Epistemic Telos: God as Sadistic Denial

Or how to transition from denial to un-denial.

The way we model the world is inseparable from our desires. The Christian sees God in all; the nihilist sees God in none; the agnostic sees God perhaps as an intangible source of comfort. The utility of God, indeed, is that God is undefinable. We may project onto God whatever fantasies that befit us, and as long as we might coerce ourselves into believing in its order, our religion thus serves its purpose. This purpose is always to assuage uncertainty or angst of some sort, to leave behind fluidity in one zone while maintaining rigidity in another. For instance, God may leave open the possibility of future sublimation—eternal love, salvation—while staunchly denying total abjection. It is this instrumentalism—telic segmentation by the map of the territory—that constitutes the DNA of our epistemic models. Patterns in the phenomena we perceive become metabolised precisely in the manner that befits this DNA, and it is in this fashion that these very patterns lose their coherence with other competing models. This entanglement is the process of epistemic dissipation that I describe in Epistemic Entropy: the irreversible corrosion of the raw utility of a phenomenal pattern. In short, the teleology of an epistemic model encodes its very spectrum of acceptance and denial.

Language

Our epistemology is intricately linked with our language and semiotics. Connotations and wordplay expose the very heart of our cultural telos. In English, we say that someone has passed away, leaving behind the possibility of dignity, of salvage, even of some elusive sense of permanence. Clinical descriptions of mental afflictions—post-traumatic stress disorder, borderline personality disorder—aim to euphemistically sanitise the uncomfortable affective core of what might be exposed by a more honest, visceral description—shell shock, an identity made of broken mirrors. We turn language into our God, nebulous, elusive and all-permitting. Language games, as Wittgenstein might observe, allow us to maintain comforting emotional connotations while perpetually moving the contextual goalposts. So it turns out that “free will”, taken to its absolute limit, is obviously absurd—no one “chooses” where they’re born, who they’re born to, the genetics they’re born with. But this is no trouble: in come the compatibilists, who redefine what it means for one to be “free” while preserving identical associations. And thus, “free will” is saved—thank God—and with it, the preservation of the implied possibility of greater control, unconstrained future fortune, and emotional justification for status games to do with desert. It does not matter that “free will” no longer refers to a true lack of constraint; the linguistic gestalt of “free” maintains some elusive, transcendent, metaphysical quality that magically satisfies whatever emotional impulse must be sated. Deeper coherence is not necessary as long as one is not motivated to look. The conclusion—a relatively high degree of freedom, “meritocracy”—is assumed from the lexical gestalt, and plausible deniability is maintained. By invoking an unfounded, associated implication, the adjective teleologically enforces an epistemic blindness, an unnatural fluidity in a zone more parsimoniously described by rigidity.

Almost all “metaphysics” is a confused language game. It is one of the most potent forms of denial. “Free will” aims to preserve uncertainty when it comes to potential positive outcomes, and reject it when it comes to the maintenance of social norms. It provides an apparent justification for the plight of the downtrodden. The convenient implication of loosened constraint allows one to pretend that if they really wanted to, the poor wouldn’t starve, the rejected wouldn’t be outcasts, and perhaps the Palestinians would not have chosen to be subjected to genocide. Paradoxically, in doing so, we also deny our own agency: we cannot help those who choose their misery, we tell ourselves, when success is just a matter of dedication. The cost of denial is our humanity. Those who dogmatically insist there is no “free will” are little better. Things are the only way they could’ve been, they say tautologically. They cite fancy terms like the maximum power principle to hand-wave away this tautology: “during self-organization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency”, defines H T Odum. In other words, whatever is better at persisting persists. The covert implication, of course, is thus that things cannot change—that perhaps we shouldn’t even try to change. But the truism that short-term domination tends to dominate doesn’t preclude radical shifts in structure, however unlikely. They deny all possibility of the relief of abjection in a self-fulfilling prophecy of despair and abdication of agency. They deny that we consciously shape this process of evolution; that we are not separate. They may seek justification for their inaction, their complicity in harm; or they may simply seek to mitigate the humiliation of desire by dissociating it away. But to relinquish a doomed fight is to turn a probability into a certainty.

