And why do we seek it?

Throughout the modern world, consumers seek authenticity. They look for genuine experiences, authentic cuisine, handmade fashions, and organic food.

A deep sense of falseness runs through the collective unconscious of the modern world. We seem to think that our normal lives are somehow unreal and inauthentic, and that genuineness can only be found by introducing something external into our lives.

The signs of this are everywhere. Young people move into an ethnic neighborhood because it seems more “authentic”. Products are marketed as “organic” or “genuine”. Ethnic cuisine restaurants tout their “authentic” cuisine. ^[1]

But what is this mysterious “something” that we seek? What exactly are we looking for when we seek authenticity? And what is it that we lack in the first place?

One possible definition of authenticity is that it is a form of supra-normalcy. We are seeking something more normal than normal life. Normal life is quite stressful for us upright hominids. We seek the normalcy of a previous era.

Because if there is one thing we all know about authenticity, it is that it cannot be found in the future or the present. It can only be found in the past.

Another possible definition of authenticity is the “natural”. ^[2] Modern life alienates us from the forests, plains, and beaches of our ancestors, and this creates a deep sense of dislocation in people. Every animal must have a sense of where it belongs in order to keep it in the environment to which it is adapted.

And we homo sapiens have not lived in cities and towns nearly long enough to have adapted to them.

Hence, we need parks and gardens and wilderness preserves in order to maintain our sanity. Even the most dedicated urbanite who would never dream of going camping appreciates the soothing, friendly qualities of a tree-lined street.

Yet another potential definition of “authentic” is “simple”. In purely mathematical terms, the complexity of our world is increasing. People invent things that other people can use to invent things. The nodes of human consciousness that are our minds are increasingly interconnected. The technologies of five years ago already seem quaint and antique.

So we seek in authenticity a version of the world that seems simpler and more innocent than our own. We buy things not simply for their basic utility (what you actually use it for) but for the feelings they evoke in us due to the associations we have in our minds about them.

So when a person buys an antique chest of drawers, or travels across town to buy organic vegetables at a farmer’s market, or listens to legendary jazz performances on the original vinyl, they are activating a whole complex array of positive associations in their minds. These associations form a (probably not very realistic) picture of the past in their minds and it is connection with this picture that we seek when we seek authenticity.

There is a sense that when something is authentic, it is closer to its source and thus somehow cleaner and clearer and hence more “real” than something that comes from the vast interconnected web of industrialization and commerce.

Hence the appeal of farmer’s markets and “artisnal” products. The young people of today express their alienation from nature and distrust of corporate capitalism by buying products made by the person who is selling them to you, from ingredients that were still in the ground yesterday.

To them, this is a guarantee not just of quality, but of that elusive quality of authenticity. It is more real to them because it is knowable. You know where it grew, who grew it, what it was fed, and there are no frightening chemical names on the ingredient list.

Whether or not this makes the product actually better in any measurable way is beside the point. They buy this product because they trust it. That makes it seem “authentic” to them. And that connection to their ideal of authenticity is the true purpose of the product.

Another source of the feeling of inauthenticity is the modern disconnection from community and cultural heritage. At some point in their lives, most people will seek a source of identity outside their families and friends. Modern society is uniquely unqualified at providing it.

We have severed ties with religion, extended family, even active democracy and the interplay of ideas. Humanity has never been more safe, prosperous, and prolific, but it has also never been so disconnected, disaffected, and depressed.

So much of modern life is virtual that it is no wonder that a sense of unreality pervades the modern zeitgeist. In the ideal of authenticity we seek some kind of reality, something solid and reliable in a sea of virtuality.

Whether we seek it in nature, ethnicity, or the past, we are seeking a connection to something greater than our self-oriented individualist consumer culture can provide. The quest for authenticity is, at its core, a quest for reality. Something that stands out from the cultural background noise of our daily lives and appeals not just to our civilized minds but to the deep longings of our primitive hearts.

