Civilization requires Myths, and Myths are Absurd

There’s good reason to think that the culture of any mass society depends on myths which are fictions, which is to say lies we’re too polite to identify as such because these lies achieve a higher good. But what are the implications of this hypothesis, for moderns and liberals who flatter themselves that they’re rational and not so credulous?

Myths Define Cultural Identity

Every large society is founded on myths which are fictions that collectively distort the population’s perception of reality to maintain its group cohesion. In his book, Sapiens, Harari sets forth one explanation of how these myths arose, which begins by pointing out that our social instincts were adapted to stabilizing small tribes of around 150 members. In such groups we can use gossip and memory to form social bonds, based on familiarity with each other. But the agricultural revolutions in the Neolithic Period drew masses of thousands and millions of strangers together, which created the problem of unifying these masses to prevent them from splitting into more manageable subgroups. The solution was that although in the actual world a multitude may have many reasons to split due to natural differences of race, gender, character, and opinion, belief in an alternative, fictional world could compel everyone to imagine themselves as having a single, collective identity. This solution was made possible by our large, flexible brains, which allow us to dissociate information, to mentally model possible worlds and to overlay values and counterfactual interpretations onto sense data. For millennia the myths that sustained nations and empires were religious and cosmological, instilling in the citizens their collective values, and constructing theological or philosophical justifications for them in the myth’s narratives.

A second cause of the prevalence of myths is apparent from the Handicap Principle in biology. In a context in which deception is often in creatures’ self-interest, a signal is more reliable if it’s delivered at a cost to the signaler. Thus, an animal may really be formidable if it can afford to squander its strength on ostentatious displays. For example, the male peacock signals to the female that it’s a worthy mate, by finding a way to cope with its gaudy and comically-oversized tail feathers. (This has given rise to the term “peacocking” in the game of pickup artists.) In the same way, conspicuous consumption indicates that the consumer has money to waste on frivolous and often self-destructive entertainments. And whereas our imagination and reasoning may be geared to planning on how to exploit regularities in the natural environment, to increase the chance of our survival under the condition of nature’s indifference towards us, a decadent population finds itself able to squander these mental resources by entertaining outlandish scenarios and having them colour its perception of reality. Thus, the more absurd the myth, the greater the population’s apparent willpower. A foreigner might be led to think, “They can afford to believe the most errant nonsense without dying of embarrassment, so their group cohesion must be superhuman.”

This leads to a third root of our large-scale reality distortion, which is that the more counterfactual the cultural narrative, the greater the test of an individual’sfaith in the collective identity. A classic example of this is Tertullian’s boast that he believes the Christian creed becauseit’s absurd. The fideistic rationalization of that faith would be that a doctrine’s absurdity may be a sign of its supernatural, transcendent origin. Similarly, Saint Paul said that the wisdom of the natural world is foolishness to God, and Jesus is alleged to have said that we must be childlike to enter the kingdom of God. These would be rationalizations, of course, not epistemically worthy justifications of faith, because not every childlike act of avoiding the natural world need be a sign of some connection to a supernatural reality. Even if there were some higher realm that we could access only nonrationally, many nonrational expressions may be merely insane or serving the purpose of a fraud, as in the case of cults, for example.

An unsettling implication of this hypothesis, that every large population holds itself together by suspending disbelief in a cultural fiction, is that even the so-called modern, secular West depends on myths in that respect. As Harari also points out, these secular myths are economic and political rather than explicitly theological or cosmological. Since the Renaissance, Westerners have trusted in science, capitalism, liberalism, and above all in individualism. We believe individuals should be free to decide how they should live, and that scientific exploration and capitalistic struggle for private profit are progressive. In The Age of Insanity, Schumaker distinguishes between modernity in general and the Western, American-led form of it. Modernity after the Scientific Revolution he characterizes as “a postindustrial order whose primary features are commodification, consumption, social marginality, technological encroachment, amplified organizational power, homogenized drives and tastes, deregulation of volition and emotion, incomprehensible abstract systems, simultaneous communication, and the shift toward reflexive knowledge.” The values of the Western form of modernization are “personal autonomy, self-reliance, future orientation, a strong appetite for change, capitalistic heroism, and success-mindedness.”

But there’s another implication, which Harari doesn’t consider, which is that because these myths are fictions, they’re necessarily preposterous when viewed from an outsider’s vantage point. Unless you identify with the characters in a work of fiction, the fiction will seem merely counterproductive to the extent that it departs from the pressing features of the apparent world. The greater the author’s license to misrepresent the facts or to imagine a farfetched alternative, the more absurd the story will seem and thus the harder it will be for a foreigner to avoid ridiculing the believers for entertaining their bizarre worldview. When you emotionally identify with the characters, you share an identity with them which allows for cathartic release or for collective action. But when your values are based on your commitment to a myth that monopolizes your emotions, so that you can’t spare empathy for the plight of the mythical characters that bedazzle the foreigners, you’re disposed to belittle the mob that succumbs to that foreign piece of fan fiction. Moreover, in so far as you can be sociologically objective about allsuch myths, including the domestic ones, you can find yourself an alienated outsider to humanity in general, so that the conventional way of life that happens right in your midst will likewise seem as absurd as the one you’d find in a remote land or time.

Medieval European Absurdity

To see this, let’s compare how Westerners view the medieval Christian mindset and behaviour, with how an objective future historian might regard Western modernity. It’s commonplace for us to mock not just medieval peasants for their astounding ignorance, but also the priesthood and medieval intellectuals in Europe for their lack of originality, that is, for their dogmatism. Although our understanding of the period has been influenced by rationalist propaganda, medieval Christianity is still palpably absurd from our vantage point. Racism and sexism weren’t just nurtured in secret suspicions of others’ inferiority; ideological hatred motivated horrific collective action in the barbarities of the witch trials, pogroms, crusades, and inquisitions.

It seems impossible even to speak now of the medieval practices of conducting full trials of animals, including pigs, horses, rats, and even insects, and of often executing the accused on that preposterous basis, without feeling condescending pity for the childlike naivety of those involved centuries ago. From Wikipedia:

Animal defendants appeared before both church and secular courts, and the offences alleged against them ranged from murder to criminal damage. Human witnesses were often heard and in Ecclesiastical courts they were routinely provided with lawyers…If convicted, it was usual for an animal to be executed, or exiled. However, in 1750, a female donkey was acquitted of charges of bestiality due to witnesses to the animal's virtue and good behaviour while her human co-accused were sentenced to death.

The lunacy which passed for normality in that period extends to the fact that these “trials” were “part of a broader phenomenon that saw corpses and inanimate objects also face prosecution.” Needless to say, animals considered “familiars” of witches were burned at the stake along with the witches.

Comedians often use logic in their rational presentation of an absurdity, to help the audience suspend its disbelief for the sake of having a laugh. That is, a comedian might begin from a silly premise and follow through with a dramatic telling of what would logically happen next in the possible world in which that premise were actualized. With that in mind, the medieval animal trials seem now as if the witnesses, lawyers, and judges were staging a comedy: their assumptions were absurd, since even if animals had moral agency, they lack the means to communicate with us, not to mention a shared culture with their accusers, so that they couldn’t hope to understand the trial. But the medieval folks went to great lengths to put those assumptions into practice. Yet those folks were obviously not acting as comedians. Their myths and superstitions supplied them with a cultural identity, but those fictions had the byproduct of causing the population not just to detach from reality, but to land itself in what seem to us—having no cultural investment in those ancestors—like so many epic failures. Some of these trials were meant to assuage the guilt of peasants for killing what they deemed to be God’s creatures, as in the case of a French bishop’s order of “three days of daily processions where the slugs were told to leave the area or be cursed, thus making them free game for extermination.” Still, this only pushes the absurdity back a step. How bizarre must their beliefs have been for the peasants to have been able to feel less guilty about killing slugs when the slugs were merely cursed in an ecclesiastical ruling!

Imagine witnessing the plight of the pig that was put on trial for damaging property, or that of the rat that was tried and executed for running across the floor and upsetting a woman. These animals would have been just as clueless about what was happening to them as they are when they’re fed to be slaughtered or are killed by rat traps. But if a time traveler visited one of those animal trials, she would likely have felt that the practice was unseemly, because morally innocent creatures were roped into an insane conspiracy by deranged, self-righteous fools who must have congratulated themselves on their Christian virtue, for giving those animal “criminals” the benefit of the doubt. The practice was enabled by theological dualism, which was needed to justify the religious faith in an afterlife despite the body’s decay. If immaterial spirits are responsible for personhood, the physical difference between species is irrelevant and so a pig or a rat could be just as noble or as evil as a human.Liberal Westerners after the Enlightenment don’t share those medieval assumptions and so can scarcely believe that anyone could take them so seriously as to have engaged in such madness.