“Objective truth” is another of these metaphysical fictions. Lexical gestalts such as “objectivity”, “truth”, “reality” generate an air of certainty and authority. The implication, taken to its extreme, is an observer-independent proposition to which all observers might converge given sufficient deliberation. In short, it is God: a denial of uncertainty, an impassioned appeal to some higher order. The cult of “objectivity” does not abandon their quest for linear, deterministic causality when quantum mechanics abundantly demonstrates that the world is better described in relational probabilities. They do not abandon their quest for fixed, concrete identity—as described by Heidegger’s metaphysics of presence—when the Higgs mechanism suggests that even the most basic of all persistent phenomena are better thought of as the emergent result of patterns that happen to be temporarily invariant under certain transformations. They insist, ridiculously, that an understanding of physics is not necessary for a good metaphysics. They reject that practical truth-seeking is a negotiation with uncertainty, not denial. Instead, they impose upon us their own flattened versions of “objectivity”. Reality, they insist, can be tamed by numbers, charts, graphs. Everything must be described by logical propositions, rigid frameworks that fail, regression analyses that don’t work, studies that don’t replicate. We are, or perhaps should aspire to be—it is not always clear which—totally rational actors, following something called a “Bayesian process” to maximise some vague notion of “utility”. Outside of this framework, we cannot know anything for sure, so we might as well know nothing at all.

We segment away our fear, apprehension, guilt, shame, love, elation, excitement—in short, all that makes us human—as “irrational forces”, all in service of our secular God of “objectivity”, as if a suppression of intense affect must necessarily lead to some higher sublimation. The Cartesian separation of “mind” and “body”, “feeling” and “rationality” is an attempt to deny vulnerability, uncertainty and powerlessness. We pretend in the virtue of “precise language”, as if there is a clear difference between a “vector” and a “function”, or a “field” is concretely defined, or “entropy” is not contextual, or “Hausdorff space” is somehow more precise than “separated space”. We do not consider that feeling can be rational, and that rationality is a feeling—or that affect can encode salience far better than dull speech, as explored by António Damásio in Descartes’ Error.

The autistic cult of rationalism cannot possibly hope to tame reality. Autism is an epistemic disability. Solipsism, scepticism, dogmatism, and deference to authority all variously manifest as a form of collective learned helplessness, refusing to take seriously anything that cannot concretely be confirmed by God himself. We become robots, automata, and we begin to see each other as such. Social ties corrode. This denial of our humanity is the schizoid process of disconnection described by R D Laing in The Divided Self. We maximise “utility”, “output”, “productivity”, “efficiency”. What these words mean, no one can tell you, but there is a general agreement that they must mean something good. “Time” becomes a commodity to conquer, a luxury to make the most of. We must spend every minute maximising utility and productivity. In a process of inauthentic reduction characterised by Heidegger as enframing, all things are framed in terms of instrumental, hedonic, and economic value. This is how we are subjugated; this is how we disempower ourselves. It is a perfect breeding ground for what Sheldon Wolin calls inverted totalitarianism.

The CEO who calls layoffs “rightsizing”, the lover who says “we’re on a break”—they intuitively understand that language is epistemology, and epistemology is language. And as George Orwell observes in 1984 with his oft-cited conceptions of newspeak and doublethink, no one understands this better than fascists. War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. America is still the land of the free, home of the brave, the greatest democracy in the world—and yet, with the Supreme Court legalising bribery and granting the President immunity for all “official acts”, it is clear that the word “democracy” no longer means what it once did. Only the nominal gestalt remains—the imaginal form intact even as the substance is carved away—and thus narrative control persists only in diminished fragments. It is what Baudrillard refers to as hyperreality. A battered and bruised, hypernormalised fiction, as described by Adam Curtis, remains of the original ideals of liberal democracy, the separation of powers and the fair rule of law. This is epistemic telos at work: the government seeks to consolidate control, and the perennially faithful seek to maintain their emotional security. “Democracy” acts as an analgesic, a balm, a tranquiliser. One need not look too deeply: your agency is maintained, your suffrage potent. Your power is not being eroded—how could it? We live in a democracy. Fascists always seek to maintain an iron grip on power through total epistemic, narrative and linguistic control. They often invoke God as the ultimate linguistic gestalt: the definitional nebulousness, the association with omnipotence and omnibenevolence, and the preexisting cultural roots are simply too compelling to resist. It is a fundamental denial of impotence, uncertainty, mortality. In American Fascists, Chris Hedges remarks of the growing Christian right:

Words such as “truth,” “wisdom,” “death,” “liberty,” “life,” and “love” no longer mean what they mean in the secular world. “Life” and “death” mean life in Christ or death to Christ, and are used to signal belief or unbelief in the risen Lord. “Wisdom” has little to do with human wisdom but refers to the level of commitment and obedience to the system of belief. “Liberty” is not about freedom, but the “liberty” found when one accepts Jesus Christ and is liberated from the world to obey Him. But perhaps the most pernicious distortion comes with the word “love,” the word used to lure into the movement many who seek a warm, loving community to counter their isolation and alienation. “Love” is distorted to mean an unquestioned obedience to those who claim to speak for God in return for the promise of everlasting life. The blind, human love, the acceptance of the other, is attacked as an inferior love, dangerous and untrustworthy.

