Category: Creating Reality Page 4 of 6

A reader wrote me to say this article had been helpful to them. Given that the pandemic and self-isolation is ongoing, I thought it would be worth putting back up. (Originally published March 2, 2020.)

There are a lot of guides for this going around, so I’m going to skip most–but not all–of the more obvious advice. You know how to watch shows online, play games, and read books. Catch up on all that reading!

Problems fall into three broad categories: lack of people, other people, and emotional self-regulation. I’ll speak briefly on the first two, but this article is mostly about learning to create your own emotions on demand.

The first issue is if you’re by yourself. People, even most introverts, do need human contact. Isolation is harmful, and long periods of it show as brain damage. The internet isn’t much of a substitute, but as much as it is, make an effort: Don’t stick to text. Get on voice or even video and voice. The more channels you have, the better. I’ve had people I haven’t talked to in ages reaching out to me, this is a good time to reconnect to old friends and relatives you like. Even better if you can do something online together–games or puzzles or whatever. Set up a camera to show the kitchen and talk while you cook, etc.

The second issue is you’re with other people: People are great, but people also suck, and even if you like someone being in the same place as them for two or three weeks when you’re used to seeing them only the evening and the morning can get on your nerves. At the extreme end, I’ve seen anecdotal reports from police that domestic violence calls are increasing.

This is easiest to handle if you’re honest with each other than you need some alone time. Have the conversation, be clear it doesn’t mean you don’t like or love the other person, and consider even scheduling both alone and together time. Some people won’t need this, we all know best friends and couples who love being in each other’s pockets, but if that isn’t you, it doesn’t mean you aren’t real friends or don’t love each other.

The third issue is emotional self-regulation. Most of us have routines, things we do every day. Get up, coffee, light breakfast, drive to work, work, chat with co-worker, have lunch, work a bit more, goof of on the internet, etc, etc. We’ve figured out routines that keep us mostly in the same set of emotional spaces throughout the day. This is like walking with a cane: You’ve set up mood assists throughout the day, week, and year.

When you lose that routine, you lose those assists. You’ve been walking with a cane: Leaning on it, threatening kids on your lawn, and suddenly a dog thinks its a stick and races away and it’s gone.

So you need to learn how emotionally self-regulate without so many assists or you need to find new assists.

Write down things you love doing during the day that you can do at home. Those are your assists. When your mood is low, look at the list and do one of them.

To emotionally regulate without assists you have to accept that a lot of your moods can be directly controlled. I’m not saying it’s always easy, but it’s mostly not easy because you never learned how; it’s not something our society trains us to do.

Let’s say you want to feel loving. Stand up, close your eyes, and imagine a child you love or a puppy. They’re mad glad to see you, and dash to you, and throw themselves into your arms. Open your arms in a huge hug, then mimic hugging them. Imagine it as best you can.

Practice this both with the physical movements, and entirely in your mind, until you can do it whenever you want and bring up that feeling.

Say you want to feel excited or gleeful. This is an arousal emotion, and can be used to change fear into something positive. Open your eyes as wide as you can, concentrating on lifting them up, and grin! Think of something exciting: Jumping out of an airplane with a parachute, jumping over a wall, playing frisbee with your dog, that time you snuck into some place you shouldn’t have and it was a gas, the first time you learned about something you loved (I remember how excited I was when I first read D&D books in the seventh grade), or remember bombing down a hill on your bike or a toboggan.

The feeling you’re looking for is WHEEEEEE!

When I do this, I often remember the TV show Pinky and the Brain. It always starts with Pinky asking, “What are we going to do today, Brain?” To which Brain replies, “Same as every day! Take over the WORLD.” I say that out loud or mentally.

Any emotion you can normally feel can be activated in this way: Imagine the situation, and either mimic the physical sensations of it happening, or feel them in your imagination. Ideally do both.

So find a memory or experience that reliably brings up the emotions, and watch your body as it moves into that emotion. What does it feel like? What is the face doing? The body? What are you thinking?

