Everything Is F*cked

HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGION
Step Six: Prophet for Profit!
So, this is it. You’ve come to the end. You have your religion, and it’s time to
reap all its benefits. Now that you’ve got your little following giving you their
money  and  cutting  your  grass,  you  can  finally  have  everything  you’ve  ever
wished for!
Want a dozen sex slaves? Just say the word. Make up scripture. Tell your
followers that “Stage Six of Manatee Enlightenment” can only be found in the
Prophet’s orgasms.
Want  a  huge  piece  of  land  out  in  the  middle  of  nowhere?  Just  tell  your
followers that only you can build paradise for them and it needs to be really
far away—oh, and by the way, they need to pay for it.
Want  power  and  prestige?  Tell  your  followers  to  vote  you  into  office  or,
even better, overthrow the government with violence. If you do your job well,
they should be willing to give up their lives for you.
The opportunities really are endless.
No  more  loneliness.  No  more  relationship  problems.  No  more  financial
woes.  You  can  fulfill  your  wildest  dreams.  You  just  have  to  trample  on  the
hopes and dreams of thousands of other people to get there.
Yes,  my  friend,  you’ve  worked  hard  for  this.  Therefore,  you  deserve  all
the  benefits  without  any  meddlesome  social  concerns  or  pedantic  arguments
about  ethics  and  whatnot.  Because  that’s  what  you  get  to  do  when  you  start
your own religion: You get to decide what is ethical. You get to decide what is
right. And you get to decide who is righteous.
Maybe  this  whole  “start  a  religion”  thing  makes  you  squirm.  Well,  I  hate  to
break it to you, but you’re already in one. Whether you realize or not, you’ve
adopted  some  group’s  beliefs  and  values,  you  participate  in  the  rituals  and
offer  up  the  sacrifices,  you  draw  the  us-versus-them  lines  and  intellectually
isolate yourself. This is what we all do. Religious beliefs and their constituent
tribal behaviors are a fundamental part of our nature.
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It’s impossible not  to
adopt them. If you think you’re above religion, that you use logic and reason,
I’m sorry to say, you’re wrong: you are one of us.
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If you think you’re well
informed and highly educated, you’re not: you still suck.
45
We all must have faith in something. We must find value somewhere. It’s

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how we psychologically survive and thrive. It’s how we find hope. And even
if you have a vision for a better future, it’s too hard to go it alone. To realize
any  dream,  we  need  support  networks,  for  both  emotional  and  logistical
reasons. It takes an army. Literally.
It’s  our  value  hierarchies—as  expressed  through  the  stories  of  religion,
and  shared  among  thousands  or  millions—that  attract,  organize,  and  propel
human  systems  forward  in  a  sort  of  Darwinian  competition.  Religions
compete in the world for resources, and the religions that tend to win out are
those  whose  value  hierarchies  make  the  most  efficient  use  of  labor  and
capital.  And  as  it  wins  out,  more  and  more  people  adopt  the  winning
religion’s value hierarchy, as it has demonstrated the most value to individuals
in  the  population.  These  victorious  religions  then  stabilize  and  become  the
foundation for culture.
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But  here’s  the  problem:  Every  time  a  religion  succeeds,  every  time  it
spreads  its  message  far  and  wide  and  comes  to  dominate  a  huge  swath  of
human emotion and endeavor, its values change. The religion’s God Value no
longer comprises the principles that inspired the religion in the first place. Its
God  Value  slowly  shifts  and  becomes  the  preservation  of  the  religion  itself:
not to lose what it has gained.
And  this  is  where  the  corruption  begins.  When  the  original  values  that
defined  the  religion,  the  movement,  the  revolution,  get  tossed  aside  for  the
sake  of  maintaining  the  status  quo,  this  is  narcissism  at  an  organizational
level.  This  is  how  you  go  from  Jesus  to  the  Crusades,  from  Marxism  to  the
gulags,  from  a  wedding  chapel  to  divorce  court.  This  corruption  of  the
religion’s original values rots away at the religion’s following, thus leading to
the  rising  up  of  newer,  reactionary  religions  that  eventually  conquer  the
original one. Then the whole process begins again.
In  this  sense,  success  is  in  many  ways  far  more  precarious  than  failure.
First,  because  the  more  you  gain  the  more  you  have  to  lose,  and  second,
because the more you have to lose, the harder it is to maintain hope. But more
important, because by experiencing our hopes, we lose them. We see that our
beautiful  visions  for  a  perfect  future  are  not  so  perfect,  that  our  dreams  and
aspirations  are  themselves  riddled  with  unexpected  flaws  and  unforeseen
sacrifices.
Because  the  only  thing  that  can  ever  truly  destroy  a  dream  is  to  have  it
come true.

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Chapter 5