Evolution

Evidently, we are not very good at making sense of the world. Predictions fail, and contradictions abound. Economists project infinite growth; physicists conceive of infinite parallel universes that indicate we can never really die; and so-called “rationalists” concoct fantasies of consciousness uploading into an immortal superintelligence. It can only be reasonably concluded that we did not at all evolve to prioritise truth-seeking. In Denial, Ajit Varki elaborates that with greater reasoning capacity, we evolved self-awareness, and then theory of mind—the awareness of others’ minds. Theory of mind is absolutely crucial for evolutionary social cohesion and competition, but with it inevitably comes the awareness of our own deaths. Naturally, within a decision-making architecture that seeks to mitigate suffering, an awareness of death leads to the possibility of suicide as a permanent solution. To mitigate this, we need the combination of a crippling fear of death and an optimism bias such that we can believe in a reason to continue living. This is the crux of what Varki encapsulates in his Mind Over Reality Transition: reliable map-territory correspondence is only incidentally favoured when it optimises evolutionary persistence.

In Breakdown of Will, George Ainslie elucidates that we have evolved to prioritise short-term reward-seeking and pain avoidance, except in the case of extreme long-term potential stimuli. Immediate survival, as ever, is most important; however, we need some future planning capacity to survive, and thus within this architecture, we need some hope of significant future reward. Those who do not develop such a capacity—or those who have become total outcasts with zero hope of social integration, as described by Durkheim in Suicide—typically select themselves out of the gene pool, either through self-sabotage or suicide. Incidentally, this doubles as a population control mechanism; one must not deny the brutality of evolution. Understandably, one of the primary motivating factors behind long-term planning is permanence: it makes little evolutionary sense to pour a significant investment into a potential reward that might not last for very long. Ephemeral reward is minimised; potentially lasting pain is amplified. This is the basis of the sunk-cost fallacy and loss aversion discussed among other epistemic failures by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow. This persistence scaling operates on multiple spatiotemporal scales: we deny our own death to maintain motivation to persist, and then we deny the death of our tribe through our obsession with legacy. It is often said that a society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit: this contribution to the permanence of the tribe thus acts as a group-level fitness augmentation. These evolutionary teloi—denial of death, optimism bias—cannot be conceived of as so-called “accidents”, but rather adaptive constraints on our epistemic filters.

Our evolutionary denial is not limited to an optimism bias. In The Elephant in the Brain, Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson elucidate the many ways in which we deceive ourselves about our own motivations and impulses in order to deceive others. Backhanded compliments are genuine attempts at kindness; charity donations are never about prestige; education is entirely about teaching critical thought; and I am writing this essay solely to be helpful, and not also at least partially for your validation. Indeed, social norms are necessary for cohesion and trust, but it can be individually advantageous to skirt these norms wherever possible. In fact, small lies are often mutually beneficial: there is no reason to expose small problems to others that are better dealt with alone, and it is often unhelpful to expose deeper motivations that may be hurtful to others. However, it is impossible to fully replicate the way we might act if we truly believed in a lie unless we first believe in the lie. This is the nature of computational irreducibility: second-order simulations of complex processes are always expensive and inaccurate. And thus actors must immerse themselves fully in the world of the characters they play, and mirror neurons have us literally feel the pain of others to construct our empathy.

Evidently, social cohesion would immediately break apart if norms were never upheld and everyone cheated. Thus, we develop feelings of guilt, rejection, shame and unlovability. Through the use of what Robert Axelrod describes as meta-norms, we reward the upholding of norms, and punish bystanders who look aside. Furthermore, we are compelled to generally give others the benefit of the doubt, at least within our in-group, to prevent the spread of a wildfire of paranoia. In A Happy Death, Camus writes: “we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love—first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.” Our egoic project, then—our epistemic telos—becomes one of crafting sufficiently coherent narratives to placate the id such that it does not fear rejection and punishment in face of what Lacan calls the big Other. In short, it is what Harry Frankfurt describes as bullshit: a story intended to persuade without regard for truth, with truth only contributing as an incidental advantage. We lie to ourselves. We repress and negate feelings, thoughts and memories we feel may lead to our exile. When we do not feel loved and secure—when we are overwhelmed with shame and fear—we feel neurotically compelled to conform to our conception of the big Other. Random thoughts of desire or violence that may otherwise be considered just as whimsical and absurd as thoughts of sprouting wings or winning the lottery may be elevated in salience—in extreme cases leading to egodystonic conditions such as harm OCD. Indeed, we have a certain amount of control over our narratives, but our id must feel they are at least somewhat believable; a battered and bruised id will lash out in paranoia, demanding more and more from the ego until it falls into the depths of despair.

