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Emotional Gravity
emotional gravity, I declare, is the fundamental organization of all human conflict and endeavor.”
“The stronger we hold a value,” he wrote, “that is, the stronger we determine something as superior or inferior than all else, the stronger its gravity, the tighter its orbit, and the more difficult it is for outside forces to disrupt its path and purpose.42
People who love the same thing love each other. People who hate the same thing also love each other. And people who love or hate different things hate each other.
“All peoples are more the same than they are different. We all mostly want the same things out of life. But those slight differences generate emotion, and emotion generates a sense of importance. Therefore, we come to perceive our differences as disproportionately more important than our similarities. And this is the true tragedy of man. That we are doomed to perpetual conflict over the slight difference.43
“And just as the individual protects her identity through beliefs, rationalizations, and biases, communities, tribes, and nations protect their identities the same way.
“Most people do not value themselves above their cultural and group values. Therefore, many people are willing to die for their highest values—for their family, their loved ones, their nation, their god. And because of this willingness to die for their values, these collisions of culture will inevitably result in war.
“War is but a terrestrial test of hope. The country or people who have adopted values that maximize the resources and hopes of its peoples the best will inevitably become the victor. The more a nation conquers neighboring peoples, the more the people of that conquering nation come to feel that they deserve to dominate their fellow men, and the more they will see their nation’s values as the true guiding lights of humanity. The supremacy of those winning values then lives on, and the values are written up and lauded in our histories, and go on to be retold in stories, passed down to give future
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But like most people struggling, you’ve enveloped yourself so much in your pain that you’ve forgotten that pain is common, and that your strife is not uniquely yours—on the contrary, it’s universal.
HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGION An Introduction to a Proven System That Will Help You Achieve Everlasting Bliss and Eternal Salvation! (OR YOUR MONEY BACK)
I still thought stuff like this was about reason and evidence, not feelings and values. And values cannot be changed through reason, only through experience.
“I think your mind is so open your brain fell out!”
We are the most impressionable when things are at their worst.11 When our life is falling apart, it signifies that our values have failed us, and we’re grasping in the dark for new values to replace them. One religion falls and opens up space for the next. People who lose faith in their spiritual God will look for a worldly God. People who lose their family will give themselves away to their race, creed, or nation. People who lose faith in their government or country will look to extremist ideologies to give them hope.12
HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGION Step Two: Choose Your Faith
We all must have faith in something. Without faith, there is no hope.
Evidence and science are based on past experience. Hope is based on future experience. And you must always rely on some degree of faith that something will occur again in the future.15
Some people’s God Value is themselves—or, rather, their own pleasure and empowerment. This is narcissism: the religion of self-aggrandizement.21 These people place their faith in their own superiority and deservedness.
Other people’s God Value is another person. This is often called “codependence.”
But here’s the thing about evidence: it changes nothing. Evidence belongs to the Thinking Brain, whereas values are decided by the Feeling Brain. You cannot verify values. They are, by definition, subjective and arbitrary. Therefore, you can argue about facts until you’re blue in the face, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter—people interpret the significance of their experiences through their values.
Evidence serves the interests of the God Value, not the other way around. The only loophole to this arrangement is when evidence itself becomes your God Value. The religion built around the worship of evidence is more commonly known as “science,”
My point is that all values are faith-based beliefs. Therefore, all hope (and therefore, all religions) are also based on faith, faith that something can be important and valuable and right despite the fact that there will never be a way to verify it beyond all doubt.
three types of religions, each type based on a different kind of God Value: Spiritual religions. Spiritual religions draw hope from supernatural beliefs, or belief in things that exist outside the physical or material realm. These religions look for a better future outside this world and this life. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, animism, and Greek mythology are examples of spiritual religions. Ideological religions. Ideological religions draw hope from the natural world. They look for salvation and growth and develop faith-based beliefs regarding this world and this life.
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interpersonal religions are as common as people themselves. Pretty much all of us, at some point in our lives, completely surrender ourselves and our self-worth to another individual.
the majority of human history has been dominated by a belief in supernatural forces and, most important, the hope that certain actions and beliefs in this life would lead to rewards and improvement in the next life.
This preoccupation with the next life developed because for most of human history, everything was completely fucked and 99 percent of the population had no hope of material or physical improvement in their lives.
things were so bad in the old days that the only way to keep everyone sane was by promising them hope in an afterlife. Old-school religion held the fabric of society together because it gave the masses a guarantee that their suffering was meaningful, that God was watching, and that they would be duly rewarded.
