IT'LL PUT THE FEAR OF GOD IN YOU, BOY

Yep, the title of this essay pretty much says it. That's exactly what society will do, put the fear of God in you.

God sure as hell ain't doin' it.

You may have noticed that I make reference to paleolithic man once in a while. I like to use him as a sort of reference point.

Another good point of reference is a newborn baby.

Both, the newborn and the cave man, have something very important in common: basic humanity.

I've said it before. If you want an unadulterated glimpse into raw humanity, at what it really means to be human, just take a good hard look at a newborn baby, or tackle a thought experiment and try to imagine what it must have been like to be a cave man (excuse me, person).

Babies know nothing of God, or good and evil, or any other kind of horseshit that is currently fueling the human social machine. A baby knows but one thing: what it feels. I should have put the emphasis on the word "it." A baby only knows what it feels. It sounds a little rough to say it this way (I mean, we're talkin' 'bout a itsy bitsy baby here), but a baby doesn't much give a solitary fuck about what anybody else feels. It has to be taught that. It has to be socialized before it even becomes aware of such fluff like the feelings of another person.

But here's the thing. In spite of all that socializing that we put the babies through, the same socializing (essentially) that we have all been put through, the basic humanity never leaves us. If you think that any of the grown-up babies around you actually gives a solid fuck about you, then you, my friend, are sadly deluded. Human beings are animals that have been programmed by Mother Nature to look out for their own survival, or what we might call in more civilized terms, their own interests.

Society, being the collection of individuals that it is, is also programmed to look out for its own interests. And what are the interests of society? The very same as those of the individual: survival. Yes, societies want to survive as much as individuals do. And how do they go about it? Same answer. Society employs the same survival tactics that its individual components do.

In the same way that individuals dupe other individuals into believing that they care about each other, society dupes its members into believing pretty much the same thing, that it cares about them.

Here's a newsflash: society doesn't give a fuck about you (beyond the fact that you exist as an essential component of itself). Society only gives a fuck about what you can do for it. It cares about your contribution to its own survival. Society wants you to work and be a good citizen. It wants you to work so it can tax you. It wants you to be a good citizen, because bad citizens are a major threat to its survival.

Bad citizens are not really bad, by the way. There is no such thing as a bad citizen. There might be such a thing as a bad taste in your mouth, but there is no such thing as a bad person. People are products of nature, which means that everything they do, from building space shuttles to committing ax murders, is perfectly natural. Nothing they do is bad. It may be disruptive, i.e., threatening, to society, but it is not bad.

But society doesn't want to go to the trouble of saying this to you. In the interest of saving itself some time and energy, it resorts to the tactic of putting the fear of God in you. People who have the fear of God in them, are very likely, statistically, to be good little boys and girls, to mind their manners, to behave. This is why society allows churches to be tax exempt. Religious organizations perform an invaluable service for society. They coach people in the finer points of good and bad behavior.

"But we owe our very existence to society," you object. "We didn't make ourselves. We were born within the dynamic of a social system, even if it is only the one of our parents."

This is true. I cannot deny it, nor would I try to. But, at the same, it's not quite what I'm getting at. It's not the basic necessity of some kind of society for the very existence of human beings. That is pretty much indisputable. What I am poking and prodding at is the way that societies get ... well, fucked up as hell. And how do they get fucked up? Because they promote bullshit.

Society wants us to be honest, doesn't it? Bearing false witness is important enough to be the subject of one of the ten commandments. How many times do we hear of a famous person getting in trouble because they lied under oath? My indictment against society is that it is lying under oath. It is not telling the truth. It is supporting the propagation of lies.

One of the biggest lies of all is the theistic one. Society needs to rid itself of all its God bullshit. Society needs to drastically curb its appetite for abstractions and focus on the real. This, in a nutshell, reflects society's real energy crisis. In the interest of saving energy (by speaking truthfully), its components get totally fucked up in the head, which means that society itself gets fucked up in the head, and on and on.

It's a vicious cycle that will probably never stop. Why? Hell fire, man. We supported Hee Haw for over twenty fucking years! You think we're gonna all of a sudden up and chuck God out the window overnight?