Modern life is very good at meeting our basic needs.

Let’s hope that in the future, it can do more.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Ask any person in the modern world how they are doing or how they feel in the modern world, and you will likely get this answer : “I’m tired. ”

Rich or poor, sad mad or glad, regardless of avocation or station in life, every single one of us is tired, or at least says they are.

Why is this? How did tiredness become universal? Why do we feel comfortable telling people we have just met that we are tired? And when did all this start?

Last question first. As far as I can tell, tiredness became universal around the turn of the twentieth century. From the dawn of modern consumerism, there have been universal claims of weariness, and a plethora of products designed to give you back your energy, as though it is something everyone starts off with but then somehow loses and must regain.

Somewhere in a depths of the zeitgeist, then, there is a belief that our energy is somehow being stolen, not spent. How can this be true?

Perhaps it is a side-effect of individualism. We consider energy spent doing things we would rather not do to have been somehow stolen. It is as if our strong individualist egos consider all bodily energies to belong to it, to be used expressly for its own ends, and therefore having to spend it on something which is, broadly speaking, not fun is the same thing as it being stolen.

Stolen or spent, the next question is : why is this a “safe” answer to the universal question of how we are doing?

First off, its very universality makes it safe. The fact that everyone gives that answer without serious social consequence is sufficient to make it a safe answer.

But more than that, admitting you are tired carries with it the implication that you have been working hard, and therefore is actually a statement of social virtue rather than the revealing of weakness it appears to be.

Everybody with a job works hard, and therefore everyone is tired. There is not an employed person in the world whose claim of working hard would be questioned. It is a curiously universal virtue. Our demanding inner children insist that having to work for a living at all is a supreme sacrifice, and therefore whatever it is, whether you are a practicing dentist or a professional french fry cook, it is hard work and you therefore work hard.

And working hard is the last remaining universally accepted collective virtue. Modern society has severed nearly all ties a citizen might us to feel like they are contributing to the collective as a whole, but claiming to be hard worker still manages to carry with it the deep implication that one is not just contributing a token amount to society, but all that you can.

Ergo, being tired means you are a good citizen.

But apart from the social implications of tiredness, what about the medical truth? Is it possible that everybody really is tired all the time?

I think it is, and to understand why, we have to look at the alarm clock.

Everybody knows what the alarm clock is for. It’s to get you up in the morning when it is time to go to work (or school, or whatnot).

But few people grasp that the very need for an alarm clock implies that you are not getting enough sleep.

Think about it. Left to our own devices, we sleep till we are no longer tired, just like we eat till we are no longer hungry. It’s not like if we didn’t have alarm clocks, we would just sleep forever. So clearly, if we wake up tired when the alarm clock goes off, we have not gotten enough sleep.

Add to that the many ways that modern life cuts us off from the usual inputs that regulate our circadian rhythms, and we have billions of people in the world walking around in a state of half-sleep, suffering continuously from the effects of sleep deprivation but not knowing it because to them, this is normal.

And what is our solution? Coffee. Tea. Cola. Caffeine. We simply accept that in order to function in modern society, it is necessary to regularly drug ourselves into an artificial state of alertness.

This, of course, does not solve the problem, it merely delays it. In theory, we could just go to sleep earlier and keep up that way.

But work takes more than energy from us, it drains our psychological resources as well, and so we end up staying up too late engaging in low-cost leisure activities like watching television in order to replenish those.

And that’s not even taking into account all the non-work activities we end up committed to, and all the little errands and labours required just to maintain our modern luxurious lifestyles.

So the modern citizen is, indeed, constantly tired. The various demands on our various resources always exceed our capacity for renewal, and so the modern person lives in perpetual debt to our bodies and our minds.

The modern person, in other words, lives deep in debt on more than one level.

Oh, and add in one more factor : our poor diets. Diets heavy in carbs, salt, and fat, all of which may taste great but the energy they provide is very short term and afterward, we are far more tired than we were before.