Spiritual religions are also powerful because they often encourage hope through death, which has the nice side effect of making a lot of people willing to die for their unverifiable beliefs. Hard to compete with that.
at a certain point, most ideologies still rely on faith. There are two reasons for this. The first is that some things are just incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to test and verify. The other is that a lot of ideologies rely upon everyone in society having faith in the same thing. For instance, you can’t scientifically prove that money is intrinsically valuable. But we all believe it is, so it is.26 You also can’t prove that national citizenship is a real thing, or even that most ethnicities exist.27 These are all socially constructed beliefs that we’ve all bought into, taken on faith.
The problem with evidence and ideologies is that humans have a tendency to take a little bit of evidence and run with it, generalizing a couple of simple ideas to entire populations and the planet.
Humanity is so vast and complex that our brains have trouble taking it all in. There are too many variables. So, our Thinking Brains inevitably take short-cuts to maintain some otherwise shitty beliefs.
Bad ideologies such as racism or sexism persist due to ignorance far more than malice. And people hold on to those bad ideologies because, sadly, they offer their adherents some degree of hope.
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political systems are entirely made up, the positions of power exist due only to the faith of the population.
Each family is its own mini-church, a group of people who, on faith, believe that being part of the group will give their lives meaning, hope, and salvation.
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modern civilization has largely alienated us from these small, interpersonal religions and tribes and replaced them with large nationalist and internationalist ideological religions.
religion is all about emotional attachment. And the best way to build those attachments is to get people to stop thinking critically.
HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGION Step Three: Preemptively Invalidate All Criticism or Outside Questioning
Now that your fledgling religion has its core tenets of faith, you need to find a way to protect that faith from the inevitable criticism that will be flung its way. The trick is to adopt a belief that creates a self-reinforcing us-versus-them dichotomy—that is, create a perception of “us” versus “them” in such a way that anyone who criticizes or questions “us” immediately becomes a “them.”
The point of these false us-versus-them dichotomies is to cut off at the knees any reasoning or discussion before your followers start questioning their beliefs. These false us-versus-them dichotomies have the added benefit of always presenting the group with a common enemy.
Us-versus-them dichotomies give us the enemies we all desperately crave. After all, you need to be able to paint a really simple picture for your followers. There are those who get “it” and those who do not get “it.” Those who get it are going to save the world. Those who do not get it are going to destroy it. End of discussion. Whatever “it” is depends on whatever belief you’re trying to sell—Jesus, Muhammad, libertarianism, gluten-free diets, intermittent fasting, sleeping in hyperbaric chambers and living off Popsicles. Also, it’s not enough to tell your followers that nonbelievers are bad.
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People are either near the top of the value hierarchy or at the bottom; there are no in-betweeners in our religion.
HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGION Step Four: Ritual Sacrifice for Dummies—So Easy, Anyone Can Do It!
I’m not very spiritual—no supernatural beliefs for me, thank you. I get a sick pleasure from chaos and uncertainty. This, unfortunately, has condemned me to a life of struggle with the Uncomfortable Truth. But it’s something I’ve come to accept about myself.
The robe, a visual cue signaling status and importance, is part of the ritual thing. And we need rituals because rituals make our values tangible. You can’t think your way toward valuing something. You have to live it. You have to experience it. And one way of making it easier for others to live and experience a value is to make up cute outfits for them to wear and important-sounding words for them to say—in short, to give them rituals. Rituals are visual and experiential representations of what we deem important. That’s why every good religion has them.
Remember, emotions are actions; the two are one and the same. Therefore, to modify (or reinforce) the Feeling Brain’s value hierarchy, you need some easily repeatable yet totally unique and identifiable action for people to perform. That’s where the rituals come in.
Rituals are also symbolic. As values, they must also embody some story or narrative.
Rituals connect us with the past. They connect us to our values. And they affirm who we are.
Newton’s First Law of Emotion states that every action produces an equal and opposite emotional reaction. In this case, something good happens to you without your deserving it. Cue guilt. Now think of it this way: You exist. You didn’t do anything to deserve existing. You don’t even know why you started existing; you just did. Boom—you have a life. And you have no idea where it came from or why. If you believe God gave it to you, then, holy shit! Do you owe Him big time! But even if you don’t believe in God—damn, you’re blessed with life! What did you ever do to deserve that? How can you live
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Most religious practices are developed for the alleviation of guilt. You could even say that that’s really all prayer is: miniature episodes of guilt alleviation.
