All That Matters
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Hardly anyone adheres to a previously-established creed agreeing with all of its tenets. We each have our own personal experiences and consequently reach our own particular conclusions, and ours will hardly ever perfectly match someone else’s. So, at some point, new members of any given religion are likely going to disagree with, doubt, and question some of its teachings and, from there on, they’ll be forced to censor themselves and lie to others if they want to ensure their own personal safety.
Members of a cult are afraid not only of physical, but also moral and social violence. If they defy their religion’s teachings (or its preachers), they will be excommunicated. They will lose most, if not all, of their friends and possibly family as well, because these all often adhere to the same faith, since we tend to surround ourselves only with people who agree with us.
Religions are a trap. They are an exploit of deep and seemingly irrevocable human flaws: our lack of intelligence, morals, courage, civility and individuality. They work because they are based on solid, ironically logical grounds: how fearful we are of each other. And they are a very powerful form of mass control, because they are extremely hard to break free of.
Note that political parties, as well as any other kind of shared-belief group, all behave essentially like a religion. Think about it and you’ll see – they are all memes propagated by ignorance (unless their ideas are actually right which, so far, doesn’t seem to have ever been the case) and enforced by very clear, albeit unspoken threats.
Most of our species’ beliefs, acts and decisions are based on lies, and we keep scaring ourselves farther and farther away from the truth by summarily stoning anyone who dares to speak it.
If you’ve tried, you know arguing against zealots is a pointless endeavor. But there’s a reason for that: they need to believe their ancient sacred texts are more than outdated philosophies embedded in juvenile fantasies. It’s not that religious people cannot see reason, but rather that they don’t want to. This is why using it on them doesn’t work.
Proving those people wrong is very easy to do by using simple arguments. Thus, zealots must censor anyone who tries to seed doubt into their minds and ranks. They cannot doubt their beliefs, because doubt is the first step to knowledge. They might often suspect they are wrong, but they cannot know it because, if they do, they’ll realize they’re actually a force of evil (despite what I’ll kindly assume were their initial good intentions).
On top of being afraid of losing their family and friends, religious people cannot recognize the error of their ways because they have been wrong for too long. To admit they were misguided would be to admit they have been fooled; to admit that they were stupid and still are (since we may grow wiser but not smarter with time). They’d also have to admit all the harm they caused while aggressively trying to impose their ludicrous beliefs upon others. And admitting those things is hard, because the dignity lost cannot be recovered and the damaged done cannot be measured or atoned for.
Those people also refuse to accept they are wrong because they need to believe that paradise is real and that they will find themselves in it if they continue to do what they are told. If they acknowledge they were mistaken, all the time they wasted doing what they wrongfully thought was right will not reward them with anything. The miserable lives they were forced to live (not for being religious, but for being human) will have been entirely pointless, all of their suffering will have been in vain, and nothing but further despair will await them in the future. Can we really blame them for being so bullheaded? Yes, we can, because they enforce and spread a mental disease, harming not only themselves but countless others as well. But we must keep in mind that we would all fear reaching such a dire realization, and that we all blind ourselves the same way religious people do. We must believe the future somehow suits our wants and needs, otherwise we have no reason to keep going. We need to believe that what each one of us can do will take us where we wish to be – in this life or in a hypothetical next – otherwise our whole existence seems purposeless and suffering is all we’ll ever know.
That’s called “hope.” We need it, and we all forge it when necessary.
Being religious when one has lived a hard, meaningless life is just as natural as being a nihilist is when one has lived an easy, full one.
Despite their fictional and manipulative nature, religions are not entirely bad. They do serve one constructive purpose: to inculcate the stupidest among us with a contrived sense of right and wrong.
I have a moral compass. I must have been born with some of it and our society, my family, friends, personal experiences, and above all my own thoughts tuned it to be what it is. In any non-highly-debatable situation, I know what the right moral choice is. Not knowing isn’t an option. As a rule, I can either choose to do the right thing, or to do the wrong one and feel bad about it for the rest of my life. So I automatically try to stick to the first (full disclosure: miserable failures do occur).
It seems many people aren’t like me, though. For one set of reasons or another, their north ended up pointing east, or even south. Most of them probably grew up under bad influences, didn’t get beaten up enough, got beaten up too much, or are simply intellectually incapable of connecting the dots. They have grown, aged, and still don’t understand how the world works and why they should try to make things better instead of worse. Thus they need to be taught by artificial means.