To take another example, Jews were demonized because some ancient, cherry-picked scriptures scapegoated them to curry favour with the Roman Empire, depicting Jews as those most responsible for failing to appreciate the god in their midst, Jesus Christ. And so Jews were murdered by Christians throughout Church history. Even Shakespeare demonized them. Again, Judaism can be rationally criticized, but here we’re talking about the necessary absurdity of how it will seem when a myth motivates a population to dissociate from reality, to act as though the fiction that emotionally binds the masses were worthy of being taken so seriously even when the myth is plainly fanciful.

Modern Western Absurdity

What’s shocking is that on the foregoing analysis, our secular culture must be capable of being perceived as being just as ludicrous as medieval Christianity (or as any ancient or foreign culture in its peculiar myth-ladenness). This can be tested if we manage to de-familiarize ourselves with our culture, perhaps by some rhetorical trick, so that we come to feel that same twinge of condescension—except now for our neighbours and for our encultured selves. We should be able to find a striking example of any of the features that Schumaker picks out (quoted above) and then imagine how that behaviour would strike someone who doesn’t share our culture. But let’s take just modernity’s fixation on abstract systems. This is a carryover of scientists’ use of artificial languages for the sake of greater precision in their predictions and calculations. The symbols in natural languages have intuitive, metaphorical undertones, and thus are counterproductive when the goal is to objectify and to quantify some phenomenon. Abstract systems dominate in the bureaucratic jargon of businesses and governments, in the dehumanizing rhetoric of militaries, and in the mass production of merchandise.

Take, for example, Big Agriculture’s practice of torturing millions upon millions of domesticated beasts to cut down on the costs of feeding pampered, short-sighted consumers such as you and me. Pig farmers keep sows in isolated gestation crates that are so small, the sows can’t turn around. The female pigs spend their entire life in these steel crates, except for the brief periods twice a year when they give birth. Whereas medieval peasants had no conception of the brain’s importance to the mind, biologists today understand that pigs are highly intelligent and social animals, so that we have no such excuse for failing to realize that not being able to turn around or interact with other pigs must constitute torture for those animals.

Thus, while the peasants personified pigs by trying them in court for imagined criminal offenses, we sophisticated modern folk imprison and torture pigs because our myths enable us to regard the animals as machines whose suffering serves a greater good. Medievals thought in terms of divinely-mandated hierarchies, of Creation as being governed by a benevolent deity so that no subject could be divorced from moral evaluation. Everything served God’s purpose, including the devil who badly miscalculated that he could rebel and establish an independent order of being, according to the myth. By contrast, moderns assume there’s no such overarching moral order, nor any immaterial life forces, so that all that remains are natural mechanisms, some of which add up to living things. As this Slate article points out, medievals “saw aspects of animal behavior that we don’t see anymore,” because they lived daily with animals, whereas consumer societies delegate farming to huge corporations that serve not God’s laws but the capitalistic imperative to struggle greedily to maximize profit. The gestation crates are kept from public view, so that most moderns never see living pigs. All we care about are the products we pay for, the bacon and hamburgers and ribs. Thus, we deride the medievals for their naivety in treating animals as though the animals’ behaviours were morally relevant, for going as far as to prosecute them for criminal offenses. But our callousness and cowardice involved in keeping the torture of livestock out of sight and mind must be just as bewildering from an alien perspective. Christian theology is gratuitous in its disregard of natural facts, but so is the modern penchant for abstract systems which blinds us to the anomalousness and thus the preciousness of life.

Living pigs are not really objects or machines; they’re just mistreated as such by faceless corporations that compartmentalize unpleasant truths. For example, no report on bacon profits in a Big Agra office will refer by name to the individual pigs which that corporation owns. Instead, the livestock will be quantified by an abstract system of calculating materials, costs, outputs, and the like. Perhaps the pigs are assigned a numerical designation. The sow’s happiness would matter to the food producers or consumers only if the moral question entered into our individual concerns—because as moderns, we’re individualists who worship our autonomy. If profit can be maximized by ignoring the sow’s unhappiness, because her ability to socialize doesn’t affect the number of piglets she can produce, and if the squalid state of corporate pig farms can be kept from public view, on the grounds of private property, to avoid a boycott, the moral question becomes irrelevant for capitalistic purposes. And if modernity is defined by the myth that capitalism matters more than traditional spirituality, the inhumane practice of torturing millions of animals for the mass production of food will continue as though we needn’t be ashamed of it, just as the practice of animal trials persisted for centuries because the medievals didn’t know better.

Moreover, if consumers can ignore the fact that to furnish us with our cushy modern lifestyle, most wild animal species have had to be exterminated (due to encroaching human habitation and industries), leaving mainly the domesticated, tortured animals, so that the bacon’s taste isn’t tainted by unwanted knowledge, we consumers will perpetuate the disparity between how the world really is and how it seems to us, given our ideological filter. The disparity is more unseemly in the modern case, because we have only false consciousness, not wholesale ignorance to enable the dissociation that sustains our myth-laden practice. We know that pain and pleasure are matters of biology, not immaterial spirit, and being individualists we glorify personhood as the pinnacle of natural creation, even though we must differ from animals only by degree. Thus, the fact that we consumers indirectly torture millions of sentient creatures, by demanding their meat for food and by participating in a neoliberal society that prioritizes economic evaluations must be as sad and grotesque as the medieval’s childlike ignorance, although in our encultured mindframe we can’t appreciate the absurdity.

Myth-Making in Politics

This assessment of the cost of social unity can be applied to the mystery of Trumpism. Liberals wonder how Republicans can afford to lie with so little shame, but liberals thereby miss the point of authoritarian propaganda. As one author puts it in the New York Times, the goal of such propaganda is “to sketch out a consistent system that is simple to grasp, one that both constructs and simultaneously provides an explanation for grievances against various out-groups. It is openly intended to distort reality, partly as an expression of the leader’s power” (my emphasis). If Democrats are more loathe than Trumpian Republicans to publicly stray from a literal reading of facts, this shows only that Republicans operate at a meta-level of myth-making. Liberals are beholden to the Enlightenment-era myths about the individual’s sovereignty through rational self-control, while Republicans understand that politics isn’t a science but an exercise in maintaining social unity through the cultivation of a mass fiction. What Trump is doing is bypassing feminized, obsolete liberal myths and reframing American social issues in terms of authoritarian fantasies that spring from his gut reaction to the anecdotes he comes across in his binges on late night television. Instead of creating his religion in the traditional manner, by sojourning in the desert like Jesus or on the mountaintop like Moses, Trump aggregates the upshot of infotainments that bubble up to the surface of social media. The result may be an uglier, regressive American self-image that befits that country’s lesser standing in a multipolar world. In any case, the fact that Trump doesn’t attempt to hide the political process of fictionalizing daily events to unify the public is itself evidence for the above analysis. Trump’s motives aren’t selfless, but the public nevertheless needs an imaginary collective identity to avoid brutalizing the strangers next door at the slightest grievance.

What’s more, though, the liberal reaction to Trump’s audacity is likewise evidence that Trump opposes a received myth to which liberals are unwittingly enthralled. The conventional wisdom is that political leaders should be honest and rational, because democracy, like capitalism, is meritocratic. In a free society, we strive to better ourselves, taking advantage of opportunities to gain knowledge, and politicians and businesspeople will be modest managers whose power is reined in by the voters or shareholders. That so-called wisdom is mythical and fantastic. In reality, the chance to exercise power over others attracts not the best but the worst members of society, namely psychopaths. Decent individuals would abhor the opportunity to dominate others, fearing that such a temptation would naturally corrupt their character. Meanwhile, zealots with the most ambition who leap at the chance to “serve” the nation or the market are actually the most likely to be inwardly monstrous. Outwardly, these “leaders” will be attractive, since the electoral and promotional processes are superficial, but ethically the winners will be disproportionately predatory or parasitic.

