Everything Is F*cked

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

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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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