From a short-term, merely practical standpoint, you really do not want to read this book. This book will mess up your life, as you know it. This book will change every single one of your relationships – most importantly, your relationship with yourself. This book will change your life even if you never implement a single one of the proposals it contains. This book will change you even if you disagree with every single idea it puts forward. Even if you put it down right now, this book will have changed your life, because now you know that you are afraid of change.
This book is radioactive and painful – it is only incidentally the kind of radiation and pain that will cure you.
Relationships
There are really only three kinds of relationships in the world. The first kind is the one we all dream of – joyous, mutually beneficial, deep, meaningful, fun, a real pleasure to have and to hold.
This kind of relationship is extraordinarily rare. If this kind of relationship were an animal, it would not even be on the endangered list. It would be by many considered extinct.
The second kind of relationship is mutually beneficial, but not joyous, deep, or meaningful. This is the kind of relationship you have with your grocer, your banker, and perhaps your boss. It is voluntary, defined by an implicit or explicit contract, and can usually be broken or allowed to lapse without guilt, regret or remorse.
This kind of relationship is not uncommon, but also not very important. We do not lose our lives, our happiness or our very souls in the pits of these kinds of relationships. They are, as the saying goes, "dry calculations of mutual utility." We are not obligated to go to the deathbeds of our bankers; our grocers do not force us to attend church when we do not believe; we rarely get into fights with our bosses about whether or not we should baptize our children.
No, it is the third kind of relationship that we are most concerned with in our lives. It is the third kind of relationship that so often tortures us. It is the third kind of relationship that undermines our joy, integrity and independence.
The first kind of relationship does not involve obligation, but pleasure. There is no need for guilt or manipulation, bullying or control, demands, tears or passive-aggression. We do not need obligation to draw us to that which gives us pleasure, any more than a child needs to be cajoled into eating his candy.
The second kind of relationship does involve obligation, but it is voluntarily chosen, for mutual advantage. We pay our mortgage; the bank gives us a house. The relationship is contractual, and thus does not need guilt or manipulation.
It is the third kind of relationship that this book will focus on.
It is the third kind of relationship that is eating us alive.
The Third Kind
The third kind of relationship has three main components. The first is that it is not chosen; the second is that it involves obligations, and the third is that it is considered moral.
The first and most important aspect of these kinds of relationships is that they are not entered into voluntarily. You are born into them. You do not choose your parents. You do not choose your siblings. You do not choose your extended family. You do not choose your country. You do not choose your culture. You do not choose your government. You do not choose your religion. You do not choose your school. You do not choose your teachers.
Sadly, when you are a child, the list is nearly endless.
You are born into this world without choice, into a familial, social, educational, political and geographical environment that is merely accidental. And for the rest of your life, everyone will try to convince you that you are responsible for this accident.
Your parents decided to have a child – you were in no way involved in the choice, since you did not as yet exist when the decision was made. Even if you were conceived by accident, or adopted, your parents decided to keep you.
Thus your parents' relationship with you when you were a child was essentially contractual, in the same way that when you buy a dog, you're obligated to feed it. Naturally, it is preferable – and certainly possible – for your relationship with your parents to be loving, mutually enjoyable, respectful and great fun all around.
But as I said before, this kind of relationship is, sadly, all too rare.
Entire generations of children have grown up with the idea that the act of being born creates an obligation.
This is entirely false, and one of the most destructive myths of mankind.
First, I will tell you what is true. Then I will tell you why it is true. Then I will tell you how to change.
What Is True
It is true that your parents chose to have you. It is true that by making that choice, your parents assumed a voluntary obligation towards you. That obligation consisted of two main parts: the first was physical, the second was moral.
The physical part of that obligation was clothing, food, medical attention, shelter and so on – the base physical requirements. I am not going to spend much time on that in this book, since the vast majority of parents succeed in providing food and shelter for their children – and those who fail in this regard are so obviously deficient that a philosophical book is scarcely required to illuminate their shortcomings.
The moral obligations that your parents assumed by having you were twofold. The first part is more or less understood in society, and consists of all the standard virtues such as educating you, keeping you safe, refraining from physical or emotional abuse and so on.
The second part of your parents' moral obligation towards you is much more subtle and corrosive. This is the realm of integrity, and it is a great challenge for societies throughout the world.
Integrity
Integrity can be defined as consistency between reality, ideas and behaviour. Consistency with reality is not telling a child that daddy is "sick" when he is in fact drunk. Consistency with behaviour is not slapping a child for hitting another child. The value of this kind of integrity is also well understood by many, even if imperfectly practiced, and we will not deal with it much here either.
It is consistency with ideas that causes the most problems for families – and the most long-term suffering for children throughout their lives.
When you were a child, you were told over and over that certain actions were either good or bad. Telling the truth was good; stealing was bad. Hitting your brother was bad; helping your grandmother was good. Being on time was good; failing to complete chores was bad.
Implicit in all these instructions – moral instructions – was the premise that your parents knew what was right and what was wrong; what was good, and what was bad.
Do you think that was really true? Do you think that your parents knew what was right and wrong when you were a child?
When we tell a child that something is wrong – not just incorrect, but morally wrong – there are really only two possibilities. The first is that we actually know what is right and wrong in general, and we are applying our universal knowledge of right and wrong to a specific action committed by the child.
This is how it is always portrayed to the child. It is almost always the most dangerous lie in the world.
The second possibility is that we are telling our child that his actions are "wrong" for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with morality whatsoever.
