compromises that are antithetical to what Jesus’s life was about. You have to read between the
lines provided by the Catholic Church, which won out in the early power struggle, but Jesus was
clearly a socialist, a pacifist, and an uncompromising moralist. He was a spiritual visionary with
his eyes set on an ideal world. Compared with his ideal, the real world is revolting, and he lived
with that contrast in mind. That’s why he didn’t care about earthly happiness. We’ll be happy in
heaven, where we belong.”
“So it’s left versus right-wing Christians, is that it? Each reads into Jesus what they want
to see. Leftists want a radical Marxist and conservatives want an authoritarian to rubberstamp
our animalistic side, our tendency to divide into warring groups of rich and poor, friend and foe,
patriot and traitor.”
“I’m curious where you’re coming at this from, friend, since you sound like you’ve put
some thought into this already. But I agree that that’s what the conservatives are doing.
However, new monasticism isn’t the same as liberalism or socialism. There’s some overlap on
various social issues, such as vegetarianism, the death penalty, wealth distribution, and so on,
but I’m an ascetic like Jesus. Liberals defend private property and communists worship the
state. I don’t say the state should have totalitarian control over all the nation’s wealth, but I also
think we have a moral and a spiritual duty to think long-term and to care most about what’s
really important, which is each other’s welfare, not about signaling how much more happy and
popular we are on account of our wealth and power. We should voluntarily renounce much of
what we take for granted, because it’s bad for our spiritual well-being. And I don’t worship the
state. I worship the divine spark of consciousness in each of us, which makes us truly equal.”
“Hmm. I can go along with much of that, as it turns out. But there are sticking points…”

Authentic Naturalism
“Tell me what you believe, then. What’s your philosophy of life? I’m Jason, by the way.”
“Hi, I’m Ben. You want to know my philosophy? Then you’d best hold onto your hat—or
at least your hood. I believe we’re especially accursed animals trapped in the belly of the
undead god. This might sound a little Gnostic, but it’s not really Gnosticism. The Gnostics said
humans are the divine beings in a horribly flawed world. Well, I’m a naturalist and a pantheist. I
think science tells us what the real world is, and that world changes itself with no personal
oversight. There’s no transcendent, personal God who governs everything. The universe
evolves and complexifies without being alive. The universe, then, is god—but an undead one.
You see?
“And we’re especially cursed, because we’re able to know all of this. Knowledge
threatens us with horror and despair, and our moral imperative is to end the curse by fighting
back. We must create our own way in nature. We must be artists following an aesthetic code
which celebrates originality as the chief virtue. The universe is the ultimate creator, but we’re
creative agents within that sublime masterwork and we can devise subworlds that testify to our
awareness of god’s monstrosity. We ought to defy nature’s creative path, renounce certain
natural instincts, and live as tragically heroic artists.”
“Well, now! I think I see why you said there’s some overlap here. You’re a sort of ascetic
as well, then, right?”
“Yeah, I’m appalled by the rigged competitions that empower an elite group of
sociopaths at the expense of the majority, because I see god’s undead zombie hand in the
 61

creation of that sort of clichéd inequality. In other words, when we’re at our most natural, when
we follow the social conventions that enable us to rationalize our evolved instincts, we’re not
being original and our lives make for aesthetically inferior art. We’re letting nature guide us, but
nature is an indifferent, undead monster that will just as likely lead us all to extinction to make
room for something new. So I’m interested in the epistemic and aesthetic advantages of social
alienation and detachment.”
“Of course, Jesus was alienated from the world into which he was born, since in that
world Rome had conquered the righteous Jews.”
“And Jesus was homeless and unmarried. He was an omega man—except that
Christianity undoes all of that with its frustrating incoherence. Jesus was poor and rich, since he
was God’s only begotten Son; he was homeless, but he also resides eternally in heaven on
God’s right side; he was meek and mild, but he’s also mighty enough to make good on his
promise to return and destroy all earthly powers that stand in God’s way. You see, Christianity
makes human history a comedy with a happy ending, whereas I see it as a tragedy. There
are optimistic naturalists, such as the transhumanists, but I think the most optimistic of those
folks are closet supernaturalists. Like Hegel, they see God as coming at the end of a process;
maybe God will be an artificial intelligence. I’m not saying that’s impossible, but I’m more of a
cosmicist. I think the undead god wins out and god’s monstrous ends are alien to us, meaning
that we count for squat in the grand scheme. Our artificial gods are idols that will pass away in
time, as the true god continues to decay like a mindless, shambling zombie.”

Love or Disgust?
“Again, I discount the orthodox mythologization of Jesus. I’m interested in the core of
Jesus’s message, which we discern only after we’ve come to grips with the historical context of
early Christianity. To me, Jesus was an outsider, because his message of universal love is
subversive. Those earthly power hierarchies you spoke of would crumble, were we to
acknowledge our equal divinity and stop pretending that our earthly success—due to
advantages of birth or talents in the service of cruel ambition—entitles any of us to live like a
king while the masses languish. When you love someone, you have a hard time uncorking your
thousand dollar bottle of wine if that beloved person is starving in the street. Most Christians’
problem is that they don’t love nearly enough.”
“I take your point, but here we come to the main sticking point. You see, I’m something
of a misanthrope. Sure, I see divinity in all creations and thus especially in such anomalous
creative agents as mammals like us. But what the hell is there to love? Love? I take it you’re
talking about agape, not eros—brotherly love, not the erotic kind. But what I see when I look at
all people is a herd of more or less pretentious mammals, mammals which are not just accursed
by our existential situation—we’re too rational for our good, given that we’re trapped in a
monster—but we’re also made disgusting by that plight. People are too disgusting to love.
The world is decaying all around us. Can’t you see that? All natural changes are aimless, even
the ones that happen in our artificial worlds since the minds that produce those subworlds are
really brains and brains are devoid of anything supernatural.
“I agree that our creations are special and that’s why I admire our greatest artistic
achievements. But love? No, everything is repellent, including Jesus and all our masterworks.
There’s much that inspires awe in the world, as the secular humanists say, but awe is the
dawning of horror. Awe is the surprise you feel when you’re presented with something sublime,
meaning beyond your comprehension. But when you learn that it’s natural and thus mindless
and undead, as modern science implies, your surprise should settle into a sickening worry that
there’s no hope, that we’re left to desperate devices which might all fail, that none shall be
covered in glory when our true resting place is revealed and it turns out our entire species is
 62

insignificant and each of us lived and died because monstrous nature twitched this way rather
than that one. No, I fear the Buddhists are right: attachment to anything is foolish, under the
ego-shattering circumstances.”
“But Buddhists are altruists! They, too, say we should sacrifice ourselves to help each
other.”
“Yeah, they’re altruists but not lovers. They crave nothing, not the improvement of
anyone’s earthly lot or any socialist utopia; they resign themselves to feeling misplaced as long
as their ego is intact, feeding them distorted impressions of what’s important, which they reject
because they’re partly enlightened. That’s how they immunize themselves against feeling any
disappointment. They sacrifice their physical happiness not for love, but because they’re
disgusted by the metaphysical error of egoism on which that foolish happiness depends.
Buddhists are hyper-rationalists, not sentimental lovers of anything. With supreme emotional
detachment, they coldly do what they think is necessary to alleviate their suffering; in effect,
they rewire their brains to extinguish their personality.”
“Well, there are different kinds of Buddhists. But anyway, are you really saying you love
nothing at all? Why go on living then?”
“I have plenty of reasons to live, but love isn’t among them. For being a new monastic
Christian with at least a modicum of intellectual integrity, instead of participating in the ludicrous
fraud that is orthodox Christianity, you have my respect. Unlike Buddhists, I hold great art to be
sacred; I’m pleased when I come across some existentially magnificent achievement. I feel
schadenfreude when I mock the absurdity of all-too-natural pastimes and the delusions that
sustain them. And I feel camaraderie with like-minded introverts and outcasts. We’re brothers
and sisters in arms, if you like. But ask yourself whether soldiers love their fellows in combat.
They die for each other, but they’ve seen too much horror to undergo anything so sentimental.
They honour their courage and other martial virtues, but to say that soldiers are lovers is lame
and unbecoming. On the contrary, soldiers are more likely to suffer from so-called post-
traumatic stress disorder and to search desperately for a reason to live, given how the horror of
experiencing war trumps airy-fairy love.”
“Agape isn’t just sentimental. Our divine spark is real. You call it our anomalous
creativity, and that’s fine. We should love people in general by way of honouring that which
equally dignifies us. We’re the most precious things in the world. Maybe the word ‘love’ is
tainted for you, because of its connotations, but you should agree that we should think more
warmly about people than about inanimate things.”
“A warm feeling? I suppose camaraderie would amount to that. But this isn’t just a
semantic question. ‘Warmth’ here is a euphemism. We’re really back to the question of whether
history is comedic or tragic. Anything like love requires a kind of optimism and open-
heartedness which I think are forbidden by enlightened metaphysics. Anyone who understands
what reality is has an obligation to face the existential implications, and the character that
emerges from that crucible and from the fires of angst and horror will be more like a soldier than
a lover. Love is for sheep, not wolves. And so it’s no accident that Christians think of Jesus as a
shepherd.”
“You’re too proud, aren’t you, Ben? We’re all lambs in God’s eyes; we’re lambs led to
the slaughter and we need a greater being to point us in the right direction to make the most of
our lives. That someone was Jesus, who showed us what a true hero values: the downtrodden
and the vision of a better world for everyone, not power hierarchies built on transient material
wealth. You’re too proud to admit that you’re a social being who needs to be loved, like almost
everyone else. Well, to be loved, first you’ve got to love.”
“Ugh! The spiritual law of attraction? Really? You should know that if you’re going to
favour a liberal interpretation of Christianity, you’re going to rely on the hermeneutic principles of
the scientific, critical historian, in which case you’ve got to be enough of a rationalist and a
 63

naturalist to know that there’s no personal God. So that’s off the table for both of us. Your
theistic metaphors are useful only as advertisements for less-informed folks.
“You say Jesus was a hero, and maybe he was heroic for standing up for the underdogs
and for proclaiming the dignity and even the spiritual greatness of everyone alike. But that
doesn’t mean we should act like sheep. Sure, we should heed the advice of wise people, but
that doesn’t mean we should submit to anything, including our social instinct. Oh, I’m not saying
we should be antisocial. But, yes, the soldier needs honour and pride, because a state of war
calls for such shields and we’re at war with nature, which is to say with god. That’s the
existential struggle.
“Love is hormonal madness, a chemical bond between romantic partners or xenophobic
tribalists. That’s why even Christians who speak of unconditional or universal love distinguish
between us and them, between humans and the demonized fallen angels who must be shunned
and who deserve everlasting agony for their sins. Guess what? The demons are rebels
against God and so are the best of us. To the extent that your Christianity supports liberal
politics, you too advocate a satanic rebellion—not against a personal God who doesn’t exist, but
against the natural god that does. You think we should build a more perfect society, but any
such society would be glaringly unnatural, because of the equality of its members. Nature is full
of inequality, because the undead god is a creator and a destroyer and when you mix things up
in those ways, you’re left with a great imbalance.”
“No, I’m afraid I can’t entertain any such comparison of moral people with Satanists.”
“Of course not, because whatever your firsthand experience of poverty and war, your
ideas are still too unoriginal to escape the trap of political correctness. You think Jesus died for
love, but that’s just a meme. You fight for liberal causes, but it’s our rationality that makes us
equal, not any vacuous ‘divine spark.’ Our reason tells us the horrible truth, and that necessity is
the mother of all our inventions which distinguish us as the great unnatural creators. By
opposing the incoherence of secularized Christianity, you set yourself up as the rationalist, but
you still speak of a personal God—even though that’s just a childish anthropomorphism. I’m not
saying I’m any kind of perfect wise man, Jason. On the contrary, I’m saying we’re all disgusting
for one reason or another, and that’s why if love is central to some worldview, that worldview is
unviable.”
“Well, your worldview is hardly viable. Without love, I see no basis for self-sacrifice or for
civility, let alone morality. To sacrifice your pleasure to help a stranger in need, you’ve got to
appreciate that person’s worth. Brotherly love is just the emotion that tells us that ultimately
we’re no better than anyone else.”
“No, now you’re talking about empathy, which is merely a kind of objectivity. The Golden
Rule is about logical consistency or at least an empirical observation of everyone’s basic
humanity. Emotion is irrelevant to that. I agree we should empathize with those who are in dire
straits. I call that pity or disgust. I pity those who fare badly and I’m disgusted with the world that
makes many people miserable. Again, the fact that you speak loosely of love tells me that
however subversive and thus admirable your kind of Christianity is, it still papers over some
existential truths.”
“Maybe there’s logic in empathy, Ben, but empathizing with someone isn’t just a matter
of knowing what you share; it’s a stirring of the conscience which prompts you to act. That’s the
trouble with your naturalism. As much as I admire your willingness to face the harsh implications
of the best of philosophy and science, unlike many New Atheists and secular humanists, you
say you’re after tragic heroism, but a hero needs to act, not just stew in solitude, amassing
ideas instead of material possessions, and ridiculing joiners from the back row. Yours is a
philosophy for mice rather than men, to borrow Dostoyevsky’s phrase from Notes from the
Underground. You overthink and you need love to motivate you to act well.”
“I agree emotions are needed as motives, but pity, disgust, and horror will do nicely for
moral and aesthetic purposes, I think. There’s no place here for schmaltz. Stale sentimentality is
 64

a recipe for kitsch, not for the virtuosity that can accomplish the miracle of ennobling us in the
face of our inevitable disaster. I’ll leave the love-talk to exotericists like you, and the most
curious Christian ascetics and rationalists may wish to investigate further, in which case they’ll
find authentic naturalism waiting for them.
“Maybe you’re right that authentic naturalists may prove unable to act, after all. Any
emotion, even the kind I prefer, is a natural process which carries us along like a river of undead
blood to an unknown, but likely appalling destination. The most heroic action, I think, isn’t
merely an effect of some such emotion, but it happens after a leap of faith. This is the act of will
that skips over the river of blood, hacks away at the undergrowth and forges an original path.
That’s the inspirational kind of action I find heroic. When you love someone, you’re possessed
by the love hormones; you’re a pitiful puppet that’s sent to carry the genes along the river. And
when you’re disgusted by some filth or hackery, you’re just as well possessed, although disgust
produces more original art than does love; just ask stand-up comedians, the irascible painters,
or the tyrannical movie directors. Spielberg’s an old, soft-hearted lefty and most of his movies
are infamous for being saccharine and schmaltzy. Only on a few occasions did he leave his
heart out of it and make Jaws, Schindler’s List, and Saving Private Ryan, which all won Oscars.
“We need emotions, because we’re animals and not just computers. But we also need
creative will power and vision, to make us unpredictable, like subatomic particles, because
we’re the animals that gnaw through our cage and even through the very undead hand that
feeds us.”
 65

Debate with YouTube Antinatalist, Inmendham

____________________________________________________

The following are the notes from my YouTube video critiquing Inmendham’s radical pessimism
and antinatalism, followed by my point-by-point replies to his response videos. For the videos
themselves, see my video “Critique of Inmendham’s Radical Pessimism” on my YouTube
channel, which you can find also in the Videos section of my blog.