So we sleepwalk through life, drained and stumbling and needing liquid stimulants just to keep going, and then we wonder why the wonder of modern life and all the apparent trappings of success are not making us happy.

We are all too damned tired to be happy. Most modern people feel like they are barely keeping their head above water most days.

No wonder we devote entire rooms of our workplaces and entire sections of the day to the great god Coffee.

And no wonder it is hard to stir people to strive for change.

It’s almost as though the evil and corrupt stupid old men who run the world want us all to be drained and unbrained all the time.

But no… they just take advantage of this happy accident.

That’s all from me for today, folks. I will talk at you again tomorrow!

The “it”, in this case, being “making videos”.

I started again on Saturday, and I am going to keep on making one a day for the foreseeable future. Here’s the three I have done so far, starting with Saturday’s.

Yup, I’m back. Note the casual, handheld style. Totally an artistic decision, and not just because it’s easier to record videos lying down in bed.

Next, I use Netflix as my inspiration and do a review of above-average action film Solomon Kane from back in 2012.

I was really surprised when this turned out to be over seven minutes long. time flies when I am enjoying the sound of my own voice, I guess.

And finally, today’s vid, in which I talk about Wonder Woman.

You know…. like I do.

And that is where I will begin today’s actual blogging because I have finished the Wonder Woman documentary and I have more thoughts on it.

It was a great documentary. But a few things in it disturbed me.

One was that, despite being launched by psychologist and weirdo way ahead of his time William Moulton Marston as a very firmly feminist (and feminine) heroine who showed the world that women could be strong and brave and such, after the boys came home from World War II and all the ladies who had been working in factories and doing all the jobs of men were told to go be housewives ^[1] now, the same fate befell Wonder Woman.

Suddenly she was way less interested in fighting evildoers and showing men the power of peaceful conflict resolution and way more interested in trying to marry Superman. Her previously action packed comic turned, seemingly overnight, into a romance comic, and at one point they even stripped her of her powers and all her cool accoutrements and turned her into a spy-action hero.

It makes total sense that this happened, but I still find it incredibly depressing. Where are Gloria Steinam and Betty Friedan when you need them? Wonder Woman is not supposed to be domesticated. She is supposed to be a free, strong, brave, loyal, and steadfastly idealistic fighter against the forces of evil.

In other words, like I said in the video, she is supposed to be the female equal of Superman. Notice Supes doesn’t get married either?

I can only imagine how crushed little girls (and certain little boys) who were Wonder Woman fans precisely because she was such an awesome figure of heroism felt when their favorite heroine suddenly stopped kicking ass on villains and started kissing ass on Superman.

I will give you a moment to get over that image in your head.

It must have been a very confusing time for women and girls in general. It wasn’t simply the men that told them they had to go back to the home when the war was over. They had told themselves that all through the war. I am sure most of the woman who had husbands overseas kept themselves going through the war with a rose-colored vision of how wonderful life was going to be when her husband came home, swept her off her feet, and took her away from the grimy grunting disgusting world of the factory and put her back where she could be dainty and feminine and yes, even subservient again.

The problem was, this Other Thing had happened. They had experienced the same burdens and freedoms of men, they had proved to themselves and the world that woman could live independent of men and do the same work as men, and despite their rosy dreams of domesticity, they could not just forget that and go back to what they had been before the war, no matter how hard they tried.

Back to WW. Luckily, eventually Steinem and Ms. magazine did come around and start hounding DC to restore Wonder Woman to her previous glory, and while, according to the documentary, Wonder Woman didn’t quite become the feminist icon she was before, she at least got her powers and her accessories back, plus a black sidekick.

The other thing that bothered me in the documentary came from something I had sort of known about but never really thought about, namely 90’s feminism.