For instance, we might tell a child that stealing is wrong because:
- We are embarrassed at our child's actions.
- We are afraid of being judged a poor parent.
- We are afraid that our child's theft will be discovered.
- We are simply repeating what was told to us.
- We enjoy humiliating our child.
- Correcting our child on "ethics" makes us feel morally superior.
- We want our child to avoid behaviour that we were punished for as children.
... and so on
Assuming they are not terrified, most children, on first receiving moral instructions, will generally respond by asking "why?" Why is stealing wrong? Why is lying wrong? Why is bullying wrong? Why is hitting wrong?
These are all perfectly valid questions, akin to asking why the sky is blue. The problem arises in the fact that parents have no rational answers, but endlessly pretend that they do.
When a child asks us why something is wrong, we are put in a terrible bind. If we say that we do not know why lying is universally wrong, we believe we will lose our moral authority in the eyes of our children. If we say that we do know why lying is wrong, then we retain our moral authority, but only by lying to our children.
Since the fall of religion, we have lost our way in terms of ethics. As an atheist, I do not mourn the loss of the illusions of gods and devils, but I am alarmed at the fact that we have not yet admitted that the fall of religion has not provided us an objective and rational moral compass. By failing to admit to the fact that we do not know what we are doing ethically, we are perpetrating a grave moral error on our children.
Basically, we are lying to them about being good.
We tell them that certain things they do are right or wrong – yet we do not tell them that we do not know why those things are right or wrong. If our child asks us why lying is wrong, we can say that it causes people pain – but so does dentistry – or we can say "you don't like it when someone lies to you" – which would be an incentive to not get caught, not to refrain from lying – and so on. Every answer we come up with leads to more questions and inconsistencies. What do we do then?
Why, then, we must bully them.
This does not mean hitting them or yelling at them – though sadly all too often this is the case – because as parents we have a near-infinity of passive-aggressive tactics such as sighing, acting exasperated, changing the subject, offering them a cookie, taking them for a walk, claiming to be "too busy," distracting or rejecting them in a million and one ways.
These kinds of innocent questions about morality represent a kind of horror for parents. As parents, we must retain our moral authority over our children – but as citizens of modernity, we have no rational basis for that moral authority. Thus we are forced to lie to our children about being good, and about our knowledge of goodness, which transforms virtue from a rational discipline into a fearful fairy tale.
In the past, when religious mythology was dominant, when children asked "Where does the world come from?" parents could reply that God made it. Despite the superstitious ignorance of those who even now make the same claim, most modern parents provide the scientific and rational explanation of where the world came from, or at least send their children to the Web, an encyclopaedia, or the library.
There was a time, though, when the question of where the world came from was very difficult to answer. When religious explanations were becoming less and less credible, but scientific explanations had not become completely established, parents had to say – if they wanted to speak with integrity – "I don't know where the world came from."
By openly expressing their lack of certainty, parents not only acted with honesty and integrity, but also stimulated their children to pursue a truth that was admittedly absent from their world.
Alas, we suffer similar difficulties today, but about a far more important topic. The religious basis for ethics has fallen away from us, and we lack any credible or accepted theory to replace it. For a time, patriotism and allegiance to culture had some power to convince children that their elders knew something objective about ethics, but as government and military corruption have become increasingly evident, allegiance to a country, a state or a military ethos has become an increasingly fragile basis for ethical absolutes. Even our cherished theories about the virtues of democracy have come under increasing pressure, as gargantuan governments continue to separate themselves from the wishes of their citizens and act in a virtual "state of nature."
Religious explanations of virtue have failed not just because we no longer believe in God, but also because it is now completely self-evident that when most people refer to "truth," they are really referring to culture.
Culture
Think about a father in a Muslim country. When his child asks him: "Daddy, what is goodness?" he will generally answer: "To obey Allah, and obey His Prophet." Why is that his answer? Is it because he has had direct experience with the Prophet, wrote the holy books himself, and has a deep understanding of morality direct from the original creator? If he had grown up alone on a desert island, would his answer be the same?
Of course not. He is merely repeating what was told to him as a child.
However, there is much more to it than that.
This Muslim father knows that his child is going to have to survive – and hopefully flourish – in a Muslim society. If he tells his child that he does not know what is right and wrong, not only will he lose his moral authority in the eyes of his child, but he will also be setting his child up for endless conflicts with everyone else in his society.
In other words, if everyone else lies to their children, what are the costs – social, romantic, economic and so on – of telling your children the truth?
My neighbour has four lovely children – the other day, his son came and showed me a drawing he'd made, a decent representation of Jesus Christ sitting on a rock and praying to the heavens. In all innocence, he asked me what I thought of the picture. Naturally, I knew that his father had told him that Jesus Christ was a real and living man-god who came back from the dead, floated up to heaven, and will free him of sin if he telepathically communicates his love to this ghost. This is no more or less horrifying than any other cult of guilt and control.
But – what could I say to this child? Could I say that this was a very good drawing of a fictional character? Could I tell him that it was an excellent representation of a fairy tale? Could I see the pain and surprise in his eyes? Could I imagine the conversation that he would later have with his father, asking why the nice man next door told him that Jesus Christ was a fictional character? Could I imagine the coldness that would then descend upon the cordial relations between our two houses? Could I imagine his father telling all of his children to stay away from the nice man next door, who wants to take God away from them? Could I stomach the chilled looks that I would receive every time I saw his family for the next few decades..?
