Religion vs The State
The State preceded consciousness, and the evidence for the bicameral mind is in the iconography of power. Language is only a tool, and the Mind it creates is infinitely varied. Because it's the power-obsessed narcissists who leave legacies in stone and precious metals, it's from their fealty that we write history. The co-evolution of language and consciousness wanders and branches as much as biological evolution, and no one has come up with a principle or law for its trajectory. We all seem to believe, however implicitly, that evolution is directed, and that some law, some divine purpose, some invisible hand, has charted its trajectory and, if left unmolested, will follow its true path to paradise. But we only believe in Paradise because our lives have been made miserable by domestication. Those who successfully avoided the spell of the State were free to invent a more limber and accommodating kind of consciousness, one that didn't set itself apart from the natural world. The minds of the Stateless were inventive and imaginative. They were conscious, but their world views merged seamlessly with their environment, and there was no division between the metaphysical and the physical. The State's creation myth had us banished from this world, but I'll bet anything that the story was first written by its opponents.
The world divided into good and evil is not a precondition of consciousness. It is, rather, a precondition of State control. We weren't banished from the garden. We were seduced away from it and, forever after, remain its (the serpent State's) slaves, its patriots and disciples, its true believers. We can't see any alternative; if we lose our faith, all the carefully crafted illusions will dissolve and leave us helpless in the wilderness. The State, the ideologies that define our world views, have made us as dependent on the State as a single cell is to the organism. We have no identity outside our service to the good, and the evil against which good's purpose is served is the only sensible option. To escape both good and evil is to escape the universe, to die without a purpose and no hope of heaven. That fear is nurtured relentlessly, and unbelievers are made to be obsessed with destruction; global terrorism is a creation of the State. The poor, we are told, are all thieves; what else could they be? And the skeptics are lunatics interested only in making us all as confused as they are. Unbridled nature desires our death, and constant vigilance is required to keep its creeping vines, light-eliminating forests, and ever-hungry predators from crossing our fences and invading our homes.
It was all illusion and vanity that made this world, this smoking wasteland of what was once natural, reduced to something only a psychopath would call paradise. The natural abundance of the biosphere was been reduced through domestication to a pathetic handful of species that have been as hopelessly modified as ourselves. And for what? To please God? Yes. And God is, and always has been, the State.
So what do we do now? We've made good on our promise. We've conquered and subdued nature, domesticated and taken dominion of the planet, and now we stand ready and willing to do the same with the whole of the universe. But we're dying, and it's become clear that we were reckless, and that the paradise that was promised is, instead, a wasteland bereft of the abundance that once sustained the intricate ecology from which we excluded ourselves. We broke it and, now, we own it. Now we begin to comprehend the systems we destroyed, and it's our duty to repair and maintain them. But God, in the guise of the State, perseveres, and will not be shamed into submission by the evidence. Power wants only power, and it will not abide its machines being managed by a democracy of common sense. Ayn Rand thought the Soviet's Communist Party was the State. But it was merely a government which had aligned itself with the State. Rather than representing the people, it had simply joined forces with the State against the people who needed to be led. The Revolutions in France and Russia made her believe that the people were the problem, and that representative democracy would, by some natural tendency to dominate and subdue, always decline into autocracy. She, and the State's most dull-witted representatives, believed that the best government was no government at all, or one that eliminated all resistance to those seeking power. She believed in the same mythologies that the State has always promoted, of heroes wrestling our weaker instincts into submission.
The State no longer needs slaves to reduce nature to a scale that fits inside its small imagination. So it shouldn't care that we no longer believe. But it does. Why? For the same reasons it has always held. Nothing's really changed. Its dominance of nature wasn't a goal so much as it was a rationalization for power. It needs reality to be aligned with its abstractions, and to maintain that illusion requires absolute power. If we stop believing in its abstract reality, the State's power disintegrates, and no matter how much the world now resembles what its madness desired, the world can never be set free. The State cannot abide physical reality running without its authorization and legitimacy. The State is jealous of its power, and dangerously so, because there is no difference, and never has been, between the State, monotheism, and God.
