by Roman McClay
Man picked Marxism or capitalism or conservatism or liberalism or this religion or that. Man picked it on his own endogenous temperament, not reason or facts. This was why the new atheists were wrong, not because there was a God; although at this point Blax figured there likely was, but, adding to himself, but because He would be more powerful and wise than us, not omnipotent at all. God would be like us -like man- compared to a dog, the bacteria in the soil, smarter but not all-powerful .
Anyway, he thought, the point was that the reason the atheist types were all wrong was because they assumed that reason, rationality, would find the One True Answer to solve any problem . And that one true answer may not even exist for one, and two, if it did, why would reason find it? Had reason figured out how to solve lying, don’t we already know -in our heads- why lying is bad? We know it intellectually, but our bodies keep doing it axiomatically, like breathing, like the beat of the heart. Reason solved math problems not biological problems , Blax thought.
We do it -we lie- because it works and thus we are not irrational enough to tell the truth and suffer the consequences. This was the argument, that man was too savvy to be good, for being good was doom, it led to death; or at the very least to unpopularity. And we are a special species, we need to be liked, loved and a part of the group. Lying is ipso facto rational , deeply so. And yet these rationalists thinks reason will lead us from lying. They don’t even know how dumb they are , he thought, as he briefly chided himself for being too haughty himself. But he needed his arrogance to survive, the way normal men need to lie, and so he banished any thought of humility at all.
Murder, theft, deception of all kinds, all of it is done by rational people for rational reasons, Blax thought. That shit works and most of it goes unpunished . Look at our government, and ours is likely best of the bunch. Look at the vast amount of immoral behavior committed every day for rational reasons. These are psychopaths: the journalists and bankers and former senators that actually lobby for the Chinese; these are rational, coolly rational men just trying to get by like in Vichy France . How reason will solve this problem is not just inscrutable, it’s likely the most irrational idea ever posited, Blax thought with a laugh he allowed to exist only in his mind .
Only a deep moral code based on something else, something besides the so-called reason that leads to longer life, more wealth, more freedom, and all the shit sociopaths like Pinker ramble on about whenever he talks up the modern world, will solve moral issues . But, Blax began thinking, if that is the way to measure how well we are doing -and Pinker does use those metrics- then let’s see how that shit is arrived at. It ain’t from doing the moral thing, it’s from cutting corners, lying, stealing, ignoring the crimes of our side, and over reacting the crimes of their side.
Look at our politics, both sides are incapable of seeing the bullshit in their own side. Tribalism is alive and well, and it’s called liberals and conservatives. Sam Harris is as irrational as them all, overhyping the president’s crimes and underplaying the oh-so-rational liberalism that allows wholesale murder of children, Blax surmised.
Oh, it’s a woman’s body, eh? Of course, that is a scientific notion of life right? That is rationalism? But doesn’t science prove that that fetus is viable now at younger and younger days? When will science be enough to convince liberals that abortion is murder? Never. Why? Because their commitment to the abortion rights argument isn’t rational, it’s based on emotions; and just like everyone they are insane and motivated by their cerebellum and limbic regions and not at all by reason and facts like they fatuously claim.
Blax was furious as he pressed his palms into the dirt and breathed loudly through his nose. The science -to all those who claim reason as their only tribe- the science shows that man is fundamentally irrational, and preloaded with biases, proclivities, disgust sensitivity and on and on. Harris never shuts the fuck up about pure reason and how all we have is arguments and talking and blah blah. No, we have muscles and weapons and a willingness to kill you, in addition to conversation, asshole. Get it?
We have soldiers, just like you do. You have your western scientific soldiers killing jihadist for you, right? Well, I think that is good, and I am glad, and I applaud that death. But some of us think it ain’t just Jihadists that should be extirpated .
We think liars and black-lives-matters and the SPLC should die too. Why? Because they are as corrosive to society as any Jihadi , Blax thought, pushing his own personal enemies out beyond his reach so he could see these larger, more diffuse enemies to he and all mankind. He watched the Jacks work and he let his mind go to work too.
And we use reason to justify this, we can back up our claims with science too. We can show that the SPLC got a guy killed by building a kill-list itself, we can show that race relations are worse thanks to BLM. We can show that promiscuous girls undermine society, and that men without good working-class jobs do the same.
We can justify scientifically that all this needs to change and that killing CEOs that outsource jobs to China -undermining the working-class, so divorce rates rise and kids become warped, and shoot up schools- would in fact, scientifically, he thought, would be a net positive. If we kill 100 CEO’s that outsource blue-collar jobs, that would save hundreds of thousands of lives in suicide prevention of blue-collar men, and the dissipation of their kids. If we kill the advertising executives, or the artists, or the teachers who encourage girls to have premarital sex, we could save the same amount of lives. I can show the math, Blax thought, and he in fact had the data that Isaiah had shown him. It was overwhelming, it was like a revelation. It had blown him away. But the facts would have no impact on the most rational of men. They had the religion of liberalism, and that was the highest wall against the facts.