I did take the path of least resistance, but did not lie to the child. I told him that I thought the picture was well drawn, and asked him what he thought about it.
Telling the truth is not an easy thing.
We can very easily see how parents in other cultures simply repeat cultural norms to their children as if those cultural norms were objective truth. Japanese parents teach their children obedience and filial piety; Catholic parents teach their children to drink the blood of their god; Muslim parents teach their children that a man who married a six-year-old girl – and consummated that marriage when she was nine – is the paragon of moral virtue; Western parents teach their children that democracy is the highest ideal; North Korean parents teach their children that the dictator who rules their lives is a sort of secular deity who loves them.
The list goes on and on. Virtually every parent in the world believes that she is teaching her child the truth, when she is merely inflicting what may be politely called cultural mythologies on her child.
We lie to our children, all the while telling them that lying is wrong.
We command our children to think for themselves, all the while repeating the most prejudicial absurdities as if they were objective facts.
We tell our children to be good, but we have no idea what goodness really is.
We tell our children that conformity is wrong ("If everyone jumped off the Empire State building, would you jump too?") but at the same time we are complete slaves to the historical inertia of prior prejudices.
Too Harsh?
I have often been accused of being too harsh on parents. "Parents do the best they can under difficult circumstances; you cannot judge the practical instructions of parents according to some abstract and absolute philosophical standard. My parents were not philosophers – they were simply telling me the truth that they believed, that they thought was accurate."
The wonderful thing about applying philosophical concepts to our own lives is that theories are very easy to test. Discussing a philosophical theory about the causes of the decline of the Roman Empire is a largely theoretical exercise, since we cannot go back in time and test it.
Theories about our families, however, are very easy to test, assuming that we have access to the relevant family members.
It is my firm belief that most human beings are absolutely brilliant. I have come to this conclusion after decades of studying philosophy and having the most amazing conversations with countless people. I am now certain that parents know exactly what they are doing – and a relatively simple test can prove this to the satisfaction of any rational person.
A Practical Exercise
Sit down with your parents and ask them what the capital of Madagascar is – or some other piece of trivia that they are unlikely to know. They will very likely smile, shake their heads and say, "I don't know." They will not avoid the question. They will be more than happy to help you look it up. It will be a trivial fact-finding interaction.
After you have established what the capital of Madagascar is, ask them: "What is goodness?"
I absolutely guarantee you that there will be an instant chill in the room – there will be an enormous amount of tension, and your parents – and probably you – will feel a very strong desire to change the subject, or drop the question.
Why is that? Why is it that when you ask your parents to explain what goodness is, the tension in the room spikes dramatically?
Well, for the same reason that Socrates was introduced to a grim libation called hemlock.
There is terror in the face of the question "What is goodness?" because authority figures claim the right to tell us what to do based on their superior knowledge. If we decide to learn karate, we submit ourselves to the judgment and instruction of somebody who is an expert in karate. If we become ill, we submit our judgment to a doctor, an expert in the field. In other words, when we lack knowledge, we defer to those who claim greater knowledge.
Our parents claimed the right to instruct us on good and bad based on their great knowledge of ethics, not based on their power as parents. Our fathers did not say to us: "Obey me or I will beat you." Although that terrible sentence might have come out of their mouths at some point, the basis of their ethics was that we owed them obedience as a just debt, and thus could be punished for failing to provide it. "Honour thy father and thy mother" is a staple of moral instruction the world over, both religious and secular. However, the honour that we are supposed to bestow upon our parents must be based upon their superior knowledge and practice of virtue – otherwise the word "honour" would make no sense. If we were thrown in jail, we would obey the prison guards because they held power over us, not because we "honoured" them. If a mugger presses a knife to our ribs, we hand him our wallet – obey his wishes – not because we honour him, but because he has the power to harm us.
By using the word "honour," parents are claiming that we owe them allegiance due to their superior knowledge and practice of virtue.
Currently, the foundational "ethic" of the family – the entire basis for the authority of adults – is that parents know right from wrong, and children do not. Metaphorically, the parents are the doctors, and the children are the patients. Parents claim the authority to tell their children what to do for the same reason that doctors claim the authority to tell their patients what to do – the superior knowledge of the former, and the relative ignorance of the latter.
If you are unwell, and put yourself in the care of a doctor, and follow his instructions, but find that you do not get better – but in fact seem to get worse – it would be wise to sit down with that doctor and review his abilities – particularly if you cannot change physicians for some reason. Since following his instructions is making you worse, you must ask: "Why should I follow your instructions?"
It would be logical to begin by asking the doctor to confirm his actual credentials. Then, you might continue by asking what his definition of health is, to make sure that you were both on the same page. Then, you would continue to drill down to more specific questions about the nature of your illness, the nature of his knowledge of the human body, and his understanding of your ailments and the methodology by which he came up with your cure.
This is the conversation that you must have with your parents regarding the nature of virtue and their knowledge of it. Your parents were the moral doctors of your being while you were growing up – if, as an adult, you are happy and healthy, full of joy and engaged in deep and meaningful relationships, it is still worthwhile to examine the knowledge of your parents, since you may have children in time, and will yourself become a "doctor" to them.
If, however, you are not happy and fulfilled as an adult, then it is essential that you examine your parents' ethical knowledge. If your health regimen has been established by a quack who has no idea what he is doing, you will never be healthy as long as you follow his instructions, since one can never randomly arrive at the truth.
