The human mind is a broken difference engine, we have built a broken society as a result, and as usual I have a theory that might explain why.
The usual approach for a philosophy piece would be to try to establish both the credential of the theorist, I have none, and the validity of the theory, I don’t have that either. I am not a researcher, nor am I a psychologist, but I believe in research, and I have some faith in psychology as a discipline. I am going to speculate, to guess, and as always I am willing to be wrong and be argued with. Bring it…
The reason I started with the opening statement is that we are in fact a difference engine, we measure most things based on how we experience them. I’ll give you an example; an African meets an Eskimo on a street in London, the African thinks it’ rather cold, but the Eskimo thinks it’s rather warm, the reason is that their estimation of the temperature is based on what they are accustomed to. Which one is correct? We can say only if we create a scale, and define on that scale exactly where warm starts and cold ends, but not otherwise. What most of us are doing is saying that it is warmer, or colder, not that it is warm or cold, so a difference. Scientifically it may be too warm or too cold, but only if we need it to be below or above some nominal temperature for something else to happen, like to have water in the correct form for us to achieve our purpose. Just like it would be no use to try to carve an ice sculpture with water at room temperature, it would be just as useless to try to fill the kettle with a block of ice or a cloud of mist. Broken, in the sense that we all disagree on what we measure, we don’t disagree on how long a meter or a yard is anymore since we have standardised those, yet we can still disagree on how to engineer a domicile using them.
The same can be said for the disagreements between those that worship what is demonstrably (the Bible and the Quran are plagiarisms of the Torah) the very same deity, differently mediated. Being that the thing they, the followers, disagree on is not the deity but it’s desires of how those who worship should live and have power to organise their societies. Muslims believe that they are the pious followers of God/Allah and they therefore are entitled to do certain things to everyone who isn’t one of them, and often to the number among them that are not pious enough. Jews believe that they are the favoured people of God/Yahweh because they have suffered at the hands of others who were not persuaded that society should be structured the way their book says, they also believe that they have a land entitlement based on the words their ancestors wrote on behalf of their deity, in their book. Christians believe that their deity suffered for them by becoming mortal and being sacrificed to themselves therefore they are absolved from the original sin of their most ancient ancestors (A&E).
But why does this matter, on to the theory I have…
Each manifestation of each religion makes certain bold claims, assumptions that the world should be configured by them, under a warrant granted by their deity, who they seem to be able to know the will of because their ancestors wrote a book detailing interactions that cannot be verified, and schisms in the laws of physics. To achieve this they use the two forces available to them, violence if they have the resources, and persuasion if they do not. Violence is the one that has the greatest immediate effect on the greatest number of people, we can see this historically, every empire has known it, and used it to great result. So we must assume that violence is intrinsically within people in the first place for it to be summoned so readily by highly motivated leaders and the writers of religious books (those that wish to be powerful). Each religiously motivated person would be no threat to other persons if they didn’t want something, proliferation, an adherence to their interpretations of the book that provides them with something like power, or the false comfort of having their perverted morality in company that validates it. But is it true that we are violent as a species, or do we learn violence as part of becoming a component of a society?
Humans all over the world teach their children to manifest violent behaviour through games and media. Sports are not only good for the physical body but they are competitive and aggressive, and a lot of children’s TV programming has violence in it, examples of which are the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers, Action Man, the A-Team, I could go on. The thing these shows/games/stories/sports have in common is that they teach young impressionable minds that the solution to any major issue is effort, commitment, unyielding belief, aggression, and the expression of justifiable violence, and so it is no surprise that these kids grow up to support, enact, or at the very least be indifferent to, the occurrence of violence. The narrative is usually that there are people, or is a person, who is evil, who desires to control the lives of others, or intends to profit from their losses. But in truth what will the hero, the child that grows up believing in this story, be, other than a protector of the common dogma, the power base that lays behind the way society is currently structured in their adulthood? And is the challenge presented by those person/s, who are portrayed as challenging the current structure of society, always wrong? One could contend that maybe the purpose of indoctrinating children early into the idea of justifiable violence is in itself a counter-revolutionary process, just like patriotism is the virtue of the vicious and tends to be blinded from reason.
I think that is worth thinking about, and asking the question if teaching children violence at a young age, and then manifesting what they are told is justifiable, warranted, valid violence for what they are told is their behalf or for the good of society as defined by those that have power, and for the reasoning that it protects their way of life, is actually a well thought out tactic, then who is the beneficiary of that tactic? I think it may be the very same people that Owen Jones and others have referred to as “The Establishment”, but I have no way of proving this. What I will say is that I believe that nothing in a society that is so subjected to scrutiny, measured, planned, with this much surveillance, and with this much propaganda and marketing, happens by accident. What does happen is the result of a mass manipulation of a majority (just enough) of the populous by the mighty, the motivated, those with resources, and those with conviction. Why would any society be allowed, by those that have the ability to make it otherwise, to be otherwise? Why would the powerful shape the education of children in the way that they do through a media that they own and run, toward violence in one program and then compliance in the next? We might at this point contend that film ,media, and news is contrived to be thematically pro-dogma, pro capitalist, pro libertarian, and rarely contains any arguments to the contrary.