Now Trump represents a backlash against that liberal convention. The “elites” and the “establishment” are blamed for double-crossing the middleclass, which they’ve done non-stop since Ronald Reagan was president. Trump won’t address the problems of globalization or automation, since there are no political or economic solutions to them. A technological miracle will save the bulk of humanity or there will be a wave of neo-Luddite slaughter and all-out war against the top one percent. But what Trump is clearly trying to do is to reframe American culture to lend the white male have-nots some self-respect. Trump’s fantasies and lies and spins are laughable, but that’s irrelevant since every culture is laughable, being a practically-necessary mass fiction that requires the believers’ suspension of disbelief. Liberal faith in democratic and capitalistic institutions is also laughable. As this article explains, these institutions are currently in the business of putting most humans out of work. Robots are taking over—and not just in science fiction. Liberals want to raise the minimum wage and improve education to ensure the masses have good jobs, but those measures are obsolete and even counterproductive. Raising the minimum wage, for example, will escalate the outsourcing of jobs not to foreigners but to machines that work for free.

Trump is an abomination, but so is civilization which condemns us to lie to each other. Trump is only exploiting the depravities of a social order that’s operated on principles first devised twelve thousand years ago. The leaders must lie to the masses, and those lies must be captivating so that the masses will beg for more. The alternative is to stare reality in the face with no protection by way of self-serving myths. That existential confrontation is deathly and suitable only for the marginalized. Mass society itself is possible only if the majority is put to bed by a lullaby, otherwise called the myth that defines the population’s cultural identity. Liberals are free to oppose and to ridicule Trump, but they shouldn’t pretend that myth-making is unknown to politics, because that gives their game away and makes them look foolish in turn.

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When Madness is Normal: Sanity in the Minds of Animals and the Rise of Divine Persons

There’s a perennial debate about the psychiatric concept of mental disorder. Is that concept being abused? Are normal behaviours being pathologized to sell pharmaceuticals? But the truth of mental health and insanity seems far removed from this controversy.

Mental Disorder as Dysfunction

The latest psychiatric manual of disorders, the DSM-5, defines “mental disorder” as “a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning. Mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress in social, occupational, or other important activities. An expectable or culturally approved response to a common stressor or loss, such as the death of a loved one, is not a mental disorder. Socially deviant behavior (e.g., political, religious, or sexual) and conflicts that are primarily between the individual and society are not mental disorders unless the deviance or conflict results from a dysfunction in the individual, as described above.”

The key to understanding this definition is the notion of a “function.” The psychiatrist wants to distinguish between normality and pathology, the latter being a deviation from a norm that calls for psychiatric action; more precisely, she wants to cater to cultural presumptions about psychological normality, which is why the definition adds that “An expectable or culturally approved response to a common stressor or loss, such as the death of a loved one, is not a mental disorder” (my emphasis). If a culture sanctions some behaviour, the behaviour cannot be abnormal or dysfunctional—unless the whole culture is backward and deranged from a modern, Western viewpoint. What, then, does “dysfunction” add to the concept of mere statistical abnormality, that is, to the concept of something’s rarity? Here the psychiatrist walks a fine line between calculating the difference between common and uncommon psychological and social patterns, on the one hand, and moralizing on the other. The latter is forbidden to the contemporary psychiatrist who seeks to align her discipline more with the hard sciences than with philosophy, theology, and the arts. In the past, psychiatrists did rationalize theological prejudices regarding the alleged evil of certain dispositions such as homosexuality and femininity. Jews and Christians read in their scriptures that women are inferior to men, and early modern, Western psychiatrists deferred to that unscientific, moralistic judgment, prescribing patronizing means for women to adapt to their alleged inferiority and lack of full personhood. But after R.D. Laing, Foucault, and others showed in the 1960s and ‘70s that the prevailing psychiatric criteria for mental health were subjective, psychiatrists developed objective tests in the form of checklists, thus preserving the scientific image of their discipline. (For a stirring presentation of this recent history, see Part 1 of Adam Curtis’ documentary, The Trap.)

The notion of dysfunction, then, is crucial to this larger psychiatric project. On the one hand, a dysfunction is an inability to carry out some process, to complete some expected relation between cause and effect. The fact that there’s a causal relationship at issue provides the generality to account for the norm which is being violated, since causality is the paramount scientific concept for understanding natural order. Psychiatrists see themselves as scientists exploring the mind and so they posit an order in the mental domain. The order investigated by scientists in general is explained with an instrumental agenda in mind, the goal being not just to understand but to control phenomena. Thus, scientists are minimalists and conservative in their theorizing: they objectify, explaining regularities in terms of force, mass, and other such relatively value-neutral properties. Real patterns are understood in terms of physical necessity—not as happening, for example, by free choice, since that would be a form of magic, a miracle that couldn’t be controlled and therefore couldn’t be scientifically (instrumentally and objectively) understood.

So a dysfunction is a deviation from, or a blockage in the furtherance of, a function, where a function is at least a causal relationship. However, because the psychiatrist sees herself as a medical scientist, she thinks she does well in the world, and so a mental function must be more than a regularity that merely happens regardless of any normative context. Functions are deemed to be good from some perspective, namely by a culture at large. Psychiatrists thus still kowtow to social presumptions, but they do so under the cover of scientific (instrumentalist, objectifying) rhetoric.Mental dysfunctions are, therefore, relativelybad irregularities: violations of social norms, causing suffering which is commonly assumed to be unwanted, and preventing the individual from carrying out her “important activities.” The goodness of mental health depends on a social evaluation, which the psychiatrist merely presupposes, but she’s quick to point out that not every conflict with society is pathological. Political, religious, or sexual rebels aren’t mentally unwell unless their behaviour is brought on by a dysfunction, as the DSM definition says. This means the rebel must suffer because of her inability to function, that is, because of a syndrome reflecting a disturbance in her thought processes. 

Of course, a syndrome is also a pattern and a process, which is to say that the “disordered,” unhealthy behaviour exhibits its own order as opposed to being an anomalous event; otherwise, it wouldn’t be a form of behaviour, a general, predictable set of responses subject to scientific explanation. So is the difference between functional and dysfunctional processes in any way objective? The DSM-4 definition provides some more detail which might help: “each of the mental disorders is conceptualized as a clinically significant behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern that occurs in an individual and that is associated with present distress (e.g., a painful symptom) or disability (i.e., impairment in one or more important areas of functioning) or with a significantly increased risk of suffering death, pain, disability, or an important loss of freedom.” From this we can gather that, while seeming oxymoronic, disordered regularities (syndromes) must be those thought patterns that cause the individual pain or a loss of freedom. Disability is painful because the “areas of functioning” are deemed important, and so a healthy person should want to engage in them. The mentally disordered rebel, therefore, mustn’t choose her antisocial course of action, but must be led to it by a thought pattern that causes her distress. She must be internally conflicted, which should make her liable to admit that her conflict with society is ill-advised.

The psychiatrist’s appeal to freedom, though, is curious, because it threatens to undermine the definition’s scientific status. But the question of whether the DSM’s definition of “mental health” is incoherent would be a red herring. The DSM itself acknowledges that “mental health” can’t be adequately defined. The definition is offered only because of its utility: as DSM-4 says, the definition “is as useful as any other available definition and has helped to guide decisions regarding which conditions on the boundary between normality and pathology should be included in DSM-IV.” This isn’t the extent of the definition’s instrumentality, however; as I said, the rhetoric of functionalism allows the psychiatrist to dabble in normative generalizations while clinging to the authority of science in the form of neutral-sounding jargon. The root of the contradiction is psychiatry’s intermediate position as a soft science, a discipline that stands between scientific investigation which necessarily objectifies and thus dehumanizes its subject, and cultural, teleological presumptions about the goodness of “health” and of the goals which a healthy person can achieve. In essence, then, the DSM definition is an act of camouflage.

Inadvertently, however, the definition helps to reveal some underlying social processes which shed light on the difference between so-called mental health and pathology. Step with me through the looking glass and look anew at these conventions we use to congratulate ourselves on our status as either normals or heroic rebels.

Animals and Persons, Slaves and Masters

Notice, then, that the talk of psychological or social functions is implicitly depersonalizing (and so quite at odds with any talk of freedom). At best, functions are roles played by actors, or by people who aren’t free to exhibit their personal preferences, because they have a job to do. For example, they might have to sacrifice their private standards to achieve a goal they’re expected to achieve on account of their prior commitments. This typically happens in the workplace where the worker needs a job to survive, but detests what her company compels her to do in this public role she occupies. For most people, psychological functions derive from social ones in that an individual feels the pressure to behave, to resist certain ways of thinking and feeling only when she contemplates how her actions would be publicly assessed. The roles most of us play are assigned by the myths that define the character of our culture, not by our private creative acts. By carrying out our social functions, we fit into society. 