Once you know what it feels like, and what the change feels like, you can learn to bring it under conscious control.

There’s nothing wrong with using props here, especially in the beginning. If a piece of music reliably brings up the mood, use it. Just be aware as the emotion arises, then try and do it without the prop later.

Like most skills, there’ll be fumbling. New skills take time. Keep at it. You’ve got plenty of time and this is a chance to learn a skill that will make your life immeasurably better long after social distancing is done.

(If readers like this article, I may put together a post on emotional self-regulation while dealing with other people. Other people can be the greatest help or hindrance, but working together in this way is the among the greatest experiences in life.)

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

How to Protect Yourself from Doomscrolling & Bad News

By Ian Welsh

On November 18, 2020

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This is an excerpt from a section in my upcoming book, Construction of Reality on how to change one’s personal reality. I hope it will help some readers deal with the current media barrage.

Emotional Performance

We discussed this before, how when objects we identify with, whether people, material objects (holy books, flags, your car), or ideas (the Bill of Rights, the Prophet’s words) are treated in ways we see as bad or good, we have an emotional reaction.

Thousands of miles away, perfect strangers are hurt, or do something we like, and we react. A flag is burned, a Koran desecrated, a bombing goes off, and we have emotions.

We have those emotions in large part because we believe we SHOULD have them. We believe that to not have them makes us bad people. “What sort of person isn’t upset when a bomb goes off in the London Subway/someone burns a flag/a dog is hurt?” etc.

We react because to not react, in our minds, makes us a bad person. It makes us not of the tribe. Remember, the tribe is whoever we share an identity with. In the distant past, that might have included ancestors and Gods and stories about our tribe. Today it is our ideology, our religion, our race, our nation, and so on.

But the mechanism is the same.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

And if a tribe’s identity was attacked, its beliefs attacked, that means the tribe was attacked, and if you didn’t react emotionally, other members of the tribe will notice that and they’ll distrust you. And if they distrusted you, that near the state of nature, well, that might go badly for you.

So these sorts of reactions are built deep into the human psyche. To not react to violations of the tribe’s identity, ideology, or to the harm of fellow tribe members is dangerous to you.

But that near the state of nature, the tribe could be under a hundred people. Maybe a thousand or two in extended tribal groups.

Not millions or billions of people.

Outrages, harm, and good events, came when they came, and were immediate; in your presence or in the presence of the person telling you about them.

They weren’t coming at you in an incessant drumbeat, from people you don’t know, about people you don’t know, all day long, from an endless well. In a world of seven billion people plus with instant communication, there’s always an outrage or atrocity.

These endless pinpricks jerk us around, never allowing us to relax, and our identities and ideology are constantly reinforced by atrocity and tragedy.

Identities and ideologies, I remind you, that are not intrinsic to you, and generally not chosen.

So to start dis-identifying, you need to break yourself of this sort of emotional performance.

Read the following and return to it often.

Feeling bad about a situation you are not in and which you can do nothing about, hurts you and doesn’t help anyone else.

If you are angry at a terrorist attack a thousand miles away — or a war, or poverty, or anything — that anger is bad for you. It kicks adrenaline into your body, keeps you in a state of arousal (not the good type, sorry) and causes stress.

And it isn’t helping anyone else.

So don’t do it. Start breaking the cycle. Make it a rule that if you can’t do anything about a situation, you won’t get upset about it, won’t worry about it, and so on. Do whatever you’re going to do, then stop reacting to it. Or decide you’re going to do something, and once the decision is made, don’t think about it until the time comes.

“Tomorrow, I’ll take some food to the food bank.”

Great, do that tomorrow, meanwhile stop feeling bad.

This is moral. This is ethical. Hurting yourself and helping no one is bad. It is immoral. So don’t do it.

This doesn’t mean don’t be empathic when you’re with a mate who’s suffering (or even with a stranger), but put it down when you leave. Help, but don’t carry the emotion with you.

This is the right thing to do practically and morally.

Break this bond. At first, it will seem impossible, but if you practice each time such situations come up, you will eventually find yourself calmer and calmer and less reactive.