Blax had almost not believed the sequela, the massive pain and suffering caused by those two things alone, much worse than terrorism, scientifically speaking. Divorce was the number one determiner for child criminality, suicide, dropping out of school and teenage sex and as the boy grew up he was likelier to have low wages and all this led to more divorce. It was a reinforcing loop of doom. And the maelstrom of anomie had all the energy of a warm summer sea; the hurricane was just now building up its head of steam.
And yet, Sam Harris keeps blathering on about loosening sexual mores because -you know- the church is too conservative. He’s as ignorant of the science as a creationist, Blax thought as he pressed his palms to the ground, making this part of him as flat as possible; making as much contact as he could.
Promiscuity by the female, the wife, before marriage was the leading cause of divorce, next only to the lack of a good paying job by the husband. And both those things were the result of changing mores brought about by decisions made by specific people. CEOs of companies, who were rationally doing what was best for stock holders; TV people, Blax thought as he felt the bile collect at the sides of the mouth, media liberals who glorified the slut for example; eschewing the so-called tyranny of the church’s prohibition on female promiscuity, right?
Was it not these oh-so-modern and liberal and rational people who globalized the economy and liberalized sex? And yet, the data -the science- was clear: these two things led to most divorce and that divorce rate led to most social ills. But, try getting a liberal or an atheist to see the data on that . These amoral fucks ain’t into science all-of-a-fucking-sudden, he thought.
Killing these socially corrosive people would mean extirpating no more than 10,000 individuals. And the lives saved would be 100 times that. Was this not rational then? he asked his own mind and his mind churned within his larger body and its larger forest too.
Blax said to himself that reason proved it; well, within reason anyway. So, Mr. Harris, why not? Why not do this? Why allow so many people’s lives to be ruined by the lenient hand? Isn’t this your argument for why we should combat religious extremism, that it leads to a permissive environment for the jihadist?
See, each man focused on his pet project, the thing that bot
hered him most. But nobody stopped to ask why was it that thing, that cause -celebre that vexed him so? Hitler was disgusted, literally felt sick over the malady of the Jews. He had biological reasons to feel that. We know, he thought, that some people naturally have higher disgust sensitivity that others . And walls , Blax then thought of boundaries writ large ; he thought of how innate this all was.
Liberals are predisposed to not want barriers. Which is why liberals don’t want a wall on the southern border and conservatives do. There is no reason or logic so bulletproof to prove or disprove either side. Both are wrong, and both are right. People are not blank slates who can be convinced on pure reason alone, and for these twits to insist that they can is to miss the entire thread, he surmised .
People are innately biased and use reason post hoc to justify what they want deep inside. And religion erects some border between their irrational desires, the thing inside them that makes them over eat, over fuck, over kill, the mania that makes men try to slake the rational need in them for food, sex, and safety. People have rational ways to survive, and irrational desires to make manifest the behaviors that get them what they need. Survival is rational, the methods we use to survive are often insanely immoral; we justify anything to get what we want. What makes one reason -a reason to win- more or less rational, Blax thought, if winning is the only goal?
But religion, like all code, can regulate those desires, and make us adhere to a more long-term strategy for getting what we want and for thinking of other people too; if our being eusocial creatures matters at all. Reason is useful too, but it is not axiomatic that if you take religion away people will all replace it with reason . Maybe a cage with iron bars keeps the lion from eating you. But maybe you have to go inside the cage first, and let the lion wander free; maybe you haven’t figured out yet how to get the lion inside of it. Your life is limited in the cage, sure. It sucks. Just like following all the rules of religion sucks, Blax thought as the birds returned and perched on the pines. He watched with his 20/15 eyes.
But it -the cage- keeps you safe for now. And the new atheists want to get us out of the cage right away and just assume that all will be ok . They assume we will come up with a rational way to get the lion inside the cage and keep us safe. Well, maybe. And maybe not, Blax thought. Maybe we will end up running around like maniacs outside the cage and get eaten by that lion after all.
Men aren’t as impressed with logic and reason as you Sam, Blax spoke to the man as if he sat right there. He smiled as he knew -if he wanted- that he could find Sam and make him speak to him; it was only morality that kept him from Sam’s doorstep, not reason . Sam’s security detail was nothing compared to Blax’s Jacks.
Blax went on as the sun dropped and the animals came and went around him: People ignore new information based on whether it comports with their already held beliefs. And people without trait openness are inured to new info; again, science shows this Sam! So new information is not helpful; your rationalism and conversations are pointless to these folks.
People’s beliefs are based on proclivities that are genetic ; again, Blax said to himself as if having to speak to a goddamn child. You cannot get rid of instincts, Sam . The best you might do is shape them a bit here and there; guide them with a powerful thing like -wait for it- religion; if man sufficiently fears an avenging God. Oh, but man can be reasoned with, eh? He needs no sanctioning God to shape, curtail his worst instincts? Then why have law at all, why make man fear the cops, just reason with him not to murder. Oh, new tune now, eh? So, man needs the cops and fear of punishment in that domain, eh? Blax sarcastically placed a humbled Sam in view of this interlocution. He envisioned him here at elevation.