Inmendham’s Argument for Antinatalism:

Intelligence vs nature: Intelligence informs us of the truth, thanks to science and philosophy,
but reason comes with emotion and motive (thus Inmendham gets angry and doesn’t present
mere logical arguments or calculations)

Nature includes our primitive psychology and religious dogmas which are parts of the
evolutionary game we’re in, the game being genetic programming, natural selection, and the
meaninglessness and horror of biological processes

The Game: (metaphors = chess, maze, lottery, tic tac toe, gladiator): the inefficient, wasteful,
murderous conditions of natural life are odious, because there’s no victory or end of the game
that justifies all of the sacrifice and suffering; the game is Life itself, as it reduces to
consumption, reproduction, and cannibalism; we’re expendable pawns, sacrificing ourselves for
the next generation, from the genes’ point of view; we’re machines, not free people, therefore
little chance of stopping the game, since our force is outmatched and we’re programmed to like
consumption and reproduction and competition

Intelligence vs the game: we’re too good for the game, because we’ve figured it out and it’s fit
only for animals, but we’re stuck in it because of our animal nature; still, it’s better to rant against
it, from a rational viewpoint, than to rationalize the game with happy-talk

The Equation: suffering is inherently bad and it outweighs pleasure; sentience is the only value
in the universe (humanism contra nihilism) and it’s equally valuable in all creatures (thus
vegetarianism and more horror than we can handle), but we’re stuck in a horrifying place and
forced to play degrading roles in the Game; for every victor, hundreds suffer and lose and then
the game starts all over with reproduction

Antinatalist Conclusion: the price paid for life to continue is objectively too high; rationally—
based on utilitarianism—we should cease playing the Game, because life is morally unjustifiable
(the pain we inevitably cause outweighs all the pleasure): stop reproducing and even prevent
the dummies from doing so since they play God by throwing another sentient being into the jaws
of nature; (metaphor: if we had the Start button, to create Earth and all biological life on it,
knowing the horrors that that would cause, would we press it?); utopian/heavenly alternative
 66

(with no suffering) reduces us to even less dignified consumption-machines (infantilism) and

makes life meaningless; moreover, this alternative couldn’t likely be brought into being, because
we’re overpowered by monstrous natural forces; no grace or dignity in making the best out of
the game, since that just apologizes for the horror

My Response:
Evolutionary, Machiavellian vs Humanitarian, Modern Intelligence (philosophical/truth-
oriented for its own sake, not pragmatic or egoistic): Inmendham assumes the latter, but that
already shows that rebellion is possible and that rebellion is best explained by positing limited
freedom/self-control

I agree that nature is mostly a horror, as is life, but the Game metaphor is flawed, since games
are artifacts with prescriptive rules; given atheism, natural laws aren’t like social or conventional
ones; this is also the problem with the Button thought experiment since the planet then would be
an artifact, but it’s not one

Inmendham’s Consequentialism: he assumes the value of life depends on the result: since no
good result, but just an endless cycle, therefore no justification of life; but no one knows how life
will end; people have kids because they hope that natural processes are progressive (ex.
transhuman singularity); Inmendham says that since no evidence of extraterrestrial life, we’ll
probably fade out too, but this is dubious; maybe the aliens outgrew their technology or live in
virtual worlds; so this assumption about the ultimate end of life isn’t rational; it’s just a
speculation

Contra the Game: we’ve been playing a different game since we became self-aware; this is the
game of culture, which speaks to our being more free than the other animals; we’re people
rather than just animals, not just because we’re informed, thanks to science and philosophy, but
because we can resist natural forces and do something relatively unnatural and anomalous,
namely start a new game that’s regulated by prescriptive laws rather than natural ones; thus, we
create cultures and the technosphere, precisely to escape from the horrors of wild nature: we’re
civilized, not wild, although we often fail to live up to our potential, given our intelligence and
self-control/autonomy

Inmendham’s Equation: when quantified, mental states are objectified and they lose their
value; thus, the quantity of pains is irrelevant to their badness; also, suffering isn’t inherently
bad, since some is deserved or it’s a means to an end, and suffering makes life meaningful,
since otherwise we’d have the meaningless heaven/utopia; moreover, again the weighing of
pleasure against pain is more speculation than calculation; no algorithm to arrive at the ratio;
slippery slope from valuing sentient beings and their pleasures to valuing degrees of rebellion
against horrible nature; thus, false dichotomy between participating in the game and ending the
game by ending ourselves (AN), the third option being playing a new game

Contra Antinatalism (AN): I recommend a third option, one which differs from (1) playing the
Game as sociopaths or as deluded enablers who can’t face the horror, and from (2) ending all
life: the third option is to transcend the animalistic game, and that’s precisely what humans have
been doing, bit by bit, for thousands of years; we’ve civilized ourselves, learned the truth, and
decided not to live as animals; we’ve built houses and cities and nations, often regressing to
insane and destructive animal behaviour, but nevertheless laying the foundations for more and
more artificiality which transcends biology; moreover, religions have had ascetic movements,
 67

again for thousands of years, and ascetics have declined to play the Game without losing all
respect for life (granted, ascetics would be pessimistic about nature, but Buddhists, for example,
find bliss in contemplating the underlying unity of causes and effects, so that’s a third option
which differs from AN’s ultra-pessimism); we follow social laws and moral codes, not just
genetic programming; we do philosophy, because we’re free to care about the truth which is
either irrelevant to our role in the evolutionary game or is even counterproductive to it (and is
thus baffling without some freewill or autonomy from the game board)

Inmendham sees this when he gives credit to intelligence, since AN requires the utilitarian
enlightenment, that is, knowledge of The Game and The Equation; but this puts him on a
slippery slope to acknowledging the possibility of the Third Option, which is personhood, culture,
mentality, artificiality, the technosphere, etc, which do make us godlike (if not necessarily wise
enough to make all the suffering worthwhile in the end)

*******

Re: Critique of Inmendham’s Radical Pessimism

Clarification of and apology for my Radical Pessimism video’s definition of AN: AN is the
view that procreation is normatively wrong, but I defined AN at the start of my video in a
confusing and contentious way. I had a reason for doing so, namely an argument in an article I’d
written months before making that video, which argues for the view that antinatalists are on a
slippery slope to being opposed to life more generally; incidentally, some of INM’s comments in
his reply support that slippery-slope argument and thus my extended definition, even though he
also criticizes my definition for being misleading. Moreover, not one of my video’s objections to
ultra-pessimism or AN depend on the extended definition (those objections being about
consequentialism, the ratio of pleasure to pain, and transcendence in culture, given what
Inmendham (INM) presupposes, namely objective reason and normative values). Still, that was
my bad.

INM’s method: INM employs the point-by-point method (where you reply separately to every
single point—or even sentence or sentence fragment—made in some text or video)—but with a
YouTube twist, since YouTubers have a sentimental fetish for first impressions; those
impressions are important in mating, but not so much in philosophy; written debates or at least
discussions in which each side thinks about what the other has said before responding are far
more useful; ideally, you’d want a synoptic view of some part of an argument and then you’d
want to prioritize your responses based on your understanding of the logic of the overall
argument; even better, you’d want to respond to opposing arguments like a philosopher,
engaging in a constructive and cooperative dialogue to discover the truth, even going so far as
to help build up your opponent’s argument, which is what I try to do in the first 18 minutes of my
video on radical pessimism and AN; this is, of course, the opposite of the bullying, pwning style
that produces anti-philosophical competitions, catering to teenaged YouTubers with their
infantilized attention spans

The advantages of INM’s method are supposed to be comprehensiveness and a demonstration

that the debater can think on his feet. But the drawbacks of INM’s method are so many and
apparent that I’ll have to list them:

Since INM responds by interrupting the video after every sentence or so, without knowing what
I’m going to say later on, he (1) throws down one red herring after another, presuming I’m
 68

saying this when I’m really saying that—as becomes clear when you interpret the quoted
sentence in the context of the rest of the argument that comes later and sometimes only a few
words later

Here are some examples where INM’s presumptions lead him astray: in the first several
seconds of Part 1, INM identifies radical pessimism with efilism and AN, leading him to say later
that my video is a waste of time because I don’t focus on the main question of AN; INM thus
misses the logic of my overall argument, which targets the links between the pessimistic
premises and the AN conclusion; in Part 1 he assumes I’m a theist, since he apparently did no
research on me at all (because he wanted to go solely on his first impression of my video), not
even glancing at the titles of my blog’s articles; in Part 2, in his reply to my point about the game
analogy, he responds before he hears my purpose for bringing up the semantic point about the
meaning of “game,” the purpose being to show that the analogy is dangerous, because it’s
cryptotheistic and it anthropomorphizes natural selection; in Part 3, he presumes I’m talking
about heaven when I say there’s an alternative to the animalistic cycle, not waiting to see that
I’m talking merely about culture; in Part 4, 2:10, where I say “we should appreciate the sacrifice
of living things and in fact we should be horrified by it,” INM interrupts just at the horror part and
then speaks as if I’d only made the weaker point about the need for appreciation, going on to
mock that as mere “lip service” (because his interruption prevented him from hearing the
“horror” part); and there are dozens of similar instances

(2) The YouTube method helps to enrage INM, since he’s left to watch a sliver of a video at a
time and to respond to each isolated silver, anticipating too much, often missing the
interconnections between the points or the context or the overall point, and thus failing to
understand what I’m saying; (3) this method lends itself to taking cheap shots, which of course
is the goal of micromanaged pwning for infotainment: it’s a divide and conquer strategy, except
that that’s counterproductive when the meaning of the part you’re discussing depends on that of
the whole in which it belongs; (4) moreover, his method makes the video unwatchable, since
there are so many interruptions that make each fragment virtually meaninglessness and thus so
much annoying blather; (5) the method biases the viewer against the targeted video since that
video becomes unwatchable and annoying due to the constant interruptions; (6) the method
encourages hyper-defensiveness instead of a more philosophical (constructive, collaborative)
mood; (7) when practicing this obnoxious method, you lose sight of the wood for the trees,
getting lost in minutia

By analogy, this point-by-point method which tries to disintegrate a source document or

video is like pretending to climb a huge mountain by chopping it into a million pieces,
stepping over each one at a time, and then boasting that you’ve climbed the mountain;
the method is egregious and abhorrent and I recommend that YouTube intellectuals
simply stop it

General comments on substance: my video wasn’t really about AN; it was about the radically
pessimistic assumptions that fill out INM’s case for AN

As it comes out in his multipart response, the core of INM’s argument for AN seems to be
what he says about the problems of consent and fairness: procreation is wrong since the
offspring has no choice in being born and thus can’t agree to it, and the parents inject an
innocent person into an imperfect world, thus guaranteeing the offspring will suffer

My direct response, regarding consent: given INM’s determinism, consent is irrelevant since
there’s no such thing as choice; instead, there are only robotic/animalistic simulations of
 69

personal qualities (thus, what I call the undeadness of fundamental natural processes); in any
case, consent is constantly given on an implicit basis by everyone who, after their formative
years, decline to commit suicide; they thus implicitly say that they’d prefer to live, that they’re
glad they were born, even knowing the tradeoffs due to the world’s imperfection; by the way, the
fact that some do kill themselves shows we’re not slaves to our genetically-based will to live

Regarding fairness, INM here presuppose a normative distinction between right and wrong, but
there’s no such meaningful distinction without what I’ve been calling the transcendence from
robotic animalism to personhood and culture (from facts to values, slaves to self-controlling
people, etc, due to complexification and evolution, which are nature’s modes of creativity; thus,
what I call the divinity of nature as the undead god); thus, the antinatalist faces a dilemma:
either radically pessimistic naturalism leads to nihilism, undermining the normative force
of AN or there’s the normative reality of fairness due to transcendence, and this
transcendence provides an alternative to enslavement to the primitive life cycle

INM protests that morality has nothing to do with his case for AN, but I was using “morality” as s
synonym simply for normativity, for the distinction between right and wrong that isn’t just a
distinction between kinds of facts. If you deny there’s such a normative distinction, ethical
values become illusory and you wind up with nihilism, which undermines AN.