I only saw the ugly side of it at the time (political correctness, anti-male hostility, and so on) but the truth of the matter is that the 1990’s contained the third wave ^[2] of feminism in North American culture.

Women and girls were publishing zines, joining punk rock bands, and there was a rise of powerful female heroes like Xena, Buffy, and my fave Scully in the media.

Far fuckin’ out, man. The disturbing bit is that, in 2001, all of them died.

Buffy came back, Xena died heroically, and I don’t remember Scully dying, but apparently a whole slew of others also got killed off that year, and that bugs the hell out of me.

Worse, it lead to a whole era of women being allowed to be only one of two things in the media : power-bitch sex fantasy ass kicking chicks, or totally passive vengeance objects who get killed in awful ways with a sickening regularity.

That bothers me even more. I consider myself a feminist (in that I am a humanist, and women are people) and it infuriates me to imagine this terrible ebbing of the positive political tide in a realm which I hold near and dear, namely genre media.

And that leads me to this very era, where women get sick bastard nerds posting the vilest and more hurting things their piggy little brains can think of on public forums, attacking any woman who dares to have an opinion on anything fannish.

It all leads me to the conclusion that despite all the progress made by women in the last 100 years, the struggle continues, and it is the duty of all decent people, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, to roll up their metaphorical shirt sleeves and get in there and push.

It’s not over yet, folks, but the end is in sight. Women are breaking through the last level of the glass ceiling and soon, we may even have parity in the highest levels of political power.

And then we will REALLY see some changes.

That’s it from me. I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Guess what? It’s Fru’s Relationship With Netflix time, and today’s springboard is the documentary The Pervert’s Guide To Ideology, starring Slavoj Zizek.

Don’t let the title fool you, though, because it has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the documentary and was, presumably, though up by some marketing hack who wanted to create cheap buzz.

Instead, it is a kind of enhanced lecture by philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who uses clips from various movies to illustrate the philosophical and psychological points he is making. And sometimes, via modern movie magic, even appearing to be in the movies himself, flopped on Travis Bickle’s cot or appearing at the wine orgy in the oft forgotten Seconds.

This little bit of razzle dazzle certainly helps to spice up what is essentially two and a quarter hours of a man with a thick Polish accent talking.

That’s just the price you pay in order to enjoy Zizek’s genuinely original and insightful thoughts. You want your Zizek, you learn to penetrate both his accent and his occasionally perplexing way of using the language both of classical European political philosophy and of psychoanalysis.

Oh, and he is obsessed with the term ideology, which I consider to be a word with too much baggage to be useful any more.

I don’t agree with all of his points, but how can I not love someone who sees psychoanalysis as continuous with philosophy and who illustrates his points with pop cultural references?

Take away the accent and add some jokes, and that could be me.

The main concept that I took away from his lecture was the concept of the Big Other, that is to say, the entity of whatever nature that occupies the position of being the overwhelming being of immense power who both guides and protects us.

As Lacan, who coined the term, noted, our first Big Other is our mother, or other primary caregiver. It is this person who hears our cries for help and understands them, who intervenes when we are upset, who provides the necessary protection from the big wild world for us, and who takes on the role of being ultimately responsible for our health and wellbeing so that we may live in the kind of safe, simplified world that our nascent consciousness can handle.

I have been thinking a lot about the need for such simplification recently. The most horrifying thought to any human being is the thought that the world is well and truly beyond our comprehension and we are naked before its chaos, unable to make intelligent choices in a universe which is ultimately unintelligible.

This idea is psychologically intolerable, and yet, ultimately true. Even the brightest among us can’t honestly claim to understand everything, and so some portion of the universe always remains unintelligible and unpredictable.

Even in a strictly mechanistic universe in which there is no such thing as uncertainty at the ultimate level and all is, in theory, predictable, we human beings are still finite in our consciousness and therefore there will still always be that area of incomprehension.

