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HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGION
Step Five: Promise Heaven, Deliver Hell
If you’ve made it this far in starting your own religion it means you’ve assembled a nice group of
hopeless people desperately avoiding the Uncomfortable Truth by studying a bunch of bullshit
you’ve made up, ignoring their friends, and telling their families to fuck off.
Now it’s time to get serious.
The beauty of a religion is that the more you promise your followers salvation,
enlightenment, world peace, perfect happiness, or whatever, the more they will fail to live up to
that promise. And the more they fail to live up to that promise, the more they’ll blame
themselves and feel guilty. And the more they blame themselves and feel guilty, the more they’ll
do whatever you tell them to do to make up for it.
Some people might call this the cycle of psychological abuse. But let’s not allow such terms
to ruin our fun.
Pyramid schemes do this really well. You give a scumbag some money for a bunch of
products you don’t want or need and then you spend the next three months desperately trying to
get other people to sign up for the scheme under you and also buy and sell products nobody
wants or needs.
And it doesn’t work.
Then, instead of recognizing the obvious (the product is one big scam selling a scam to a
scam to sell more scams), you blame yourself—because, look, the guy at the top of the pyramid
has a Ferrari! And you want a Ferrari. So, clearly the problem must be you, right?
Fortunately, that guy with the Ferrari has graciously agreed to put on a seminar to help you
sell more crap nobody wants to people who will then try to sell more crap nobody wants to more
people who will sell it . . . and so on.
And at said seminar, most of the time is spent psyching you up with music and chants and
creating an us-versus-them dichotomy (“Winners never give up! Losers believe it won’t work for
them!”), and you come away from the seminar really motivated and pumped, but still with no
idea how to sell anything, especially crap nobody wants. And instead of getting pissed off at the
money-based religion you’ve bought into, you get pissed off at yourself. You blame yourself for
failing to live up to your God Value, regardless of how ill-advised that God Value is.
You can see this same cycle of desperation play out in all sorts of other areas. Fitness and
diet plans, political activism, self-help seminars, financial planning, visiting your grandmother
on a holiday—the message is always the same: the more you do it, the more you’re told you need
to do it to finally experience the satisfaction you’ve been promised. Yet that satisfaction never
comes.
Look, time out for a second. Let me be the one to break the bad news to you: human pain is like
a game of Whac-A-Mole. Every time you knock down one kind of pain, another one pops up.
And the faster you whack them, the faster they come back.
The pain may get better, it may change shape, it may be less catastrophic each time. But it
will always be there. It’s part of us.
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It is us.
A lot of religious spokespeople out there make a lot of money claiming they can beat the pain
of the Whac-A-Mole game for you, once and for all. But the truth is that there is no end to the
pain moles. The faster you hit them, the faster they come back. And that’s how all the douche
canoes in the religion game stay in business so long: instead of admitting that the game is rigged,
that our human nature is fundamentally designed to generate pain, they blame you for not
winning the game. Or, worse, they blame some nebulous “them.” If we could just get rid of
“them,” we’d all stop suffering. Pinky swear.
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But that doesn’t work, either. That just transfers
the pain from one population to another, and amplifies it.
Because, seriously, if someone really could solve all your problems, they’d go out of
business by next Tuesday (or get voted out of office next week). Leaders need their followers to
be perpetually dissatisfied; it’s good for the leadership business. If everything were perfect and
great, there’d be no reason to follow anybody. No religion will ever make you feel blissful and
peaceful all the time. No country will ever feel completely fair and safe. No political philosophy
will solve everyone’s problems all the time. True equality can never be achieved; someone
somewhere will always be screwed over. True freedom doesn’t really exist because we all must
sacrifice some autonomy for stability. No one, no matter how much you love them or they love
you, will ever absolve that internal guilt you feel simply for existing. It’s all fucked. Everything
is fucked. It always has been and always will be. There are no solutions, only stopgap measures,
only incremental improvements, only slightly better forms of fuckedness than others. And it’s
time we stop running from that and, instead, embrace it.
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This is our fucked-up world. And we’re the fucked-up ones in it.
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