There are three paradigms of “behaviour,” of functional activity in this sense. The first is animal behaviour which corresponds to natural order as determined principally by natural selection. Talk of the functionality or optimality (that is, the pseudo-rightness) of adaptive animal behaviour is a remnant of obsolete deistic thinking in biology. Interaction between the genes and the environment produces body types which in turn act with some regularity; in general, organisms are subject to a life cycle which requires that they seek resources to sustain them so they might contribute to the future of their species by reproducing. But Darwin showed that this process is a matter of sheer causality. Animals tend to approve of most stages of their life cycle (short of the final stage, being death), because their bodies are engineered to result in that approval via the influence of hormones, cognitive restrictions, and the like. They fear certain outcomes and desire others, and functional, adaptive, biologically-determined behaviour is the pattern of responses—by turns awe-inspiring and gruesome—that we see throughout the animal kingdom we’ve almost entirely displaced. Animals hunt for food, craft shelters, put on a show to attract a mate, and sometimes cooperate to raise their offspring, because that’s what they’re built to do. In that respect, their behaviour is robotic: genetically programmed and largely automated.

As I just hinted at, that paradigm of behaviour is in the process of being superseded, as domesticated animals replace wild ones and thus as a social order revolutionizes the prior, natural one. The second paradigm, then, is of animals conforming not to their phenotype or to their habitat, but to the dictates of a particular, godlike species that acts as their global master. While deism was a hangover from a time of mass medieval confusion, the behaviour of most large animals is indeed now intelligently designed, because those animals are almost all domesticated or on the verge of extinction. Domesticated animals fulfill social rather than “natural” (naturally selected) functions in so far as they’re forced to act as our slaves (as pets or livestock). For example, they live in pens or cages and so have their basic needs met not by the fitness of their labour but by the power of corporate farming conglomerates and by the insatiable demand of spoiled and deluded human consumers that drives the farming industry. Instead of caring for their offspring in the wild, domesticated sows have their piglets forcibly removed soon after they’re born so the mothers can return to their social function of pumping out another round of offspring.

The third paradigm carries over our practice of domesticating (enslaving) wild animals, into the nonorganic realm of technology, yielding robots and other machines that likewise can function or malfunction according to whether they fulfill their programs. Sheep, pigs, and chickens, along with pets and zoo animals must be forcibly trained to behave as demanded by their masters, because their social function conflicts with their natural one, and so there’s always the risk that the animals will resist when the opportunity presents itself. Technology lacks any such ambivalence, of course, because machines have no prior programming.

These are the three touchstones of our notion of functionality. When applied to people, then, as in the case of the psychiatric conception of mental health, functional individuals are at least implicitly compared to wild or domesticated animals or to machines. In either case, notice that whereas mental health is supposed to be a benefit or even a precondition of our achieving our ultimate goal in life, such as happiness, virtually no one would approve of being compared to animals or to machines. And yet mental health is defined in terms of functionality, pathology in terms of dysfunction. Indeed, putting aside the idiosyncrasies of the DSM definitions, we generally think of mentally healthy individuals as those who successfully go about their business, thus performing one or another social function, the latter being a culturally-sanctioned pursuit such as a family life or a career. Like animals that have prior programming or like machines that are developed from their moment of invention to achieve a single purpose, so-called healthy human individuals are animalistic or mechanical in their social interactions.

But this raises the question of how the analogy might be extended to take into account the input of the masters. Who is assigning healthy, normal individuals their social roles?The answer follows upon our observing that the mass of normal “individuals” or “persons” are betas in the ethological respect: they’re followers in a dominance hierarchy, perhaps working their way to becoming alphas (leaders who enjoy privileged access to the group’s resources) or perhaps content with the security of their station. If human societies are composed of mammalian dominance hierarchies, at least at some level of analysis, there must be human alphas who have an outsized impact on societal standards. Historically, these alphas have been political rulers, including the lords and aristocrats who employed troubadours, playwrights, and painters to mythologize their exploits, but whose tastes and habits typically repulsed the unwashed masses, leading to violent overthrows as in the French, American, and Communist revolutions. More recently, thanks to the rise of public relations propaganda and to capitalistic and democratic assimilations of the potential for mass resentment about grotesque economic inequality, oligarchic tastes have trickled down to the conventions that outline what we might call the middleclass life cycle. A normal, healthy, middleclass beta would be alternately shocked, appalled, and jealous were she treated to an insider’s view of a plutocrat’s lifestyle, just as anyone who glimpsed a deity would be simultaneously terror-stricken and drawn towards the transcendent reality (as Rudolph Otto said about an experience of the numinous). Just as alpha and beta wolves don’t live in the same way, since the alpha has many more privileges and free rein whereas the beta must knuckle under or risk its life by staging a duel, human upper and middle classes might as well reside on different planets—as caricatured in the movie Elysium. For example, whereas a middleclass drudge must wade through the masses at the airport to board a crowded plane, the upper class member typically has access to a private jet or yacht.

The point isn’t that oligarchs explicitly plot to domesticate the masses, deciding step-by-step how the latter might be controlled. But the indoctrination and training do unfold organically as a result of loopholes in democracy and capitalism which implement old forms of social control in new guises, the old ones being theocratic or megamechanical, as in Lewis Mumford's conception of the latter. For example, in liberal societies, civic religion replaces theism as the noble lie that sways the citizens to trust in the society’s systems and laws (see Simon Critchley’s The Faith of the Faithless). And capitalism perpetuates the myth that narrow-minded selfishness is the engine of progress, which tricks consumers into accepting vast status quo inequalities. All of which is most glaringly apparent in the political and economic dynamics of the United States. That country does indeed lead the free world in that it reveals how the progress of liberal humanism is due to a Faustian bargain. Humanism is evidently powerless to create a truly progressive civilization, one that does away with premodern forms of barbarism. On the contrary, the U.S.-centered, post-WWII global civilization we think of honourifically as “modern” only perfects the master-slave relationship. We use technology to accelerate the demise of all wild, uncivilized forms of life, meaning all nonhuman species, and then the strongest, most cunning or remorseless human leaders turn our predatory instrumentalism to the task of enslaving the bulk of humanity to boot. Now Hollywood and corporate advertising indoctrinate the masses with market-tested myths to cultivate our selfishness and materialism as well as stoking our fantasies and unconscious fears, to prolong the palpably unsustainable form of civilization at the apex of which is necessarily a quintessentially insane leadership.

And so we reach the surreal irony that the standard of mental health for the masses, namely social functionality, civility or domestication, is established by indoctrination flowing from a liberal, capitalistic (selfish and materialistic) civilization that reserves its most godlike rewards for those who are palpably unwell. To wit, oligarchs are typically psychopaths. They’re either able to peck their way to the top of the pecking order because they’re biologically unencumbered by a conscience which would otherwise retard their ambition, or else they accustom themselves to the inhumanity of their enterprise and so lose their scruples as they acquire more and more corrupting power, as in the case of U.S. President Obama. We middleclass folks—with access to computers and the internet and time to spare perusing blogs—may think it’s important to distinguish between the mentally healthy and the unhealthy, and we’d further conceive of the happy middleclass family that we see on TV ads or in 1950s Hollywood as the paragon of sanity. The smiling parents with their adoring children and pet dog are the sanest because they’ve completely conformed to mass cultural expectations. They beam their smiles not because all is well with them, but because they’re uninterested in learning how their lifestyle is endangered by blowback from the atrocities committed by those buried, as it were, in the matted fur growing from their nation’s repulsive underbelly.

What we fail to grasp is that the controversy over this middleclass distinction between mental health and insanity, where the latter is understood as mere social dysfunction, is a tempest in a teapot. Looked at in the context I’ve laid out above, what we call mental health is akin to the unknowing tranquility adopted by a victim of Stockholm Syndrome. We long to be the godlike oligarchs who have maximum prestige and freedom in our rapacious societies even as we shy away from seeing clearly either those leaders or those societies. Our complacence and passivity are functional means of preserving an unstable, highly-destructive civilization that’s represented by fittingly-monstrous avatars such as Donald Trump and his ilk. That is, our “healthy” normality entails our social functionality, which means we must focus narrowly on our middleclass life cycle, ignoring the global ramifications and the hideous deformities that naturally fester in the leaders of this delusion-fueled way of life. We think we’re sane and healthy when we do our jobs even though we long effectively to be perfectly insane (from this middleclass vantage point). We wish we were oligarchs—even though the oligarchs aren’t fully human; they lack the capacity for complex emotions, because were they burdened by a conscience, they couldn’t manage the massive cognitive dissonance that must form in the mind of any rational person who participates in the upper echelons of so grotesque and blinkered a civilization as the one in which we modern liberal humanists have created for ourselves. The point should be emphasized that the sociopathy of the top one percent of wealthy and powerful individuals is hardly accidental. While not all members of this upper class are equally inhuman, the process by which any average person is liable to be corrupted by their dominance over others and over the world in general is familiar, although we prefer not to dwell on the implications for our self-image, according to which we’re innocent followers of those leaders.    