Also, I call INM a utilitarian and he seems to think that’s an insult, because utilitarianism is a
kind of morality and INM thinks AN is based purely on science and logic, whereas morality is
part of philosophy and philosophy is as much art as it is science (although INM speaks of
philosophy and science as equally objective and rational); but INM’s values are utilitarian; he
thinks happiness in the sense of pleasurable mental states are precious, and that pain is
normatively bad; moreover, he thinks we can quantify these states and that we should try to
maximize pleasure; it’s because natural life supposedly necessitates that suffering outweigh
pleasure, that we shouldn’t introduce children to this world; also, as I say in the video, INM talks
a lot about consequences, and utilitarians think consequences are crucial to determining what’s
right and wrong; this kind of value system is different from, say, deontology, which takes duty or
honour to be the primary value

Note: most of the following times are approximate

PART 1:
31:28 INM says creating life is less justifiable than killing, since “killing of the unproductive” is
justified; also in Part 3, 34:30 he says AN is about stopping reproduction, but then he adds
(agreeing with me), “yeah, ending all life eventually, but this doesn’t have to be your problem”;
this demonstrates my point about the AN slippery slope

40:00 INM: better programming liberates us, once we condemn our original, genetic
programming, replacing it with ideas/philosophy; Ben Cain (BC): i.e. replacing it with culture,
which is my point about our ability to play our own game, to escape from the animalistic cycle
and transcend nature-as-wilderness (as opposed to nature-as-universe, which we can’t
transcend, contra supernaturalism)

46:15 INM contra my point that higher knowledge makes us free: he says “logic does not
liberate” and we just switch to the logic game from the lecher’s life, but this contradicts what he
 70

just said, which is that ideas replace the worse, innate program with the better one and liberate
us

INM goes on to say we can’t make up our own game, because we have limits; BC: different
software/games can run on the same hardware; in general, a variety of programs can run on the
same platform, so who says nature can’t produce creatures whose primary advantage is their
flexibility, their ability to adapt to any environment, which frees them from having to over-
specialize to fit into any one environment? That flexibility alienates us from nature and frees us
to make up rules instead of slavishly doing what most other animals do

PART 2:
4:24 INM: “Better requires consistency with the facts” (i.e. rebelling against nature is useless if
we’re responding with something as chaotic as nature, as opposed to responding with logic or
facts); BC: this is the naturalistic fallacy; facts don’t determine values; logic and science don’t
tell us what’s better or worse; that takes normative principles which rest ultimately, I think, on a
leap of faith in Kierkegaard’s sense, on a choice to come down on one side or another, to put
our stamp on the world in this way rather than that one; I’ll come back to this point below

5:45 INM: nature sets the agenda by giving us desires, which a game requires; the agenda
includes the motivation for us to play; thus, there’s no way to play another game since we’d
need desires and the primitive ones are genetically programmed; BC: I agree that natural
selection sets the agenda in this way, which is why I say we’re still animals and our
transcendence is limited; but the genetic “programming” is the means by which we change
ourselves into something else, since we instinctively create artificial environments that retrain us
to be civilized rather than animalistic; nature thus creates some primates which use their traits to
transform themselves into a more autonomous and godlike species (godlike because we create
microcosms, which are worlds within worlds); I come to back to this numerous times below

10:45 INM back-peddles, calling nature a factual “system” and saying his Game metaphor is
merely a description of the facts, not an anthropomorphism; but descriptive generalizations
about the facts (i.e. natural laws, which themselves were originally deistic) aren’t the same as
rules which are prescriptive; INM says nature is the original game and human artifacts are
bastardizations of that game; BC: this illustrates my point about the treacherousness of this
metaphor, since systems can be more easily left in favour of some other system or mechanism;
systems have no normative or teleological component, whereas games obviously do, given the
connotations of that word; moreover, to the extent that our species has thought of the natural
world as the primary game, that’s because our experience has been based on animistic
projections of our social categories onto the world, so that we’ve treated the world as being
enchanted by spirits (minds); all nonliving things then become homes for spirits, and natural
laws become social conventions and moral or teleological principles

12:47 INM goes from agreeing with my point that natural laws are given by natural forces, to
calling those laws “rules,” thus confusing descriptive with prescriptive laws; sorry, but scientists
don’t discover rules in nature—unless we’re talking about sociologists, anthropologists, or
political scientists who are talking about the microcosms we set up

14:50 INM explains the purpose of the Game metaphor, which is to explain that there are
winners and losers in life; BC: actually, there are winners and losers only in cultural terms,
 71

which requires our microcosm and our standards and criteria; there are no winners and losers in
natural selection, since there’s no referee, no designer or programmer of the natural laws

Moreover, if there are only natural systems/mechanisms, with no freewill or morality, as INM’s
radical pessimism implies, then values in general are illusions; there are then only facts, not
meaningful normative questions, human rights, or even the badness of murder; thus, there’s a
slippery slope from AN to mass murder to achieve the purpose of eliminating suffering, as I
explain in my blog’s article on AN; by the way, contrary to what INM says in his dialogue with
Corey Anton, pain isn’t inherently bad; without a moral evaluation, pain just causes us to try to
end it, but it’s the naturalistic fallacy again to think that that causal relation equals any kind of
normative value; feeling that pain is bad doesn’t make it so; normative value derives from moral
axioms/principles and ultimately, I think, from something like a Kierkegaardian leap of faith in
the sacredness of some way of life (see Durkheim’s sociological account of religion)

So AN is faced with dilemma: radical reductionism/eliminativism of normative philosophy

versus a slippery slope to agreeing there’s transcendence as indicated by the
meaningfulness of normative questions, by our limited freewill which makes those
questions meaningful, and by our cultural distinctions which individuate us as a species

When we’re being objective, we dispense with our anthropomorphisms and the importance of
objectivity here is that it shows us there’s space for participating in artificial rather just primitively
natural processes; no one but us cares if we act like animals, so assuming we have the power
and the self-control to break free of the innate system (thanks to the tools the genes gave us,
with their long leash on us), we can do something else, such as worrying more about ideas than
material things

15:00 INM: games require fairness (“decent standard of victory”) and consent; since there’s
none in life, life is broken as if it were a rigged game; BC: this is all anthropomorphic; nature is
amoral and so it’s not a game in the relevant sense, so it’s not broken; nature is monstrous
because it’s impersonal, inhuman, and mindless and thus precisely because it’s not like a game;
on the contrary, nature is alien to sentient creatures like us who can see it for what it is without
projecting ourselves onto it with personifications

17:00 INM says he’s nowhere near implying that because life is a game and we can’t escape it,
therefore we should play it; i.e. therefore we have that extra pressure on us, to play our roles;
BC: then why deny the obvious, that human culture (intelligence, philosophy, science, art)
transcends the primitive routines of evolutionary life? See below, in Part 3, where INM slips up
on this point by talking about our natural “function”

20:00 and 21:00 INM: if we don’t like the word “game,” we can switch to calling everything a
“process,” including natural selection and football and Monopoly and the lottery; BC: that misses
the point of the dualism, of the break between nature and culture/artificiality: football and
lotteries really are games because they’re intelligently designed, they’re run not just by physical
laws but by rules in the sense of conventions which have a normative and teleological
dimension, because they come from minds; Darwin showed us that evolution’s not like that;
thus, the dubiousness of INM’s Game analogy

24:00 INM: this point about the Game analogy is a silly semantic one, it’s irrelevant, and the
analogy’s not dangerous; BC: my point isn’t silly since the words have implications, especially
when INM argues so much by analogy, relying on connotations rather than explicit deductive
reasoning
 72

25:30 INM: his AN doesn’t depend on morality (an “imposition of dogmatic sentiment”); rather,
AN is just about an ethical value equation or exchange (winners depending on sacrificial losers;
e.g. masters on slaves; one person’s pleasure on someone else’s pain and thus rightness on
wrongness); BC: I was using “morality” as a synonym simply for “normativity”; anyway, this is
the scientistic, pseudoscientific move of reducing normative questions to quantifiable,
mathematical ones, but you won’t get any wrongness from such a quantified formulation unless
you add moral assumptions/axioms; the mathematical formalisms just put the values into fancy
patterns, but the math doesn’t generate the normative status of the values in the first place

28:20 INM: BC’s job is to explain why we have the right to play with someone else’s welfare
when we can’t get consent or fairness from them (because they’re too young to give it and we
can’t significantly improve the world); BC: determinism implies there’s no right or wrong since
there’s no autonomy or personal responsibility; instead, there are only facts; add atheism and
you get the implication that life is a process not a game, so again no values or normativity; INM
fades in and out of appreciating these implications of his radically pessimistic form of atheistic
naturalism: he prefers the more objective and thus non-normative-sounding “equation of values”
to “morality” and he compares nature to a game even though he knows nature’s determined by
natural laws, not by rules

33:00 INM: time travel is phantasmagorical and ridiculous, so that’s a very dubious example of a
happy end of natural life; BC: I agree, so that was indeed a bad example, but maybe techno
gods will produce some greater good that won’t literally erase the past but will negate the
wrongness of the past suffering, by balancing it with something great in the future, such as a
virtual universe in which infinite species are created and given all sorts of opportunities for
advancement, self-control, and so on; my point was only that it’s speculation either way, since
we’re talking about the distant future and technology has changed remarkably fast (Moore’s
Law)

39:00 INM: not all speculations are equal, regarding extraterrestrials; BC: I agree they’re not all
equal, but the evidence is ambiguous; it’s like the interpretations of quantum mechanics which
scientists are agnostic about until tests eliminate some and favour others; the rational response
to the unknown is agnosticism, suspension of belief or at least of certainty, but INM says the
state of extraterrestrials is “obvious”

46:25 INM: if pleasures and pains have infinite value, then we can just do the infinity math and
tally them on that higher level; BC: no, that misses the point; when art is priceless, experts
decline to measure its value in quantitative terms; the contrast is between appreciating
something’s quality (as in moral/normative value) versus carving it up with objectifying divisions
and pseudoscientific Benthamite equations

47:00 INM: universes can be infinite and still individual, therefore pains and pleasures could be
so, assuming they were infinitely valuable; BC: universes would be infinite in extent, not in
value; we measure objective properties, not subjective ones like right and wrong; of course, we
can measure pain and pleasure as objects (there are degrees of pain), but my point was just
that when we do so we’re no longer thinking of them as having normative value, since we’re
objectifying them, like the way a killer objectifies/demonizes his victim to live with himself after
he commits the horrible deed

48:00 INM: regarding the point that no one knows whether pain outweighs pleasure, we
nevertheless have a sense that the game is more about unfulfilled desires which amount to
 73

pains (the chase, hamster in a wheel without getting anywhere); BC: a hunch isn’t the same as
a mathematical calculation or equation; so those hyper-objective sounding formulations are just
pseudoscientific, whereas what we’re really doing here is speculative, partly artistic philosophy;
let’s be upfront about that and stop trying to scientistically invoke scientists’ authority

49:00 INM: we can calculate risk (e.g. if we know statistically there’s a 1 in 10 chance of a car’s
brakes failing and thus we know the car could more likely run a kid over, we’d be wrong to risk
driving in the car; likewise, we can know whether we have a right to gamble with someone
else’s welfare); BC: this shows only that rational decisions can be made once we have the
probabilities; my point is that we don’t have the overall measurement of the pain-pleasure ratio
for our species; we know that if someone gets his arm cut off, he’ll feel pain, but not whether
almost any person, let alone the whole species, feels more pain than pleasure; it’s
pseudoscience to speak of objective, mathematically precise knowledge there; e.g. thousands
of years ago, people looked at the world in animistic terms, so they felt more at home in the
world even when disasters occurred; were there lives as full of pain and angst as modern
people’s? Did they feel like hamsters in a wheel? No, that’s a modern phenomenon of ennui

PART 3:
2:35 INM: we know enough about the harm in the world to know that we shouldn’t have children,
since having children amounts to gambling without their consent, imposing a nonconsensual
burden on the offspring; BC: this is implausible, since adults wouldn’t have children if they really
did know the offspring would suffer more than feeling relatively happy; by saying it’s a gamble,
the antinatalist is conceding that the evidence for the ratio is ambiguous, that our lives are
mixed regarding pains and pleasures and no one knows which outweighs the other, because
there are way too many factors, including our attitude towards suffering (e.g. Stoics feel less
pain than others); moreover, people believe that life is worth it regardless of the gamble,
because they think much of the pain is a means to limited higher goods (e.g. the pain of going to
the dentist is needed to give us good teeth, which helps us attract a mate and have the pleasure
of falling in love); no ultimate, apocalyptic Good is needed to justify our lesser pains, since those
are tolerable and often useful in teaching us lessons and helping us achieve our goals; granted,
though, some people’s lives really are horrific and as it turns out they shouldn’t have been born
at all; and indeed, the risk people take in having children is partly due to genetically-determined
ego, but there’s also something heroic in it: we courageously and even crazily rebel against
nature, adding to our ranks in the cultural enterprise

4:00 INM: evolution is an inefficient/wasteful process; BC: this assumes that living things are
valuable, but nature doesn’t value them at all; nature is amoral and mindless, which is why I call
it undead; thus, “inefficient” is anthropocentric or at least anthropomorphic; living things are
valuable to themselves, to their to kind, and to saintly altruists like the antinatalists; that value is
subjective, not objective; science and math don’t tell us what to value