So how do we resolve this paradox of intolerable truth? In the most general terms, we generally decide that while we might not understand everything, we understand “enough” of our world to get by, and that will have to be enough.

We remain aware that the cold callous hand of remorseless fate is always in play and that therefore something unpredictable and unavoidable could always step in and ruin our feeling of being in control, but we push this thought from our minds as something impossible to control and therefore best not thought about.

More specifically, however, in political terms, we have different solutions based on one’s basic political view.

The conservative solution is to simply deny anything which suggests that things are more complicated than they can handle. They substitute raw emotion for reason and actively seek out whatever views stimulate the most primal emotions such as rage and fear and therefore the views that have the strongest simplifying effect.

Once this pattern is established, the conservative comes not simply to rely on these surges of simplifying emotion but to trust them exclusively. Every time they feel the tiniest twinge of doubt that their worldview matches the world, they experience a surge of primal emotion that drives out the higher brain function and makes everything seem simple to them again.

This, incidentally, is why they are so reliant on conservative media to reaffirm their beliefs constantly. The kind of emotional state on which they rely is difficult to maintain and requires constant emotional stimulation.

The liberal solution, on the other hand, is to accept a certain amount of doubt in the scope of their understanding in return for faith that what they do know about the world is verifiably true. Logic, reason, and knowledge may not deliver the kind of black and white rock solid certainty that conservatives crave, but its products can be tested for veracity.

It should be noted, however, that liberals can be just as guilty of substituting emotion for reason in an attempt to simplify the world when they are feeling doubt.

Liberals simply use a different set of emotions, like compassion, empathy, and altruism to do it.

We are, all us, operating in a noncomprehensive subset of true reality, and therefore we are all stuck making do with an imperfect map of foreign territory.

It should be no surprise, then, that the less intelligent, either due to a congenital lack or due to senility, tend towards conservatism, and that liberalism maps to intelligence so neatly.

In general, the smarter, the more liberal. That doesn’t mean that all conservatives are stupid or that there are no stupid liberals.

But it does mean you will find more liberals at Mensa than NASCAR.

We should have some pity, though, for those who must operate in a world they simply lack the intellectual capacity to understand.

Imagine how frightening that would be, and how desperately you might lunge for anything that promised to cut the complexity of the world down to a size you can comprehend if it was you.

That’s all for me for today, folks. Talk to you again tomorrow.

Let’s talk about differentiation.

In psychology, differentiation is the process by which we develop a unique identity, separate from our families and even our societies. As we develop as individuals, we naturally gravitate towards a sense of self that is distinct from others and that gives us the sense of uniqueness that is necessary for that vitally important sense, the sense that we are valuable to society and we have a role to play.

This is most obvious in the behaviour of teenagers. In our teen years, we go through a process of trying to figure out where we fit in society and, at the same time, the need to develop an identity separate from one’s parents and family becomes intense.

That’s why “things that would piss off your parents” are so attractive to teens. By doing something their parents definitely would find bizarre or even offensive, they get that feeling of differentiation that they crave so badly at that age.

This is why every generation finds a way to offend their parents. For a while I thought there would be some logical end to that process, that eventually social progress would lead to a world where a teenage girl could literally walk around nude and nobody would care, but now I am not so sure.

Teenagers are nothing if not innovative.

But this differentiation process begins long before puberty. Even as children, we develop a sense of ourselves and who we are in relation to others. The need is not as strong, especially for the “only child”, but in all families, we naturally fall into roles we play within the family dynamic and each role fills a (often unspoken) need.

So, for instance, a child may become “the one with problems” in the family because that gives everyone something to focus on, and honestly, someone to blame for everything. Another might become the “good child” because that is the way they distinguish themselves from their siblings, and they serve as the glue that holds everything together.

One of the basic rules of social dynamics is that while a lot of social dynamics are dysfunctional, they all function. This parallels the way in which, in individuals, even maladaptive coping mechanisms solve some sort of problem.