I recently re-watched the film Se7en, in it a zealot follows a Christian story based interpretation of the will of god as written of in various parts of the bible, then Thomas Aquinas, then Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales. He enacts gods mandated revenge on those that he sees as sinners, but in the film he is the bad guy. My question at this point is that if he is expressing the will of his deity in physicality rather than in rhetoric alone, then why is he not, to Christians at least, the hero of the movie? Read your religious books people, the Jewish god wants all homosexuals to be killed along with those they perform acts of homosexuality with, that is unless they are unwitting participants (accidental homosexuality?), Muslims echo this also, as do a lot of Christians. I once had Jehovah’s witnesses call at the door for a chat, and just to make them feel a little uncomfortable, and admittedly to amuse myself somewhat, I told them my neighbours were a married gay couple and asked if they were going to kill them, shall I participate also, do I have to do it alone, and by what method we would dispatch them from this mortal coil? As you might expect they had no answer, because to answer either way condemned them as immoral, or their book as.
Huxley wrote a book in the early part of the 20th century called Brave New World, in it he speculates on an ordered society where sexualisation is a normal and state controlled part of a child’s development, done as a process of removing all the difficulties that arise during human development and sexual frustration. This is to eliminate deviancy, frustrated sexual desire arising and triggering bad thoughts towards other sexual beings, the sort of thing we see in our society with the InCels (involuntary Celibate persons who manifest a deep resentment to those that they think are denying them their right to sexual endeavour). It is speculated, and I have read, that long ago nuns might masturbate the male children in their charge to relieve them of their tension and help them to sleep, as if a primitive method to treat ADHD. This sounds abhorrent, inappropriate and kind of icky to us now. Then it maybe had purpose, and because it was deemed to be being done by the pious (who had defeated the demon of desire, supposedly) it may have been considered fine. Note: I cannot research this because google is ever watching and will flag me as some sort of deviant that requires monitoring, I did try and immediately encountered both a warning and a suggestion where to seek help – this is another part of the process of closing down what can be known, I Mean I get it yeah, but I just wanted to potentially verify a historically recoverable fact rather than maybe quote something that was hearsay.
Now the reason I have gone in this, what may seem a strange at this point, direction, is that sex is such a dangerous thing isn’t it? Well no, it’s not actually. Sex is a healthy, evolutionarily useful, and fun thing to be doing. It almost has no downside if, and only if, enjoyed by people who are in full capacity of their faculties and are willing participants that have not been deceived or manipulated. So why then is the enjoyment of two persons, or more, making love or giving and receiving physical pleasure for only that purpose, not in any way portrayed in the media that young people absorb? Yet violence is abundant and acceptable? Could it be that in a society where there was no jealousy, frustrated sexual desire, tortured sexual identity, we might have less potential for violence, and therefore be less useful to the powerful, who may need anger and frustration to be just abundant enough to be useful? Two men have an argument in a pub, the subject is irrelevant but the result is that they fight about it. One emerges victorious, but has this validated his position? If so then might has right, that means that the ideology of the mightiest country is the correct ideology, or the religion that holds the most power, the most wealth, has the largest portfolio of real estate, and can command the greatest number of adherents, is the one that is correct. Now the idea is that is bandied about is that persons come into the fold because they are persuaded that said religion is the correct one, but accepting this indicates both a deep misunderstanding of history as well as a deep naivety concerning how religions change as they gather followers.
A religion starts as an idea in the mind of one person, it then captures those persons that see it as useful to them in the sense of power as well as those that are seeking something they cannot describe or define, answers they wish to find in the teachings (and they will find them no matter how much they have to torture the narrative). What it does while its numbers are small is masquerade as a cowering and humble object of liberation, espousing love and peace, this is likely because it finds itself within a minority that is dominated by a previous system of belief. When it gains enough power it reveals its intentions, to dominate and rule and restrict. We can see this in each of the Abrahamic trajectories, where the priest appeals to the slaves with a rhetoric that appears to free them, only for them to agree to another form of enslavement at a later point.
Russel contended a teapot, floating in space, undetectable to all human made machinery. He then challenged anyone to question his faith in the existence of the teapot as a way of saying prove that there is no teapot. The existence of a teapot in the minds of the followers of the teapot was theirs to prove if they wished to have others also believe in it. Just like the existence of anything unproven, merely speculated or imagined, has a burden of proof that lies with those that have faith in its existence. The teapotters we will call them, build a system of morality around the teapot, they imagine it a flawless being that pre-dated the universe it now floats within. The teapot has wisdom beyond that of man, it likely created man so that it’s greatness could be known. our teapot lord has agency, it wants something from us, for us to refrain from touching ourselves or touching others without first making eternal commitments to them, and it wants us to only touch one other of us. A back story is created, one where the creator needs the created beings to provide money to those that speak on their behalf, because they must live in sprawling mansions and travel the world on private jets. Factions splinter from the original teapottters, forming new groups that modify the teachings of the tea pot, imagining a more benevolent teapot in some cases, and in others a more capricious one. There are wars against those that wish not to follow the teapot cause, people strap explosives to themselves and rush into crowded markets to dispatch as many of the non believers to the land of eternal tea. Land promised to the teapotters, in the book the older teapotters wrote, is fought over and occupied. Families fall out about the materials the teapot is made from, some say it is stripped pattern others say dots. Political positions are granted to those in the robes of the teapot without elections and they lobby for changes to human laws, often restricting land ownership. Charities raise money to educate poor people in foreign nations on the ways of the teapot, offering food as incentive.
None of what I have written about the teapot religion(s) is any more ridiculous than what you learned in primary education, it just doesn’t have the numbers yet.
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