Everything Is F*cked

HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGION
Step One: Sell Hope to the Hopeless
I’ll  never  forget  the  first  time  someone  told  me  I  had  blood  on  my  hands.  I
remember it as if it were yesterday.
It  was  2005,  a  sunny,  crisp  morning  in  Boston,  Massachusetts.  I  was  a
university student then and walking to class, minding my own business, when
I  saw  a  group  of  kids  holding  up  pictures  of  the  9/11  terrorist  attacks  with
captions that read, “America Deserved It.”
Now, I don’t consider myself the most patriotic person by any stretch of
the imagination, but it seems to me that anyone holding such a sign in broad
daylight immediately becomes a highly punchable person.
I stopped and engaged the kids, asking what they were doing. They had a
little  table  set  up  with  a  smattering  of  pamphlets  on  top.  One  had  Dick
Cheney  with  devil’s  horns  drawn  on  him  and  the  words  “Mass  Murderer”
written beneath. Another had George W. Bush with a Hitler mustache.
The students were part of the LaRouche Youth Movement, a group started
by the far-left ideologue Lyndon LaRouche in New Hampshire. His acolytes
would  spend  countless  hours  standing  around  college  campuses  in  the
Northeast, handing out flyers and pamphlets to susceptible college kids. And
when I came upon them, it took me all of ten seconds to figure out what they
actually were: a religion.
That’s  right.  They  were  an  ideological  religion:  an  antigovernment,
anticapitalist,  anti–old  people,  antiestablishment  religion.  They  argued  that
the  international  world  order,  from  top  to  bottom,  was  corrupt.  They  argued
that  the  Iraq  War  had  been  instigated  for  no  other  reason  than  that  Bush’s
friends  wanted  more  money.  They  argued  that  terrorism  and  mass  shootings
didn’t  exist,  that  such  events  were  simply  highly  coordinated  governmental
efforts to control the population. Don’t worry right-wing friends, years later,
they would draw the same Hitler mustaches and make the same claims about
Obama—if that makes you feel any better. (It shouldn’t.)
What the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) does is pure genius. It finds
disaffected  and  agitated  college  students  (usually  young  men),  kids  who  are
both scared and angry (scared at the sudden responsibility they’ve been forced
to take on and angry at how uncompromising and disappointing it is to be an
adult) and then preach one simple message to them: “It’s not your fault.”

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Yes, young one, you thought it was Mom and Dad’s fault, but it’s not their
fault.  Nope.  And  I  know  you  thought  it  was  your  shitty  professors  and
overpriced  college’s  fault.  Nope.  Not  theirs,  either.  You  probably  even
thought it was the government’s fault. Close, but still no.
See,  it’s  the  system’s  fault,  that  grand,  vague  entity  you’ve  always  heard
about.
This was the faith the LYM was selling: if we could just overthrow “the
system,” then everything would be okay. No more war. No more suffering. No
more injustice.
Remember that in order to feel hope, we need to feel there’s a better future
out there (values); we need to feel as though we are capable of getting to that
better  future  (self-control);  and  we  need  to  find  other  people  who  share  our
values and support our efforts (community).
Young  adulthood  is  a  period  when  many  people  struggle  with  values,
control,  and  community.  For  the  first  time  in  their  lives,  kids  are  allowed  to
decide  who  they  want  to  be.  Do  they  want  to  become  a  doctor?  Study
business? Take a psychology course? The options can be crippling.
4
And the
inevitable frustration causes a lot of young people to question their values and
lose hope.
In addition, young adults struggle with self-control.
5
For the first time in
their  lives,  they  don’t  have  some  authority  figure  watching  over  them  24/7.
On the one hand, this can be liberating, exciting. On the other, they are now
responsible  for  their  own  decisions.  And  if  they  kind  of  suck  at  getting
themselves  out  of  bed  on  time,  going  to  their  classes  or  a  job,  and  studying
enough, it’s tough to admit that there’s no one to blame but themselves.
And  finally,  young  people  are  particularly  preoccupied  with  finding  and
fitting  into  a  community.
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 Not  only  is  this  important  for  their  emotional
development,  but  it  also  helps  them  find  and  solidify  an  identity  for
themselves.
7
People  like  Lyndon  LaRouche  capitalize  on  lost  and  aimless  young
people. LaRouche gave them a convoluted political explanation to justify how
disaffected  they  felt.  He  gave  them  a  sense  of  control  and  empowerment  by
outlining a way (supposedly) to change the world. And finally, he gave them a
community where they “fit in” and know who they are.
Therefore, he gave them hope.
8
“Don’t  you  think  this  is  taking  it  a  little  too  far?”  I  asked  the  LYM
students  that  day,  pointing  to  the  pictures  of  the  World  Trade  Center  towers