Those people need to be clearly told what to do and what not to, and convincing them requires clear, simple and unchangeable directives, which when strictly adhered to lead to rewards deemed desirable by all. A religion and its preachers come into play to convince such people that, if they act in a certain way, they’ll get a pair of wings, a shiny halo, a cool harp, and go live in the clouds. If they do anything other than what they’ve been told, they’ll burn in agony for all eternity. Christianity, for instance, teaches those who are incapable of guiding themselves not to murder anyone and not to bang their neighbor’s wife. Those are concrete actions rather than the essence of what people should know and guide themselves by, but it does part of the trick – it’s far from ideal, but it’s something.
The main problem here is that whoever does the preaching gets to choose what is “right” and what is “wrong.” They usually don’t know either and, even if some of them eventually do, they still end up being seduced and corrupted by the influence they exert over their flock. And what may have been initially meant to do good ends up existing and spreading just to satiate a few people’s individual greed and thirst for power, while harming everyone else.
Trying to put it all shortly: religions are unforgiving systems based on fictitious collective beliefs that fear and police themselves. They are a mechanism that can be used to give those who suffer hope and to set the lost on a minimally civilized path, but which tends to end up serving mainly to empower and enrich one or a few individuals.
Religions spread memetically, through tantalizing lies repeated again and again until as many people as possible fall for them. Once a cult grows large enough, it automatically polices itself, because all of its members are implicitly encouraged to act violently against anyone (including themselves) who disagrees with its holy text or its preachers.
Religious people are in part forced and in part force themselves to deny reason, ignoring facts and, consequently, tainting everything they meddle with.
There’s only one true religion: it’s called “reason,” it’s called “science.” Others may even serve as a temporary, palliative measure to deal with some of humanity’s flaws but, ultimately, they all lead to hell.
A World Gone Retarded
Nowadays we praise criminals, vulgarity, poverty, stupidity. We demonize those who can and victimize those who can’t. We silence those who are right while handing down free megaphones to anyone who isn’t.
Take rap music, as a first example. People who “sing” them are usually imbeciles, often with a criminal background, who emit unpleasant noises that preach or downright incite uncalled-for violence, drug usage, promiscuity, theft, and all sorts of animalistic behavior. And yet people listen to and give money to them, catapulting those “artists” into celebrity status, spreading their word.
Consider American female pop stars, now. Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and the such, despite being actually able to sing (I know Gaga at least can), all dress up in whorish costumes and act like strippers during their shows, bouncing around half-naked on stage before spreading their legs wide open to a juvenile audience. Those “ladies” seem to be perfectly fine stripping and pole-dancing for money, like any common prostitute would. And then, as soon as they step off stage, they start preaching about their superior moral standards, about how women are mistreated by society, how they are more valuable than men, and how they are entitled to more rights than us. And people buy it.
What about professional athletes (again)? Most of them have two options: to become an athlete or a criminal (which includes becoming a police officer or joining the military), since without brains one has no options but to rely on brawn. Then, in the US, they cheat their way into college, getting full scholarships while people who actually want to study and are able to, who can learn and contribute, who have a chance to understand, discover, invent and improve, end up being left out.
Professional popular sports players are paid millions of dollars to do something the rest of us do for fun, for free, or even pay to. They become arrogant, believing they are better than everyone else because they can take a ball from one side of a field to the other (wow!). Then, they show up on the TV and people heed their every word as if those guys actually knew something about anything.
Democracy is shoved down our throats daily, left and right, from above and below, as if it was a flawless, idyllic political system. We let the most unqualified among us decide all of our fates and call it “wisdom.” All of our elections are in one way or another rigged, and we call them “fair.”
Owned and controlled by greedy kids with God complexes who employ even younger, brainwashed ones, social networks have been potentiating the political correctness meme, bringing censorship to an all-time high in the Western world. Saying one of the million things that are now considered taboo out loud has literally been criminalized in many places, and most of us believe that not discussing (which we currently don’t, because it’s not a discussion when only one whining and yelling side is heard) or even thinking about those problems will solve them.
Receiving their [filtered] information exclusively from those same social networks, young people become radically biased without even noticing and then go around calling others biased. They believe those who are posting videos on TikTok and YouTube know what they are talking about, while in reality such folks ended down there precisely due to knowing nothing and having never managed to do a single thing right in their lives.
Some of the most recent movies and TV series have been upping the ante on shocking effects, taking gore and homosexuality to the most gruesome and disgusting levels imaginable, because Gen Zs seem to have been rendered unsensitized to all standard stimuli thanks to receiving too much of everything too soon via the smartphones they were given when they turned 3 years old and haven’t once left outside their reach ever since. Those kids will soon start having problems getting excited about or interested in anything, but no one seems to care about them either.
