Why not pick a side? This is one of those special times in history where you won’t get your head lobbed off for blasphemy. Nobody is going to fire you for esoteric religious beliefs. The average person is not going to look at you weird if you don’t go to church every Sunday. And especially after Covid, my understanding is that churches are the desperate ones. An elder at one of the churches I’ve been to told me it used to be that you’d go to church to show your community how much of an upstanding citizen you were. Those days are gone.
Now is a good time to sink our teeth into the deep existential questions. We’re just a couple innovations from farm-door technology so advanced that an apple can be grown, picked, and shipped to your door and when you open the package, you’re the first set of eyes to take hold of that fruit. This is the kind of magic today’s technology is capable of. It would be a shame to waste this opportunity.
As a proper optimist you would take this opportunity to understand the fundamentals. Don’t do, think, as Zizek would say. In the last few years you might lose friends over who you voted for, but you can sit with a Muslim and discuss religion without having to kill each other. This is a blessing and a curse.
Somehow, we’ve lost the fire for religious conviction. And yet—religion should in theory be your foundation if you believe it. The curse is that we make light of the sacred. Even those trying to get us back to tradition do so in a removed ironic tone. We’re ironic and unserious. We lack purpose.
People often grow conservative as they get older. Our minds calcify. What it means to be left of center shifts and people who started off left-leaning gradually find themselves on the right. We’ve seen this happen with the likes of Dave Rubin, Elon Musk, and Jordan Peterson. Their view was that the left’s shenanigans were too much. But let’s also consider the other view, if only for the sake of argument.
We develop a world view that explains where we are and how we fit into it. Facts that don’t fit become exceptions and corner cases for succeeding generations to resolve. But to the young, the exceptions can appear damaging enough to undermine the entire view.
As an older person, if you took such an approach, you’d lose your goddamn mind. You might be behind the times, but at least your not a crazy person. This is probably a worthwhile tradeoff. Even if you resist calcifying, it’ll come for you eventually, and you might end up a half-boiled egg with runny whites—an incomplete project. I’m afraid of this for myself.
Or, actually, now that I think about it, there’s an entire ecosystem of ways to be wrong. For example, it’s one thing to be esoteric. But if nobody can understand what you’re saying because you’re too busy signaling how esoteric you are and assuming everyone knows what you know, then good luck. But you can also fail by doing the exact opposite and believing that you have the answers and everyone else is an idiot and can’t see the obvious truths. The lesson here is whatever you do, you can fuck it up. And this is another reason why picking sides is often counterproductive.
I wish winning at life was as easy as picking the right horse. But no, you can accidentally overfeed the horse out of an uncontrollable desire to win at all costs. Your horse ends up waddling last to the finishing line. You lean in the other direction and you end up with an overworked horse, and it crawls to the finish line.
This might be a bit of a tangent, but maybe Communism failed so catastrophically because the Russians did it. Everything is backwards in Russia. After communism arrived in China, it somehow started to work—and I mean this literally. Sure, they had many of the same growing pains, but China is now the West’s strongest contender. You give a bad idea to a group of talented people, and they make it better. You give a good idea to capable people, and they’ll find a way to mess it up. Why would communism be an exception? Don’t get me started on how unrealistically idealistic it is. Of course it’s idealistic. It would be irrational to barge on in the face of evidence, but to have a worthy goal out on the horizon is a good thing. We know the Germans are quite capable. Why did they fail? This might have something to do with who they decided to target. They may have picked the wrong master race. If your country is going to get nationalistic and pick a master race, why pick a tiny minority?
Let’s not forget that it means something that Russia has some of the most beautiful women. I came from a slavic country. These women will drag their heels through thick mud. When they come back home, their heels will be twice as heavy from the mud. They will scrub the layers off, shine them, only to take these sparkling heels out into the mud again the next day. Catholic churches are androgynous. Russian Orthodox Churches are decidedly feminine and cute. Russia considers the land to be their mother-land. None of this is a mistake.
If anything, Germany’s experience with fascism is more of an indictment against fascism than Russia with communism. Surely Germany, of all countries, would have figured out how to run a proper authoritarian regime. They didn’t. They flamed out—and quickly. Stalin stayed in power for much longer; the communists stayed in power for much longer. And if Moldbug is to be believed, the United States is currently a communist country. It could be worse—at least we’re not Russian.
One challenge we’re going to face is the next generation is going to grow up with AI. My 4 year old daughter will sometimes ask me things like: “can I see a video of a bee fighting a mosquito? An ice cheetah with wings?” We’ve generated AI images together. Her mental model of what’s possible is very different than mine. Likely, I’ll get older, my mind will calcify, and I won’t be able to give her the kind of life advice that would allow her to be the most successful. If I don’t give her any advice, she’ll be led astray. If I give her the wrong advice, I’ll be the one to lead her astray. We’re creatures of irony. You might think you’re killing it as a parent because you’re teaching your kids your religion, and instilling in them good Christian values. But then your child is Aella. This is not an outcome most Christians expect.
I remember a story where a rabbi saw a boy reading Bertrand Russel, a famous atheist. The rabbi didn’t tell the boy he’s going to hell. The rabbi smiled and said, “it’s good you’re reading him now. It’s better to grow out of Bertrand Russel than to grow into him.” The point is, your kids are going to be curious, and if you try to shelter them from evil, you may end up instilling in them a fire for contrarian thinking that will stick with them for life. And if you don’t shelter them, and your kids end up taking a bad path, you’d always wonder what would have happened if you sheltered them more. Maybe if they didn’t feel like they could escape, and if you taught them the outside world was not just evil, but absolute evil, maybe then they would have stayed in your faith. Who knows—right?