If a madman passes himself off as a doctor, when a patient asks for his credentials, he will smile, spread his hands, and say, "Well of course I don't have any!" His openness about his lack of knowledge and credentials establishes his relative innocence.
However, when the patient asks for a doctor's credentials, if the doctor evades the question, or becomes hostile, or dismissive, then clearly the "doctor" is fully aware of what he is doing at some level. A man who commits a murder in a police station may claim insanity; a man who murders in secret and then hides the body has the capacity for rationality, if not virtue, and thus cannot claim to be mad.
The fact that your parents will do almost anything to avoid the question "What is goodness?" is the most revealing piece of knowledge that you can possess. It is the fact that blows the cage of culture wide open. It is the horrifying knowledge that will set you free.
You will not just benefit from examining your parents. You can also sit down with your priest, and examine him with regards to the nature of the existence of God (this is a useful conversation to have with religious parents as well). If you are persistent, and do your research in advance, you will very quickly discover that your priest also has no certain knowledge about the existence of God – and will become very uncomfortable and/or aggressive if you persist, which you should.
Is it wrong for a priest to say that he only believes in God because he "has a feeling"? In terms of truth, not exactly – in terms of integrity, absolutely.
The fundamental problem is not that the priest claims the emotional irrationality of "faith" as his justification for his belief in God, but rather that the existence of God was presented to you as an objective fact, and also that you were not allowed the same criteria for "knowledge."
These two facets of the falsehoods you were told as a child are essential to your liberation as an adult.
Fiction as Facts
When you were a child, you did not have the ability to objectively validate the commandments of those who had power over you. Your susceptibility was a great temptation to those who would rather be believed than be right. All power tends to corrupt, and the power that parents have over their children is the greatest power in the world.
A child is biologically predisposed to trust and obey his parents – this has great utility, insofar as parents will often tell their children not to eat poisonous berries, pull hot frying pans off the stove, or run around all day outside without sunscreen on. The requirements of survival tend to discourage endless "trial and error."
When parents instruct their children, they can either present that instruction as conditional, or absolute. Conditional instructions – do not hit your brother except in self-defence – tend to lead to endless additional questions, and quickly reveal the parents' lack of knowledge. As the child continues to ask what exactly defines self-defence, whether pre-emptive strikes are allowable, whether teasing can be considered aggression and so on, the fuzzy areas innate to all systems of ethics quickly come into view.
As these fuzzy areas become clearer, parents fear once more the loss of moral authority. However, the fact that certain areas of ethics are harder to define than others does not mean that ethics as a whole is a purely subjective discipline. In biology, the classification of very similar species tends to be fuzzy as well – at least before the discovery of DNA – but that does not mean that biology is a purely subjective science. Water can never be perfectly pure, but that does not mean that bottled water is indistinguishable from seawater.
Due to their desire for simple and absolute moral commandments, parents spend enormous amounts of energy continually herding their children away from the "cliff edges" of ethical complexities. They deploy a wide variety of distractive and abusive tactics to achieve this end – and all these tactics are designed to convince the child that his parents possess absolute knowledge of ethical matters.
However, as children grow – particularly into the teenage years – a certain danger begins to arise. The children, formerly compliant (at least from the "terrible twos" through the latency period) begin to suspect that their parents' "knowledge" is little more than a form of hypocritical bullying. They begin to see the true conformity of their parents with regards to culture, and really begin to understand that what was presented to them as objective fact was in reality subjective opinion.
This causes great confusion and resentment, because teenagers instinctually grasp the true corruption of their parents.
A counterfeiter necessarily respects the value of real money, since he does not spend his time and energies creating exact replicas of Monopoly banknotes. The counterfeiter wishes to accurately reproduce real money because he knows that real money has value – he wishes his reproduction to be as accurate as possible because he knows that his fake money does not have value.
Similarly, parents present their opinions as facts because they know that objective facts have more power and validity than mere opinion. A "doctor" who fakes his own credentials does so because he knows credentials have the power to create credibility.
Recognizing the power of truth – and using that power to reinforce lies – is abominably corrupt. A man who presents his opinions as facts does so because he recognizes the value of facts. Using the credibility of "truth" to make falsehoods more plausible simultaneously affirms and denies the value of honesty and integrity. It is a fundamental logical contradiction in theory, and almost unbearably hypocritical in practice.
Thus it always happens that when grown children begin to examine their elders, they rapidly discover that those elders do not in fact know what they claimed to know – but knew enough about the value of the truth to present their subjective opinions as objective knowledge. This hypocritical crime far outstrips the abuses of mere counterfeiting, or the faking of credentials, because adults can protect themselves against false currency and fake diplomas.
Children have no such defences.
Do As I Say, Not As I Do…
The second major hypocrisy involved in presenting subjective opinion as absolute fact is that parents reserve this power only for themselves – and self-righteously punish children for doing exactly the same thing.
Take the question of going to church. Religious parents tell their children that they must go to church. When the children ask why, they are told, "Because God exists, and He loves you," or other such nonsense. In other words, parents command their children with reference to objective absolutes. Children are absolutely not allowed to say, "I don't want to go to church because I don't feel like it."
Fast-forward a decade or so. The child – now a teenager – sits down with his parents and asks: "Why do you believe in God?"
If he is persistent and knowledgeable, he will quickly corner his parents into admitting that they believe in God because of "faith." In other words, they have no proof that God exists, but believe in God because they feel like it – since no matter how emotionally compelling faith is, it remains in essence a feeling that contradicts reason and evidence.