Religion and spirituality are evolution’s solution to norm enforcement and maintenance of motivation. They provide a concrete set of rules to follow; a sense of community and purpose; and a promise of a brighter future, some degree of permanence, redemption and order. They are catnip for the id. To temper our anxiety, they provide a sense of belonging and validation, and reinforce our optimism bias by rigidly denying the possibility of total abjection, and fluidly leaving open the possibility of sublimation. Buddhists preach universal compassion, and promise nirvana for those who walk the path; Christians preach repentance, and assure the faithful a place in heaven. Religions affirm our existence: “the more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself”, writes Richard Francis Burton. In the same vein, Susan B Anthony once said: "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." Religions are the glue that hold together societies. Notably, as Héctor A García suggests in Alpha God, Gods are often modelled after a dominant alpha male to which we must show signs of submission—circumcision, burqas, and other such costly sacrifices—and signal in-group loyalty. Sadism is baked into our DNA. God has been used to justify flaying, burning at the stake, genocide. Overall, religions maintain order, enforce cooperation, mitigate neuroticism, and hijack our reward-seeking architecture with promises of future relief.

Our optimism is our lifeline. The total abjection of there being nothing to hope for is too much to bear. And the more insecure we become, the more dogmatically we assert absurdities such as that life is intrinsically desirable, humanity is inherently good, and death is always bad. It is the essentialism criticised by David Livingstone Smith. We may appeal to God, spiritual or secular. We insist that voluntary euthanasia is evil; we must keep people alive in pathetic states of immiseration for as long as possible. Disability is not a hindrance; paraplegics should unequivocally want to live. Life is always full of fluid, positive possibility. And thus we condemn perfectly reasonable cripples like Clayton Atreus to stabbing themselves in the abdomen with a knife in a bathtub. We insist that civilisation can and should expand indefinitely, and we chop down trees, torture animals, and populate our finite planet with billions of humans doomed to crash and burn. This is suicidal beyond death. A measured optimism is distinct from a dogmatic optimism bias. There is always something to be optimistic about, even if it is simply the end of all suffering. Measured optimism at least tries to be realistic; the other is denial. In denying death, we embrace death. This kind of black-and-white splitting is always the result of an implacable id, an epistemic telos of suppressing excess fear and apprehension. In The World As It Is, Hedges elaborates on this process of telic simplification:

In his book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann distinguished between “the world outside and the pictures in our heads.” He defined a “stereotype” as an oversimplified pattern that helps us find meaning in the world. Lippmann cited examples of the crude “stereotypes we carry about in our heads” of whole groups of people such as “Germans,” “South Europeans,” “Negroes,” “Harvard men,” “agitators,” and others. These stereotypes, Lippmann noted, give a reassuring and false consistency to the chaos of existence. They offer easily grasped explanations of reality and are closer to propaganda because they simplify rather than complicate.

Those who are aggressively plunged into an abyss of hopelessness may nihilistically mirror this splitting: life is intrinsically undesirable, humanity is inherently bad, and death is always good. Suicide is admirable; people who birth children are irredeemably evil. Those who claim to be content are either lying or deluded; there is no point in ever trying to feel better. Nothing really matters anyway; there is nothing to gain or lose. Splitting is the only way for them to manage their disappointment and envy. This absurd collapse of nuance is the cruel result of our evolutionarily and culturally degraded capacity to remain content in the moment, to realise that our contentment does not have to be permanent to matter, and to accept that impossible outcomes are still worth fighting for. When we are subjected to immediate misery with no prospect of relief, we are faced with the unbearable conflict of simultaneously wanting to live and wanting to die. This is not a contradiction: as Ainslie describes in Breakdown of Will, we are often better thought of as a network of subagents with competing interests. Suicide results when Thanatos erases every last trace of Eros. This is our prerogative. But Thanatos can only win a Pyrrhic victory.