Monotheism is not a refinement of polytheism. It's an altogether different thing, and to call both "religion" diminishes religion (and its modern counterpart, science) to ideology. The religions that the State eradicated and replaced with Law, Ideology, an abstract God obsessed with absolute and non-negotiable control, can now be resurrected, just as natural ecosystems can now be restored. The State's infrastructure will be maintained, just as any ecosystem is maintained, but like ourselves and the natural world, the natural and the technological will no longer be perceived as combatants. The State's divisions, between ourselves, and between ourselves and our environment, will be erased. By us. Once we muster the courage to stop believing, it will be like climbing those last few yards to the mountaintop, and we'll wonder what made us, only moments before, cling so desperately to that rock just below the summit.
The world divided into good and evil is not a precondition of consciousness. It is, rather, a precondition of State control. We weren't banished from the garden. We were seduced away from it and, forever after, remain its (the serpent State's) slaves, its patriots and disciples, its true believers. We can't see any alternative; if we lose our faith, all the carefully crafted illusions will dissolve and leave us helpless in the wilderness. The State, the ideologies that define our world views, have made us as dependent on the State as a single cell is to the organism. We have no identity outside our service to the good, and the evil against which good's purpose is served is the only sensible option. To escape both good and evil is to escape the universe, to die without a purpose and no hope of heaven. That fear is nurtured relentlessly, and unbelievers are made to be obsessed with destruction; global terrorism is a creation of the State. The poor, we are told, are all thieves; what else could they be? And the skeptics are lunatics interested only in making us all as confused as they are. Unbridled nature desires our death, and constant vigilance is required to keep its creeping vines, light-eliminating forests, and ever-hungry predators from crossing our fences and invading our homes.
It was all illusion and vanity that made this world, this smoking wasteland of what was once natural, reduced to something only a psychopath would call paradise. The natural abundance of the biosphere was been reduced through domestication to a pathetic handful of species that have been as hopelessly modified as ourselves. And for what? To please God? Yes. And God is, and always has been, the State.
So what do we do now? We've made good on our promise. We've conquered and subdued nature, domesticated and taken dominion of the planet, and now we stand ready and willing to do the same with the whole of the universe. But we're dying, and it's become clear that we were reckless, and that the paradise that was promised is, instead, a wasteland bereft of the abundance that once sustained the intricate ecology from which we excluded ourselves. We broke it and, now, we own it. Now we begin to comprehend the systems we destroyed, and it's our duty to repair and maintain them. But God, in the guise of the State, perseveres, and will not be shamed into submission by the evidence. Power wants only power, and it will not abide its machines being managed by a democracy of common sense. Ayn Rand thought the Soviet's Communist Party was the State. But it was merely a government which had aligned itself with the State. Rather than representing the people, it had simply joined forces with the State against the people who needed to be led. The Revolutions in France and Russia made her believe that the people were the problem, and that representative democracy would, by some natural tendency to dominate and subdue, always decline into autocracy. She, and the State's most dull-witted representatives, believed that the best government was no government at all, or one that eliminated all resistance to those seeking power. She believed in the same mythologies that the State has always promoted, of heroes wrestling our weaker instincts into submission.
The State no longer needs slaves to reduce nature to a scale that fits inside its small imagination. So it shouldn't care that we no longer believe. But it does. Why? For the same reasons it has always held. Nothing's really changed. Its dominance of nature wasn't a goal so much as it was a rationalization for power. It needs reality to be aligned with its abstractions, and to maintain that illusion requires absolute power. If we stop believing in its abstract reality, the State's power disintegrates, and no matter how much the world now resembles what its madness desired, the world can never be set free. The State cannot abide physical reality running without its authorization and legitimacy. The State is jealous of its power, and dangerously so, because there is no difference, and never has been, between the State, monotheism, and God.
Monotheism is not a refinement of polytheism. It's an altogether different thing, and to call both "religion" diminishes religion (and its modern counterpart, science) to ideology. The religions that the State eradicated and replaced with Law, Ideology, an abstract God obsessed with absolute and non-negotiable control, can now be resurrected, just as natural ecosystems can now be restored. The State's infrastructure will be maintained, just as any ecosystem is maintained, but like ourselves and the natural world, the natural and the technological will no longer be perceived as combatants. The State's divisions, between ourselves, and between ourselves and our environment, will be erased. By us. Once we muster the courage to stop believing, it will be like climbing those last few yards to the mountaintop, and we'll wonder what made us, only moments before, cling so desperately to that rock just below the summit.
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