However, when that teenager was a child, he was never allowed to make decisions because he just felt like it. He was not allowed to stay home from church because he didn't feel like going. He was always sent to school despite his preference for staying home at times. His feelings did not create truth, or establish objectively valid criteria for action.
When he used exactly the same methodology that his parents used, he was called disobedient, wrong, sinful, wilful, immoral, stubborn and a thousand other pejoratives. For his parents, acting on the primacy of feeling is praised as an absolute and objective virtue. For him, acting on the primacy of feeling is condemned as an absolute and objective vice.
Conformity
As the child grows up, his tendency to want to "merge with the herd" is criticized as an immoral weakness. Any susceptibility to fashion trends, linguistic tics, prized possessions, general sexual habits or any other form of "groupthink" is opposed by his parents on supposedly objective and moral grounds.
Again – generally in the teenage years – the child begins to realize that his parents do not actually oppose groupthink or conformity on principle, but only attack competing conformities. If a son begins to run with a wild gang, his parents will criticize him on the grounds of conformity, but it is not conformity that they object to, but conformity with a gang they disapprove of, rather than with a group they approve of.
And it gets even worse than that.
The reason that the parents dislike the child's new gang is because the parents fear disapproval from their own gang. If the son of religious parents starts hanging out with a group of atheists, his parents will criticize him for his mindless conformity, and pointless rebellion – but only because they fear being attacked, criticized or undermined by their own religious peers. In other words, they effectively tell their son: "You should not be susceptible to the disapproval of your peers, because we are susceptible to the disapproval of our peers."
Is Ignorance Hypocrisy?
The argument is often made that parents are not aware of all the complexities of their own hypocrisies, and thus are not morally responsible for their inconsistencies.
Fortunately, there is no need for us to rely on mere theory to establish the truth of this proposition.
If I tell you to take Highway 101 to get to your destination, and it turns out that this takes you in the exact opposite direction, what would be a rational response if I were truly ignorant of the fact that I was giving you really bad directions?
Well, I would first insist that they were the correct directions, since I genuinely believe that they are. However, when you sat me down with a map and pointed out exactly why my directions were so bad, I would see the truth, apologize profusely, and openly promise never to give out bad directions again – and buy a whole bunch of maps to boot, and spend some significant amount of time studying them.
However, if I got angry the moment that you brought up that I had sent you in the wrong direction, and refused to look at any maps, and refused to admit that I was wrong, and kept changing the subject, and kept distracting you with emotional tricks, and got more and more upset, and refused to tell you how I came up with my directions – and ended up storming out of the room, you may be unsure of many things, but you would not be unsure of one thing at least.
You would no longer imagine that I was ever interested in giving good directions.
In the realm of the parent-child relationship, this realization comes as a profound and terrible shock. This realization lands like a nuclear blast over a shantytown, radiating out in waves of destruction, smashing down the assumptions you have about all of your existing relationships.
The moment you realize that your parents, priests, teachers, politicians – your elders in general – only used morality to control you, to subjugate you – as a tool of abuse – your life will never be the same again.
The terrifying fact that your elders knew the power of virtue, but used that power to control, corrupt, bully and exploit you, reveals the genuine sadism that lies at the core of culture – it reveals the awful "cult" in culture.
A doctor who fakes his credentials is bad enough – how would any sane person judge a doctor who studies the human body not to heal it, but to more effectively cause pain?
A fraud is still better than a sadist.
What can we say, then, about parents and other authority figures who know all there is to know about the power and effectiveness of using moral arguments to control the actions and thoughts of children – who respect the power of virtue – and then use that power to destroy any capacity for moral integrity in their children?
In movies, terrorists almost invariably kidnap the wife or child of the hero in order to enforce his compliance with their wishes. His virtues – love and loyalty – are thus turned into the service of evil. The better he is, the worse he must act. The more he loves virtue, the more he is controlled by evil.
And thus do the best become the worst.
And thus are children raised.
And this was your instruction.
Reluctance
We instinctively shy away from confronting the moral void at the core of our relationships – and, fundamentally, the moral void at the core of our relationship with ourselves.
There is a simple and terrible reason for our reluctance to confront this emptiness.
Societies are generally built upon mythologies – in fact, a society can be accurately defined as a group of people who all share the same mythology.
I use the term "mythology" here because I want to ease you into the idea of social fictions, and the degree to which they distort your relationship to yourself and others – and thus your relationship to reality.
There are two major disciplines, which help us dispel the corrosive cobwebs of social fictions and reach through them to grasp reality. The first is theoretical; the second is practical.
The first discipline is logic, which is the process of organizing our thoughts in a systematic and non-contradictory manner. The second is science, which is the testing of logical theories against empirical observations. The union of these two disciplines is philosophy, which is in its fundamentals the testing of theories of knowledge against both logic and empirical observation.
Logic will tell you that two plus two equals four; science will verify that placing two rocks next to two other rocks will result in an aggregation of four rocks.
But it is philosophy that tells us that logic plus empirical testability are both key requirements to the establishment of the truth. It is philosophy that specifically rejects the primacy of faith, or the primacy of emotion, or the primacy of authority, or the primacy of age, or the primacy of preference, or the primacy of biology – or any of the other foolish and exploitive mechanisms that human beings have used as substitutes for logic and evidence in order to inflict "truth" on the helpless.
Philosophy is the opposite of mythology. Or, more accurately, truth is the opposite of falsehood.