Akrasia

It is clear that evolution does not have our hedonic interests at heart. But our neuroses go beyond this. Our environment has mutated too rapidly for us to genetically adapt, leading to the exacerbation of a form of self-sabotage variously referred to as akrasia by the ancient Greeks, jouissance by Lacan, and taṇhā by the Buddhists. Our reward systems have been hijacked, cognition overwhelmed by increasing complexity, emotional capacity overwhelmed by greater uncertainty and failing social bonds, and attention spans shortened by our technology—all as described by Sherry Turkle in Reclaiming Conversation. Normally, our id should yell out at our ego when our self-deceptions go too far. But we have not yet evolved a distaste for tobacco, as we have just barely used it for over 10,000 years; we have not yet evolved a resistance to social media, leaving our dopamine and sympathetic systems hijacked; and we have not yet evolved the greater cognitive and emotional capacity required to deal with increasing uncertainty—especially as our “tribes” extend far beyond the cognitive limit imposed by the Dunbar number.

The attachment traumas described by Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score were once adaptive. If we grew up in an unforgiving community, chances are we were never going to escape it, and thus a scarcity mindset was perfectly rational. But this is no longer true. Instead, neoliberalism has given us a generation of motherless children who have grown up to feel no sense of solidarity with anything but the void. Borderline, narcissistic and schizoid tendencies variously result. We become disconnected from our bodies; we lose our interoception, since to need is to be rejected. We enter abusive, toxic relationships, because we imagine it’s the best we can do; our epistemic telos thus becomes one of justifying the toxicity rather than fleeing it. It is often said that it takes a woman an average of seven times to leave an abusive relationship. In our distrust of intimacy, we become variously submissive and controlling. We test each other’s loyalty, because in times of scarcity, it is better to be betrayed now than at some future, critical time. We demand immediate, transactional return. As relentlessly exposed by Andrea Dworkin, Hedges and Gail Dines, sadomasochistic pornography and ersatz sex result as shallow, desperate attempts to feel anything other than the void. We deny the corrosion of our humanity.

Our social ties have rotted. Our economies have hollowed out. Religion has lost its authority, leading to what Nietzsche describes as a sort of despiritualised nihilism. We no longer trust each other. We want love, but we have been conditioned to distrust it. Without the psychological safety of tribal affection and financial security, our psyches have become saturated with fear, and we have lost the capacity to metabolise uncertainty and affect. And so we double down on the cult of denial. We deny the very forces that make us feel vulnerable but alive—whimsy, idiosyncrasy, affection, curiosity, playfulness, intimate exposure of our insecurities—to placate an ever-growing fear of retaliation and manipulation. In place of what Donald Winnicott describes as the true self arises a hollow, defensive facade that seeks to mask the id: a false self, a simulacrum of humanity. If schizoid dissociation is not total, true individuality is replaced with a narcissistic individualism of domination and greed. In a process coined by Gregory Bateson as schismogenesis, we fall into mutually aggregating spirals of defensiveness, apprehension and despair. The linguistic gestalts of “love” and “connection” still elicit ideals of warmth and tenderness, but now refer only to performative ritual, a playact of intimacy between hollow shells. But there is no true intimacy without vulnerability. There is no true love without risk. The very act of compassion forces us to relinquish the power we have over the Other. And so we retreat into neuroticism and paranoia. We create new Gods of “meaning” and “legacy” in an effort to deny all we have lost, as if to love and be loved isn’t enough. In All About Love, bell hooks writes:

When greedy consumption is the order of the day, dehumanization becomes acceptable. Then, treating people like objects is not only acceptable but is required behavior. It’s the culture of exchange, the tyranny of marketplace values. Those values inform attitudes about love. Cynicism about love leads young adults to believe there is no love to be found and that relationships are needed only to the extent that they satisfy desires. How many times do we hear someone say “Well, if that person is not satisfying your needs you should get rid of them”? Relationships are treated like Dixie cups. They are the same. They are disposable. If it does not work, drop it, throw it away, get another. Committed bonds (including marriage) cannot last when this is the prevailing logic. And friendships or loving community cannot be valued and sustained.