You will also be more effective, because you will no longer believe that “thoughts and feelings,” absent action, do anything for people who aren’t in your presence.

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This is a reprint: It was originally published Nov 8, 2018, but I think people need it again & there are a lot of new readers.

The “System” Did Not Appear Ex Nihilo

By Ian Welsh

On July 13, 2020

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Last week I wrote an article lampooning the idea that people are only following incentives and therefore are not bad people.

Let’s spell this out clearly.

The system, whatever the system is, whether it is New Deal capitalism, Stalinist communism, English high feudalism, neoliberal capitalism, or French late medieval feudalism, is a creation of humans.

Our system is always a choice.

It doesn’t feel like a choice to you as an individual, because it is a collective choice which weights a very few individuals’ preferences much higher than yours. Not being Barack Obama (who had a choice to end neoliberalism) or FDR (who did choose to create a new type of capitalism) or Khrushchev (who created a different type of communism, recognizably different from Stalinism–and much more pleasant to live in), you have never had much of a choice.

So, being weak and only one person, to you the system feels like a force of nature or God, given, not a man-made construction.

But the system is always made and is always the result of choices. Sometimes, individuals at key junctures get to make a choice or a difference, and most people only make choices as part of large groups. But it is a choice.

Even within a system, different results are produced. English feudalism was far kinder than French feudalism, with far more free men and far fewer villeins or serfs. England produced common law and even non-free men and women had rights. Russian serfdom by the end of the Czars was known for its cruelty, but it wasn’t always thus, and so on and so forth.

More recently, and if not within your memory (though it is within my memory), then certainly within the memory of people you know, the previous form of capitalism running the US and most of the “free” world produced the following results:

steadily increasing incomes after real inflation was measured;
steadily decreasing share of income being made by the richest in society;
steadily increasing prices (but slower than wages).

It did all those things because it was designed to do those things. A choice was made in 1933, and made again pro-actively every four years after that to keep doing it. After a while, people became wishy washy about its continuation. You can trace it in stages: the post-war Congress weakening unions, Truman deciding to keep the war time state running, Kennedy deciding to lower top taxes, qualified immunity in the 60s, Nixon deciding to start the war on drugs, and so on.

But it didn’t really end until Reagan. Reagan was a choice, that’s why there were elections. He had been worked for, hard, by various rich people who could see that the current system was slowly siphoning away their power, and they found, with racism and the fear engendered by the oil shock crises, enough of a wedge to get a voting majority of Americans onside.

Then they systematically changed how the system operated so that it would produce:

stangnant income for the majority of the population (really decreasing if inflation were properly measured);
steadily increasing share of income and wealth controlled by the wealthiest in society;
steadily decreasing prices of production of goods. At first some of this was passed on, but most of it was kept as profit.

Neoliberal capitalism produced different results from New Deal capitalism because it was designed to do so. It had different incentives, to use econo-speak.

To say “people just follow the incentives” is driveling idiocy when dealing with large social matters, because in large social matters, the incentives are dependent variables; they are chosen by the leadership and the mass of the people (who, yes, do have power in large enough groups–Reagan was not possible if enough Democrats hadn’t defected, they were called the “Reagan Democrats”).

Nor are people ex-nihilo. We are shaped by the society we live in. Reagan’s revolution could not have happened while the Lost Generation still had large numbers because the Lost Generation remembered not just the Great Depression, but the roaring 20s. Knowing that the wealthy had caused the Great Depression, most Lost believed in keeping the rich poor. Those who came afterwards, not properly remembering the 20s, did not feel this in their gut, and they were willing to sell out.

Neoliberals said, “You can have a suburban home, away from the blacks, and we’ll spike the value of housing and stocks, so you’ll be rich, and you won’t even have to work for it.” Sub Voce: “Because you’ll get it for doing nothing, you won’t care about wages, which we’ll crush.”