One of the most important arsenals you have as a parent is your credibility. If you lose that, most of your ability to influence is gone. You think you’re standing up against evil, but you’re shooting yourself in the foot. And one of the most surefire ways I’ve noticed people going wrong is with excitement. When someone is excited, watch out. There’s a rapacious greed that comes from frantic energy. The person is possessed and in need of exorcism (figuratively, of course).
God rewards passion. And by passion, I don’t mean the word in the way you might use it in a job interview: “I’m passionate about getting this job.” No, I mean it in the sense of your willingness to suffer.
Escape is key. The left’s version of this is consent. Everything is about consent: sex, trigger warnings, and sexual self-expression. The right’s version of this is limited government. The left is willing to let you take their money as long as you leave their bodies alone. The right is going to tell you what you can and can’t do in the bedroom, but will do so on a tighter budget. However, even the right-wing monarchist Mencious Moldbug has a form of consent built into his system. To him, the right to exit is the only universal human freedom you need. The idea is to model our political world after the corporate one. You don’t get a say in how the company-like country is run, but you can leave. It’s like at-will employment.
In practice, what happens is if you your employment history is too spotty, companies don’t want you. So if you’ve had a string of companies where you tried to bring serious problems to the surface, volunteered effort outside of work hours, then you may end up being marked as a troublemaker, not a team player, and not worth the trouble.
To bring this all around, it’s now a little ironic that when my life started to move south, I turned to Christianity. I was swimming in secular waters, which I grew suspicious of. I began to suspect I was being poisoned. So made a sharp rightward turn to tradition. But in reading the Bible—skeptically—I discovered almost the opposite. Picture this—you have Jesus walking the earth performing miracles, and having 12 followers. However, these closest allies all abandon Jesus at his moment of greatest peril. Peter, denies Jesus to fit in, the rooster crows, realizes, and cries. Previously, Jesus said, to him (who’s name means rock), on this rock, I will build my church. Judas, who sits with Jesus at his last supper, betrays him.
When I started reading the Bible, I expected to get this diatribe on the importance of family. Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, Jesus meant to divide families, and he says so himself:
34 Do not assume that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn
‘a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.
A man’s enemies will be the members
of his own household.’
When conservative Christians speak about teaching the whole Bible without skipping the hard passages, they usually mean the verse about wives obeying their husbands.
Christian ideas are stunning to behold. Jesus is willing to die for the very people who would quickly deny him—imagine that. And he’s willing to side with you when nobody else is will. If anything, my own experience with Christianity was that those who fell from the faith were cast out as untouchables. If you were Christian, you were given chance after chance. But if you left, you hardly existed. It was cruel. Jesus himself was kinder to the outsider than the insider.
When Jesus, the image of the perfect person, suffered, the most vivid moments of his struggle are two-fold. 1) when he cries tears of blood. This is because he desperately does not want to die. This establishes that he’s not a reckless suicidal masochist. And 2) when he cries out “my God my God why have you forsaken me.” That moment sticks in my throat. You have this perfect servant, and even God forsakes him. By the logic of the story, why on earth would someone want to be Christian? This is especially so if you come to Christianity as an atheist who isn’t keen on miracles to begin with. You’re not ready to believe in the resurrection, but it’s not hard to believe that Jesus really did feel separated from God in that moment which is eternally remembered in the symbol of the cross. This is the symbol that endures, not the resurrected Jesus, but the suffering Jesus on the cross—removed even from God.
How can you say you believe Jesus is Lord and carry a cross? So what if a rock band wants to invert the cross? It’s a symbol of a human moment. The primary Christian symbol is not that of an open tomb, a dove, a hand with a hole in it, or of Jesus ascending to heaven. Instead, we get a cross. He is our payment to heaven, our indulgence, our salvation.
By the logic of the story, someone had to pay the price, and it was Jesus. In some sense, we are indebted even though our sin has been paid for. My experience with Christians is they want you to accept Jesus so they could accept you. If you can say Jesus is Lord, they’re willing to work with you. If you don’t, some may even feel a little outraged by your stubbornness to refuse a free gift. But they don’t quite have it. They want you to believe. They’re over-eager to have you take the leap into a premature proclamation of faith. This isn’t Christ-like in the least.
And picking a side, whether it be religious, political, or romantic should be a personal decision. Ultimately, we will fight for what we actually believe, and the less we pressure one another to pick a side, the faster we arrive at the Truth. My biggest beef is with Christians at the moment. They’re too scattered. They can’t resolve their differences. They haven’t gotten their house in order. The divorce rate in their churches is too high. The depth of their thinking is too shallow. Kenneth Copeland’s shadow looms large, and he largely remains unopposed from the inside. The spirit of Judas is chewing through Christianity and consuming it from within.
But then we look on the left, and we see a set of people who are getting along against all odds to such a surprising degree that Christians regularly call it demonic. Many of the most liberal lefties are fans of Jesus, but not of organized religion. They are the real followers. They’re not following an intermediary. They’re unwittingly taking the only correct path there is—through Christ. Their instincts are correct, and it’s the hypocrisy of the church that drives them away. Christians ask for public proclamations of faith, but Jesus saved those with enough faith to touch his cloak in secret. Christians believe in an honest day’s work. Christ told us we’re more precious than ravens who neither sow, nor reap. The church teaches the prosperity gospel. Christians are quick to demonize sinners. Christ loves us in spite of our misgivings.