Outsiders Liberated from the Rat Race

Who, then, are the truly sane ones? We can begin to answer this with a non-normative distinction, between those who are clearly unwell, according to the forgoing analysis, and any remaining folks who at least have that potential for mental wellness. If we eliminate the betas who are called mentally healthy but who are actually dupes in a freakish and heinous system, and we set aside the alphas who are either full-blown sociopaths or who are at least corrupted to some extent by their escalating engagements with hedonism and sadism, we’re left mainly with the losers who correspond, ethologically, to omegas. These last to receive the group’s bounties stand outside the dominance hierarchy because they’re too weak or unreliable to be trusted with the job of defending the territory or of securing the group’s next meal. That very outsider status, however, should allow omegas to appreciate the sublime horror that counts for daily life in the wild. Of course, this assumes that the social species in question have the capacity to feel that sort of abstract, existential fear, which presumably isn’t the case for most of them. Human omegas are in that position and yet that alone doesn’t make them sane. Some of these omegas are homeless and starving and thus ill-equipped to think clearly. Some are depressed or schizophrenic or otherwise deranged. Other, learned outsiders succumb to mystical balderdash and exploit beta herds as their cult leaders. Some graduate to beta status themselves as monks or nuns of a holy order.

In any case, the question of sanity isn’t the one to ask. While we can speak biologically of normal and abnormal brain functioning, and of debilitating disorders such as Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia, the general notion of mental health is part of the beta’s self-delusion. The kind of health we have in mind is the pet’s passivity, the ability to function in the socially accepted way. Mental health is measured by your tendency to contribute to society, especially by raising a family and earning a living. Above all, the healthy person must fit into a culturally-prescribed role. In that respect, she’s more animal or machine than person. To borrow from the DSM definition’s hodgepodge of sophistries, the hallmark of personhood is autonomy—indeed the very freedom that has no place in functionality. Existentialists like Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Camus, and Sartre have exhaustively analyzed the concept of personal freedom, particularly from the phenomenological end. They emphasized the onerous burden of responsibility placed on the free individual, the dread and angst she suffers knowing that because she’s free, she has no foundation to rest on, no axioms to guide her choice of a direction in life. Indeed, the existentially-free individual seems deranged in her ruminations. Like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, the free person will be inwardly conflicted and crushed beneath the magnitude of her decisions, given that a precondition of her freedom is that she understands we alone must decide on our life’s meaning. And like Camus’ stranger, the free person is liable to be alienated from feel-good, beta society. If we ask the broader question—not "Who is sane?" but "What ought we to do?"—the person who is free to obey social conventions or to reject them as farcical may be both mentally unwell in some sense, but also heroically superhuman.

Incidentally, this is why the DSM’s point about the connection between suffering and dysfunction is so telling. The “well-adjusted” beta multitudes shouldn’t suffer because they’re sheeple, and disturbing their domesticity would be as rude as scaring babies. But genuine, enlightened peoplewill likely suffer for their self-understanding: they know that they’re free, that mass culture is obscene, and thus that they’re on their own as outsiders in the whole uncaring universe. Why wouldn’tthey suffer? But also, if that existential suffering makes them “dysfunctional” or even antisocial, why is that worse than being an apologist for a “humanistic,” “progressive” civilization that dehumanizesthe masses and enslaves or exterminates most forms of life like the crazed aliens you see wreaking havoc in old sci-fi movies?

The Emergence of God at the Reversal of Fate

The more pertinent distinction isn’t between dysfunction and mental health, but between animality and personhood. Animals and machines follow training and rules; their behaviour is programmed and so they’re slaves to a master. Again, existentially speaking, most humans, namely the beta class, are animals and machines, not persons: we live as functionaries in one system or another, playing roles without much self-awareness or appreciation for the cosmic tragedy—the destruction of the biosphere—to which we’re contributing in our workaday fashion. Those with the greater potential for autonomy are the omegas, the social outsiders who thus bear the weight of the existential choice of what to do with themselves, since they have no role to play. Again, the stakes are no longer pathology and health, but automatism and personhood. Instead of wondering whether we’re normal or deranged, we should be considering whether we’re authentic persons in the first place. Are the beta masses that follow the megalomaniacal predators of the top one percent healthy for doing so just because they thereby maintain some social order? Is it sane to pursue the long-term destruction of all life or to shirk your responsibility as a potentially self-aware human, by acting out natural and social roles instead of making a philosophically-informed choice of how to live? What is one deluded nobody’s happiness worth in the shadow of the dreadful con of which she’s a victim? If we shift our perspective to one that appreciates the existential stakes, we begin to discern that the majority that’s called healthy, sane, and normal aren’t even fully human. Their minds are inauthentic, because they haven’t been liberated by a philosophical awakening. Plato and Jesus both called them vulgar swine, those controlled by their lusts or who wouldn’t recognize pearls of wisdom even were they dropped at their feet.

Interestingly, once we set aside the psychiatrist’s narrow, half-hearted teleology, we can see that despite the alphas' psychopathy, they too have a greater capacity for authenticity since like the omegas they’re not imprisoned by any social system. Whereas the omega’s freedom derives from her marginalization and by the higher-order thoughts that afflict and alienate her as she retreats inward in hyper-reflection, the alpha is liberated precisely by his amorality and transnational perspective. Not committed to any national ethos, not trapped in any rat race, but godlike in his command over the experiences he chooses to have, the alpha stands above and thus apart from mass society. As you might have gleaned, freedom isn’t necessarily a gift. We’re most free when we’re detached from everything else, including our home and loved ones, when we’re isolated and left to stew over some weighty decision we alone can shoulder the responsibility for. The homeless and the forgotten losers, the nomads and beatniks, the introverted artists paralyzed by sensitivity, the misfits and drifters and fools and freaks and itinerant monks and above all the outsiders—these are the freest creatures on earth and thus they alone are fully human in so far as our species is supposed to be populated by people rather than by animals or machines. And if the plutocrats and mob bosses and emperors and dictators are warped by their power and celebrity, they can be just as superhuman as the sage, regardless of the alpha’s insanity or evil. Alphas wouldn't be fully human in the biological sense, because of their limited capacity for complex emotions, as I said, but they might be psychologically superhuman, given their detachment from mass society and from its social roles and norms. In any case, there's no guarantee that our best representatives are especially clear-headed and benevolent; on the contrary, we may be afflicted with the leaders we deserve because those masters may develop our human potential to its terrifying endpoint.

In a founding myth of Western civilization, Yahweh said about Adam that he should have a helpmate, because it’s not good for man to be alone, and so Yahweh made Eve (Gen.2:18). But this myth was a rewriting of earlier, Sumerian stories that reflected our animistic past, when our ancestors perceived all of nature as being alive, and so instead of being bent on controlling natural mechanisms, the ancients assumed they could socialize with the world. As Daniel Dennett explains in Breaking the Spell, animism and theism were caused by the overuse of our instinct for relating to each other as minds. On the whole, the ancient animists were thus also more akin to childlike animals than to authentic, liberated and forlorn persons. Far from being rationally alienated from nature and society, the ancients projected social categories onto the whole world and so felt at home everywhere and under all circumstances. Animists would have abhorred the prospect of being alone, because their aptitude for socialization and personification, which Dennett calls the intentional stance, was hyperactive. But solitude is almost a precondition for freedom and thus for personhood. This is why the introvert’s inner life transcends the extrovert’s monkey-like preoccupation with making acquaintances and flirting and gossiping and the like; the introvert’s presence graces the animal kingdom with something new, something virtually supernatural, with a godlike being that can do what it alone likes. The price for this emergence of godhood—which is almost synonymous with personhood—may be mental disorder in the form of cognitive or emotional dysfunction, because an absolute, posthuman god would be tortured by the sovereignty that alienates it from everything else. But there’s a fate worse than not fitting into an irresponsible society, and that’s being the human animal or machine that depends on the delusions keeping that society afloat.   