More than this, a system selects for people who will do what it requires. You cannot join many gangs without murdering someone first. You cannot be in power in DC, or almost any state capital, if you are not onside with crushing wages and making the rich richer. You will not be allowed in power. You will not want power, because you will quickly find out that you can’t do what you want, you can only do evil.

The system doesn’t so much turn people evil as it selects for evil. The “incentives” don’t work on everyone, what matters is that, if they don’t work on you, you don’t get into power. Or, if you somehow fluke in (like Corbyn) you don’t stay in power. You won’t compromise enough.

People worked hard to create neoliberalism. Once they were in power, they worked hard to create a system which excludes those who don’t want to crush wages and make the rich richer. The rules of the system, the incentives, were created by men and women and are maintained by men and women.

They are not unchallenged, but so far every challenge has lost. Corbyn was a challenge. Sanders was a challenge. There have been other challenges. They all lost. This was true of every challenge to the New Deal Order from 1936 to 1976. All challenges lost. It looked unbeatable.

One day, the New Deal Order lost. One day Neo-Liberalism will lose. The questions are only, “When?” and “To what?”

Hitler, Mussolini, and Lenin defeated older orders too.

So, the people who run the US and the developed world are almost all very bad people. They were selected to be very bad, and they also worked very hard to ensure that only evil people could get power, because only evil people will do what their system requires and it is the system that makes them powerful and rich. (Reminder: Nancy Pelosi is worth $120 million.)

The systems selects for evil, the system was created, and is maintained, by people who worked and are working hard to make sure it selects only evil people to run it.

Just like Soylent Green, the system is people.

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Who Gets to Be Violent and Why?

By Ian Welsh

On June 4, 2020

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The people who need to a good shit-kicking are most politicians, CEOs, and senior civilians.

Well, and cops, obviously.

And they need to know the cops can’t protect them from another one.

The President, the mayor of New York, the Governor of New York, almost everyone who works for the Federal Reserve, all senior Wall Street Executives, every senior executive at Google and Facebook, every executive at a private equity firm is on that list. (Even if they are personally “good,” they work to make evil more powerful.)

Yeah, this is the Rubicon, shit we’re not supposed to actually say. Powerful people routinely arrange to have weak people (98 percent of the population) killed, beaten, impoverished, and effectively enslaved by debt and fear of debt.

But the weak are told that if they resist all the things done to them under the threat of violence (and it’s all under the threat of violence), they must never be violent.

It’s the logic of the bully, of the coward: “My victims must not fight back, they must lie there and take their beating, and not resist. My violence is legitimate because I am powerful, but the weak must not use violence. If they do, we’ll escalate and escalate and escalate. We won’t just kill them, we’ll take everything, rape and torture; lock them up for years, deny them healthcare. There is nothing we will not do to those who resist us.”

So, for your own sake, understand in your bones that the violence your lords and masters (and they are your masters, and you are their slaves) do is legitimate, and that you have no right to resist.

If you do resist, and, worse, if you dare be violent, you are a bad slave, a bad peasant. Violence is reserved for the master class and their enforcers; it is something that they have the right to do. It is good when they do it, and it is bad when you do it.

This is a social fact: It is true because it is made true.

Be violent to the master class or their lackeys and the penalties are huge. It’s better to just sit there, and become homeless, go into debt, spend your entire life at a job you hate, doing what a petty tyrant tells you to, until you’re too old to work.

Because as bad as all those things are, they are better than what they’ll do to you if you really fight; if you do to them what they give themselves the right to do to you.

The only time you have the right to be violent is if you are violent against their enemies: domestic or foreign. Angry? Full of hate? You can get it out. Put on a uniform, or just play vigilante against a mutual enemy.

But never, ever, strike at the actual masters. The lords. The people making your life hell.

Because they control violence, they control money, and they will hurt you. If somehow they can’t get you under the rules, well, they’ll hunt you down like a dog, like they did the Ferguson protesters, killing them over years.

Who gets to use violence is a social fact.

You don’t.