4:10 INM attempts to summarize my argument about transcendence and culture, concluding
with saying that I’m saying that “our contemplations are worth torturing animals”; this is nothing
more than a presumptuous strawman; I say that higher mental states transcend the “game,”
because they transcend—as a result of complexification/emergence—all undead natural
processes, including natural selection, but that doesn’t mean I think the impersonal animals
have no subjective value; that’s a whole separate question (see my articles on aesthetic value
and originality; torturing animals is certainly ugly and wrong)
 74

5:35 INM: it’s pretentious to talk about the “infinite transcendent value” of mental states, as BC
does, since it’s based on no well-known logic; BC: why not watch the whole video before
commenting to see if I explain myself? I do so when I talk about culture and complexification
throughout the last third of the video (I also explain myself in numerous articles on my blog)

8:45 INM: contra my representation of his view, there are no net positive values, only positional
or relative ones, so we’re merely paying down our debts, as it were, not making money; we’re
always fixing what’s bad, not creating anything that’s overall good; BC: my mistake, then, but
mere relative normative value entails that we should be agnostic about the relative value of
every single experience that’s ever happened on our planet, until we know how all life ends,
since all living things interconnect; by analogy, in a horserace, we don’t know which horse is
really doing the best until we’ve watched the whole race (but life isn’t a race; that would be an
anthropomorphism); also, the point about the slippery slope to transcendence still goes through,
since the relative values would nevertheless be objective and, most importantly, normative, for
INM; that’s what matters to my argument, not the relative-absolute distinction; the points are that
normativity is an emergent phenomenon that indicates our autonomy (due to language and
reason) and thus what I called transcendence, and that we use that transcendence/liberty to
create culture, which is our own game (a real game, governed by rules, not just natural laws);
our game (our artifacts, etc) may only be subjectively good, but that game is still separate from
(emergent from, albeit dependent on) the monstrosity of undead nature, since it’s infused with
purpose and meaning that we put there

10:37 INM: basic problem of lack of desert/fairness or consent; thus a world with supposedly
more and more good in it would have to be failsafe; otherwise, we’d be gambling with the next
generation and only digging ourselves out of a constantly-deepening hole (as I’d put it); BC: our
game is to go to war with monstrous nature, which is why we create our microcosms that
replace/eliminate/trash the wilderness; necessary evils such as gambling by procreating are
justified by the profundity of the overall mission, to create a tiny place in the universe where
there’s nobility, honour, and tragic heroism, where animals that were once slaves freed
themselves and fought back against their undead master, breaking the chains that bound them
and refusing to follow the routines of natural selection so slavishly; we’re still animals, not to
mention physical objects, so we do follow natural laws and we regress, but we also strive to
achieve emergent purposes that are entirely extraneous to and anomalous in the cycle of
animalistic life; we do that because we’re relatively godlike (we create worlds)

15:30 INM: BC keeps avoiding the full scope of the cycle of life; it includes reproduction,
consumption, cannibalism and addiction, and the addiction part gets at the psychological
compulsion to play the game since we desire things and thus suffer when the desires are
unfulfilled; BC: in the handful of videos of INM’s I’ve seen, he didn’t include “addiction” in the list,
but I see its role now in his argument; I agree that desires and thus the underlying
natural/genetic processes are fundamental to culture and that’s why I don’t say culture is
supernaturally transcendent (i.e. literally heaven); culture is an emergent phenomenon, which
means that it’s a great complexity which rests on simpler levels of nature, just as the cerebral
cortex rests on the older emotional and instinctive parts of the brain (by the way, that’s why I talk
about the cerebral cortex—not to get at the size of our brain, but to point out its special
structure, which makes us relatively autonomous); the downside of this dependence of our
projects on undead natural processes is that we’re liable to regress to animalistic behaviour as
we often do; nevertheless, there are higher-level processes, just as biological ones don’t reduce
to physical ones; so instead of giving in to the horrors of nature, by effectively terminating our
species through AN, most people choose to play a relatively unnatural game called cultural life
 75

INM says numerous times that culture will always be based on primitive motives, but he has a
burden to show not just there’s a dependence or a causal relation there, but that all aspects of
culture qualitatively reduce to the state of those primitive motives; that would strike me as the
genetic fallacy (saying that the Olympics is barbaric, for example, because it derives ultimately
from our animalistic drives); INM is thus denying nature’s creativity; transcendence doesn’t
happen merely on this planet in human societies; atoms became molecules, molecules became
nebulas, which became stars and planets and so on (this is natural evolution and
complexification throughout the universe; it’s change, the undead god of nature changing itself,
and we’re merely part of that creative process—only we can create with an honourable
purpose); I’ll say more about the genetic fallacy below

21:20 INM: culture is animalistic, contrary to what I say, because cultures annihilate each other
and even drop nuclear bombs on each other; BC: the unprecedented degree of our
rapaciousness is actually evidence of our transcendence, since most animal species don’t
counterproductively (insanely/irrationally) exterminate other species, thus endangering their
ecosystem and themselves; humans are the most barbaric because we’re free to be evil or
insane as well as good; the monumental degree of our destructiveness is a byproduct of the
very capacities that make us people rather than just animals (personhood isn’t identical to
sainthood)

23:30 INM: culture is just selfish people screwing each other over, and many people don’t want
to admit that that’s all they’re doing; BC: this is grossly simplistic psychological egoism, refuted
in every introductory ethics textbook written in the last several decades; e.g. often the
psychological egoist (who thinks all actions are necessarily selfish) confuses the fact that
actions necessarily derive from the self with the issue of the action’s object or purpose, i.e.
whether it’s aimed towards helping the person performing the action or someone else, as in
altruism

26:30 INM denies my distinction between Machiavellian/evolutionary intelligence and the

philosophical/scientific kind, which I thought he’d conceded; but without that distinction, there’s
no reason to think antinatalists have any objective, absolute knowledge of the facts of natural
life and we’re stuck with postmodern skepticism about all knowledge claims; thus, AN doesn’t
get off the ground and there’s no point in saying AN is “rational,” “logical,” and so on if reason is
limited to the evolved psychological “agenda mechanism,” as if we can’t think of anything
besides eating, sleeping and screwing each other over; INM says “the lizard and the ape are still
driving the human race”; I actually agree with that if we think of “driving” as providing us with
basic motivations (Plato, the big rationalist, said much the same thing with his chariot
metaphor); but our creativity allows us to build new games on top of that platform; it’s like
new software being implemented in the old hardware

28:00 INM: organisms “walling themselves off” is a metaphor that doesn’t work, since creatures
use tools; BC: I was talking about straightforward biology (membranes, homeostasis, etc)

29:10 INM says I’m not going to “win him over with this kind of crap,” referring to my point about
how culture transcends animalistic life; BC: I had no expectation that INM would even hear
about my video, let alone respond to it or be persuaded by it; I’m merely explaining to my
readers why I don’t go so far with pessimism as to be led to AN

30:45 INM says we use technology and our economies in an unwise way, thus we’re still brutes;
BC: had INM merely watched a few minutes later in the video, he’d have seen that I concede
that our technology progresses much faster than cultures and characters do and that we
 76

specifically lack the godlike wisdom to guarantee any great end to our cultural games;
moreover, I grant that because we’re still animals (minds emerging from bodies and thus
supervening/depending on our older drives, instincts, and so on), we regress to savage
behaviour much of the time (in the video I sometimes said “all of the time,” but I was speaking
hyperbolically)

35:35 INM asks rhetorically, “Isn’t it curious how the most savage, subhuman people are the
ones having the most kids?” thus suggesting that AN is rational; BC: poor people have more
kids because their societies more closely resemble uncivilized jungles where there’s no reliable
government to keep people safe from predators, so they have lots of kids, knowing that some
will die early, as in animalistic life in the wild; in more developed countries, the living standard is
higher so there’s a greater chance that any offspring will live a long life; it’s advances in culture
(including medical science) that make for that contrast between relatively natural/wild and
artificial/civilized cultures

39:25 INM says we don’t live up to our ideals, so my argument about the availability of a higher
game is a “fail,” since “there’s no evidence this [i.e. living up to our ideals] is the function of the
organism [i.e. of a person]; the function is [that] the animal is visceral [sic], the animal has the
passion;” BC: this is a fine illustration of my point about the danger of the Game metaphor: here,
INM is relying on the extra pressure from the pseudo-teleology implied by “function” to get
people to doubt the viability of a non-animalistic life path of trying to live up to our more original
ideals; he’s talking as if we were bound by our evolutionary programming; that is, he saying not
just that we often submit to that powerful programming, but that our purpose/function is to
submit to it; very dangerous indeed, that crypto-theistic Game metaphor (to be clear, I believe
INM himself is simply an atheist, which is good, but his metaphor has misleading crypto-theistic
connotations)

INM goes on to concede that we can transcend that function as long as we’re “passionate about
the truth” as opposed to being passionate about more animalistic goals; this contradicts much of
what he says above and lands him on the slippery slope I talk about, which leads to the
conclusion that we can (imperfectly) transcend our animal nature even as our higher nature
depends on and is bound up with that lower nature (just as the cerebral cortex sits atop and
interconnects with the older parts of the brain)

44:45 INM: we can’t transcend natural selection, because our brain and understanding are tools
that evolved for purposes of warfare, to help us out-scheme competitors; BC: there’s adaptation
and then there’s exaptation; I agree that reason, for example, evolved for Machiavellian
purposes, as I say in the video, but we also acquired the byproducts/exaptations of science and
philosophy; so again, this is the genetic fallacy, reducing something’s value to its point of origin,
denying the possibility of one thing’s genuinely changing into something else; this also proves
the importance of the “god” part in my “undead god” image: nature is divine simply in the sense
that it’s genuinely creative; throughout nature, Y comes from X, where Y doesn’t equal X;
human culture vs the animalistic life cycle is only one instance of the natural creativity
(evolution, complexification, and emergence) that’s found everywhere in the universe

46:40 INM personally attacks me, saying that I’m holding out the hope that culture is somehow
wondrous and sublime, all the while scheming because I’m not one of the many paying the
price, because I’m not a slave or a pig being slaughtered; BC: I agree that many people and
animals have it worse than me, but I’m an omega male; I’m hardly one of the winners in modern
societies, so that personal attack falls flat (and is irrelevant)
 77

49:50 INM: all my talk of “sublime” and “amazing” creative processes is merely subjective, since
INM sees nothing special about human culture; BC: the normative aspect of natural creativity
would indeed be subjective, but again, if INM had simply watched a little further before
interrupting, he’d have seen me talk about the anomalousness of culture, which makes culture
virtually miraculous (extremely improbable, albeit not supernatural); the anomalousness of what
we’re doing is perfectly objective: no other species has language, for example, nor has any
other species dominated such a variety of environments as we have, thanks to our extraordinary
flexibility; nor does any other species come close to knowing the total objective truth of nature
(including the inevitability of death) whereas we are, thanks to the exaptation of reason; nor
does any other species have art as well as just tools, nor is any other species nearly as godlike
as we are in terms of our surrounding ourselves with what Dawkins calls an extended
phenotype, which is our artificial world that answers to us and is filled with meaning and
purpose; whether an ultra-pessimist can look at all of this and still say it’s boring and brutal and
lowly is neither here nor there, since the objective anomalousness of that transcendence
(emergence/complexification) remains

PART 4:
3:00 INM mocks my “nature is undead” metaphor; I explain that metaphor at length on my blog
and in my first YouTube video, but a philosophical naturalist shouldn’t have to work too hard to
figure out its meaning (like a zombie, nature simulates personal qualities, such as creativity and
intelligent design, even though it’s fundamentally mindless and impersonal; the metaphor is thus
hardly “gibberish”)

3:40 INM: the horror of nature isn’t complicated since it’s just a matter of “precious commodities”
being “controlled by crude forces”; BC: I agree, but what could make anything precious for the
ultra-pessimist who thinks “morality” is a bad word even though I’ve been using it as a synonym
for “normativity”? Instead of talking about morality, INM talks pseudoscientifically about the
“exchange” or “equation” of values, but what makes anything valuable in INM’s picture of nature,
where there’s no freewill or transcendence from natural selection or natural
systems/mechanisms/processes? All values and qualities then become illusory and we’re left
with physicalistic nihilism

This might be a hidden role of his Game analogy, to ward off nihilism and to provide a crypto-
teleological basis of his utilitarian values (pleasure = good, pain = bad); that is, nature would
literally program us to feel pleasure as good (even though it wouldn’t since nature isn’t an
intelligent designer or an assigner of purpose), therefore pleasure would be our value; sorry, but
that would be the naturalistic fallacy; pleasure becomes at best instrumentally good in that case,
not normatively so; likewise, having a shovel is instrumentally good, relative to my goal of
removing the snow from the sidewalk, but the goodness there is nothing more than a fact about
the shovel’s usefulness to my purpose and its increasing the probability of success; if that’s all
AN values are, on this reductionistic naturalism, all of INM’s insults against nature and
destructive humans are empty, since there’s nothing really wrong with anything,
including the murder of all life to achieve the AN goal of ending suffering; this isn’t a
semantic point about the meaning of “value” or “morality”; the point is that AN would undermine
its value judgment by not leaving room for the emergence of normativity (of values which
philosophers usually call moral) from the world of natural facts

INM adds that “crude forces don’t make for a good baby sitter”; I agree, and that’s why
intelligent creatures like humans have been busy for thousands of years surrounding ourselves
 78

with something other than the crude forces of the wilderness, namely with the microcosm
comprised of intelligently-designed artifacts that we (imperfectly) control, which has largely
replaced the wilderness on this planet, at least temporarily