We are, all of us, deeply aware of the deficiencies of our beliefs. The basic knowledge that our beliefs are mere prejudices, inflicted on us by parents and teachers, is a fact that, deep down, we are all perfectly aware of. The amount of energy that we all put into pretending otherwise is staggering, and debilitating. There is a reason that depression is one of the most prevalent forms of illness.
The contradiction at the core of social mythology is that these cultural falsehoods are always presented as objective and absolute truths.
Americans, for instance, are famously proud of their country, and the beliefs that they have inherited from the Enlightenment philosophers and the Founding Fathers. This is a very strange notion when you examine it.
The average American just happened to be born in America – it is a mere accident, not something earned. The average American takes pride in his cultural heritage, which he did not invent, and which was taught to him by others, who also did not invent it. Believing that you are virtuous because you were born in a particular country is like believing that you are an excellent businessman because you inherited a lot of money, or that you are a good person because you happen to be tall.
The average American has no idea of the philosophical premises underpinning the ideal of a constitutionally limited government. The average American enthusiastically supports a government that is hundreds of times more oppressive and brutal than the British government from which his ancestors fought to free themselves. The average American enthusiastically celebrates Independence Day, despite the fact that, when his country was founded, slavery was protected, and basic rights for women and children were denied.
In other words, the average American blindly praises his own culture and history because he is taught to praise it, not because he has any rational understanding of its actual merits and deficiencies.
This is not to say that America is not a better country than, for instance, Syria. It is, and I am glad not to be living in Syria. However, the methodology for transmitting value from parent to child remains the same in both countries. The genuine values in America arose from rational thought and breaking with tradition, not from blind allegiance to dirt and cloth.
The average American considers himself superior to the average Muslim, because he believes to some degree in the separation of church and state, supports limited democracy and the rights of women, and respects certain aspects of the free market. He believes that these are good values to hold, and criticizes Muslims for not holding the same values.
The sad fact is that while specific beliefs vary from culture to culture, the methodology of belief in all cultures is identical. The simple fact is that if the average American had been born to Muslim parents in Syria, he would be exactly the same as the average Syrian Muslim. He would be no more likely to value the separation of church and state than the average Western woman born in Manhattan would be likely to wear a burka.
Patriotism is the hijacking of the achievements of others – usually ancestors – and taking ego gratification in them as if they were one's own. This involves a curious distortion of logic that is blindingly obvious when seen.
Either someone is a good person because he was born in America, or because he conforms to objective standards of goodness. You either like a car because it is a Buick, or Buicks are good cars because they get excellent mileage.
If someone is good because he was born in America, then clearly he cannot judge a man born in Saudi Arabia as deficient in any way, either morally or culturally. The essence of aristocracy – the eternal plague of mankind – is the belief that we are "born into" superiority; that our "excellence" is somehow innate. However, if an American is "superior" to a Saudi, then that superiority is not earned. If Bob were born in Saudi Arabia rather than America, he would be an "inferior" Muslim rather than a "superior" Christian or American. Thus Bob's superiority – or lack thereof – has nothing to do with his personal choices, but is rather defined by the accidents of geography and birth. Either Bob claims to be better due to geography, which is impossible – or due to his own personal virtue, in which case geography has nothing to do with it.
Both Americans and Muslims are simply reproducing what they are told – what is inflicted on them through emotional punishments when they are children – and calling it "morality." This is exactly the same as a child who is force-fed, who then calls being overweight "moral," while the child next door is underfed, and then calls being skinny "moral." Sports fans are the same way – the closest franchise is just somehow the "best."
Basically, culture is the compulsion to call whatever surrounds you "moral." If you live in the mountains, it is moral to live in the mountains. If you were taught to swim, then swimming is moral. If you were not taught to swim, then swimming is immoral. If you were taught to cover your legs, then baring your legs is "immodest." If you were taught to uncover your legs, then covering them up is "prudish." If you were taught to fold the flag a certain way, then folding the flag any other way is "disrespectful."
When I was six, I was sent to an English boarding school. One of the rules there was that I was had to wear garters around my socks to keep them up, especially in church. I was told in no uncertain terms that if I entered the church without my garters on, I was being "disrespectful to God." This didn't make much sense to me; I argued that God made my legs, and men made garters, and I was sure that God would appreciate looking at his own creation rather than something that men made.
Naturally, my objections were also framed as immoral talkback – I was being "disrespectful" to the headmaster.
I am sure you get the idea.
Everything that surrounds you is framed in terms of ethics, because framing things in terms of ethics works. If you can get a child to believe that something is right or wrong, you control that child's mind, his body, his allegiance, his very being. Moral arguments have a power that is unmatched in any other form of human interaction. In terms of social control, moral arguments are the ultimate WMDs.
Susceptibility
As children, we are highly susceptible to moral arguments because we so desperately want to be good, and because we know that "morality" is synonymous with praise, while "immorality" is synonymous with punishment. When our parents, priests and teachers tell us that something is "good," what they are really saying is: "You will not be punished for this – and you may even be rewarded!" Conversely, when we are told that something is "bad," what we are really being told is that we will be punished for doing – or even contemplating – whatever it is.
We are not punished for being bad. "Being bad" is invented so that we may be "justly" punished.
Those in authority are continually driven to hide their perpetual use of power over their victims. Our teachers do not like to openly tell us that they will hurt us if we disobey them, because that is too naked a display of abusive power.
It is also a highly inefficient form of control.