The people who rule your life and make it hell do.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Who I Bleed With and Why Bernie Is Trusted

By Ian Welsh

On March 6, 2020

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So, identity is and always has been one of the most important forces in politics, the rise and fall of empires, etc. This was true long before “identity politics” or intersectionality and it will be true long after they are forgotten.

Identity is who you feel with. Who you bleed with. If people like you are hurt, you hurt. You can see this in degrees in terrorist attacks and natural catastrophes. If it’s the Brits being hit, Americans care. French? Somewhat less. Baghdad market bombing? Don’t give a shit. (Yes, you are special flower and do actually care, which may well be true, as you are one of my readers and self-selecting for caring more about people not like you, but most people don’t. I wish they did, but they don’t.)

This is also true for good things; they matter more if they happen to people I identify with.

My primary political identification is with the precariat: The working class who aren’t even stable working class. They can lose their jobs at any time, they live in bad housing, they are one bad bounce away from the street. In the US, they can’t afford healthcare even if they have insurance, in most countries they can’t afford dental care and you can see it as they get older in their yellow teeth.

These are the people who are always scared, who will work until they die or physically just can’t, and who will push far past what “can’t” would be for most other people. They work through pain and illness because, even in most countries with sick days, a week isn’t enough if you’re precariat: When you eat badly, and you work hard, your health breaks at some point.

I’ve been precariat a lot during my life. I’m precariat now. I’ve belonged to other classes, I’ve even been well off, upper middle class. I’ve hobnobbed and lived with the upper classes plenty, I grew up with them in boarding school. I can fit in with most classes, as long as I have the wardrobe, though as I get older and look older it becomes a bit harder: I don’t have the shiny well-cared for, calibrated, drugged look the upper classes have at my age.

Some of my identification with the precariat is simply that I often am one. But I could choose to identify with other classes or groups, I’ve been among many of them at some time. People can be stubborn about identifying with a class they no longer have the material circumstances for–they can hold on to that until they die, acting as if they still belong and often getting away with it. It’s worth doing, because lower class people are treated worse.

Period. They are treated worse, always. I put on a suit and clean up and I see the change. I change my manners and act middle class, and how I am treated changes, always for the better.

Lower class people have manners and attitudes which are recognizable, and higher orders, even the people only a little higher, shit on them the moment they recognize those manners. Exceptions exist, and I’ve gone out of my way when my circumstances are good to be an exception (which is why service staff anywhere I go regularly always like me), but they are exceptions.

But while some of my identification is simply positional, a lot of my political identification stems from the fact that the precariat, more than anyone except those who have fallen out of the system completely, are the ones who need the help. They tend to work very hard and get very little for it. I’ve done office work, construction work, retail and food prep, among many, many jobs, and the psychological stress of office work can be real, but it’s not the same as a hard physical job, where in any case the bosses are often still assholes. (This is especially true in retail in my experience. Never did manufacturing.) Office workers also tend to have a bit of protection from the most abusive behaviour, because of a certain shield of civility which does not apply to those at the bottom.

So, I am for Bernie, and I was for Corbyn, because they will do the most for those who need the most help. I can argue that most of what they want to do will also be excellent for everyone but the very rich, even if many of those people don’t recognize it, and it’s true, but I don’t care very much. The self-identifying middle class, the upper class, and the rich (three separate classes) are mostly either actively scum, or passively scum. The “middle class” has thrown everyone, including their own weaker members, under the bus in a pathetic attempt to keep their perceived status. The upper class are the rich’s close retainers, executing their policies and about one member of the rich out of a hundred who has power is doing more good than evil.

Identification is a matter of feel. When the precariat are hurt, I hurt. I feel their pain. This isn’t theoretical, you can see it on brain scans. When something good happens for them, I am happy. This is true even if it has no effect on me; I’m Canadian, and have universal health care–yet I have spent much of my career advocating for the US to adopt universal care.

One reason that Warren never had a hard core of supporters the way Sanders does is simple: She doesn’t identify as lower or working class or precariat. She doesn’t feel like one of the body. She doesn’t actually seem to feel the pain. Bernie, despite having been in Congress for ages, has a lot of Jewish working class feel. The anger that turns off the technocrats as inappropriate for the office is real to working class types. If there’s reason to be angry, be angry. And Bernie is angry because their bosses are treating them like shit.

