A long winding rant: the enemy is your friend is your enemy
On being yourself, being a good person, and the justice of the free lunch
I thought this post would go somewhere, but it winds around and around and doesn’t properly land. It crashes into the trees at the end and the plane goes up in flames. So I’m adding this note in the beginning to warn you that this post is very much a long and winding rant. Not only is it a rant, it’s a little cynical.
You see someone wanting to help the poor? There’s a deep selfishness there. You see someone saying the poor need to stop moping about, get up, and do some work? There’s deep selfishness at the core of this too. They want to excuse their own inaction.
You see a criminal beating up an old person to steal his money. How could a good person go after the weak like that? But then you watch a nature documentary and the narrator explains that the lion is helping the zebra population by killing off the weak. Now you look at human beings again, and you like to think we’re above this, but in many ways we are not.
Let’s look at the woke phenomenon. If you take the conservative stance and say these woke people are degenerates. You could take the blue tribe perspective and see standing up for minorities and outcasts as kindness. But both could be motivated by incredibly subversive evil. The hug of death is a real thing.
Say you’re a trans person in a conservative town. You haven’t transitioned yet, and you’re too afraid to express your real self. You feel alienated from your environment. Nobody seems to get you. When you express the inner self, people look at you weird, and they judge.
After I wrote this piece, I realized someone reading this might realize I’m not a trans person, and because of this, I shouldn’t talk about something I don’t know. And I had another voice telling me I shouldn’t say anything about trans people because someone will think I’m talking about myself and that this post is a very subtle way of testing the waters before I come out. I can’t win. I know this. The thing is, people don’t just transition to change genders. They transition from religious to atheist, or from dating to single.
Back to imagining you’re trans. I could argue (possibly offensively) that these conservatives are on your side. They want you to get get married, have family, kids, and leave a legacy. And even if the inner you resists it the entire way, their culture of shame and punishment will shepard you along to a seemingly normal family life. As they say, all happy families are the same, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. In this sense, these conservative people want you to live.
But there’s a sense in which an inauthentic life is slavery. Sure, you can robotically follow all the conventions against your will, but how is a life motivated by incentive and coercion any kind of life? In fact, are these same conservatives presumably religious? Sure, transitioning might be irreversible, but that’s fine, right? You have a soul and this soul is what ultimately matters.
Say you’re tired of living a lie and you leave your environment because it’s not authentic to you. You’ve been an outcast your entire life, so you decide to finally do something about it. You’ve been ashamed of who you really are, but you’ve resisted making friends with people like yourself because you’re ashamed to be associated with them, even though they’re very much like you. So you have a choice. You either stay lonely and alienated, or you make the jump. You’re not a robot. You’re a human being, and as a person, you crave human connection. Forget the question of what a “good” person should do. What does a person do?
So you make the jump, and you start associating with people your conservative family would consider weird. Over time, you let more and more of yourself out to your new friends. Finally, you feel comfortable enough to come out to them that you’ve never felt comfortable in your body, and that you’re trans. They don’t judge. They accept you.
But the confusion here, at least to me, is that if being trans is fine in a secular context, it should be even more fine in a religious one. If you see religion as a set of rules, that’s one thing. But if you believe you have a supernatural soul, and you believe in a gracious God, then God should be able to accept you no matter what you did with your physical body. Ideally, the good and loving Christians would accept you as a trans person, and then accept you if you de-transitioned. And it would be just the same. But if you became a scummy preacher like Kenneth Copeland, it would be understandable if they chose to never speak to you again.
Heaven, hell, and free lunches
In some sense, maybe we’re all so evil and cruel that we’d rather be kings in hell than servants in heaven. Actually, the situation is more complicated still. If you’re a king, there’s accountability. In some sense, it’s more evil to be a servant in heaven. You enjoy the benefits of heaven without having to take responsibility for it. Whereas if you’re a ruler in hell, you have some skin in the game. Sure, it sucks to be down there, but you’re presumably being punished and you’re getting what you deserve. But if you’re in heaven because you accepted a free gift from Jesus, then how are you a better person?
Things are even more complicated. Most of the energy on earth comes from the sun, which is free. Why not make use of it? The sun gives and gives, and we take and take. There’s no end to it, and we hope it stays like this forever. A true believer in justice would eventually expect God to send us a bill. When you get to heaven, God is going to judge you not just for the sunshine you’ve used, but the sunshine you’ve wasted. Imagine this. Your whole life will flash before your eyes. God will show you all the sunny days you spent indoors by yourself because you were too anxious or too scared to reach out to others. He’ll judge you for not putting a solar panel on your roof. The sun shone graciously upon your roof all for nothing. You ungrateful scum. Off to hell with you.