If your teacher were to say, "If you lie to me, I will punish you" – and just left it at that, then lying would always be more or less a calculated risk – and being punished for lying would have no more moral significance than being fouled while playing basketball. If a teacher is facing a class of 30 students, each of whom is calculating whether or not he can get away with a lie, then clearly, as more of them lie, each lie becomes that much harder to catch, just as it is harder to figure out exactly who is talking when 20 children are chatting rather than just two.
Furthermore, if a parent openly uses brute force to compel compliance from a child, then the pattern-making centers in our brains will immediately extract a principle out of that interaction. Within our minds, every decision and interaction is involuntarily extrapolated into a principle. If our parents compel our compliance with brute force, then the principle that we extract from that interaction is: "Whoever has the power should use it abusively to control everyone else." Or: "Whoever has the most power should inflict his will on whoever has the least power."
Due to the natural decay of organic life, this is a rather dangerous principle for parents to establish. If we think of a single mother raising two boys, we can easily see that creating a principle called "brute force rules" – while perhaps having a certain practical utility when they are young – will scarcely serve her well when her boys hit their teenage years, and become physically far stronger than she is. Even fathers will reach dotage and physical weakness relative to their sons, and thus will scarcely benefit from applying the principle of "whoever has the most power should forcefully subjugate whoever has the least power."
Thus the use of force must be forever shrouded in the fog of "ethics." This is a very tricky business logically, because what is required is a simultaneous appeal to both a principle, and a person – which is directly contradictory.
The Contradictory Appeal
When your father says, "Honour thy father and thy mother," he is invoking both a principle and a person. The principle is that all mothers and fathers are honourable, and so deserving of respect. The person that he is invoking is himself and your mother specifically – thy mother and father.
Logically, this makes no sense.
Saying, "Honour thy father and thy mother," is like saying, "Honour all the women who are my wife." If I must honour all women, then I will automatically honour your wife, since she is a woman. If I must honour your wife, then there is no point saying that I must honour her as a woman, because that would involve honouring all women again. It's one or the other.
If you must honour the category "father" and "mother," then you must respect all mothers and fathers equally. Showing preference for your own parents would be unjust.
If you must show preference for your own mother and father, then the category of "mother" and "father" is irrelevant. It must be for some other reason, then, that you should honour these particular individuals.
If you should bestow honour upon your mother and father as individuals, and for no objective principle, then what is really being demanded is not honour, but obedience towards individuals in the guise of honour as a principle.
This basic logical contradiction, while complicated to discuss syllogistically, is something that every child instinctually understands. When our mother demands that we respect her, do we not feel contempt, frustration and despair? Demanding respect is like demanding love, or hijacking an aircraft. It is commanding a destination, rather than respecting the free choices of individuals.
We cannot imagine someone hijacking an aircraft on its way to Vladivostok and demanding, "Take me to Vladivostok!" People hijack planes because the plane is not going where they want to go.
Efficient Control
If, however, through intimidation, the distinction between the principle and the person can be blurred and buried, a far more efficient mechanism of control is achieved. If a child – or a citizen – can be taught to obey a person as if that person were a universal principle, the foundations of hegemonic dictatorship, whether in the family, the church, the school or the state, are firmly established. If a child's mind can be taught to obey the whims of an individual to the same degree that the child's body obeys the absolutes of gravity, then near-perfect control can be established.
Of course, this control incurs a terrible cost – and a terrible risk. The cost accrues to both the parent and the child, as is the case in all corrupt interactions. By using false and inconsistent principles to teach the child to obey a person rather than a principle, the child's ability to extract principles from interactions is crippled. Such children inevitably grow up to repeat destructive patterns in relationships, seemingly without any ability to learn from their mistakes. How could they learn from their mistakes? They have been taught as a principle to obey individuals – how can they then conceivably extract generalized principles from the behaviour of those individuals? That would be like hoping that water will flow uphill. Expecting such people to extract productive principles from their interactions with others is like expecting a medieval monk who believes that the world follows the whims of the gods to discover the theory of relativity – or even the scientific method itself.
For the parents, the cost is a perpetual and growing fear of the intelligence and perceptiveness of their children, which manifests in a variety of ways, such as genial blankness, corrosive contempt, yawning indifference or fussy irritability.
For our parents – and our elders in general – the modern world has virtually guaranteed that the gig is up.
The antidote to false morality is a multiplicity of false moralities. The antidote to irrational prejudice is more irrational prejudices.
It is by being able to see the world as a whole that we can finally set ourselves free.
Detonating Mythology
If we were only ever exposed to English, we would not think of it as "English," just as "language." The need to differentiate English as a language only arises when we come into contact with other languages.
Similarly, if we are only exposed to our own mythologies, we do not think of them as mythologies, but rather as the truth. If we only know our own god, then we can refer to this fiction as "God" – this is a universe away from saying "a god," – or, more accurately "our god."
Deep down, each of us knows that our faith in our fragile fairy tales can only be sustained if we constantly steer clear of competing fairy tales. This tends to cripple our capacity for empathy – we must in our hearts ridicule the foolish beliefs of other cultures, and never take the terrifying leap of trying to see our own culture through their eyes.
The fear and hatred that so often mars the relations between different cultural groups does not arise out of ignorance, but rather out of knowledge. Christians feel uneasy around Muslims – and Muslims feel uneasy around Christians – not because they are different, but because they are the same. Two adulterous women who know each others' secrets will, if forced to sit together for lunch, have a very uncomfortable time – not because they know too little about each other, but rather because they know too much.