7:20 INM asks who is the “we” who I say prefer to live as people rather than animals, who prefer
to be civilized by culture rather than live without our tools that support the non-animalistic
games; my answer is that most people who ever lived would stand with me against the
antinatalist; some would be deluding themselves since their life choices are mostly subhuman,
but most would prefer to be relatively autonomous people rather than animals enslaved by their
programming and by their given environment; most would prefer to live in the environments we
create for ourselves, beginning with the inner, mental environment we create by thinking a lot,
rather than be stuck with the crude natural forces of the wilderness

8:15 INM mocks my talk of “precious creatures” and he belittles people as gladiators in a blood
sport, thus contradicting his earlier slogan, “precious creatures controlled by crude forces”; are
most people precious or not? INM is caught in this contradiction because he wants to
distinguish the saintly and rational antinatalists from the brutish human masses who cause all
the suffering, but he also bases his AN on utilitarian logic which sees value in the potential of all
sentient creatures to be happy (through the mere biological and thus universal capacity for
pleasure); thus, INM has to condemn most living things for being so brutal and ignorant
even as he has to praise them for being normatively precious (or he has to praise their
potential to enjoy the precious mental state of pleasure); again, given INM’s radical pessimism
and reductionism, nothing whatsoever is actually precious; instead, there are only creatures that
feel some things are valuable, but feeling X is valuable doesn’t make X really so; now, is the
antinatalist willing to concede that her utilitarian value system merely feels right to some people
as opposed to being rational and thus applicable to everyone? No, INM wants AN to be
scientific, so he construes normative questions in quasi-mathematical, objective terms, as if the
setting of values in an equation justifies the values in the first place or even shows that the
values are real rather than illusory; the reason values and purposes are real, by the way, is that
nature complexifies, which has to do with what I’ve been calling transcendence at all natural
levels, including psychology and human culture

9:10 INM accuses me of hypocrisy, since I allegedly discharge my moral obligations merely by
paying lip service to high ideals while I meanwhile feel free “to do whatever the fuck I want,” as
opposed to joining the antinatalist and combatting destructive actions with constructive actions;
BC: I don’t claim to be a hero or a saint; the articles on my blog lay out what I condemn;
likewise, INM has made over 2000 videos, thus he’s done a lot of talking as well; Does he also
act to uphold his values? Well, I believe he’s a vegetarian and I assume he doesn’t have
children; none of that personal stuff is any of my business, though, since I’m interested only in
the philosophical ideas here; how could INM know whether I’m a hypocrite when he doesn’t
know the first thing about my values? After all, he evidently did no research on me, misreading
even the name of my blog at the very beginning of Part 1 of his video response; certainly, he
showed no signs of having read any of my articles; so these are cheap and more importantly
boring personal attacks

13:00 INM’s elitism: there are the minority of rational pessimists, including antinatalists, and
then there are the masses who live as beasts; BC: if INM had done a little research on my
view—which, of course, he had no obligation whatsoever to do, although it would have been
useful to him—he’d had seen my dozens of articles where I talk about esoteric vs exoteric
knowledge and about the rationally enlightened (thanks to the curse of reason) vs the beastly
masses; so he’s arguing with a ghost here—as in at least half of his multipart response where
 79

he presumptuously throws down red herrings and goes after strawmen because of his
egregious YouTube-style, point-by-point method of debate

13:30 INM: culture isn’t anomalous in the sense of being surprising, because we know how it
evolved from simpler processes; BC: again, adaptations vs exaptations; the new uses to which
we put our traits do have many surprising results, such as the scientific ability to understand the
whole universe or language’s ability to project our minds outside our bodies to give us what
Plato called a kind of immortality (e.g. we can read Plato’s thoughts long after he died); history,
therefore, meaning the record of ancient events is surprising and anomalous and thus evidence
of our transcendence from the animalistic cycle of life

14:15 INM: we don’t control culture or our microcosms, because we don’t control “the agenda
engine” (i.e. our primitive motivations and psychology); BC: I agree we don’t choose our goals
and ideals out of nothing, so we’re not godlike in that respect, but unlike animals that can’t think
twice or reflect on their motivations or balance one goal against another, searching for
coherence in their model of the world and struggling to overcome cognitive dissonance, we
have limited self-control; we may not choose our basic desires, but we can prioritize them based
not just on more primitive desires, but on logic and our comprehensive understanding of the
facts, on our long memories, and on our cultural conventions (including historical lessons and
testimonies); we can shape our character even after our parents shaped our childish and
animalistic instincts by teaching us their cultural values;

INM goes on to say there’s no logical need to create needs that don’t have to exist, so we’ll
always be controlled by our agenda engine; but who says our creativity has to be dictated just
by logic? Artists have many nonrational inspirations, including their curiosity and idiosyncratic
way of interpreting their subconscious, archetypal desires and whisperings of the muse; again,
reason alone doesn’t tell us where we ought to go; reason can help us get there if our goals are
realistic, but our primary goals have ultimately nonrational motivations; those motivations can be
genetically programmed or more transcendent, personal, and cultural; in any case, these mix
together in our mind, so that the ultrapessimistic reduction of everything to beastly egoism and
bigotry (“scheming brains”) is a crude oversimplification

19:30 INM: self-control of ideas is really about memes, as Dawkins says; BC: not all ideas are
memes, and memetics is at best a protoscience if not a pseudoscience

19:55 INM: my talk of “higher nobility” and of aesthetic value is as silly and subjective as saying
that women with big breasts are magnificent; BC: the notion of “objective value” is an oxymoron,
so the fact that values mean something to some creatures but not to different ones is trivially
true; art doesn’t lose its value just because that value needs to be understood in a context;
indeed, scientific models have pragmatic and aesthetic aspects as well, since they pick out
relevant properties in the world that interest creatures like us; that doesn’t make the models less
useful; aliens would indeed laugh at our values, as INM says, just as most people would laugh
at the antinatalist’s radical pessimism; the difference is that the antinatalist contends that her
values are somehow objectively true because they’re based on reason and mathematics rather
than on faith or intuition or some creative vision; but that’s the naturalistic fallacy: reason tells us
the facts, not what ought to be done about them (e.g. Should we pursue pleasure or pain? The
answer’s not obvious, as is shown by asceticism)

22:00 INM: being controlled by silly forces (i.e. artificial ones we fall for) is just as bad as being
controlled by crude, natural, evolutionary ones; BC: the silliness here is just subjective; most
people don’t think culture is silly; on the contrary, billions of people have died for their ideas (for
 80

their gods, etc); they lived as hybrids we can think of people-who-were-also-animals; they lived
in microcosms rather than in the wilderness and those microcosms were refuges from
the nonintelligently-created parts of the world, so those masses have signed onto the
existential war against nature’s monstrosity, by signing up for culture (for the noosphere
and the technosphere); the aliens that would come here to laugh at our cultures would have a
culture of their own (since they’d have godlike technoscience), so they’d be hypocrites, just as
imperial humans are hypocrites for mocking primitive cultures

26:00 INM says I’m a hypocrite for not being a vegetarian and again for only paying lip service
to my sympathy for vegetarians, because I rely on others to kill animals for me; thus the “we
transcended ones” who I keep talking about are just low-life hypocrites; BC: again, I’ve used the
royal “we” to refer to those who prefer culture and degrees of civility to the naked jungle;
whether I live up to my ideals—even if it were true that I don’t do so here—is irrelevant to
whether we all have the potential to live up to our personal or cultural ideals that isn’t explained
just by positing naturally-selected selfishness; by the way, the contrast here between the
pwner’s preoccupation with personal attacks and the philosopher’s preference for discussing
ideas themselves nicely illustrates the difference between the two kinds of intelligence, the
animalistic Machiavellian kind which makes us competitive animals and the transcendent,
exapted kind that makes us civilized, godlike people who live in worlds we create for ourselves
(e.g. worlds made out of ideas rather than just flesh-and-blood bodies we compete with for food
and sex)

27:20 INM responds to my point that “there’s a difference between human beings and animals,”
by mocking me as if I’d said that humans are wholly better than animals; the point about
transcendence/complexification/emergence is descriptive, not normative; humans are manifestly
different from the other species; we’re godlike not because we’re majestic or omniscient, but
because we create worlds (microcosms); we’re also often proud of ourselves so we add value
judgments and we prefer the human potential to that of most other species, instead of just
describing the different limitations of each species; but those value judgments would be
subjective; if INM knew anything about my philosophy, he’d know I don’t egoistically celebrate
the human potential; instead, I say that the best of us are at most tragically heroic in their
degrees of asceticism, since they’re burdened with knowledge of the horrible truth of nature,
while the majority’s happiness is sustained by delusions

*******

Re: Nihilism or Transcendence? A Reply to Inmendham

I’ll pass over the more deranged, rambling, and abusive parts of INM’s embarrassing video
response. Note that the given times in the video are approximate.

1:00 INM: Living things are merely machines competing to replicate the DNA molecule; that’s
our natural function; BC: that is what animals tend to do, at some level of explanation, but
there’s nothing objectively right or wrong about that function; this is why INM’s anthropomorphic
game metaphor is misleading; in any case, humans are clearly unlike other animals in that
we’ve gained more self-control so that we’ve partially transcended that primitive function; INM
commits the genetic fallacy when he reduces all human behaviour to its evolutionary origin in
some primitive function; “magic” isn’t needed for this transcendence, since natural forces and
systems plainly add levels to themselves through evolution and complexification; INM fails to
understand the implications of nature’s evident creativity
 81

1:30 INM: some animals are also conscious and so they feel pleasure and pain and the ratio of
those mental states is unfair; BC: here INM commits the naturalistic fallacy, since he hasn’t
shown that pleasure and pain are really good or bad; his reductionistic naturalism implies only
that animals subjectively care about their pleasure and pain, but that’s just another natural fact
that has no normative implications; what INM needs is a normative axiom or principle that isn’t
identical to any statement of mere fact, but that would be tantamount to conceding my point
about how nature transcends itself—in this case by adding a normative dimension to the factual
one

2:20 INM: BC says life is worth living, but he has the “right” to say that only because he’s an
“arrogant optimist”; BC: INM hasn’t shown how anything in nature is right or wrong, so his talk of
anyone having the right to do anything is vacuous, as far as his worldview is concerned; until he
comprehends how nature transcends itself, thus falsifying his reductionism, his moralistic
naturalism will be incoherent and he won’t be logically entitled to his AN (i.e. to his
condemnation of procreation)

3:00 INM actually takes my advice and changes his method, by watching some of my video,
taking notes and thinking, and then cutting to his response, as opposed to filming his first
impressions (later on, when he loses all patience, he returns to his earlier, egregious method);
but he nevertheless rejects my criticisms of that method (even though, as I just said, he
temporarily adopts my recommendation); his defense of his main method mostly makes a
strawman out of my argument, since he focuses on the point-by-point aspect and not on the first
impression one; of course, I have nothing against fairly representing a viewpoint, by quoting the
target argument; as is clear from my list of seven criticisms, the problems are with cutting back
and forth so often that the quotations lose their meaning, and with giving only your first
impressions, without giving yourself any time to think about the arguments and maybe engage
in a more constructive dialogue

3:30, 5:30 INM says he implied that I’m a pantheist, not a theist, but that was later in his
multipart reply, as I recall; earlier on, he speculated that I might be a theist and he wasted some
time on that possibility; that’s only a minor example, though; a more troubling example comes
up near the end of the present video, where instead of asking for me to clarify what I mean by
“reductionism,” INM falls back on a strawman (see below); this is what happens when you’re in
a hyper-defensive mind-frame instead of a philosophical one, when you don’t give yourself time
to think much about what you’re hearing or reading before you respond; the reason I
paraphrased or reconstructed INM’s argument in the first 18 minutes of my first video on INM’s
radical pessimism is that I wanted to demonstrate that I understand the overall argument; also, I
wasn’t aware of a video that lays out his whole world picture and I wasn’t about to delve more
deeply into INM’s 2000 videos; anyway, INM agreed with most of my summary, even riffing on
my formulations, so there was no red herring in that summary (as I explained in the “Nihilism or
Transcendence?” video, there was arguably a red herring in my definition of “AN,” but my
objections didn’t assume the slippery slope argument that informs that definition)

8:15 INM denies that he lost the forest for the trees when he filled his multipart video response
with just his first impressions; I’m not saying that everything he said was irrelevant, but he did
indeed miss the logic of the argument; the logic is that INM’s AN presupposes the very
transcendence I talked about; INM calls that transcendence “phantasmagorical nonsense” and
“leprechaun gold,” so he also fails to understand that his reductionism is opposed to the natural
evidence of evolution, complexification, and emergent properties (i.e. the evidence of natural
rather than magical creativity)
 82

11:15 regarding my point that INM has no basis for speaking about consent, because he’s a
determinist, he says there can still be intelligent or uninformed decisions in a deterministic
world, as well as a “right” to exercise our intelligence; e.g. if someone sells you a car but lies
about its condition, they take away your ability to make a correct, informed decision; I agree that
misrepresentation and degrees of intelligence can exist in a deterministic world, but consent is
the choice to permit something to happen; in other words, it’s the choice to withhold your ability
to oppose something, given that you have that degree of self-control; in a deterministic world,
though, everything that happens is forced to happen, so consent becomes impossible because
there’s no such thing as self-control (instead, the self is controlled by external things); as I said,
in such a world there’s only the simulation or superficial appearance of such a higher-level
quality; for example, suppose a robot thinks about whether to allow someone to pick it up and
move the robot to another location, and the robot eventually signals its “approval” by blinking a
green light on its head; assuming the robot has no autonomy at all, but merely performs some
calculations based on its perception of stimuli, it becomes a gratuitous anthropomorphism to
speak of the robot’s thus having given its “consent”; again, INM must grant my point about
nature’s self-transcendence (and thus give up his philosophical reductionism) before he’s
entitled to his normative rhetoric, including his talk of consent