If you find a demented man dressed as an ugly woman that looks like a cheap doll rolled out of a faulty Chinese production line repulsive, you are “homophobic.” If you ever acknowledge a black person did something wrong, you are “racist.” If you call a member of the IDF a genocidal war criminal, you are an “antisemite.” If you spent most of your life studying, then working, and earned some money for yourself, you are “privileged.” If you defend yourself against a woman’s verbal or physical assault, you are a “misogynist.” And we’ve come to a point where you might actually end up in jail for doing or simply saying any of that.
If anyone tries to publicly deal with actual reality in any reasonable way, going against the widely disseminated and retarded trends currently allowed in our Overton’s Window (that which is considered acceptable in public speech at a given time), they are automatically and overwhelmingly censored.
I read somewhere that censorship evolves in three stages:
Stage one: forbidding people from publishing what the censor doesn’t want others to know;
Stage two: people start censoring, by themselves, what they publish before doing so, to avoid being persecuted;
Stage three: people avoid thinking about what has been censored, because any minor misstep can get them arrested, tortured and/or killed.
We, in the West, have reached the terminal stage of this social disease.
I will talk a little more about some of these issues I just mentioned further ahead, but they had to be all mentioned together to provide a picture of how ridiculous our species, or at least the Western portion of it, has become.
We ought to ask ourselves: how did we get to this point?
And I answer, even as I tire to repeat it: via fear.
We idolize those who are wrong, abide by censorship, and let those least qualified to guide us do so because standing up to those people would be suicide. Being afraid, we tag along with them instead. And as we do, our moral compasses become twisted.
To preserve ourselves, we side with those we disagree with and end up defending things we are morally against. To avoid being harassed, assaulted, kidnapped, maimed and murdered by large, violent, and potentially armed groups of people (whose greater exponents are governments) we can’t possibly defend ourselves against, we publicly adopt their points of views, pretending to be one of them. To pretend convincingly, we need to act in accordance with our fakely adopted perspective. And once we’ve acted upon it, violating what we truly believe in and desecrating our own moral values, we are lost – we have become hypocrites. Our conscience is tarnished, our moral north spun out of place, and then, with our own conscience broken and removed out of the way, there’s nothing left to stop us from doing wrong again.
Each time we do something we know we shouldn’t, it becomes easier. We come up with increasingly absurd explanations to justify our condemnable actions and force ourselves to believe in them. The veil between “right” and “wrong” becomes blurrier; before long, it vanishes. Being irrational and harming others becomes the rule rather than an exception. Then we are no longer pure, clean; instead we are soiled, corrupted. Knowing the damage we’ve caused cannot be undone and that the line cannot be uncrossed, we keep moving farther beyond it. With our chance of being good gone, we embrace evil with arms, legs, and soul wide open. And then we have finally become one of those we initially feared, hated and despised.
The greater the number of despicable acts a person commits, the more their moral compass spins astray, the less their own conscience stops them from doing even worse, the more harm they cause, and the more they distance all of us from having a life worth living.
Each person that falls into that trap becomes one of “them” – one of those we must rid ourselves of. And the more of “them” there are the easier it is for them to corrupt others. The more of “them” there are the more people they force to undergo the whole process of shredding one’s own moral values.
By fearing those we should fight and thus refraining from doing so, we allow their numbers to grow exponentially. If they grow into large enough numbers, their lack of morals becomes endemic. And once it becomes globally endemic, humanity is lost.
This may sound a bit off-topic, but I should probably say a thing or two about the perceived public opinion.
The “public opinion” doesn’t exist; it’s not “a thing.” What exists is just the perceived one: what people believe is the actual public opinion but isn’t. Since no one can access every individual’s private and honest opinions, and we all have to wear social masks just to stay alive, none of us can possibly know what the actual public opinion is. And even if we could identify it, it would be useless because, with each one of us living in a different made-up reality and defending exclusively our own private interests, our true collective view of our species and of our society is bound to be an irrational mess of wildly different and often opposite notions – an absolutely useless compendium.
This is important because what politicians, big companies, and others with power use to evaluate, manipulate and please (so that they can profit from it) the masses is that perceived public opinion – a forged impression of a fantasized, falsely aligned society.
And who forges that impression?
The media.
Here’s my point: once you have been convinced, by the media, that everyone else believes in something, speaking aloud against it puts you in danger, because you’ll be attacked by a large number of people if you do so. You’ll expect that to happen, so you’ll stay quiet. Going against what is perceived to be the generally accepted standard is self-destructive, because the many who are stupid enough to actually believe in it are usually also prone to assault and hurt others – including you.