Warren wants to be the good boss; the good intellectual. The savior.

Bernie feels like one of us and he’s angry with us.

He may or may not win the nomination (though I think he can win the election.)

But it’s why there’s a core of people who trust him through thick and thin.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

How Capitalism Makes Evil Rational

By Ian Welsh

On February 14, 2020

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It’s always worth understanding an important ideology’s ethical calculus.

Capitalism’s is brilliant.

If someone is willing and able to give you money to do something, you are improving their life.

The corollary is:

If you have money, you have it because you have improved someone else’s life. The more you have, the more lives you have improved.

There are assumptions embedded in this logic: That people know what improves their lives, for example, and that everyone involved is buying and selling voluntarily.

Demand isn’t desire, mind you. If you want something that would improve your life a lot, it doesn’t matter if you can’t command enough money to get it. Adam Smith pointed out that bums may want coaches complete with horses, but this does not translate to “demand.”

Still, basically, the theory is that you get money by helping other people.

Roy Dalio, the fund manager famous for his book on principles, believes this one hundred percent.

Now, it’s important to understand that capitalism is an ideology and organizational principle sitting on top of a series of technologies. We can call those technologies “industrialization.” Industrialization is not capitalism; we can imagine there might be other moral and organizational principles which could work with industrialization. We tried, as a species. We called it communism, which was centralized industrial control, and it didn’t work out in the end. Some say that’s because it couldn’t work, others say it’s because the USSR had less people and resources than capitalism, along with a weak strategic position.

I’ve argued parts of both. The truth is we don’t actually know.

Both systems are ideologies which determine who gets to control a certain amount of other people’s time, and who got to tell people what to do. That’s what money does, and anyone who has spent their entire life working for money by doing what other people tell them to do should understand this (though remarkably, many people don’t).

Capitalism is also an argument based on scarcity. It says: “There isn’t enough, so we need to make sure the people who get what we have use it to help others.”

That’s the actual moral argument: Capitalism is the best way to use people and resources to help the most people. It’s why whenever someone suggests there might be another way, someone else will say “Venezuela, Venezuela, neener, neener.”

Here’s a strange thing, though. Every time I look into homelessness I find that there are more empty homes than homeless people. There’s probably an exception, but I’ve never found one in the Western world.

We also throw out far more more food than is needed to feed everyone.

So at the very least, we know that capitalism isn’t distributing goods to everyone who needs them. The capitalist argument to this contradiction isn’t, “That’s false!” It’s that, “Communism failed, so you’re stuck with this.”

Then there’s another issue: Capitalism has turned out to be terrible at managing scarce resources. We could make a lot of things we use more durable so they’d last longer. Instead we make them so they won’t, deliberately. We make them so they’ll break or wear out, and people will have to buy another set, because companies need to make a profit. It’s not that cell phones couldn’t be created to last much longer, it’s that the people who make them don’t want to. The same is true of light bulbs, clothes, almost all electronics, cars, and so on.

We’re wasting vast amounts of resources, and that waste also shows up as vast amounts of pollution and huge destruction of the environment.

Pollution, including pollution involving carbon, methane and other climate change gases is an important example of not managing limited resources. There’s actually a limited amount of room to pollute, and beyond that, the environment starts changing in ways which are dangerous to us and the rest of life. This is a genuine scarcity “pollution sink,” and capitalism isn’t managing it.

It turns out that capitalism (and state communism before it) isn’t very good at managing scarcity. Perhaps it’s better than an opposition which doesn’t exist any more, but it’s not good enough to avoid wiping out island nations and changing the climate catastrophically.

So what we have is a technology which is theoretically capable of managing scarcity (industrialization/science) and an ideology and organizing principle (capitalism) which can not.

We produce way more than we need, vast amounts are wasted, we still have people without homes or going without food, and we’re destroying the environment and changing climate in disastrous ways.