Differentiation does not stop when we leave our teen years, of course. This need to compare yourself to others and try to figure out how we compare to them and how we are different from them in order to protect our own identity continues for our entire lives, although as we age, it slows.

That established, let’s talk about options.

Studies have shown that, past a certain point, the more options you give a person, the less happy they will be with whatever they choose and the less certain they will be that they got the right one.

It just makes sense. If you are choosing from a thousand options, the odds of picking the “right” one are a thousand to one, or so it seems. Society tells us that what matters is to get the one that’s right for you, but that doesn’t help much. There are still a lot of options and low odds of picking the one that is right for you, or so it seems.

Now let’s combine differentiation and options and start talking about the Internet.

We now live in a global village, just like Marshall McLuhan predicted. “Society” used to consist of just the people in your little town, or neighborhood, or sometimes just your kin, if you live in a remote rural area.

Even in relatively recent years, the real world of our inner lives only had to include the people we consider our peers (as well as friends and family), and this limited the number of people we could compare ourselves to and the number of options as to where you rank in the pecking order.

But now, the doors are flung open and we are, in our still limited ways, part of a community of practically the entire world. This village of ours has become mighty big. And I think it has an effect on how people feel about themselves.

Ever since the dawn of mass media with Gutenberg, and only accelerated by radio, television, and now the Internet, our pool of people in our lives has been increasingly taken over by people with whom we are not actually personally connected. Politicians, celebrities, figures in the news, even fictional characters end up multiplying the entities in our minds and making our mental villages a frighteningly complicated and competitive place.

People end up comparing themselves to people who are the social alphas of entire cultures, if not the world. People feel bad for not being George Clooney, who is famous all over the globe. And if you count the number of potential rungs between you and him on the ladder of success, you can’t help but notice that there is a lot of them.

We face a crisis in differentiation. How can you form an identity distinct from billions of other humans? Where exactly does our instinct for social status competition go when we are competing against all of humanity?

No wonder people end up feeling like they are nobody simply because they are not a celebrity. No wonder they are willing to do whatever it takes, no matter how humiliating, in order to stay on television. No wonder fame can drive people nuts and make them pathetically addicted to it.

If you are world famous today, that makes you socially dominant over billions of people. It doesn’t matter whether that makes sense in any logical or practical sense. Our social instincts are far too strong and run far too deep to be constrained by that. If we want to save the public self-esteem, we will need something stronger than that.

I can’t tell you what that will be. Something powerfully symbolic that makes it okay to be ordinary again.

I’ll work on it.

Talk to you again tomorrow, folks!

Well, I said I would do hell, so let’s do Hell, shall we?

I finished that documentary about the concept of Hell that I mentioned yesterday, and I have to tell you that apart from the parts where they talked to people from the Westboro Baptist Church (because seriously, fuck those people), it is as though the whole thing was made especially for me.

It is a subject I find extremely interesting, they covered it quite well and from a lot of different angles, and I learned a lot and heard a lot of things which stimulated my imagination and deepened my understanding of the world and the people in it.

And for me, that is pretty much a grand slam.

One thing I learned is that, within Christian theological thought, there are three main schools of thought on Hell.

The first is infernalism, which is the view of Hell that dominates mainstream Christianity and that we are all familiar with via popular culture if nothing else. This is the idea that Hell is a place of constant conscious maximum agony for all eternity. It is the most severe punishment imaginable, and there is nothing worse than going there.

To me, that has always seemed like the result of schoolyard bragging. Oh yeah, well I shoot you INFINITY times!

The second is annihilism. Under that system, good people still go to Heaven, but there is no Hell required, for the wicked souls are simply destroyed. After all, Jesus only promises the life eternal to those who follow Him. Arguably, if the wicked live forever, even if that is in constant agony, they too have been granted life eternal.

The third and last is universalism, and that is the one that really stopped me in my tracks because I naively believed that I had invented the idea.