Love sustains us. It is the driving force behind our optimism. Those who can no longer believe in the false self’s caricature of love fall into despair. In a last-ditch attempt to maintain a corrupted optimism, they may seek endlessly to fill the hole with money, sex, cars, drugs, social media, vacations, careers, domination, status. As Gabor Maté describes in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, lovelessness is the source of most addiction. They may retreat further into a dogmatic schizoid-avoidant pessimism. Their epistemic telos becomes one of mitigating envy, of justifying their despair. They must believe that love is impossible, that true contentment does not exist. Or as in the fable of The Fox and the Grapes, they pretend that they would never want it anyway. They may cite vapid pop science articles on the hedonic treadmill or Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, ignoring that no Buddhist has ever developed a tolerance to mettā (lovingkindness); and they may aim to fill every moment of their time with empty dopamine chases or domination, casting aside the sublime joy of quiet, undirected being. Their misanthropy becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, a prisoner’s dilemma of schismogenesis. Without the prospect of future salvation, immediate discomfort becomes more and more unacceptable. They amplify what Byung-Chul Han coins a palliative society characterised by algophobia: a pathological fear of pain. Invoking the Gods of “rationality” and “objectivity”, they pretend they are missing out on nothing as the only remaining way to save face.

Those in emotional turmoil often cannot stand silence, because silence means they must face the horror of their fundamental lack. A baseline hypervigilant, traumatic state is associated with dopamine dysregulation, poor attentional control, and excess neural gain, where any potential reward could result in a reduction in uncertainty and blunt the pain. Anything can draw away their attention; anything can be a potential reward or threat; and any sufficient perception of threat or reward may trigger hyperfocus. They perpetually seek more frequent and intense distractions in an effort to return to a barely tolerable baseline, and they do not notice they are being overstimulated, because their default state is one of overstimulation. Motivation becomes sporadic. As understood by Maté in Scattered Minds, lovelessness is the source of most ADHD. Eventually, they may fall into depression as it becomes clear no relief is possible—a lasting evolutionary freeze response to defeat and low social status—and their dopamine system becomes persistently downregulated. In The Agony of Eros, Byung-Chul Han writes:

Depression is a narcissistic malady. It derives from overwrought, pathologically distorted self-reference. The narcissistic-depressive subject has exhausted itself and worn itself down. Without a world to inhabit, it has been abandoned by the Other. Eros and depression are opposites. Eros pulls the subject out of itself, toward the Other. Depression, in contrast, plunges the subject into itself.

Catastrophic dysfunction is the end stage of denial of the Self and Other—the pretence that there is any way out other than to face the void. Pascal once remarked, “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Sadism

Sadism is a denial of love. It is the laziest response to insecurity, a denial of powerlessness that paradoxically disempowers the denier. It is Nietzsche’s ressentiment—hostility born of feelings of inferiority, failure and worthlessness. Hatred is always an attempt to mask fear and abjection. To sadists, love is about transaction, control, power plays. The more they deny love, the more they deny their own death to compensate, and the more they embrace death as a consequence. They are terrified of real love. They do not understand that winning is losing, and losing is winning. The hollowness of dominance is embedded in our DNA: we evolved to seek communion, since paranoia is metabolically expensive. In Too Much and Never Enough, Mary L Trump describes the emptiness of her uncle Donald’s facade; George Bush paints self-portraits depicting him washing off the guilt of the Iraqis he murdered; at the end of The Act of Killing, Anwar Congo retches as he fails to maintain his denial of the horror of the hundreds of killings he brutally carried out. Sadism is not true enjoyment; it is a denial of it. The denial of the humanity of the Self and the Other always leads to sadism, as we flatten each other into fungible tokens. Eros succumbs to Thanatos.

The Buddhists understand this, and preach the practice of terrifying unconditional compassion—rejection and status games be damned. Christians understand this, and tell us to love our neighbour, and to do unto others as we would have done unto us. Yet we take more seriously the academics and apparatchiks that question whether morality can be considered real at all. Those who do not understand love seek to scorn it, as if it is a weakness to care about injustice, poverty, genocide. “Sensitive” is turned into an insult; activism becomes gauche; compassion is dismissed as naive. Only irony, apathy and glib dominance are acceptable. Art, cinema, poetry, when taken seriously, are stripped of their authenticity and beaten into homogeneous submission. No longer can we be seen expressing earnest love. In Letter to Refaat Alareer, Hedges writes:

Killers are trapped in a literal world. Their imaginations are calcified. They have shut down empathy. They know poetry’s power, but they do not know where that power comes from, like an audience left gaping at the deft skill of a magician. And what they cannot understand they destroy. They lack the capacity to dream. Dreams terrify them.

The Israeli general Moshe Dayan said that the poems of Fadwa Tuqan, who was educated at Oxford, “were like facing twenty enemy fighters.”