Anyone who gets some TV time ends up influencing the “public opinion.” And the people who “pop-up” on our screens are usually politicians, who strive to protect only the interests of select groups; actors, who specialize in impersonating others; random experts, with questionable credentials and competence; comedians, who think everything is a joke; athletes, who failed second grade twice; journalists, strictly bound by their editors’ personal agendas; religious figures, who confuse fantasy with reality; or incompetent, failed people who fill the internet up with their ill-informed opinionated streams.
As we all listen to professional liars, people who don’t know half as much as they pretend to, jokers, troglodytes, manipulators, lunatics and idiots speaking, the general public assumes that what they all say is not only true, but also that those people’s view of the world is normal – since such people were allowed to manifest their opinions publicly, everyone is watching the same thing, and no one is doing anything to counter what they say, our instincts dictate that what we are all seeing must be credible, unquestionable, and not only acceptable but, in fact, right.
Unqualified people are allowed to speak publicly not because they should, but because someone is personally interested in them doing so – they are there because someone else profits from their words and appearances. And no one does anything about it because everyone is, yet again, afraid to: speaking against a politician might get you thrown in jail; speaking against a celebrity will spawn an army of their admirers to curse and threaten you; speaking against an athlete might get you physically assaulted by his team’s fans; speaking against a “half-expert” will be taken as an outsider attacking an entire class of professionals; and speaking against a media vehicle is just plain suicide, because they can force their opinions upon millions of people while yours can barely reach a dozen.
When people fear challenging someone, whatever bullshit spills out of that person’s mouth is treated as true even if it’s a lie. It’s treated as wisdom even if it’s obviously stupid. It’s treated as right even if it’s completely wrong. And as “the feared ones” keep making public statements, more and more people listen to their words, and more and more people end up actually believing in them. (As a reminder: feel free to disagree with anything I say – I am not going to hurt you.)
Our moral values are superseded by the twisted ones “on air.” Our children grow with a misconception of reality, with a wrong notion of what a human being is, of what it means to be one, and of what we should aim to become. We end up with a world in which global powers condemn a country “in the strongest terms” because it started a war while at the same time they openly finance genocide against people who are doing nothing more than to seek justice on another corner of the planet. We end up with women physically assaulting their husbands and taking a dump on their beds then suing the guy for moral damages. We end up with millions of people believing democracy is a good idea, and with those who democratically disagree being beaten up to death by the police.
We start our lives off with a fairly reasonable sense of “good,” “bad” and “just.” And then, out of fear of what will happen to us if we stick to them, we deface or entirely abdicate our own moral values, siding with whatever our politicians and the media claim to be the “public opinion” in a sad, barely successful attempt to simply maintain our physical integrities and what little remains of our natural, theoretically irrevocable freedoms.
The perceived public opinion is a tool. It is created and manipulated by those in power to achieve their own desired ends. But now, with the advent of the internet, high-speed connections, and streaming, pretty much anyone can play this game.
We have random mongoloids all around, daily disseminating their idiotic ideas on YouTube for anyone who’s dumb enough to listen. But those folks are fairly irrelevant since they have no goal other than to make money for themselves, and they end up only misinforming the “few” (up to a few dozen millions, at most) fools who trust them. The internet entities that actually play the game, in the open and without shame, are the professional trolls (paid social media manipulators, fake-news disseminators, fake politics-focused accounts, etc.).
The purpose of internet trolls is the same as the media’s: it is to make us believe that, even when we know we are right, we are part of a small minority that stands no chance of overcoming the vast number of those who are wrong – so it would be “smart” for us to shut up, bend over, and meekly take it from behind, “just like everyone else does.” Thousands, millions of fake accounts are created and people are paid to disseminate idiocies using them to make the rest of us afraid of saying out loud anything that violates their employer’s interests. Trolls are a modern, weaponized and unveiled tool of “manipulation by fear of being outnumbered.” They are the priests and imams of the internet, funded by private interests and shady governmental institutions alike.
Children and teenagers, in particular, are very easily swayed by anything they watch or listen to. They see the world through screens, trust anyone who appears in them, and naively believe in all kinds of nonsense. Even the smart ones are prone to fall for it, because the impression they get is that most people believe in “troll crap” and, being aware of their own ignorance about everything, they assume “most people” must be right. Young humans don’t know what is going on, they can’t quite think for themselves, and they don’t really care, because important stuff is adults’ stuff. Thus, the number of people who blindly defend what is wrong is steadily increasing. And the worst part is that those young people have already started voting, since this “social experiment” has already been going on for decades, guaranteeing that our species will keep making the wrong decisions at least for the next several decades.