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Hit Music: The Assault on the Brain

Let's take on the pressing mystery of a type of so-called “hit music,” such as the kind often played on Virgin Radio. A few days a week I leave work at lunch to get a sandwich at Mr Sub, and they always play that radio station. I’m treated then to certain recurring songs, interspersed by the banter of Ryan Seacrest and the blather of ads.

What these songs have in common is minimalism. There’s hardly anything going on in them. I’ll give you some examples: “One Dance,” by Drake, “Love Yourself,” by Justin Bieber, and “Hands to Myself,” by Selena Gomez. Not all the hit songs on that radio station are minimally musical like those examples. Most, in fact, are dance, rap, or soul songs. In the case of rap or soul music, the instruments might be low-key because those songs feature the lyrics or the soaring voice. But then there are these minimalist songs where the instruments, the voice, and the lyrics are hardly even there. Those are the ones that especially cry out for some explanation. Why do they exist? What do these ghostly, gutted songs reveal indicate about the current state of Western art?

Now, in my opinion, 98% of all Virgin Radio’s hit music is abominable: balless, brainless, vapid, happy-talking, and/or annoyingly repetitive. But if I were to vent that opinion for the next little while, that would be a mere cliché. Hit music is made mainly by young people for young people—younger than me, at least. And we all know that older people lose touch with young people’s culture. Besides, we’d be talking about taste in music, and that’s subjective. So instead of committing the old guy’s fallacy of mistaking his aesthetic taste for knowledge of some objective fact, I’m going to leave aside the value judgment and point straight at the objective features of those minimalistic songs. On YouTube, you can listen to the ones I listed and then you’ll know what I mean, if you’re not already familiar with them.

For some background, I recommend this video interview of John Seabrook, author of The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory, and this article that discusses the recent history of hit-song writing. The upshot is that hit music today is manufactured by teams of song engineers who fill in the blanks of the track-and-hook template, following rote procedures made possible by the computers on which almost all of this music is made. The beats are separated from the melodies, and teams of producers are swapped by studios to work on dozens of songs for each headlining “artist,” like Rihanna, Britney Spears, or Justin Bieber, which are then pared down to form the CD. This method of engineered, assembly-line music-writing is very different from the romantic one of the 1960s and 70s, in which individual artists expressed their vision on account of their personal talent. Think of The Beatles, Jimmy Hendrix, or Led Zeppelin. Hit music now is like fast food or the Marvel comic book movies that have taken over Hollywood. The food is manufactured to exploit weaknesses in the human brain, such as its love of sugar and fat, just as the movies are made by armies of computer graphics engineers who serve up action and teenager fantasies. Apparently, the brain also has an infantile love of repetition. The brain releases dopamine if we can predict when the song’s hook will reappear, so a hit song must be simple and catchy.

This, though, is the formula for hit music in general. Again, the result is commercial music that has no existential impact and poses no artistic challenge to dubious conventions. But where does the absurd minimalism of a subset of hit songs enter the picture? Here are a few possible explanations. First, the musically-minimal songs push the boundaries of computer-driven hit music, by catering to no one, with virtually no attractive features. As machines and computers dominate the landscape, we must dehumanize ourselves to adapt to that inhuman environment. Hit music isn’t aimed at whole persons, with our everyday concerns and existential questions. Instead, the music targets the brain’s pleasure center: the song is formed by mechanisms of mass production that trigger the listener’s complementary neural mechanisms, to complete a capitalistic exchange of money for the fleeting pleasure taken in the bare-bones sounds inserted into the track-and-hook template. 

The minimalistic songs, then, constitute an austere form of this corporate denial of substance or sustenance. Hit music enriches some so-called artists and music producers, but fundamentally it expresses capitalistic logic and the power of computers. What it doesn’t do is tackle the age-old questions posed by genuine artists. Why are we here? What is life for? What’s the best way to live? Hit music is motivated not by an artistic vision but by greed, it’s made largely by the computers themselves, and it caters to an isolated neural mechanism. Minimalistic hit songs are stripped-down in that they provide nothing of interest except for whatever it takes to trigger the dopamine rush with the very least amount of musical effort. In a sense, hit music isn’t for us; we, the listeners are eavesdropping on something happening in an infamously-degrading social system and in an artificial, increasingly digital environment. If we want our art to challenge us with the artist’s attempts to wrestle with profound questions, using various forms of expression, the minimalist hit songs reveal that there’s no there there in hit music. Hit music endures despite that inadequacy because the systems and machines that produce it don’t and even can’t care.

Alternatively, the minimalistic songs may arise as conscious or unconscious critiques of the hit music industry, by the song engineers who are frustrated because they have pent-up artistic impulses that aren’t being met, due to their industry’s commerciality. The absurdity of these minimalist songs may be a result of their functioning as parodies of hit songs. As I said, the idea would be to drive the industry’s logic to its anti-art conclusion—except that instead of arising mechanically in the manufacturing process, these songs may arise from some producers’ comedic or satiric intention. Along these lines, the song engineers may be rebelling against the temptation presented by computers to construct a hundred layers of artificial sounds in each song, returning to a back-to-basics approach. Perhaps, then, these renegade songs are meant to awaken the listener to the fact that hit music in general is as empty as these absurdly-empty minimalist songs. As to why the audience welcomes minimalist songs that may subliminally critique hit music culture, the answer is implicit in what I’ve already said. The audience doesn’t personally approve of any of these songs. A song is a hit if it meshes mechanically with the brain’s pleasure center. Indeed, the ambiguity of “hit song” is itself revealing, since it suggests that this kind of song is an assault against the audience, a strikingof the pleasure center rather than, say, an artistic appeal to our better angels or our higher cortical processes.

A third possible source of minimalism in hit music is the headlining artist, who’s reacting not against the music industry but specifically against the audience, punishing us with low-effort products in response to our stealing of his or her work on the internet. The artist may be asking herself: “Why put soul-searching effort into my music when the fickle, treacherous audience won’t even pay for the songs but will download them for free? Why not just phone it in, given how little value the audience itself evidently places on music?” If we appreciated the artist’s work, we’d pay for it. But we steal it, so we must not care about music. Thus, why should the musician care about her music, either? In this case, the auto-tuned voice in many of these hit songs would represent an insult to the audience. Again, the artist may be thinking, perhaps unconsciously, “I have contempt for my audience that shows contempt for me by stealing my music. So I’m not even going to let them hear my true voice. They don’t deserve to be in my presence, so all I’ll give them is a computer-distorted, Frankenstein mishmash. And when it comes to live performances, I’ll lip-sync them for the same reason, to further punish the cheaters.” Of course, some of these “artists” can’t sing, being selected by corporations for their looks or attitude or family connections, and so they must rely on the computers to provide a tolerable voice track. But those who can sing and still resort to auto-tuning and lip-syncing appear to be involved in a cold war with their audience.

However, this third explanation has a chicken-and-egg problem. The reason music-listeners stopped paying for music is because music became disposable, thanks to the rise of the track-and-hook method in the 1990s. First came the musician’s ceding the artistic territory to the engineers and corporate producers, the result of which was that music CDs were filled with a few hits that tended to sound the same and with seven or so duds that didn’t catch on. Then came the audience’s response to that corporate takeover of music, which was to pirate that music, extracting the pleasure from the hits and moving on to the next duplicitous music CD, ironically using the same digital technology to steal the songs, that unleashed hit music in the first place. The audience thinks to itself: “Why pay for something that we unconsciously feel isn’t wholly music in the first place? Why reward fraudsters who claim to produce art, whereas they’re really engineers churning out disposable, disappointing products?” 

There are, then, at least two kinds of art. There’s the noble kind, often called modern but which is better called existential, which is all about the individual’s quest for meaning after the death of God. Existential art isn’t just historically recent, since it likely was produced at the dawn of Neolithic culture when humans unlocked the cognitive power to ask existential questions, prior to the imposition of organized religious answers. Once those latter answers fell into place, another kind of art was born: propaganda. Any art that reinforces mass delusions for the sake of social unity is propagandistic, preserving conventions instead of philosophically subverting them in a search for the deeper truth. Propaganda can be religious or secular. The religious kind includes the medieval Church stained-glass window and the Gregorian chant. The secular kind includes corporate advertisements and the hit songs in question, the insipid noises you hear on Virgin Radio that preach the message that everything’s alright in the world. Far from being earned, that happiness rests on fantasies which assuage the anxiety that’s the authentic reaction to secularism. Minimalist hit songs are ambiguous in that they while they’re crushingly onerous to tolerate, they may serve either existential or propagandistic functions. 