Art that once encouraged us to face ourselves has been replaced by art that distracts, art that validates, art as commodity. In place of songs like All You Need Is Love by The Beatles, we are left with increasingly narcissistic anthems such as Starboy by The Weeknd. No healthy culture would elevate lyrics like these to the top of the music charts:

I’m tryna put you in the worst mood, ah
P1 cleaner than your church shoes, ah
Milli point two just to hurt you, ah
All red Lamb’ just to tease you, ah

Defenders of such lyrics deny the degradation of our capacity to love, the metastasising violence of our culture. It’s just an ironic performance, they say—a harmless fantasy, a self-aware parody. They ignore that humour is the vector of normalisation, a shift in the spectrum of what is acceptable in daily life. They desperately mock songs like Stephen’s Crossfire and Sincerely that dare to look injustice in the eye. The words we consume, the fantasies we create—they reinforce the very epistemic models and neural wiring that validate them, until our hollowness calcifies into sadistic stone.

In a culture of sadism, criticism blends seamlessly into insult, until insult is all that is left. Constructive criticism is power-with: at its best, it is an endeavour to seek mutual clarity and solidarity. In contrast, insult is decidedly power-over: a cruel attempt at domination driven by sadistic insecurity. The more overwhelmed our id, the more the ego flattens and simplifies. In reality, nothing is all good or all bad. Not science, not life, not the objectively terrible poem you wrote in seventh grade. But when our egoic narratives are threatened and just barely holding together, we instinctively lash out in an inchoate rage. We deny nuance, ambiguity, the beliefs of the Other, their humanity. In a video uploaded by Fox News, commentators eclectically describe Bruce Springsteen’s criticism of President Trump as a “cry for relevance”, “so tone-deaf” and “ass-backwards”. There is a remark that he should “cry a little harder”. In nearly seven minutes, the only concession they can make is that he’s a “legend” in the music industry, and that he’s made some “good songs”—although Bob Seger “smokes him”. In nearly seven minutes, they cannot find a single moment to empathetically concede the frightening effect of Trump’s actions on a significant percentage of Americans. As those who once fought for Eros relinquish to the God of “objectivity”, Thanatos takes over. In The World As It Is, Hedges writes:

But in the game of American journalism it is forbidden to feel. Journalists are told they must be clinical observers who interpret human reality through their eyes, not their hearts—and certainly not through their consciences. This is the deadly disease of American journalism. And it is the reason journalism in the United States has lost its moral core and its influence. It is the reason that in a time of crisis the traditional media have so little to say. It is why the traditional media are distrusted. The gross moral and professional failings of the traditional media opened the door for the hate-mongers on Fox News and the news celebrities on commercial networks who fill our heads with trivia and celebrity gossip.

When a cultish ideology of sadism is all we have in the midst of decay, we latch onto it like a drowning man clutching at a straw.

Un-denial

Our civilisation is collapsing. We turn a blind eye to the signs at our own peril. We ignore the genocide in Gaza at our own peril. We ignore climate change at our own peril. We ignore COVID at our own peril. We ignore the darkness and cowardice within all of us—as demonstrated by Stanley Milgram and Solomon Asch—at our own peril. Everything is perfectly fine, and whatever doesn’t specifically affect us right now doesn’t matter—can’t matter. Or perhaps if we just hurt the right people, prosperity will be restored. We ignore that what can happen to others can happen to us—that we have a personal interest in the suffering of others, that Thanatos does not discriminate. As Morris Berman explores in The Reenchantment of the World, and as the Buddhists have already known for millennia, reality, in truth, is not split hermetically into the Self and the Other. Indeed, in destroying the Other, we destroy the Self.

Those who are faced with the unbearable progression of collapse often resort to magical thinking as a last-ditch, schizophrenic strategy to restore order to the world. In America: The Farewell Tour, Hedges writes:

Civilizations over the past six thousand years have the habit of eventually squandering their futures through acts of colossal stupidity and hubris. We are not an exception. The physical ruins of these empires, including the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Ottoman, Mayan, and Indus, litter the earth. They elevated, during acute distress, inept and corrupt leaders who channeled anger, fear, and dwindling resources into self-defeating wars and vast building projects. These ruling elites, consumed by greed and hedonism, retreated into privileged compounds—the Forbidden City, Versailles. They hoarded wealth as their populations endured mounting misery, hunger, and poverty. The worse it got, the more the people lied to themselves and the more they wanted to be lied to. Reality was too painful to confront.