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featured on their pamphlets.
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“No  way,  man.  I  say  we’re  not  taking  it  far  enough!”  one  of  the  kids
replied.
“Look, I didn’t vote for Bush, and I don’t agree with the Iraq War, either,
but—”
“It  doesn’t  matter  who  you  vote  for!  A  vote  for  anyone  is  a  vote  for  the
corrupt and oppressive system! You have blood on your hands!”
“Excuse me?”
I didn’t even know how to punch someone, yet I found myself balling my
hands into fists. Who the fuck did this guy think he was?
“By  participating  in  the  system,  you  are  perpetuating  it,”  the  kid
continued, “and therefore are complicit in the murder of millions of innocent
civilians  around  the  world.  Here,  read  this.”  He  shoved  a  pamphlet  at  me.  I
glanced at it, turned it over.
“That’s fucking stupid,” I said.
Our “discussion” went on like this for another few minutes. Back then, I
didn’t  know  any  better.  I  still  thought  stuff  like  this  was  about  reason  and
evidence,  not  feelings  and  values.  And  values  cannot  be  changed  through
reason, only through experience.
Eventually, after I had gotten good and pissed off, I decided to leave. As I
started walking off, the kid tried to get me to sign up for a free seminar. “You
need to have an open mind, man,” he said. “The truth is scary.”
I looked back and replied with a Carl Sagan quote I had once read on an
internet forum: “I think your mind is so open your brain fell out!”
10
I  felt  smart  and  smug.  He,  presumably,  felt  smart  and  smug.  No  minds
were changed that day.
We  are  the  most  impressionable  when  things  are  at  their  worst.
11
 When  our
life  is  falling  apart,  it  signifies  that  our  values  have  failed  us,  and  we’re
grasping  in  the  dark  for  new  values  to  replace  them.  One  religion  falls  and
opens up space for the next. People who lose faith in their spiritual God will
look  for  a  worldly  God.  People  who  lose  their  family  will  give  themselves
away to their race, creed, or nation. People who lose faith in their government
or country will look to extremist ideologies to give them hope.
12
There’s a reason that all the major religions in the world have a history of
sending  missionaries  to  the  poorest  and  most  destitute  corners  of  the  globe:
starving  people  will  believe  anything  if  it  will  keep  them  fed.  For  your  new

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religion, it’s best to start preaching your message to people whose lives suck
the most: the poor, the outcasts, the abused and forgotten. You know, people
who sit on Facebook all day.
13
Jim Jones built his following by recruiting the homeless and marginalized
minorities with a socialist message minced with his own (demented) take on
Christianity. Hell, what am I saying? Jesus Christ did the same damn thing.
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Buddha,  too.  Moses—you  get  the  idea.  Religious  leaders  preach  to  the  poor
and downtrodden and enslaved, telling them that they deserve the kingdom of
heaven—basically, an open “fuck you” to the corrupt elites of the day. It’s a
message that’s easy to get behind.
Today, appealing to the hopeless is easier than ever before. All you need is
a  social  media  account:  start  posting  extreme  and  crazy  shit,  and  let  the
algorithm  do  the  rest.  The  crazier  and  more  extreme  your  posts,  the  more
attention you’ll garner, and the more the hopeless will flock to you like flies
to cow shit. It’s not hard at all.
But you can’t just go online and say anything. No, you must have a (semi-
)coherent  message.  You  must  have  a  vision.  Because  it’s  easy  to  get  people
riled  up  and  angry  about  nothing—the  news  media  have  created  a  whole
business model out of it. But to have hope, people need to feel that they are a