So, if we have cops to put the fear in us, then maybe man needs to fear God too; since the cops can’t respond to all infractions in under 10 minutes and the law doesn’t even care about the worst and most corrosive things, Blax reasoned. The cops don’t give one shit about things like lying, promiscuity and outsourcing of blue-collar jobs which are all legal . Maybe a blitzkrieg God who punishes all that shit, is the most rational thing of all to keep that guy from lying to make the sale, to get that girl to keep her pants on, and make that CEO keep jobs in America , Blax thought .
There may be no perfect answer, no right and wrong, there may be only things that kinda work better or worse for each type of person along some analog scale , he thought. How is reason going to handle that, when we have a society to run? Do we have different speed limits for some, or allow some men to fight in the street? Do we allow some abortion but not all, some premarital sex but not all, some schemes to make money but not all? How do we decide which drugs are legal, which sex is legal, which lies are legal? Give me a rational way to know? Is each man the same? Do each of us get the same calories or do the same amount of work? Planned economies fail for this very reason: men are different from one another.
And reason is not sufficient to figure out how to live. It’s taken us 300 million years to learn how to live, and in 400 years you come and wreck it all with your modernity and leniency and tear down all that work and bray about wealth production and life span while the whole society crumbles under our feet.
It’s just like bankers, Blax thought of the data on bank melt downs and public bailouts. It’s just like these vermin who blow up economies every 25 years but make large bonuses for themselves in between each meltdown that wrecks it all for everyone but them. They, the rationalists who have set themselves up with slutty wives and lots of dough and status through the roof, with their liberal values that don’t mind the loss of racial, ethnic, religious cohesion, the ruin of the working-class - who cares? they say. They say, those proles, shit, they are all deplorable Trump voters anyway right, Sam, right FBI Lawyer number two? They don’t matter at all, you all say.
See, religion just tells each man that there is an ideal, and that ideal is God, and we should strive for that. And this makes irrational men -all of us- behave a bit better in most cases. It shames us when we lie -for God, the ideal, is watching us; and it prevents us from murdering each economic rival -for God, the ideal has told us not to stack up riches here on earth; and it forces us to think of more than mere rational gain, like money and sex and power -for God, the ideal says each man among us has the spark of divinity in them and thus our countrymen are not just tools to use for our own personal -rational- gain.
Religion allowed us to articulate the future and the need for sacrifice and the sovereignty of the individual. This was many, many millions of the years in the making .
Reason, rationality, allows us to justify any act of murder and malice and perfidy against an enemy. We know this is true. As soon as a man is our enemy , empathy retreats, and the brain modules that inhibit aggression are denuded chemically. Well, in a rational world, is not everyone my enemy? If we have no tribes, no loyalty based on religion or race or nationality, if the whole world is the same, is not each man against each man? Homo homini lupus.
You can say, no. But, look at how we act, Blax thought with his hands still pressing into the damp dirt as the evening sun began to set now below the black trees. In cohesive societies, where everyone is more alike racially, religiously, tribally, the crime is lower, the trust is higher than in multi-cultural societies where manifold ideals persist. That is your scientific reason pal, he thought.
In the real world, the empirical world, tribalism works, rationally . And in societies of difference, the substrate for genocide is just there waiting for someone to come and pick it up and smash the whole thing to bits .
Dostoyevsky said that even if you gave man all he wanted, let him lie in bubbles of bliss, that he’d smash it all to bits just to prove he’s a man and not mere piano keys , Blax thought.
Daniel Dennett has shown you that if you tell a man he has no free will -which you bastards insist on telling us- then that man lies, cheats, steals more. And yet, Sam, you refuse to believe it. Man cannot handle your truth. He acts in irrational ways, unproductive ways, oh,
but wait, he actually acts most rationally: he lies, cheats and steals because that is what works in a rational world. See, without morality, a transcendent morality above and over man, separate from rational material gain, man acts like a goddamn chimpanzee and murders, rapes and steals with lies incessantly coming from his mouth. Real man is not some moral paragon, he is ape and apish and willing to do almost anything to survive. Chimps war, they literally go to war. They have no compunction about genocide. Man is barely above this level and it was only by learning to live within tribes, with common ideals -i.e., common gods- that could keep us from anarchy.
Religion helped us form an ideal, an ideal that was based on what allows a society to cohere. In chimps that ideal is a tough but fair alpha chimp; not a wimp but also not a tyrant.
That is their ideal. It took millions of years to figure out. And if the alpha plays nice and has friends and grooms others with magnanimity; and if he only uses violence when necessary, his reign and the well-being of the troop is longer than if he be a tyrant or a wimp. Consult Franz de Waal , Blax thought as he chided the modern liberal in his mind in this never ending rant that offered no succor, because it was ultimately abstract, his enemies far away, remote. He was arguing against a man he’d never meet, over a society too large for him to truly care for, a society due to this size that didn’t -couldn’t- care about him. But he kept on, he kept on with ideas and nations and peoples larger and larger. His anger needed a foil in concomitant size and power.
And, Blax thought, this is the ideal that each chimp knows. How do we know? Because if he is a wimp they overthrown him and if he is a tyrant they do too. Only if he is toughly fair do they let him reign for many years. The balance between chaos and order is written on their ape hearts.