Societies in acute distress often form what anthropologists call “crisis cults,” which promise recovered grandeur and empowerment during times of collapse, anxiety, and disempowerment. A mythologized past will magically return. America will be great again. The old social hierarchies, opportunities, and rules will be resurrected. Prescribed rituals and behaviors, including acts of violence to cleanse the society of evil, will vanquish the malevolent forces that are blamed for the crisis. These crisis cults—they have arisen in most societies that faced destruction, from Easter Island to Native Americans at the time of the 1890 Ghost Dance—create hermetically sealed tribes informed by magical thinking.

Further, in American Fascists:

There are at least 70 million evangelicals in the United States—about 25 percent of the population—attending more than 200,000 evangelical churches. Polls indicate that about 40 percent of respondents believe in the Bible as the “actual word of God” and that it is “to be taken literally, word for word.” Applied to the country’s total population, this proportion would place the number of believers at about 100 million. These polls also suggest that about 84 percent of Americans accept that Jesus is the son of God; 80 percent of respondents say that they believe they will stand before God on the Day of Judgment. The same percentage of respondents say God works miracles, and half say they think angels exist. Almost a third of all respondents say they believe in the Rapture.

Those who finally manage to face the collapse do not often respond with clarity. They retreat into hollow shells of schizoid defeatism or sadistic narcissism. They alone will be prepared; they alone will survive as everyone else tears each other apart for meagre scraps. They do not understand that it is better to die loved and loving than to eke out a few more years in paranoid squalor. Our elites indulge in a final splurge of hedonism; they cut down trees to make way for a climate conference; they make jokes at our expense.

The id seeks narrative stability to confirm its social viability—that it is safe, loved and lovable. We must return to small, functional egoic narratives to provide stability and mitigate distortion of truth. As Paul Graham notes, as do Lacan and Buddha and a multitude of other thinkers, the bulkier our identity, the more fragile it becomes—and the more neurotically we defend our telos in fear of abject exposure. In The Scout Mindset, Julia Galef writes about motivated reasoning, or what she calls a soldier mindset:

We talk about our beliefs as if they’re military positions, or even fortresses, built to resist attack. Beliefs can be deep-rooted, well-grounded, built on fact, and backed up by arguments. They rest on solid foundations. We might hold a firm conviction or a strong opinion, be secure in our beliefs or have unshakeable faith in something.

Arguments are either forms of attack or forms of defense. If we’re not careful, someone might poke holes in our logic or shoot down our ideas. We might encounter a knock-down argument against something we believe. Our positions might get challenged, destroyed, undermined, or weakened.

Galef notes that a scout mindset requires the ability to remain emotionally unfazed in face of narrative collapse. Contradiction must become almost desirable—an opportunity to improve our worldview—rather than a loss, a source of fear and embarrassment.

As Elisabeth Kübler-Ross notes in On Death and Dying, it is almost impossible to rush someone out of denial when it is the only lifeline they have. We cannot pull them out by casting aside their very real fears and insecurities as irrelevant and “irrational”. There is no equation or framework we can use to calculate the “optimal strategy”; we cannot invoke the old Gods of rationalism to resolve the very problems they created. It is difficult not to deny death when we have never felt loved—when we are still holding on to the desperate hope that perhaps we might have mattered. We must once again nurture the old ideals of love and compassion. We must shed our false selves, again and again, and build more minimal, truly lovable identities, accepting of our vulnerability. We must create a world in which we can believe that despite our darkness, we are still loved and lovable, worth more than our worst moments.

We must internalise in our souls that all creatures deserve to be free of suffering—the only egoic narrative that is not susceptible to self-cannibalism and decay, as the Buddhists realised thousands of years ago—and with our newfound courage, learn to update our narratives when they no longer reliably correspond with reality. We must learn that it is enough to find peace in the moment—that it does not have to be permanent for it to matter. No one undergoing a genocide will tell you that their suffering is insignificant because it will eventually end. We must consciously adjust our frameworks of value, and we must reclaim the art of conversation. And we must do all this knowing we will fail. In America: The Farewell Tour, Hedges writes: “we do not become autonomous and free human beings by building pathetic, tiny monuments to ourselves. It is through self-sacrifice and humility that we affirm the sanctity of others and the sanctity of ourselves.”

With the strength provided by a new cultural mythos of communion, we must learn to grapple with our impermanence—and even accept the comfort that it provides. All suffering ends. I will not glorify death. I would love to pretend that I want to die, that I want humanity to end, but there is an ancient part of you that always knows when you are deceiving yourself. It is sad that we are born to die. To deny this is to deny our humanity. We all have a God. Mine is not a benevolent one. In my rebellion against God, I commit acts of kindness. But ultimately, He lets us go. And for now, that is enough.

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