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Sexual Bliss and the Anguish of Enlightenment

Why in the first half of the twentieth century were women’s ankles considered sexy in the United States? Why are breasts considered intimate parts in industrialized places but not in poorer ones where breasts are thought of in more utilitarian terms? Why in conservative societies, such as those in the Middle East, are women’s whole bodies, including their wrists and hair, considered indecent if publicly exposed? Why is public nudity taboo in Canada and the US, but less so in Europe?

The answer must begin with the fact that whereas biology determines the sexual practices of animals, psychology and culture are factors in human sexuality. Specifically, no human body part is inherently sexy, not even the genitals which have primarily sexual functions as far as biologists are concerned; for example, nudity in the locker room or in a life drawing class or on the operating table isn’t so sexually arousing. Social context matters: the historical evidence indicates that under certain conditions, the tantalizing concealment of any body part can cause sexual arousal in a brain in which the imagination rather than just the sex hormone dictates sex appeal. In a prudish culture, visually-oriented men must make do with limited offerings, and so American men in the 1930s imagined ways in which the ankles of long-dress-wearing women could be thought of as sexy. Likewise, bored Middle Eastern men might rhapsodize about women’s hair curls and eyelashes, which are the sole body parts that some Islamist dictatorships permit to be publicly exposed. Most male body parts have the tedious evolutionary function of being muscular to make the man an effective protector, and so women starved for some novelty in their sexual diet imagine that beards can be sexy. Just as the long dress which covers the legs and ankles allows the woman to choose how high to raise the garment, creating an air of mystery and of being so near and yet so far from the promised land, as it were, the beard can obscure lantern jaws which are symbols of strength and stability, and the facial hair tantalizes as the man chooses to shave and to allow the hairs to grow to varying lengths.

Evolutionary psychologists are certainly right to point out that the underlying mechanisms of arousal have biological, reproductive functions, but culture isn’t an impotent byproduct of genes and hormones. We rewire our brains by modifying the environments to which we must adapt to survive, and our artificial environments are energized by ideologies, including those that determine the purpose of the tools, machines, and other artifacts we rely on throughout civilized life. Thus, whereas the mechanism of female arousal may originate from the woman’s desire to have her clitoris stimulated by a penis, for the evolutionary reason that sexual pleasure facilitates the transmitting of genes by sexual reproduction, that desire has evidently been exapted after what Yuval Harari calls the cognitive, agricultural, and scientific revolutions. Thus, women can be turned on by the way a beard makes the man seem withdrawn or wayward and in need of mothering and instruction. The biological mechanisms are repurposed to achieve cultural, often idealistic or fantastic goals. Sex acquires meanings that have little to do with that which is paramount from the gene’s eye view. In particular, sexual ecstasy is comparable to the religious kind, which in turn is akin to the experience of existential horror, to the revelation of that which transcends and so humiliates not just our comprehension but our standing as entities.

The Revelation of Sex

The degree of lust and of the giddiness of being on the threshold of sexual contact may be inversely proportional to the degree of familiarity with the partner’s body or with sex in general. The more sex you have, the less earth-shattering it becomes over the years, unless your sex drive is low or your expectations are curbed by cultural conventions. This is one reason that adultery is commonplace among able-bodied individuals who have options: to renew the height of ecstasy enjoyed when sex in general or with a particular partner was novel. Sex for virgins is typically overwhelming because they haven’t yet solved the mysteries of sex. Unfamiliarity with the other’s body parts or with the sex acts that are generally kept secret accounts for why even ankles, wrists, calves, beards, or hair can be deemed sexy even though those parts are irrelevant from the genetic standpoint. In hunter-gatherer tribes, for example, breasts have no sex appeal because they’re constantly exposed and so their men’s imagination isn’t fired by the fantasy of what they would look or feel like were they revealed. They’re exposed because the tribes are consumed with the purpose of surviving in harsh, perhaps exceptionally humid natural lands and have no time for luxuries such as fashion. By contrast in the individualistic West, fashion is an art form and we individuate ourselves by showing off our possessions, thereby forgetting about the fleshy bodies toiling to maintain so many artificialities. Indeed, as Morris Berman argues in Coming to Our Senses, we in the West are virtually disembodied; we live in our heads and in a noosphere of abstractions—until, that is, in all infantile innocence we find ourselves drawn back to that which is hidden by the products of our labour, to the shapes, sounds, and tastes of each other’s flesh. 

This lack of public familiarity is a precondition for assigning breasts an intimate status such that their public exposure might be judged indecent. Men or lesbians in industrialized societies long to spy or to feel women’s breasts only if those sensations remind us that reality can be hidden. Presumably, lesbians are less aroused by the opportunity to gawk at another woman’s breasts, because they’re familiar with their own, and the same should be true for gay men regarding their degree of pleasure taken from an experience with another man’s genitals. Token newness must suffice, because unfamiliarity with the typeof flesh is out of the question for homosexual individuals. In any event, the limit case of sexual lust is felt by one who has no direct knowledge of the other’s body parts but whose fantasies have been inspired by enticing indirect knowledge, such as pornographic representations, tall tales in the schoolyard, or partial revelations in the form of sexy clothing. 

Like people, animals have mating competitions so that the fulfillment of climax for them lies at the end of some rituals they must complete, but unlike domesticated people’s, animal bodies aren’t selectively hidden from the world. Animals don’t know or care that they’re naked, whereas we don our fig leafs to recover our dignity in light of our self-awareness and our greater understanding. The experience of being a person is that of having our virtually supernatural (anomalous) mind confined to a natural, animal body. When we understand that absurdity, we fear what calamities might be visited upon us in such a godless universe, and so we sweep the evidence under the carpet, as it were, concealing our nakedness so that we can pretend to be the disembodied gods we worship. Our sex instinct remains as an animal calling, at least for most of us, but that instinct is bound up with our understanding and our imagination, because our minds are godlike. Thus, mating between people isn’t just a degrading competition, as it is for the animals that are puppets driven by their genes rather than by egoistic interests to understand their place in the world and to rectify their position by altering that world. In addition to the foolish, ethically dubious dances we perform to attract a mate, we set up an existentially symbolic dynamic in which the heaven of sexual ecstasy, the ego’s dissolution in intimacy with a partner, and thus the paradoxical experience of disembodiment achieved in a bout of unreserved objectification happen only when we unmask ourselves by removing our clothing and the accompanying pretenses of civility.

The Anticlimax of Enlightenment

Reality, too, is hidden from us, not just because we’re small creatures that aren’t in direct contact with the whole of time or space, but because our cognitive tools humanize the world, putting comforting metaphors and preoccupations between us and what Eugene Thacker calls the horror of the world-without-us. In Thacker’s analysis, the world-for-us is how it appears to us at the height of our naiveté, when we don’t appreciate that our anthropomorphisms are self-serving projections as well as practically-necessary lies. The world-in-itself is the world in its essence without anything extraneous left behind by the process of coming to know the world’s nature. This is the Kantian noumenon which isn’t entirely conceivable, since every act of knowing, including the scientific or mathematical kind, leaves behind artifacts on that which is known. The world-without-usis perceived by the cognitive trick of imagining the objective world-in-itself as though it were inhabited by someone else who is suitably indifferent to or ignorant of us. For example, we can follow H.P. Lovecraft and imagine that our planet is really a playground for monstrous, slumbering deities who will eventually awaken and annihilate us and everything we stand for as so many extraneous growths. The world-without-us is how the world-in-itself would seem without the presence of humanity, if that world could nevertheless be experienced by someone else. After we’re extinct like any other species and all traces of our civilizations are lost, only the world-without-us will remain, the world as it’s always really been despite the lies we presently tell ourselves to avoid confronting the fact that we’re all fundamentally homeless. The last person standing after the zombie apocalypse, for example, would behold the party that continues after most of us have left the club, the cycles that proceed having always had nothing essentially to do with any of us.