The only way that mythology can sustainably dominate generation after generation is by pretending that it is not mythology, but reality.
To help clarify this, consider the following thought experiment.
Imagine that the water in a sink has consciousness, and is sentient. Now imagine that I pour this water into a variety of glass containers, each of a different shape. The water, since it is sentient, would doubtless congratulate itself on its individuality. Since it would be unable to see the glass that surrounded it, contained it, and shaped its very form, it would honestly believe that its true physical shape was a mug, jar, test tube, or martini glass.
The sentient water filling the test tube would look at all the funny glass shapes around it and be enormously amused. "Do they not know how ridiculous they seem from the outside? Can they really imagine that that is their true shape? It's madness!" it would chortle, pressed up against the glass of its own conceptual prison. And the water in the martini glass would look at all the other containers – including the test tube – and say exactly the same thing.
And this, really, is the state of all of the different cultures around the world. Each of us is poured into a clear glass container, which we believe represents the truth, which provides us with a shape and an identity that we mistake for "human nature." And this can work relatively well – at least until we begin to catch sight of all the other glass containers surrounding us.
For a time, we will endeavour to maintain the illusion that only other
water is contained in an obvious glass container – not us! However, there are those among us who can break free from the glass cage of culture – we stand outside such containers, and from our vantage point, the differences in the sizes and shapes of the containers are practically irrelevant.
The size and shape of your prison is not important. The fact that you are in a prison is.
The knowledge that you are in a prison does not have to be learned. It only has to be accepted. It is not something that you do not know. At a very deep level, you are perfectly aware that what you call the truth is just the magical physics of invisible fairy tales.
How do I know this?
As with every idea in this book, there is no need to take my word for anything. You can easily discover your deep understanding of this fact with a few simple experiments.
As I have mentioned before, you can sit down with your parents and ask them about goodness. You can sit down with your friends and tell them that you are afraid that you are living in a fiction that is sapping your joy and independence. You can go to a mosque and ask if you can observe. You can put yourself in someone else's "glass container" and see how you feel.
Try it. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine sitting down with your parents to ask them about goodness, or having a drink with your friends and talking about social mythologies. Do you feel nervous? Do you feel a vague and uneasy fluttering in your stomach at the very thought of such honesty and curiosity?
Why? Why do you feel afraid? Why have you never asked such questions? Who told you that such questions were not allowed? Were you ever punished for asking these questions in the past? Is there any law against asking such questions?
What will happen when you ask such questions?
You already know the answer. That is why you are afraid.
It is not cowardice that makes you afraid. It is wisdom that makes you afraid.
Because you have every reason to be afraid.
Mythological Love
Our whole lives, we are surrounded by people who claim to love us. Our parents perpetually claim to be motivated by what is best for us. Our teachers eternally proclaim that their sole motivation is to help us learn. Our priests voice concern for our eternal souls, and extended family members endlessly announce their devotion to the clan.
When people claim to love us, it is not unreasonable to expect that they know us. If you tell me that you love Thailand, but it turns out that you have never been there, and know very little about it, then it is hard for me to believe that you really love it. If I say that I love opera, but I never listen to opera – well, you get the general idea!
If I say that I love you, but I know little about your real thoughts and feelings, and have no idea what your true values are – or perhaps even what your favourite books, authors or movies are – then it should logically be very hard for you to believe me.
This is certainly the case in my family. My mother, brother and father made extravagant claims about their love for me. However, when I finally sat down and asked each of them to recount a few facts about me – some of my preferences and values – I got a perfect tripod of "thousand yard stares."
So, I thought, if people who know almost nothing about me claim to love me, then either they are lying, or I do not understand love at all.
I will not go into details about my theories of love here, other than to say that, in my view, love is our involuntary response to virtue, just as well-being is our involuntary response to a healthy lifestyle. (Our affection for our babies is more attachment than mature love, since it is shared throughout the animal kingdom.)
Virtue is a complicated subject, but I am sure we can agree that virtue must involve some basics that are commonly understood, such as courage, integrity, benevolence, empathy, wisdom and so on.
If this is the case, it cannot be possible to love people that we know very little about. If love requires virtue, then we cannot love perfect strangers, because we know nothing about their virtues. Love depends both on another person's virtue, and our knowledge of it – and it grows in proportion to that virtue and knowledge, if we are virtuous ourselves.
Throughout my childhood, whenever I expressed a personal thought, desire, wish, preference or feeling, I was generally met with eye rolling, incomprehension, avoidance or, all too often, outright scorn. These various "rejection tactics" were completely co-joined with expressions of love and devotion. When I started getting into philosophy – through the works of Ayn Rand originally – my growing love of wisdom was dismissed out of hand as some sort of psychological dysfunction.
Since my family knew precious little about my virtues – and what they did know they disliked – then we could not all be virtuous. If they were virtuous, and disliked my values, then my values could not be virtuous. If I was virtuous, and they disliked my values, then they could not be virtuous.
And so I set about trying to create an "ethical map" of my family.
It was the most frightening thing I have ever done. The amount of emotional resistance that I felt towards the idea of trying to rationally and morally understand my family was staggering – it literally felt as if I were sprinting directly off a cliff.
Why was it so terrifying?
Well, because I knew that they were lying. I knew that they were lying about loving me, and I knew that, by claiming to be confused about whether they loved me, I was lying as well – and to myself, which is the worst of all falsehoods...