Christians tend to get themselves into ruts about the one true understanding of scriptures. You don’t believe in the trinity? Heretic! Christians are awfully comfortable about tossing out those who don’t fit. And they’re thinking that the big bad enemy is some atheist, or even a trans person. But the real problem, in my opinion, is Christianity is turning into a multi-headed snake. Jesus said a house divided cannot stand. The secular world is quite united by comparison. In fact, a common Christian conspiracy is that there’s a cult of people who are secretly controlling the government. And sure, there is evil, but the secular people are inventing many great things religious people use.
The blue tribe people are the ones willing to dig in the trenches of the unknown to uncover new truths. And sometimes this means taking some crazy ideas seriously. When creative thinking works, we get inventions like Calculus from Newton. BTW, he didn’t believe in the trinity as an academic at, ironically, Trinity college. He was smart enough to not let the truth set him free. And just like Jesus, though he could not set himself free, he did set us free from from the difficulty of calculating the area under a curve. This is his free gift to us. We don’t have to use it, but we’d be worse off.
A lot of trans people are suffering, even after transitioning. We somehow can’t figure out that people are people. A lot of people are not treated as people as soon as they step outside the lines. We’ll either put you on a pedestal or we’ll say you’re scum. Yeah, but you’re a person at the end of the day. And maybe you’re a bad person, but at least you’re a person.
We don’t just want to have nice things. We want to have good relationships with those around us. We want harmony goddammit! And we will kick, scream, and squeal until we’re treated like people. And we’re right to do it. And because we already live off free energy from the sun, we don’t just want to be seen as people because it’s the right thing to do. Having someone treat us like people because of “duty” can still feel like an insult. Who wants to be nothing more than God’s way of testing someone else in their faith?
Forget about justice. We want the free lunch, and we’re not stupid or naive for wanting it. We’re all takers at the end of the day. And sure, we can feel bad about this, but think of it another way: did you choose to be here? Did you consent to being born? In some sense, your life is a free gift. But if life is a gift, then it’s no problem if it’s taken from you, is it? If you didn’t get to choose to exist, why should you get to choose when you die?
Life just doesn’t make sense. And many Christians will say, God is the answer. You need God. Sure. But to most Christians, God is not so much the answer, as a way to cover it up. Their god is drapes over a window, or locked treasure chest. And don’t you dare peek and try to actually get to know God and see the light. No, God wants you to remain ignorant. No free gifts. No light. You are meant to walk in darkness. And if you try to understand the world, it’s a sign of your worldliness, or of you trying to become God.
At the end of this post we find ourselves in the beginning. We’re back in the garden of Eden. We’re Pandora with her box. We’re Neo from the Matrix presented with the red and blue pills. Anyone who wants you to know is selling you false hope. Knowledge isn’t freedom. Knowledge is always an info hazard. Knowledge is the loss of innocence.
Jesus said that if you didn’t know, you would have not sin. He’s right. If you discover some evil, and you do nothing, aren’t you somewhat complicit? Sometimes living under a rock is better. Go out into the wilderness. Or, if you’re not that hardcore, just move to the suburbs—almost as good—and just drive into the city for work. Sure, you’ll still see things you’d rather not, but you’ll be in your car, and you should be looking at the road ahead anyways.
And if you do a good enough job at work, you’ll make enough money to send your kids to school where they’ll lose all kinds of innocence. But it’s ok, because it’s out of sight, and you can pretend you don’t know.
But without knowledge, I’d be farming in some rural village, if that. I’d be a hunter-gatherer. I wouldn’t have the means of being cynical. I’d be too busy. I’d try to plant some crops, there would be a drought, and I’d struggle to survive.
How do I wrap this up on a positive note? I dunno. I’ve rewritten this ending a few times and it always ends on a sour note. Great. Thanks for reading. I’m stuck in my head now. I’m self-involved. This is what it’s like to be in this state of mind. You just get stuck and you don’t know how to get out. And trying doesn’t help. How does someone quit smoking or a bad habit? Should you wait for the New Year? Should you wait for an occasion to justify it?
There’s a kind of common disposition in Orthodox monks/saints, but I can’t remember one specific quote at moment. St. Peter of Damaskos comes to mind. Others in the Philokalia. But what you mentioned about wanting to help the poor being selfish + saying the poor should pull themselves up by their bootstraps is also selfish, this is a kind of beginning in prayer. The heart breaks, in it’s desire for Perfection, but the seeming inability and impossibility to reach for it in any way. But that is mysteriously how Perfection is born. Or so I’m told. I wouldn’t know.