The horror of the world-without-us, which is really just a debilitating glimpse of the impersonality of the world-in-itself, is obscured by the fig leaf of the world-for-us.In our religious fictions which we call myths, we imagine heroic mortals ascending to the abode of the gods. Moses climbed remote Mount Sinai where the world-in-itself was revealed to him in the form of a supernatural bush that burns without being consumed by the flame. The world’s essence which transcends our feeble, often parochial conceptions can present itself in miracles, according to old stories which are exoterically read as being about divine breakthroughs into nature by the personified Beyond; of course, that theistic interpretation is the mere conservative one that reinforces our vanity which we need to function in the unheroic, animal fashion. We’d like to think that we’re one with the world’s essence and that nature is fundamentally alive and even knowing and moral like us; that way, we wouldn’t be existentially homeless, after all, and horror wouldn’t be our most authentic experience, the deepest appreciation of reality. So Jews imagined not just the paradoxical burning bush, but a voice that spoke to Moses from the transcendent world-in-itself. Likewise, after Jesus’s baptism, “heaven was opened,” a dove descended, and Jesus heard a voice telling him that God loves him. Esoterically, all religious myths are horror stories, as cosmicism must replace theism for those who love knowledge more than themselves and the convenience of their station.We can have an intimation of the world-in-itself, but only with the accompanying dread that that world was, will be, and is fundamentally now the world-without-us.Stripped of our reassuring delusions, the burning bush is voiceless or if it speaks, it speaks in a language we can’t translate so that we’re frustrated eavesdroppers or fifth wheels. The dove that descends from the clouds only vacates its bowels on Jesus’s head and the skies are silent when he’s executed as a result of a hideous, Kafkaesque mistake about his identity.

There is, then, an analogy between human sexuality and philosophical revelation. First there are the tantalizing clues that something longed for is hidden; if only you could entice this other creature to shed its outerwear, you could have sex, build a partnership, and establish private grounds for intimacy. Sex feels rapturous as though we were swept off to a transcendent plane, even if that’s only because we must first degrade ourselves as we strip off our clothes, hide ourselves from public glare, and pretend that we deserve a private space that shouldn’t be regulated by ethical rules of conduct. We “transcend” civility, by acting as animals, going backward rather than forward, as it were, but we nevertheless experience bliss in that state of undress just as we feel love and contentment when we’re emotionally intimate in our private life with our partner. With regard to sex, we shrug off the yoke of civility and thus much of the world-for-us, and are rewarded with waves of pleasure followed by orgasm, by a fleeting moment of joy.

Similarly, with regard to cognition we lift the veil of ignorance as we learn the embarrassing epistemic status of our cherished metaphors and myths. We discover that our best knowledge of the world-in-itself succeeds only by its wholesale objectification and demythologization, leaving us disenchanted with nature. What bubbles up then is revelatory horror and giddiness at the suspicion that we’re satanically free—at least during those brief occasions when we take up Spinoza’s eternal perspective, or God’s-eye-view, and appreciate everything’s place in the world-without-us. Reality is revealed to us when we depersonalize it and ourselves, but instead of finding utilitarian pleasure, as in the case of the orgasm that binds a pair of mates together and encourages them to reproduce, the intrepid philosopher is rewarded with incendiary, satanic insight. Religious revelation ought to be apocalyptic indeed, since for the enlightened individual, that revelation of the world-in-itself destroys the world-for-us. In reality, we’re all horrifically free—free of gods that don’t exist, free of homes that are nullified by their transience, free of social codes that we negate whenever we revert to our animal fixations. We’re as free and as aimless as the void we represent when we grasp the world’s objectivity and its necessary indifference to us. Nature seems to unfold with much regularity and thus by way of restrictions rather than freedom, but that seems so only from our pathetically-limited perspective. In quantum reality or at the level of the megaverse, everything happens all at once and on a virtual whim, with no intermediate mechanisms or local transactions whatsoever, not to mention for no reason and with no plan in view. Particles pop into existence just because—like our entire universe, in a timeless state of being. And when we understand those sobering facts, however imperfectly that may be; when we learn that “humanity” in the normative, progressive and vain sense is a joke, we become as monstrous as the world that thereby “speaks” through our mystical or indirect representations of it. Terror, angst, sorrow, or madness is the fruit of those cognitive loins. The orgasm of philosophical insight is the glee of insanity or the queer relief of the omega outcast who is alienated from the grotesqueries of mass society; those existential pains are stages of mourning for the loss of the world-for-us. What mentality emerges from our oneness with the depersonalized world-in-itself, by means of our contemplating the horrors of the world-without-us can hardly be described in polite company.

Fathoming the Alienness of the World-Without-Us

But let’s investigate with the aid of a science fictional thought experiment. Imagine that you’ve gone where no one else has been. Moreover, you’re at where no one else will be because no one else can reach there. Suppose, for example, you’re Ant Man, as in the movie, who shrinks to the subatomic scale and is condemned to drift there for eternity unless he can puzzle his way out. Or perhaps you’re one of the scientists in the movie Sunshine, who penetrate the sun’s corona. Or you’re in a spaceship that’s travelled faster than light, leaving you alone on a planet in another galaxy. Astronauts are known to experience a deflating sense of life’s worthlessness when they return to Earth and when they’re permitted to leave aside the politically-correct blather they’re forced to emit to encourage society’s support of space exploration. The world must seem fragile and lost from orbit, but the astronaut is also largely alienated from that world; only the commitment to carry out the scheduled tasks provides a lifeline and prevents the astronaut from slipping into a miasmic depression due to such a confrontation with nature’s inhumanity. However, alone and in a vast and unchartered wilderness, say, the explorer would also feel childlike glee, the rebel’s freedom of being unburdened by social conventions. The Starship Voyager is sent to the other side of the galaxy and the crew wrestles with whether Starfleet’s code of conduct applies to their predicament. Of course, the Captain believes that that code is their lifeline, their one chance of retaining their humanity. The crew members must carry out their duties and struggle to return home; otherwise, horror would dawn upon them as they’d realize that in light of the fact that the galaxy is evidently so large to allow for such estrangement from the bulk of humanity, their jobs at Starfleet have always been farcically insignificant.

Imagine, though, you’re alone on an alien moon, the star around which Earth orbits nowhere in the night sky, your lightship a wreck on the moon’s surface. Before you fall and rise stone formations never glimpsed by anyone. Your scientific training equips you with concepts to objectify your surroundings, to quantify the mighty craters and mountains, and even to begin to use them to your benefit. But you have the nagging feeling that the moon’s existential significance surpasses such understanding and utility. With the trappings of culture and civility so far away, with your family, friends, and coworkers nowhere to comfort or to preoccupy you, and confronted by the alien vista, you muse that you must have been reborn because the world-for-us has vanished for you. There is no us on that moon, only you, and you haven’t the creativity or the fortitude to create a new web of conventions, a fresh host of fictions to obscure nature’s alienness. The horrifying implications of the objective world’s impersonality overpower you in your alienation, and you’re treated to a revelation of the world-without-us. What are you in that monstrous world that flexes its causality with no goal or remorse? What are you but part of it and nothing more, as the illusions and hypocrisies of civilized life fade to irrelevance? As on Mount Sinai, the remoteness of your location makes the ground on which you tread holy, but there's no reassuring voice from beyond, just the enveloping silence of the outer reaches. Now you realize that the heavenly bliss promised by the world’s religions was only ever a misleading metaphor; that as we’re united with the inhuman essence of reality, true liberation from our social roles is baneful; that God is a fiction we project onto nature to turn the wilderness into an encouraging mirror image of ourselves, and that the reality of Being is best captured in the experience of horror.

You’ll appreciate that sex, too, must always have been an allegorical pantomime signifying the pilgrim’s “progress” from theistic and other conventional delusions to cosmic awe at the pseudo-audacity of the universe that was never made for us. You smile as you grasp why the dictatorial (monotheistic) religions always posited that sex is sinful, because the cosmicist wonder which sex facilitates competes with the bogus payoff of the politically-motivated religious scriptures. The end of sex isn’t transformation into a spiritual body that lives forever with God in heaven, but a fleeting, drug-induced (hormonal) pleasure that’s nevertheless the ultimate goal of most human activities, and that’s achieved only after the suspension of all cultural niceties. As the blinders of the world-for-us are removed and the enthralled individuals degrade themselves in sessions of sexual foolishness, the climax of so much absurdity can only be as anticlimactic as the naturally-understood orgasm. There is no eternal bliss in heaven, because quantum timelessness has no personal attributes. There is world-ending revelation, but it’s nothing to boast about, let alone something that vindicates the troops of evangelists who knock on doors to spread the “good news.” The greatest heroes of cognition aren’t the scientists who formulate objective models of natural processes, but the philosophers hiding under rocks who make the best of the wider, destructive implications of those models. The satanic heroes earn the hell of their wisdom. When, lost in their sexual throes and convulsions, somewhere on a “home” planet to which these heroes can never return, the masses cry out, “Oh, God! Oh, God!” they effectively and absurdly praise themselves as the sources of the theistic metaphor. They believe they’re thanking ultimate reality for sustaining such joy, but that reality is deaf and dumb, and the noblest sexual joy quickly turns to despair.

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