See, long and ever ago, I wrote a story about a hate-mongering corrupt evil televangelist who dies and goes to Heaven, only to discover that absolutely everybody gets in. There is no Hell. There is no Judgement. Absolutely everyone gets in.

Yes, even Hitler. I specifically included him in the story. ^[1]

But alas, my hubris was misplaced. Turns out that has been a recurring idea in Christianity practically since its inception. The argument goes that it is impossible to imagine that a just and loving God would ever send anyone to Hell, period. God’s grace is infinite, and thus so is his ability not just to forgive the sinner, but to bring them to salvation and make them truly good people again.

There is a great Bible passage (which for some reason I cannot Google up) that says that all who die will face the fire of judgment, but that this fire will burn away their sin like it was chaff, dirt, and stubble, and reveal the gold, silver, and precious gems underneath.

This suggests that God purifies people instead of damning them, and that’s what makes sense to me, heathen that I am. God relieves people of the burden of the struggle for divinity and instead lets them live on in perfect grace for all eternity.

So even Hitler gets cleansed, and is thus rewarded just the same as someone who led a saintly life. If this idea infuriates you, remember that by this system, due to God’s infinite grace, Hitler isn’t evil any more.

Let that idea stir your noodles for a while.

Before I watched the documentary, I had no idea that there was something besides infernalism within Christianity. It is not like you ever hear about these alternative views, and there’s a reason for that.

They are both considered heresy by nearly every Christian church out there. And not just any heresy, but the most dangerous one out there. It’s such a terrible heresy that all kinds of Christian church leaders in this day and age start using the word heresy when you bring it up.

And needless to say, I was thrilled to find out that there are still ideas out there that people consider dangerous heresy. It immediately filled me with admiration, and a little envy, for people like George Coleman, author of the book To Hell With Hell, who have the courage to stand up to all these fire and brimstone peddlers and preach the universalist message.

It’s not hard to see why the idea pisses people off. For the priest class, it kind of ruins their whole racket. They sell salvation, and salvation on their own terms (more profitable that way, and more fun), and if there is no Hell, then what exactly are they saving you from?

I would say “your own sinful nature and the misery it brings”, but that might be too subtle for these people.

For your average churchgoer, it becomes a question of invested effort. If there is no Hell, then they have been doing a lot of things that they really did not feel like doing for no reason at all. In fact, if you really look at it through that simplistic point of view, a lot of what people do for religion is not just unpleasant, it’s downright silly.

And people will naturally resist the idea that they have done silly, unfun, humiliating things for no reason.

Being nonreligious, I have always puzzled at the idea that there has to be some sort of reward and punishment system in order for people to be good. A lot of the angry preachers in the documentary seemed to think that if word got out that there is no Hell, society would instantly descend into anarchy.

But law, secular or religious, is not what keeps people from doing the wrong thing. The primary reason most people do not do bad things is that they do not want to be a bad person. The fear is not of eternal postmortem torment but of immediate and extremely painful guilt, not to mention fear of being thought of as bad by one’s community.

Most people do not want to be bad people, so they don’t do bad things. It’s just that simple.

I don’t believe in any form of theistic religion, but I do believe in sin, redemption, confession, and grace. These are all real things which really exist.

They just have nothing to do with a mythical God and everything to do with the nature of being human.

I guess that’s all for today, folks. Talk to you again tomorrow!

Or possibly a new conservatism. Trying to fit new ideas into the old one dimensional politics is like trying to define a cube without depth. It’s impossible.

Anyhow, my topic today is about the necessity of forming a new political movement. Call it rational liberalism, or evidence-based compassion, or whatever you like.

But the left needs to divest itself of its lunatic fringe of radical reactionaries if we are to march boldly and firmly into the future. To be limited by the exact same kind of thinking that causes the right wing social conservatives to blindly oppose things like gay marriage and marijuana legalization is not only unfitting our high intellectual ideals, it is a virtual guarantee that our voice will be confused, weak, diffuse, and ineffectual.