13:15 INM speaks of some behaviour as stupid, malicious, evil, cruddy, shitty, and so on, and
he denies that determinism prevents him from positing those bad qualities; but as I said
throughout the video, it’s determinism plus reductionism plus atheistic naturalism that together
imply nihilism; INM still has to choose between nihilism or transcendence; if he wants to talk
about right and wrong, he’s got to acknowledge that nature transcends itself, adding values and
purposes to facts, and autonomous people to the herd of animals; once he acknowledges that,
he must take seriously what I say about the potential to create a better world, as opposed to
giving up on our species for fear that life will always be as horrible as its most primitive
manifestations

13:30 INM slides from making normative category judgments, saying that I’m an apologist for
some “malicious and cruddy” behaviour, to saying that those judgments are merely “logical”; this
is yet again the naturalistic fallacy; logical relations have no normative implications; therefore,
just because some statements are illogical doesn’t mean they’re bad; illogic isn’t inherently bad
as a matter of fact; science tells us the facts, so notice how in their capacity as scientists,
scientists don’t posit values when they speak of natural forces and systems; INM pretends that
value judgments spring from mere rationality, like Athena from the head of Zeus; all you’d have
to do to see the naturalistic fallacy there is to watch INM state an explicit argument (with
premises separated from the conclusion and specifying the rules of inference used), going from
rationality to normativity; the fallacy is hidden because he speaks, rather, in anthropomorphic
analogies; near the end of this video he loses his patience on this very point (see below)

14:30-15:45 INM says that even in a deterministic world there are wills that make decisions
based on their experience, and that the more experience someone has the more skills and
wisdom they have and thus the better their decisions; here INM is assuming the transcendence
thesis, not determinism; this is because he stops short of tracking the causal relations outside of
the individual, as though the complete explanation of a “decision” were just the psychological
one that might as well posit our autonomy—for all INM’s talk of the mere internal causes of a
decision; by contrast, the determinist thinks that the distinction between the inner and outer
causes is arbitrary, which thus makes the talk of “will” or of “decisions” arbitrary and superficial
as well; when INM calls us “machines,” he’s dehumanizing us in the deterministic manner, since
machines are more obviously caused to act from outside their borders (unlike the human brain),
 83

but when pushed on the anti-normative implications of determinism, he retreats to the

transcendence thesis without acknowledging as much

16:50 INM: saying that nature is divine is “idiotic”; BC: this demonstrates a churlish lack of self-
awareness on INM’s part; he uses hundreds of colourful metaphors in each of his many videos;
likewise, when I say that nature is divine, I’m using that word ironically but also in such a way as
to get at a fundamental truth about nature’s creativity; the importance of this truth is apparent
from what happens when we fail to understand this aspect of nature, such as when we resort to
reductionism, like INM, and reduce personhood to animalism and psychological egoism, and
normative values to the facts of pleasure and pain; to say that nature is divine is to say that
nature creates itself from chaos, so that only a mindless monstrosity is the ultimate creative
power rather than any person; using the theistic term in an ironic way to get theists to perceive
the atheistic implications of naturalism is hardly idiotic

17:10 Likewise, INM says it’s idiotic to play with the word “undead,” since it has “mystical”
connotations; again, it’s just a striking metaphor that gets at a fundamental implication of
philosophical naturalism; we can see the undeadness when we look at the gray area between
life and death, such as the virus; is a virus alive or dead? A virus is so simple and mindless and
yet it seems to act with purpose; likewise, we’ve been fooled by all the order in nature to think
that gods are behind natural processes; instead, there are just the processes that unfold
themselves, and to call them undead is to call attention to the fact that nature at the
fundamental level is neither inert nor animated by mind or spirit; nature is zombielike in that
respect; again, zombies are popular nowadays, so this is a useful metaphor

18:00-19:30 regarding my point that most people give implicit consent to having been born, by
not killing themselves after their formative years, INM says there are other reasons why they
don’t kill themselves; specifically, it takes time to figure out how bad life is, people acquire
attachments to friends and family, and dying is an ordeal we want to delay as long as possible; I
agree there are lots of reasons why we don’t kill ourselves, but a main reason is the one I gave:
people prefer to live because they get a lot out of life; a tiny minority of people, including
antinatalists, may be suicidal and they don’t give their consent, but I’m talking about those who
aren’t at all suicidal; the fact is that they have the option to kill themselves and they don’t; there
are relatively painless ways of doing so and any personal attachments would have to be
balanced against the fundamental lack of consent which the AN posits, that is, against the
radical pessimism and depression which entail that life is evil; at 19:50, INM goes off on a
deranged rant about how people aren’t in favour of legalizing suicide (I’m putting this as
charitably as I can); this is irrelevant, since a suicidal person wouldn’t care whether the act is
legal or not; an act can be morally but not legally right, but even the question of its moral right is
irrelevant to the point at issue, which is just that most people implicitly give their consent to
having been born, by not being suicidal; at around 20:30, INM says that I’m hypocritical for
not advocating for everyone’s right to commit suicide, and that only if I advocated for that right
would I have a respectable argument here; again, this personal attack is a red herring;
regardless of whether I think suicide should be legal (and INM has no knowledge whatsoever of
what I think on that topic), the connection between implicit consent to having been born and the
fact that most people aren’t suicidal is plausible

19:45 INM slips up when he says that the reason he personally doesn’t kill himself is that he’s
“here to fight” people like me or Mengele who torture animals, etc etc; again, INM shows here
that he’s committed to the transcendence thesis, that he believes we can do some good in the
world, in this case by fighting evil; he’ll maintain that this fight is ultimately futile, since we’re
always just cleaning up part of our mess and we can never clean it all up, as he says; but I say
 84

the same thing in my articles: I say the best we can do is be tragic heroes since primitive nature
wins in the end; the question is whether a partial victory is sufficiently worthy to provide a
superior alternative to the effective termination of our species through AN; by holding out
the option of fighting against perceived evil, INM is implying that we can do some good in the
world, but this should lead him to approve of procreation as long as we ensure that our children
follow in our footsteps; of course, this is what actually happens, since most parents teach their
children their values; of course, the problem is that people have different ideas of noble pursuits;
but is it “magical thinking” to say that one day there will be more consensus on right and wrong?
Would that require a miracle? And does logic or science alone compel us to think that such a
consensus is impossible or improbable, even in the distant future? Hardly

21:00 regarding what I say about nature’s self-transcendence in the metaphysical sense, INM
says I should transcend my “crappy, parasitic paradigm” and “earthling bigotry,” and agree that
there’s no way out of the primitive evolutionary game; this is back to psychological egoism, but
culture already demonstrates that we have the potential to transcend that kind of primitive
selfishness; INM himself says he chooses to live (and make videos) to fight those he regards as
evil-doers, so presumably he thinks that’s a less selfish thing to do, compared to eating meat
and being deluded; my point about transcendence is a metaphysical one, which is that nature
adds emergent levels to itself, so we go from biology to psychology and sociology; our cultural
games aren’t entirely reducible to the biological process of natural selection; our
behaviour can be modeled or explained in different ways, depending on the concepts we’re
working with; INM resorts to the reductionistic ones of selfishness and replication of DNA, as
though those concepts could explain the difference between a Mozart concerto and the noise
made from banging your head on the piano keys; the point is that once we see that nature
metaphysically transcends itself through evolution and complexification, we have reason to think
the norms of evolutionary life can change too; nature’s not a static or inert place, so the
antinatalist should stop with the cynical eliminations and reductions of everything to the
most primitive levels; at 25:00, INM says there’s no reason to think nature is going to evolve
anything other than “trilobites, sea monsters, dinosaurs,” and the like; here INM contradicts what
he says about the value of his being a warrior for the AN cause; INM goes back and forth
between cynically reducing everything to the most primitive level, to positing emergent,
transcendent levels to make room for the superiority of his life to that of the deluded,
procreating masses; moreover, we can look at how anomalous our culture and technology and
autonomy are, to expand our minds regarding the possible future transformations of species

22:55 INM denies that reductionism implies nihilism; actually, the point was that reductionism
plus determinism plus radically pessimistic and atheistic naturalism together have that
implication; but sticking just with reductionism, INM unfortunately confuses the scientific with the
philosophical kind when he asks rhetorically how merely dissecting something, taking it apart to
see how its parts function, implies that we can’t appreciate the whole thing’s value; that is
scientific reductionism which I haven’t been taking any issue with; scientists explain things by
analyzing them, reducing them to simpler mechanisms; that’s all fine, because unlike the
philosophical reductionists, such as INM, scientists don’t take the extra step of eliminativism, of
denying the reality of the higher-level patterns once you’ve figured out how the parts work

the problem is that INM’s reductionism amounts to eliminativism; that’s why he thinks he
can get away with saying that life boils down to selfish parasitism or to the replication of DNA or,
to give his most expansive account, to consumption, reproduction, cannibalism, and addiction;
he thinks biology shows that that’s what’s going on at the deeper level, so therefore we can just
dismiss the higher-level phenomena, such as culture, morality, autonomy, personhood, and so
on; INM goes back and forth between reducing personhood to animalism and thus
 85

eliminating autonomy and personal responsibility and all other grounds for making
normative distinctions, and implying nihilism, on the one hand, to committing the
naturalistic fallacy and identifying the facts of sentience, pleasure, and pain as being
sufficient for goodness and badness, to make room for the normative force of his AN and
for his misanthropy, on the other; that is, he goes back and forth between nihilism and the
transcendence thesis instead of choosing between them

25:15 just as he does at 39:25 of Part 3 of his earlier video reply, INM proves my earlier video’s
point about the danger of his game metaphor; here, he says “there’s no transcending the model”
and “you can’t fix the function; that’s the whole point: it’s a desire machine”; notice how obvious
it is that machines are precisely those things which can be fixed—and not just fixed, but re-
engineered altogether, so that the machine takes on new functions (as in our exaptations which
replace our adaptations); so why would AN imply that machines must keep their old functions? I
think it must be that INM is misled by his anthropomorphic interpretation of natural selection as
a “game,” which leads him to think that our functions are somehow obligatory rather than just
tendencies that can be physically overcome, just as a mountain can be climbed

26:15 INM speaks of AN as a failsafe, value-neutral option, since it does no harm; however, if
everyone stopped having children, our species would end and that might prevent a greater good
from emerging in the future; thus, there are no value-neutral options; if we kill ourselves, for
example, we prevent the good we might have done from happening, and if we don’t have
children, we prevent the good our children might have done from happening; I believe David
Benatar tries to get around this by saying there’s an asymmetry between preventing harm and
preventing good (somehow it’s fine to prevent harm, but it’s not bad to prevent the good from
happening), but I hardly think his convoluted argument on that issue is transparently rational

26:45 INM rebuts my point that he commits the naturalistic fallacy when he says that pleasure
and pain are good and bad, respectively, by saying that he has firsthand evidence, namely the
fact that he feels the one is good and the other is bad; he says there’s nothing that can undo the
“intrinsic quality” of those sensations; unfortunately for INM, scientists are the ones who tell us
what’s intrinsic in our sensations, and neurologists don’t posit the rightness or the wrongness of
the firing of our neurons that equals our sensations of pleasure and pain; so it looks like the
normative evaluation of our factual sensations is optional; and how could it be otherwise? Just
list the facts and see for yourself whether they have any normative implication

INM’s thinking here is sloppy, preoccupied as he evidently is by his unremitting hostility; what
INM knows for sure isn’t that pleasure is good, but that he prefers pleasure to pain; what he
knows is that some mental states feel better than others; and he might even infer that all
creatures feel the same way; those are the facts, that creatures feel pleasure and pain and they
prefer the one to the other; that implies subjective values; to be clear, there’s no naturalistic
fallacy in inferring such subjective values, since those values are nothing more than our
personal preferences; no, the fallacy is when you speak of objective or absolute right and
wrong, based just on those facts of how things feel to us

INM proceeds to a strawman, saying that I don’t agree that pleasure and pain are good and
bad, respectively; the issue isn’t whether we prefer pleasure to pain; obviously we do; the issue
is whether INM’s radically pessimistic naturalism logically entitles him to make his
normative claims; in other words, the issue is how best to explain our evident preference for
pleasure over pain; can we explain the difference between right and wrong in the world, merely
with INM’s type of naturalism, which includes eliminativism and determinism? Or will we need to
posit nature’s ability to add levels and properties to itself?
 86

28:40 INM quotes my video where I say, “Let’s talk a bit more about morality” and then he points
out that he already said in his multipart response that he wants nothing to do with that word
“morality”; and this just demonstrates my point about the poverty of the first impressions
approach to YouTube videos, because by this point INM has returned to his old method; he
gives here his first impression without having watched the rest of my video, and so he’s
unaware of the fact that just a few minutes later I respond directly to INM’s point that he rejects
the term “morality”; but this doesn’t stop INM from accusing me of putting words in his mouth
and from calling me “fuckhead” for doing so, etc etc

