User:Korihor

This page contains a number of ideas I've been working on, involving mostly my personal magical system that I sometimes call Atheistic Mysticism, Dark Science, Left Hand Path Humanism, or whatever strikes my fancy at the moment.

Consciousness and it's side effects

The evolution of consciousness provided humanity with incredible adaptive skills. We are, as far as we can tell, the only animal on the planet capable of consciously adapting ourselves, both individually and as a group, to new environments and conditions—even going so far as to construct or directly modify our environment to better suit our aims. When that happened, we left our other primate cousins in the dust (or in the trees, depending on how you see it).

But nature doesn't like to give things for free, and consciousness came laden with a rather unpleasant side effect: namely, that we suddenly found ourselves alone in a very harsh, heedless, and dangerous universe. A universe that was infinitely larger and more powerful than we were. Before consciousness, there was no "other", because there was no "self".

Paradise lost, regained

With consciousness, we became alienated from our universe. The first creatures, as far as we can tell, to do so. And we all would have probably cowered in the back of our caves in absolute terror, and perished entirely as a species, were it not for one factor that nature wasn't expecting: magical thinking.

I think this is what they're getting at when they talk about all those uncouth Titans, and Zeus killing Chronos and taking over Mount Olympus, and Prometheus stealing fire from the Gods, who rewarded him by chaining him to a rock where a raven eats out his liver day after day (remember, the universe gives nothing for free -- the conservation of misery, if you will). We have a sense that we've been let in on a secret, or given something we weren't supposed to have, and that there's a price to pay. Paradise Lost.

With magical thinking, we could fool ourselves into believing that the saber-toothed tiger won't sink its fangs into our squishy parts, if only we chant and paint the walls of our cave, or paint our bodies, or wear a discarded saber tooth tiger claw on a sinew around our neck. We believed, however foolishly, that we could influence our own fate with our newfound powers of creativity.

And, funny thing, we were right (mostly). Paradise Reclaimed.

The birth of the gods

But we were still puny monkeys just getting the hang of our opposable thumbs and learning how to bash our neighbors skulls in with various blunt instruments, and the universe was still infinitely large. It wasn't enough for us to take charge of our destinies of our own accord. We needed powerful allies who would make the universe a safer place to raise little monkeys. So we created gods.

It's funny that we didn't immediately latch on to the idea that we would need an infinitely powerful god in order to save ourselves from an infinitely powerful universe, but for some reason we started small. We put spirits in streams, rocks, animals, and little gods and gave them more power than we thought we had, ourselves. This helped us put "For Sale" signs on our caves and move into condos in the city where the gods and their self-appointed servants made ziggurats and temples to protect us. Eventually, it dawned on us that we would need a much bigger god, and some shepherds in a dusty little crossroads smack in the middle of some turf between Egypt, Persia, and Greece decided that their tribal storm god was the One God, and slaughtered a bunch of Caananites to prove the point.

The problem is that we attributed to this God a whole bunch of laws that were hard to understand, much less follow. And even one fellow, Job, who managed to understand and follow them all, still suffered His Divine Wrath. So after a bunch of mystics around the Dead Sea tried to figure a way out of this mess, a Hellenized Jew named Saul changed his name to Paul and concocted a mixture of a bit of Greek mystery cult, Jewish monotheism, and a healthy dose of Zoroastrianism, and appointed a poor itinerant magician named Jesus—who couldn't object to the nomination because he was nailed to a tree by the Romans—to be the Son of God, here to Save Us All. And we needed saving because, after all, it was our fault that we came up with a God that had so many cryptic rules in the first place.

This new God served as an excellent proxy for the power of our own magical thinking, feuling an empire which created Western civilization in the wake of its own collapse. The ziggurats and temples gave way to cathedrals, and everything was going along great until the Black Plague created the middle class, who discovered a new sense of freedom and autonomy. All of a sudden, merchants were as powerful as nobility. This would have been of little consequence, except that the nobility owed their position, largely, to the sanction of the priests—which tended to have a very corrupting effect on the clergy. The middle class became a little drunk on their own freedom and started to resent the fact that the local priest had the God-given authority to absolve them of their sins, even though he was off impregnating their daughters, sodomizing their sons, embezzling the parish funds, and auctioning indulgences off to the highest bidder.

Individual piety gradually became more important than priestly authority, which gave rise to the Cult of the Virgin, and all sorts of mystical speculation, egged on by the philosophical, mathematical, and magical texts being siphoned out of the Holy Land during and after the Crusades.

Eventually, all this mysticism and talk about personal relationships with the creator, coupled with the corruption of the priests, caused the middle class to question the church's authority to speak for God (especially on the matter of state authority). They began thinking that one's social position should be a matter of individual merit, rather than birth, and pretty soon we had the Reformation, the Rennaisance, the Age of Enlightenment, and the American and French Revolutions in (fairly) rapid succession.

Almost everyone was giddy at the prospects of liberty as an engine for personal and social liberation, operating under the illusion that once the chains of religious and political oppression were loosed, humanity would enter a golden age and finally be free of the existential dilemma.

Ragnarok

But they were wrong. The middle class became the ruling class, and power shifted hands to the Industrial Giants, and suddenly the same weapons that were used to overthrow the landed gentry—namely, science, reason, and economic liberty—were now beginning to be used against them. At the same time, people started to perceive that the New Gods of statecraft and commerce weren't any better at saving the human soul than the Titans they had just defeated. About that time, a concerned German fellow named Nietzche dared to say what everyone already knew, but was afraid to admit: God is dead.

That's when all Hell broke loose.

By the time that 6 or 7 million Jews were slaughtered in Europe, 20 million assorted souls were butchered in the Soviet Union, and countless others massacred in various parts of Asia, people started to realize that things had gotten quite out of hand, indeed. Although we've managed to somewhat hinder the rate of genocide, we are largely still in the same fix. Some thinkers attribute the problem to the ever-increasing rate of technological change, some blame the rise of secularism and accompanying decline in religious values, others blame religious fundamentalists, while still others blame the dehumanization and exploitation of the workers.

In the beginning, again

The point that all but a few of these thinkers seem to miss is that we've come somewhat full circle. We have managed to cast down the false gods we created in order to secure redemption from the existentialist dilemma, and we find ourselves, once again, as puny tool-building monkeys alienated from an unimaginably large universe that is utterly heedless to our concerns. Only this time, we've learned that we can't rely on the gods to be of much help (not that this really keeps us from trying—we're inventing new gods at an unprecedented rate, and dethroning them just as quickly).

We must come to terms with the fact that redemption from the existential dilemma cannot be had by creating gods and shifting the burden of responsibility to them. We must realize that there is no salvation outside of the self. And that's what all of Nietzche's talk of the Superman was all about.

(to be continued)