Because the plain truth is, you cannot lead people forward if what you really want is to backward, whether you are looking to retreat to a 1950’s that never existed or a state of balance and harmony with nature that also never existed.

The true enemy is irrationality. It is people swept up in passionate ignorance because it feels good and it’s easy. Just let go of your intellectual integrity and believe that which you already find easy to believe, with your usual set of villains and the scary scary things they do, and you too can enjoy the cathartic release of screaming in righteous rage at the Satan of your choosing without those pesky nuances and (heaven forbid) actual facts getting in the way and ruining all your fun.

Just try being the voice of moderate, fact based reason around people and see how they pout at you like they are children and you are spoiling a very fun game of make-believe. Then you will see what is really going on.

And before you get all smug, liberals, and assume I am only talking about Tea Party whackjobs jizzing all over themselves with glee as they pillory Hillary and satanize Obama, remember that this applies equally well to lefties screaming about nuclear power, GMOs, or the rain forest.

A key to the guidance of this new liberalism will be to question any movement that resists your looking at the real fact, the hard data, instead of their overheated and hysterical rhetoric. If people are worried that you will reach the “wrong” conclusions if you are left alone with the facts, it is a sure sign that these people have deep seated doubts about their own positions and are afraid that the facts do not actually support said positions, and that they have therefore been at best ridiculous and at worst possibly downright evil for vastly insufficient cause.

Because that is the thing about the kind of pure irrational high of total righteous conviction. It provides an excuse for all kinds of sins. Because if the enemy is infinitely evil, then all actions taken against them are justified, right?

People who otherwise would never think of screaming and foaming at the mouth in public will gladly do it at a political rally where it is not just allowed but socially rewarded on a massive scale. What is truth compared to that kind of pleasure? It feels good to be so sure of yourself. It feels good to get praise and reinforcement from like-minded people. And it really feels good to experience such unity with others, to be of one mind with so many others in a confined space.

Why, it’s just like church, except without the depressing and boring parts.

So I can see the appeal of these movements. I really can. All you need to make it perfect is your own source for news from the “right” perspective, already processed into the soft and digestible form your prefer, with nothing that might upset your mental digestion and cause the heartbreak and anxiety of actually having to think about what you think about things.

And again, I remind you that this applied equally to Tea Party morons who have no idea why they hate Obama and hysterical, hand-wringing environmentalists who have no idea why they hate GMOs.

They just know they are scared, and that is good enough for them.

So we fact-based moderates, we people of compassionate goals and rational means, we people who want to change the world by facing the facts, we who know you can’t get anywhere without taking a good look around to find out where you are, need a single unifying voice around which a movement can coalesce.

We need a motto, a rallying cry. As Jon Steward said, you can’t just march down the middle of Main Street chanting “Please Be Reasonable”. It needs a better fulcrum than that, some sort of inspirational sound bite that encapsulates what the movement is all about in a way that really speaks to people.

The problem is, of course, that reality is complicated and nuanced and thus nearly impossible to turn into a perfect little gem of a soundbite. That is precisely the problem. People prefer to believe in simplified, cartoonish versions of reality because it helps them cut down the complexity of the world to something they can handle.

And there is no royal road out of that mindset. You cannot make people think harder than they feel like thinking about things, You can present people with the absolute truth, a truth that is not just well expressed but vitally important to their own lives, and if it is too inherently complicated for the small amount of space they have open for new thoughts, it will simply bounce off their heads and fall to the floor, unnoticed.

So it looks like we will need to either be willing to dumb down the truth (bad) or lie in its service (worse) in order to get the point across.

There has to be another way, a way to bring people into the data-driven, results-based fold without scaring them off or misleading them. Some way to get them excited about the truth.

Damned if I know what it is, though.

Talk to you again tomorrow, folks!