30:10 INM says that if pleasure and pain are only subjectively valuable, that means the values
are arbitrary, like the preference for one ice cream flavour rather than another; this confuses
objectivity with universality; the philosopher Kant argued that all our judgments are subjective in
that they project our innate cognitive forms onto the world we sense, but he maintained that
because we have the same basic forms, our judgments often have universal scope, meaning
that we would all make the same judgments in the same circumstances; so subjective
judgments can be universal; likewise, if our brains work the same way in terms of our ability to
feel pleasure and pain, we may all agree that one is preferable to the other; those judgments
wouldn’t be arbitrary since they’d be based on our common brain structures

but none of this is relevant to the point I was making, which is that INM’s version of naturalism
seems to entitle him to speak only of subjective values, i.e. of our preference for pleasure; that’s
all normative rightness and wrongness come to in his worldview, to that biological preference; if
that makes normativity too arbitrary for him, that’s his problem, assuming I’m right that his
worldview has that implication

30:30 INM adds that his value judgments are rational rather than just subjective, because they
apply the Golden Rule; Kant tried to make morality rational in that way and there are few
Kantians around nowadays; that’s because critics pointed out that even evil people can be
consistent in their behaviour as long as they’d be OK with other people abusing them in the way
they abuse others, were the circumstances reversed; for example, suppose an evil person is
torturing a weaker person and the evil person is asked, “Would you want to be tortured in that
way?” If the evil person says, “Yes, I’d be fine with being tortured in the possible world in which
I’m this weaker fellow who can’t stop the torturer,” there would be nothing illogical in the evil
person’s thinking, no violation of any law of reasoning; in any case, logic is irrelevant here, since
it skips over the relevant differences between us, including the circumstances that contribute to
our personal development; logic treats everything the same, which is why we can use place-
holder symbols in logical arguments; but right and wrong are context-sensitive; for example, one
person might deserve pleasure while someone else deserves pain, and it wouldn’t even make
sense to imagine a possible world in which the two people reversed positions, since then they’d
have different histories and experiences, so they wouldn’t have acted in the ways they’re
actually being rewarded or punished for; so if you’re looking to logic to ground your morality,
you’re scrounging in a bare cupboard

31:30 INM replies to my reference to David Hume on the is-ought gap and the naturalistic
fallacy; I pointed out that, contrary to what INM says, there’s no badness that’s inherent in the
physical event of pain or of murder; INM replies that we can rationally figure out that murder is
bad, based on our personal experience of pain; INM is moving the goalposts here, since our
cognitive faculties and experience aren’t inherent in the mental state of pain or in the event of
stabbing someone; of course, I’m not denying that we can come up with arguments for the
badness of various events; that’s not the point at issue; the question is whether a determinist
 87

and a reductionist/eliminativist like INM can get away with speaking of right and wrong without
committing the naturalistic fallacy, by reducing right and wrong to the “inherent” or “intrinsic”
facts of pleasure and pain (i.e. to neural events) and then back-peddling to what we can judge
based on rationality, sentience, and experience; here again, INM is implicitly agreeing with the
transcendence thesis, since rationality, sentience, and experience are already higher-level
phenomena than trilobites, dinosaurs, and the replication of DNA
 88

Answering Sam Harris’s Moral Landscape Challenge

____________________________________________________

At the start of his website’s FAQ for the Challenge, Sam Harris summarizes what he calls his
book’s central argument. That summary is clearly invalid: he slides from the assumption that
moral values “depend on” facts having to do with conscious creatures, to the conclusion that
morality itself has scientific answers. This is like saying that because land-dwelling animals
depend on ground beneath their feet, biology reduces to geology.

As for the implicit argument in The Moral Landscape, as I interpret it, that argument is also
flawed. Harris thinks that because morality has to do with the facts of how to make conscious
creatures well, and these facts are empirical, there’s a possible science of morality. Putting
aside the question of what exactly counts as science, let’s consider whether any kind of
reasoning tells us what’s moral. Take, for example, instrumental reason, the efficient tailoring of
means to ends. If we want to maximize well-being and we think carefully about how to achieve
that goal, we can, of course, help to achieve it. Is that all there is to morality? No, because
instrumental reason—as it’s posited in economics, for example—is neutral about the
preferences. This kind of rationality takes our goals for granted and evaluates only the means of
achieving them. So we can be as rational as we like in this sense and the question will remain
whether our goals are morally best.

Russell Blackford makes the same point and Harris replies that a utopia in which well-being is
maximized is possible, and so if a bad person’s preferences stand in the way of realizing that
perfect society, we might as well change that person’s way of thinking, even by rewiring his
brain. Presumably, we could do that—just as we could turn an altruist into a psychopath.
Reason alone doesn’t tell us which would be the superior person, so Harris’s response here
merely begs the question.

For another example of reasoning, take the basic scientific aim of telling us the naturally
probable facts, through observation and testing of hypotheses. Conceivably, scientific methods
could uncover facts of how Harris’s utopia would work and they might even lay out a roadmap
for how to perfect our current societies. As Harris says, some present societies might be better
than others, given the ideal of maximizing well-being. If empirical reasoning could tell us that
much, would that answer the central moral questions?

No, because as Harris admits, science wouldn’t thereby show that the maximization of well-
being is factually the best ideal. Rather, a science of morality would presuppose that utilitarian
ideal as being self-evident, just as medicine presupposes the goal of making people healthy, as
Harris says. This analogy is flawed, though, because doctors can fall back on the biological
functions of our organs, whereas moral aims needn’t be the same as what we’re naturally
selected to do. Medical doctors try to make our bodies function in the way that maximizes our
species’ fitness to carry our genes. Note how much harder it is to explain what counts as mental
 89

health. This is because the question of which mind is ideal is partly a normative one, and
science apparently doesn’t address it.

So is our well-being self-evidently what we all ought to pursue? No, for at least two reasons.
First, we may not deserve to be happy or we may be obligated to suffer because too much well-
being would be unseemly in the indifferent universe that we have no hope of altering. This is
roughly the point of the Christian doctrine of original sin—which may be neither here nor there
for secularists, but this doctrine also reflects the ancient Eastern religions’ pessimism about
natural life. Instead of trying to be happy, says the Hindu or Buddhist, we should ideally resign
ourselves to having a detached and alienated perspective until we can escape the prison of
nature with honour. Robert Nozick makes a similar point with his Happiness Machine thought
experiment: living in a computer simulation might maximize well-being in terms of our conscious
states, but people tend to feel that that narrow flourishing would be undignified, under the
circumstances.

Second, “well-being” is a vacuous placeholder that must be filled by our personal choice of a
more specific ideal. Harris says otherwise, because he thinks his Good Life and Bad Life
illustrations point us in the direction of the relevant facts. But notice that his heroine leading the
good life is on a slippery slope to suffering in the way that Oskar Schindler suffers at the end of
Spielberg’s movie. “I could have done more,” Schindler says in horror. The fact is that the more
empathetic we feel, the more we must personally suffer because in that case we must suffer on
behalf of many others. So a world in which we prefer to maximize collective well-being is
simultaneously (and ironically) one that maximizes individual suffering, and that’s so even
though many people would come to our aid in such a world. A selfless person can’t accept aid
or even compliments that could just as well go to other, more needy folks. Indeed, those with
altruistic motives intentionally sacrifice their personal well-being, because they care more about
others than themselves.

Thus, in so far as the ideal of well-being includes the goal of personal contentment, this ideal is
opposed to the moral one of altruism, of maximizing (other) people’s happiness. Which goal is
preferable isn’t up to pure reason of any kind. Rather, as with all our core values, we must
ultimately take a leap of faith that our personal stamp is worth putting on the world. And in so far
as so-called rationalists would presuppose Harris’s utilitarian ideal, they’d clash with pessimists,
existentialists, world-weary misanthropes, melancholy artists, esoteric Hindus, Buddhists, and
the like. Moreover, in light of how extroverted Western norms have tended to become more
global, not reason but force and a crass lowering of standards would likely settle the matter.
 90

Commiserating in the Undead God

____________________________________________________

Hi Benjamin,
I'm writing to express my sincere gratitude for the work you've done on your blog. I discovered it
a few weeks ago and have since spent a great deal of time combing through your intelligent,
thought-provoking, and often challenging pieces. I apologize for what might prove to be a whiny
or indulgent message here, but I feel the need introduce myself and some of the issues that
brought me to your blog, at the very least to illustrate my gratitude for your writing and also to
selfishly ask for some advice and clarification, which I could truly use at the moment. I
appreciate your time in advance and hope this isn't inappropriate or a large inconvenience.

I'm an 18 year old college freshman who began this school year generally content with life and
operating within the typical atheistic secular-humanist philosophy of life you frequently target in
your pieces, inspired by a convenient reading of Camus in my 10th grade English class and
some baseline philosophy reading. College and the general change in social and environmental
context quickly got me reevaluating my perception of life, and soon a whole host of grave
existential dilemmas began finding their way into my thought; questions of value, meaning,
consciousness etc. that I thought I had figured out in high school, but whose rationalizations
seemed to be quickly deteriorating--suddenly, I was finding scathing critiques of Camus's and
Sartre's philosophies, describing them as childish and wholly inadequate to the true challenges
posed by existentialism and nihilism. My reasonable justification of my morality and sense of
purpose quickly fell apart. My resulting obsessive research demonstrated that older thinkers like
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer were onto the same ideas I was, which I found momentarily
comforting, but the questions of suffering, suicide, and whether there might be any possible way
of rationally justifying my continued existence weighed like hell on me, and for every piece I
found describing some fix to these philosophical problems, I found another contradicting it.

Thus far, my year has been a continuous series of existential crises. They've been marked by
alternating periods of some vague hope and debilitating despair while I attempt to maintain my
grades and a normal disposition for friends and family, most of whom can't seem to understand
why I think the way I do, excluding a few who do but don't take their thought processes to these
extremes. As a friendly, cynical-yet-idealistic kid who loves the Colbert Report, absurdist
literature, Talking Heads, and was hoping to finally kiss a girl at some point in the near future, I
have never felt so terrifyingly alone. I did begin seeing a school therapist last semester (to pacify
the worries of my parents), who ultimately hasn't been much help with these particular
philosophical issues (I identified quite a bit with your article on psychiatry, her professional
assumption seems to be that angst is bad regardless of the philosophical justification). Our
discussion about the philosophical debate over suicide has, as you might expect, been
completely unhelpful. I've spent countless hours in the last several months huddled over my
laptop trying to find answers, frantically bouncing around countless links and websites and
 91

forums, in the process becoming acquainted with a basic groundwork of philosophy, which led
me down the ropes into nihilism, naturalism, materialism, pessimism…the works--Google and
Wikipedia are wonderful and terrible things. At this point, finding motivation every morning is a
struggle, and the daily anxiety is constant and overwhelming.

At my most horrific point, I found myself drowning alone in my dorm one late night in compelling
YouTube videos and blog posts about anti-natalism and the rationality of suicide, arguments
made by people who seemed highly intelligent and philosophically educated, who had
considered all possible counterarguments and debunked them before they could get off the
ground. I couldn't seem to find any coherent arguments against such a terrifying conclusion that
weren't swiftly answered by ANs, and even scholarly responses to the issue seemed to be
dismissed by other undeniable compelling sources (for example, David Benatar wrote a
response article to criticisms of his book, addressing his most prominent critics--including the
one you cite in your article about AN--and concluding that his theory still stood). Thinkers like
Zapffe and Schopenhauer and Ligotti came up, and the reason behind their thought was
compelling enough, only to have modern bloggers and philosophers push them to an even
further point of pessimism. I found Nietzsche's life-affirming ideals, which had previously
provided me with some hope, blindly dismissed as grotesque and as resorting to the
romanticized, unintelligible tough-guy existential rebellion that no rational or realistic person
could possibly accept. And though many of these anti-natalist thinkers seemed not to advocate
suicide, their rationales against it never appeared more than flimsy and unsatisfying to my eyes.
So essentially, I found myself cowering in the most horrific nihilistic despair, utterly hopeless,
unclear as to why I should continue my life.

I found your blog the next day, the link to your anti-natalism article popping up on google. To
say it was a relief is an understatement, as it was the first intelligent response to the issue I had
found that seemed to approach the issue from a slightly different perspective. Your arguments
bought me some piece of mind, and I quickly began exploring the rest of your blog. Your writing
was a breath of fresh air-- level-headed, highly educated, and comforting, dealing with difficult
issues that other mainstream philosophers I had read about glanced over without resorting to
any nasty, emotionally-charged attacks of zealous blog philosophers...in retrospect, I suppose
the fact that your pessimistic arguments were a cause for my optimism at the time is indicative
of how hopeless I felt before.

Certainly, some of it was problematic for me, primarily your dissection of love as being
aesthetically negative--my closest friends were my only comfort during darker times, even as I
kept them largely ignorant of my issues (I wonder if you think some concept of companionship,
like Nietzsche's description of marriage as rooted primarily in "friendship," might be a possible
substitute, or if I'm doomed to live the rest of my life--and pass through college-- in self-imposed
isolation to escape existential inauthenticity. I'm surely more of a thinker than many of my
friends, and have always considered myself more an observer than blind participant in society,
but I am by no means an introvert who finds it easy or desirable to avoid friendship and social
situations (or what I suppose you might refer to as delusional social games). Perhaps my
hormones and wishful thinking are coming into play here, but I desperately want to avoid finding
genuine friendship to be aesthetically wrong, even as your logic of rebellion against our natural
tendencies makes a great deal of sense. In other, more honest words, can I ever feel okay
about wanting that first kiss if it's rooted in a mature intellectual relationship rather than simple
sexual impulses that reduce to evolutionary programming? Is this possible? Or even just a close
friend? Is the inspiration we can find in art any different than the inspiration we can find in other
people? I apologize if these questions are redundant, and I realize this is quite a loaded topic for
you to respond to, especially with someone my age, but I hoped you might have some
 92

encouraging words about it outside of what you've already posted on Rants. Or perhaps I'm
simply too cowardly to abandon these desires. But I am desperately hoping there might be
some manner of finding a middle ground). I really don't mean to pinpoint one of your arguments
here and whine about how I don't want to accept it, as some commenters have, I just hope that
there might be some chance for a slightly more positive alternative to this specific idea.