That’s an ideology which is, well, evil. To produce more than we need, and then say, for ideological reasons, “But some people have to sleep on the street, and others need clean out sewers by hand, and still others have to go hungry” is a simple failure. To destroy the ecosphere is another failure.

Capitalism doesn’t do what it is supposed to do: It doesn’t use resources efficiently or distribute them in a humane way. In fact, it uses resources inefficiently, vastly so.

It turns out that “if it makes money” isn’t a good proxy for “does good while using resources efficiently.”

By capitalism’s rules, destroying the world is rational. Not feeding people is rational. Having homes sitting empty while people freeze on the streets is rational. Making way more goods than people need, through planned obsolesence, is rational.

And these aren’t corner cases. This is what the logic leads to. This is the system running on its core logic loops. Someone is paying for all of these things, so it must be making them better off, so therefore doing these things is good. More, the people doing those things are given MORE resources (money) so they can perpetuate same behaviours, because the system assumes the behaviour must be good, or someone wouldn’t be paying for it.

This isn’t just, well, evil. It’s insane.

When your ideology says: “Destroying the world’s climate and environment, starving people, and making people homeless is rational”? There’s a problem with the ideology.

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“Construction of Reality” First Draft Sent to Editor

By Ian Welsh

On February 10, 2020

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The stretch goal in 2016 was a booklet, “Construction of Reality” (CoR) about how, as individuals, groups, and societies, we create reality.

The first draft is done, 58,887 words and has been sent to an editor. This is more than I expected and more than planned.

I apologize to 2016 donors and subscribers, this took way longer than I intended. Part of that is that I’d never written a book before, part of it is that the topic was more difficult than I expected (especially to write CoR without it feeling like a textbook), and part of it is that my health was trash, but the fact remains you’ve waited a long time and will wait a bit more. I’m sorry about that.

(As an aside, my health has radically improved in the last three months. What finally did the trick was a 100 day “juice cleanse.” I did it because someone suggested it, and I’d tried everything else. Didn’t expect it to work, but it did. I’m not 100 percent, but the improvement is huge.)

Back on topic, when the book comes out will depend on whether the editor thinks it’s the sort of book that the publishers would be interested in. This has little do with quality, it’s a judgement about how they perceive it will sell. If so, it’ll be at least another year, if not, you should see it sooner.

“How To Think,” which I promised in last year’s fundraiser will not take nearly so long. Though not an easy topic, it’s a lot easier than how we construct reality. I’m a lot healthier, and I’ve written a book now, and know better what I’m doing. (Blogging, article, and essay skills translate poorly.)

I do think you’ll find “Construction of Reality” (CoR) to be worth the wait. One advantage of the long writing time is that I’m able to be fairly objective about it. Contrary to what non-writers think, writers usually aren’t happy with their books when they’ve just finished them (and at various stages I wasn’t), but I am with CoR. Almost no one, myself included, can claim unique ideas, but the synthesis of ideas in CoR is unlike any book I’ve read.

One reason writing CoR took so long is that I stopped, threw out most of what I had and restarted because I wanted you to receive a book which was actually useful, not a dry tome, however accurate. I think and hope this book will be something which will actually make some readers’ lives better. (Not all, no one can write that book!)

I’m looking forward to sharing CoR with you.

Money helps me write more. If you want to support my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Christianity as a Religious Ideology

By Ian Welsh

On December 27, 2019

Comments

Religions are ideologies. They are little different from something like capitalism, or Marxism, or the divine right of kings, or humanism.

That is to say ideologies are sets of statements about how the world and people are, and how they should be.

Christianity takes humans as fallen. We are innately bad, and we must be reformed by good education, including punishment. “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” This is different from classic Confucianism, which assumed that humans were essentially neutral slates, or the Confucianism of Mencius, which believed that humans were innately good, similar to Rousseau. The Chinese Legalists, on the other hand, assumed humans were bad, and the Imperial justice system tended to run on their ideas, not those of Mencius.