In general, I've mostly found myself immediately identifying with your ideas while (perhaps
contradictorily?) hoping to rationalize them in a manner that doesn't completely cut me off from
the life I know. I probably don't mean to sound so negative at this point, I've certainly gotten
significant pleasure and hope out of the great majority of your writing, such as your discussion
of Brassier and your dialogues with R. Bakker, as well as your whole discussion of aesthetics.
I've also greatly enjoyed your new satirical articles and videos. However, as you might imagine,
my other troubling concerns tend to overshadow these positives.

In relation to the anti-natalism issue, your writing certainly provided me with some immediate
comfort after that dark experience. However, as desperately as I'd like to, I can't seem to
conclusively put to rest their arguments and be fully content in accepting yours rejection of AN.
Like I wrote above, even the most compelling arguments against it seem to find opposition from
intelligent anti-natalist thinkers. As such, I wonder if you've kept up with any new writing on the
issue? I've noticed your blog mentioned on a few of these AN sites, and the line typically goes
something like "this guy seems to have some pretty intelligent views about the horror of
existence and all, but then he tries to fix it with some BS romanticized existential rebellion ...he'll
come around to AN eventually."

Now, I certainly see comments like this as oversimplifying the nuances of your aesthetic
response to cosmic horror, but at the same time I can't help but entertain the disconcerting
thought that they might be correct, in some sense and that one might be able to rationally
dismiss your views for the same reasons they reject Nietzsche's, or the simpler Camus (i.e. an
inadequate justification of suffering, silly idea of existential rebellion), leading ultimately to a
suicidal nihilism that might result if you confront the conclusions of AN truthfully. Perhaps this
doubt is the mark of my being a young, impressionable thinker who hasn't fully internalize the
arguments for himself yet. While part of me wants to assume you've accounted for these
objections in your work, another part worries that it might fall victim to these criticisms anyway.
To clarify, I have read your articles on AN and suicide (I've read most of the blog), but let me
stress that I don't profess to fully comprehend the complexity of your ideas, which I suppose is
why I'm asking you about these criticisms, and I genuinely hope you don't take offense to my
possible unintentional disregarding of important points in your work that may already have
addressed these concerns. However, if you could ease my mind on these issues, it would be
greatly appreciated (Again: I don't mean any offense or disrespect to you or your thought
whatsoever! I'm simply superficially cynical and can't help but bring my pessimistic bias into
things. I imagine you can relate. I'm positive my ignorance is also a significant factor).

In a more general sense, I wonder if you might have any tips for an 18 year old college student
trying to balance a fulfilling intellectual and emotional life with an enlightened and despairing
understanding of our existence and the many troubling ideas that come with it, ideally one that
doesn't force him into complete seclusion and depressing isolation. Again, I don't mean to
overstep my boundaries in asking such questions, as I know you are simply an intelligent thinker
posting his thoughts on the internet rather than someone volunteering philosophical therapy for
troubled kids. Yet, the nature of these issues being what they are, I find myself feeling utterly
alone in figuring this all out and would greatly appreciate any help you could provide. I do have
plans to meet with my philosophy professor (just started philosophy 101--the irony) to discuss
 93

your writing, and am set to meet a philosophy grad student with a specialty in Nietzsche in a few
days to discuss generally, if only to get out of my head a bit. Even so, I thought it might be smart
to reach out to you directly.

Ultimately, I'm a young person trying to find a way to genuinely cope with these terrifying ideas
in a way that won't rob me fully of everything I hold dear. At times, I wish I could fall for the
delusions that direct much of society, but such a possibility is quite far gone by now, and
perhaps after all, as you've pointed out, unethical. Maybe my hope in this situation is foolish, but
I don't want (can't bring myself?) to give up on some salvaging of my old values just yet.

Again, I want to thank you for the work you've done, and for taking the time out to read this
obnoxiously long, overly personal letter. I've noticed a few comments on your site of late
carrying a similar "help me I'm scared!" tone, and I don't mean to add to them unnecessarily or
be a burdensome stranger. I was nervous to write to you for these reasons, but I don't feel I
have many other viable places to turn. I would greatly appreciate any sort of response you could
provide, although I understand if this is an inconvenience. I truly apologize if any of this has
been distasteful or immature or poorly written, or if I have expressed gross ignorance on the
subjects discussed.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

A Reader [name redacted]

********

Dear Reader,
There’s no need for such formality in writing to me. I’m always intrigued by readers’ comments
on my writings, partly because I haven’t expunged my ego and am glad to know some people
find my blog useful, but also because I learn from those comments and am happy to help fellow
travellers. Your engagement with the blog is particularly moving and challenging and I thank you
very much for your thought-provoking comments and questions.

You write very well for an 18-year-old. Indeed, I doubt I knew half as much as you seem to
when I was your age. I’m sure you’re aware of the stereotype of the teenager who goes through
a period of angst, because the teen is between being a child and an adult. That’s often the time
for philosophical exploration before the teen gets a life, as they say, to fill his or her time with
meaningful distractions, such as family and employment. Philosophy can be a trap in this
respect. It’s the curse of reason, but more specifically it’s the obsession with discovering the
absolute truth however subversive that truth may be. There’s the sense that those who confront
the truth are heroic while everyone else is cowardly and infantile. I too have that sense, but
there are other things going on here too.

The fact is that when you take philosophy to its limit, as Scott Bakker seems to be doing, in his
way, truth itself dissolves in the mystical perception of nature’s unity and fundamental
physicality. There are no more texts or symbols or theories or arguments. There are natural
processes that just happen, and our pondering and talking are parts of those processes. And
another fact: nature is horrifying but also sublime. That’s what the antinatalists miss. They focus
 94

on the suffering and they think their moral obligation is to end it at all costs, but suffering isn’t
inherently bad. Morality is practically epiphenomenal, so suffering too is part of what nature’s
becoming--through living things like us.

Incidentally, you’re in luck on two fronts. Even as I type these words I’m just now uploading a 55
minute YouTube video I made the other day responding to Inmendham’s antinatalism and ultra-
pessimism. You can find that video on my YouTube channel. It’s hard to respond to antinatalist
arguments without going into them in detail, but I’d be suspicious of overly-technical arguments
in philosophy in general, since philosophy is at least as much art as it is science. The problems
with antinatalism are much more fundamental and glaring than technical. The antinatalist claims
to be hyperrational and naturalistic, but then you hear them talking seriously about morality and
utilitarianism. Unfortunately, there’s a clash between naturalism and morality. Morality is
supported by myths and we should judge myths largely on their aesthetic merits, because
they’re fictions and the relevant natural process that’s passing through is a creative one: we
relatively autonomous beings are creating ourselves and our societies, using moral and
religious ideas as artistic inspirations.

As for heroic rebellion, I say in the video that palpable evidence of it is provided by all culture
and artificiality which distinguish us from the lower animals, which indicate our limited freedom
from the degrading cycle of life, and which have been going on for thousands of years. So
there’s plenty of evidence of suffering in nature which should indeed horrify us, but there’s also
tremendous evidence of transcendence in the cases of personhood, culture, and the creation of
our artificial worlds which replace the old, genetically-determined order. Antinatalists need to
pay more attention to the latter and stop harping so much on the birth pangs.

Also, I plan to write soon on the choice between misanthropy and personal intimacy. I got the
idea to do so after I was moved by seeing the movie Her (and then to a much lesser extent, Don
Jon). So you might want to check that article out. It will likely be up within a few weeks.

To address one of your questions, then, yes I do think there’s a middle ground, but I’d prefer not
to characterize it as such because that would assume we’re all on the same continuum when it
comes to our values. It’s like comparing artworks (paintings, movies, and so on). We can do so,
but the works are actually independent since to understand them you need to appreciate the
contexts in which they’re made and there’s great variety in those contexts. This isn’t to fall back
on postmodern relativism, since there are universal truths--but that’s only with respect to the
facts. When we’re talking about values such as moral or aesthetic ones, we should be wary of
deferring to social conventions or to other kinds of received wisdom. Values are just
emotionally-compelling ideas that lend coherence to our worldview, and a worldview is a set of
ideas that makes sense of our experience, memories, character, and other circumstances. So
there’s a lot of variety here to account for.

Anyway, no, I don’t think we should all be ascetic introverts. I do think there are honourable and
existentially-responsible ways of having social relationships. I’m still thinking about this, though,
so hopefully I’ll have more to say in that coming article.

But one question I’d ask you is whether philosophy is the primary cause of your angst. Maybe,
instead, your interest in philosophy is an effect, something you turn to for consolation because
of personal troubles in your life. If you have such troubles, you might consider dealing with them
directly rather than using philosophy to rationalize them or to distract you. Maybe you just fell
into philosophy because of the teen phase I spoke of or because you’re particularly bright or
bookish. In that case, I’d say that you’ve got many years ahead of you for brooding and
 95

pessimism. Don’t waste your youth on an old person’s worries. I know that might sound
condescending, but I’m not saying you should put aside philosophy entirely in an egregious act
of intellectual cowardice. Instead, you might arrive at an interim conclusion of agnosticism about
some of these issues.

Instead of brooding so much now, you should find something that really inspires you, something
you personally find sacred (ultimately important and emotionally stirring), and something that
challenges your rational, philosophical conclusions on a gut level. If we pretend that our
philosophical beliefs are purely rational, we wind up being perhaps apparently godlike, like
Sherlock Holmes or Data or Sheldon Cooper (from The Big Bang Theory), but we also become
fundamentally clownish and incomplete. Antinatalists (or ultra-pessimists in general) are fuelled
not just by reason, but by loathing, bitterness, and so on. I know about the genetic fallacy of
reducing a statement’s epistemic status to a psychological factor, but that’s not what I’m doing
here. I’m saying our picture of the world should be as complete as possible. Again, philosophy
has an artistic side and that’s where emotions enter the picture. Antinatalists like Inmendham
move us with harsh rhetoric, but we can be moved in positive ways as well, such as by uplifting
art.

Emotions are matters of mood and our moods change over the years. At 18 you’ll be
preoccupied with sex and be moved by the thrill of anticipating naughty entanglements. What
I’m saying, then, is that you should focus on philosophical reflection now only if you have few or
no opportunities to live as a happy-go-lucky teenager. If you’re obese or impoverished or
mentally ill, for example, nature may have already pushed you in a philosophical direction. But if
you have opportunities to enjoy yourself more, don’t let them go to waste just because the truth
seems bleak. The truth of what we should value depends partly on what we put into it, because
unlike scientific truth, the normative kind is subjective. Again, our values have aesthetic roles in
that they literally shape our lives. You should want to become something awe-inspiring, sublime,
and beautiful, not something hideous or clichéd. We should try to have the last laugh against
nature’s monstrous creativity, by using that creativity against the undead god. Be original in how
you reconcile your reason and your emotions, your philosophical doubts and your aspirations
and ideals.

Suicide isn’t remotely the answer unless you’re literally living in hell. Remember that if you dwell
in a modern society, there are millions of people elsewhere in the world who have it much worse
and they’re not killing themselves. Those poorer folks aren’t simply stupid, either; instead,
they’re swept up in world-spanning social and evolutionary processes that seem to be creating
higher orders of being (the noosphere, technosphere, and so on). I do think that happiness is
unbecoming for anyone with a passing interest in the natural truth, but there are more than just
the two choices of delusory happiness and debilitating angst. I think we should struggle to find
our ways of reconciling these issues and of bridging the old divisions between reason, emotion,
and instinct.

We should understand that nature is an undead god, which means that the world is primarily a
sublime creator and that our glory then is to create with honour, integrity, and artistic inspiration,
if not necessarily with world-shaking genius. We should create our worlds partly to rebel against
the natural horrors and to honour our godlike potential. And those artificial worlds can include
networks of friendships and of more intimate relationships. Just try to do justice both to reason
(science and philosophy) and to your nonrational side. Great art requires inspiration, so we have
to let our emotions move us. But if we find all our emotions are dark, that’s because our
experience is too limited. Again, our moods change as soon as we encounter different aspects
of the world. So shake things up and work hard and have some fun!
 96

I’m not saying we should strive for what I’ve called a rich, full life, as infantile consumers and
philistines, because the quantity of experiences isn’t as important as the quality. My point is that
you need to find something in the world that arouses your passion since that will motivate you to
produce great art (to live well in aesthetic terms). Again, because nature is the undead GOD, it’s
bound to have created a great many things, some of which will surely awe you in a constructive
way rather than just disgusting or shaming you. Go out and find those things in the world and
then, as Joseph Campbell said, follow your heart.

You seem to appreciate that I’m not a social worker and that I’m not especially wise, but I’ll
close by reminding you of those facts. I’ll help my readers as I can, but I don’t have the ultimate
answers; on the contrary, I’m using my blog primarily to work out some answers for myself. The
internet is full of people doing likewise. But don’t follow anyone. If you find something inspiring,
something that moves you on a gut level and that motivates you to try to put your stamp on the
world, you’ll have done the best you could with what you’ve been given.

Ben