If you believe humans are bad, you must change them; fix them. Such ideologies tend to be punitive. If you think humans are good, on the other hand, you have to mostly avoid screwing them up, and such ideologies try to avoid punishment and negative reinforcement.

Christianity’s caused a lot of suffering down through the ages, a statement I hope isn’t controversial. A lot of that comes down to Christianity’s metaphysical beliefs for most of that time.

The only way to go to Heaven is through acceptance of Christ;
If you don’t go to Heaven, you will wind up in Hell. Hell is eternal torment.

The combination of these two beliefs means that, logically, anything is acceptable if it leads to someone becoming a Christian. Charlemagne once force-converted ten thousand pagans, then executed them. They died as Christians, with no chance to sin, doubtless they went to heaven. Spanish conquistadors would burn heretics, because they believed that would send them to heaven. Conquering a country to convert its people was not only moral, it was the only moral thing to do. To do otherwise would be to condemn everyone born there to hell, which is to say to torture which never ends.

Christianity is a form of hegemonic ideology. “Everyone should follow this ideology.” Democracy is another hegemonic ideology, “Everyone should be able to vote for their leaders.” Oh, there are exceptions, but they are minor. A country that is not a democracy, to a believer in democracy, isn’t ruled legitimately. Plenty of wars have been justified by hegemonic democratic principles, and plenty of non-democratic governments have been overthrown when democratic powers defeated them (Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I, for example.)

But remember that, after the Napoleonic wars, aristocracy was re-instituted in France. The hegemonic philosophy of the day can differ.

Islam is also a hegemonic religious ideology: everyone is supposed to eventually become a Muslim. That’s the goal, although it’s sort of okay for the other monotheists to stick around.

Hegemonic philosophies which get traction change the world. They evangelize. They conquer. When they go bad, they go really bad.

Religious hegemonic ideologies have the extra oomph of “God said.” If “God said,” well then, you can’t override that, because obviously “God is right.” The best you can do is to say “Well, perhaps we misunderstood part of this.”

Non-hegemonic ideologies find hegemonic ideologies horrifying. Hegemonic ideologies breed fanatics, people who aren’t willing to say “it’s okay for other people to live differently.”

Don’t think this is always a bad thing: Our ideology may radically oppose slavery, for example, or starvation, or torture or rape, and say “No one should every do these things!”

Is that bad?

Well, is it worth fighting wars over? That’s really the question. Is it worse using violence to stop this? How much violence? At what point are the evils of the violence you’re using worse than whatever it is you oppose, or whatever good you intend to impose?

Christianity’s monster state ruled by crusades and inquisitions and insisting that women bear the children of their rapists–that sort of thing. This isn’t in question, because we have a lot of Christian history.

This doesn’t make Christianity uniquely monstrous, or more evil than many other ideologies, but it is baked into the set of beliefs required to be Christian (forced conversion, death to pagans and heathens) or is easy to pervert a hegemonic ideology towards (abortion is murder, murder is always bad, unless you’re murder a non-Christian to force conversion of their society).

Other ideologies have other monster modes. We’re beginning to see Hinduism’s right now. We’ve been seeing how Islam goes wrong for many decades now. Communism regularly gets vilified for its crimes and I trust people know the crimes of capitalism, though they tend to be understated–because it is our ruling ideology.

But religious ideologies are always particularly dangerous, for the simple reason that one cannot admit God was wrong, because God can’t be wrong. (The Hindu Gods, oddly, can be wrong. Pagans are usually pretty clear that gods aren’t always right.)

Beware the consequences of monotheism with infallible Gods, and beware the consequences of hegemonic ideologies.

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The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Creating Reality Page 4 of 6

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How to Protect Yourself from Doomscrolling & Bad News

The “System” Did Not Appear Ex Nihilo

Who Gets to Be Violent and Why?

Who I Bleed With and Why Bernie Is Trusted

How Capitalism Makes Evil Rational

“Construction of Reality” First Draft Sent to Editor

Christianity as a Religious Ideology